10 questions to help you clarify your vision and find focus in your business

I've made *a lot* of mistakes in my business journey. And one of these was lacking the clarity and focus for the vision I had for my business' future. In today's episode, I'm putting *you* in the hot seat with some questions to ask yourself to find this clarity and focus for yourself.

– The 3 lessons I wish I'd learned earlier in my business and how you can learn from these mistakes.
– Why getting really clear and honest with yourself can help you to understand what's important and why.
– Why letting go of the “how” can drive you to dream bigger and deeper without limiting yourself or your business.
– How identifying the internal and external forces that are stopping you from having the kind of business you want can help you to understand what you can and can't control.
– Why being really clear and focused on your vision will help you to identify what you can start doing (and what you need to stop doing).

 

 
Today, I'm sharing 10 questions to help you clarify your vision in your business so that you can create focus and figure out where to really intentionally spend your time and your energy to move your business forward. 

 

Question #1: Why do you do what you do? 

What made you choose to start a business? What is that big, deeper reason underneath why you are doing this? What motivates you to keep doing it on those days when everything is falling apart and you don't really want to show up to work? Why do you keep doing it, right? And be honest with yourself here. There's no right answer. 

There's nothing that you are supposed to say. I used to think that my why had to be impacted and if it wasn't impacting, then it was selfish. And yes, the impact that my business has is one of the reasons why I do it, but I also do it for selfish reasons as well.

I love the freedom that it gives me. I love the creative expression that I can have. I love that I can literally dream something up and then make it happen. So what is it that is driving you to do what you are doing in your business? 

 

Question #2: What makes that important to you?

So if you said that your why for your business is to have more freedom, well, why is that freedom important to you? What makes that freedom important to you? For me, that creative expression, that outlet for my ideas, that's important for me because I have a lot of ideas, and to me, having that outlet makes my life fun and exciting and it means that every single day is different. 

 

Question #3: What makes this important to you? Why does this matter to you? 

And this might hurt your brain a little bit because we're going a lot deeper than we usually like to think. We usually like to think at the surface level. But let's say that your answer to the last question, you know, freedom's important to you so that you can travel more. Well, why is it important to you so that you can travel more? 

Maybe it's so that you can experience other cultures and enjoy living life in different places. Maybe it's because it keeps life interesting for you and you get bored if you stay in one place for too long. What's the why underneath the why that's underneath the why I know this is getting deep. 

 

Question #4: What would your dream business look like five years from now? 

What are your wildest biggest dreams? What do you do every single day? What don't you do as well? We're very quick to think about what the things we want to do are, but we also need to think about what don't we want to do. Who supports you, who's your team, right? What kind of impact are you having? Who are you having this impact on? And when it comes to thinking about the bigger vision for your business like this, I would always suggest don't worry about how you're going to do it. 

Don't get too worried about like, Oh, but that's not possible for me right now. Don't think about the how and don't think about whether it's realistic or not. Okay, this is for you to dream big, and then the how will figure itself out along the way. 

 

Question #5: Why do you want this kind of business?

So following on from that last question, why do you want to have the things that you want to have five years from now? And the reason I'm asking this is that you know, what I said before about how I started building an agency, that was what I thought I wanted and it ended up being something that I actually really didn't enjoy, something that I hated and that's because I never spent the time to think about why I wanted this particular thing. 

So it was only then that I realised, hang on, this isn't what I want, this isn't aligned with my vision, that was when I realised a different way to scale would be to add digital products, add courses, and programs and by scaling that way, I was still able to do the work that I enjoy doing. I was still able to do the strategy, the marketing. I was able to teach people how to do their own strategy and their own marketing. 

And for me, that meant that I could have a much bigger impact. It meant that I could still do the work that I wanted to do. So really thinking about why you want to have this particular thing that you are building. 

 

Question #6: What are the external forces that are stopping you from achieving this five-year vision?

For example, maybe there aren't enough hours in the day, or maybe it's really hard to reach new people on social media these days. You can't control these things. There's no point trying to figure out how to reach more people on social media when you know you have very limited control over that, but you can control how you react and you respond to these external forces.

Too many business owners try to change the external things that they can't control and they fail at that because you can't influence the Instagram algorithm. You can't change how many hours there are in a day, but you can change how you work within these constraints, that is what you have control over. So like I said, you can only control how you react and you respond to these things.

 

Question #7: What are the internal forces that are stopping you from having the kind of business that you want to have five years from now? 

For example, I don't feel confident putting myself in the spotlight is a pretty common one that comes up or I procrastinate. That might be another one that comes up. These are things that you can change. I used to feel really shy and self-conscious about my voice because I've lived in a couple of different countries and I've always been the person who's had the weird accent, whichever country I've lived in. But I started a podcast despite being terrified that people would judge me and make fun of me.

And only by showing up, that was how I built my confidence. That's how I became confident in my voice and in speaking.

You don't build confidence by sitting there, journaling about it, and meditating and trying to wait until you are confident enough to do the thing. You build that confidence by doing the thing.

 

Question #8: What does your dream business look like 12 months from now?

Now, five years is still a while away. It'll go faster than you think, but it's still a while away. So let's think 12 months from now. What does your dream business look like 12 months from now? And I want you to get really clear on what do you do in your business and what you no longer do in your business. And again, don't think about the how just yet. You can figure that all out later. But for now, we just want to think about what do you do and what you no longer do. 

 

Question #9: What uncomfortable things do you need to start doing to create this?

Remember what I said about confidence? Confidence comes from doing, not from thinking about it and if something feels really uncomfortable to you because you're not confident enough to do it yet, you really need to start stepping into that discomfort for something to change. If you want to get a different result, or you want your business to look different, you need to start doing something differently. So what uncomfortable things do you need to start doing to create this? 

 

Question #10: What do you need to stop doing? 

Maybe you need to stop blindly chasing all of the shiny sparkly ideas just because somebody told you that was what you should be doing or maybe you need to stop wasting your time on creating content for Instagram when you have an online course that's half finished that you need to finish building so you can actually start making sales. 

 

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