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BUSINESS
MEASURING SUCCESS IN 2021 A NEW WAY OF THINKING? By Gry Tomte
I’ve always been a high achiever. I also used to measure my success by numbers. The goal was “being number one” (whatever that is!?) Making a million dollars in turnover. Then it was two. And so on and so on.... I still remember clear as day, I was working with a coach and my goal at the time was “to make a million dollars”. Silly in hindsight. But that was the goal I had set for myself to know I was a success. If we as a business hit $1m, I’d made it... Even more clearly though, I remember the month we did hit that target. You’d think I was on top of the world right? Celebrating? Ummm. Not quite. I was talking to my then coach, feeling like an absolute failure because we’d had so many cancelations that week! It was early December and everyone on social media was talking about being super busy. And we just weren’t. We’d had a huge amount of cancelations and I really felt low. But when we went through the figures, to my surprise we’d had the biggest month we’d ever had! And, we’d hit the $1m yearly turnover mark. And here I was - I was miserable. Feeling like a total failure. Years later I’ve learnt three very valuable lessons about this experience. 1. Success isn’t measured by “that someday when you hit that particular target”. It’s in the moments along the way. Because when that “someday” comes along, most likely you’ve already set yourself a new goal. And, you might not even know you reached it. 2. The moment you stop focusing on the output (making money, which of course we all need) and rather focus on the input, you’ll, by default, get a better output. 3. Success isn’t always what you think it will be. And, I’ll tell you about that next.
And, as we realised it was going to go on for months, it was just very clear the writing was on the wall. Now, I did have a choice. I could still go pursue opening another clinic. Be a shark - and look for whatever became available on the market. Or, if I wanted to look after my team the way I wanted to, I knew I’d have to reframe my goals I chose to look after my team as best I absolutely could.
When the pandemic hit - it was PRETTY clear that a lot of the goals we had set for our business just wasn’t going to happen.
I invested my time and my money on making sure they were ok and making their wage still and that they were growing and not losing touch with their work.
And I struggled to be ok with that. As a high achiever I had some real lofty goals I had set for myself and my business.
I invested in adding more team members so we could optimise how we work when we get back
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to work so we could look after our clients in the best possible way. I was playing the long term game. I also in the process I had some amazing realisations thinking about my own relationship with success. And, that’s when I realised there’s another measurement; IMPACT. I heard this fantastic talk the other day by one of my favourite speakers, Simon Sinek, which illustrates this absolutely perfectly. Simon was doing a speaking engagement at the Pentagon when he was met by a well known general who took him to the conference hall to do his speech.
