Check out Part 1: Clarify Your Goals and Part 2: Obtain Your Goals
Enlist an Accountability Buddy
It’s easy to be enthusiastic at the beginning of a task, but it’s far harder to stay motivated as time goes by. Enlist the aid of someone to hold you accountable. Perhaps it’s a family member. Maybe it’s a friend. Or maybe it’s someone you work with, who helped you develop these goals in the first place. It may even be your business coach. Share your goals with him or her. Ensure that s/he checks in with you regularly, perhaps every week during your reassessment of the action plan, to ensure that you’re taking all those small steps needed to achieve your big goals.
Measure Your Success
Foresight is about looking forward, but it’s also about looking back, of measuring how far you’ve come. It goes without saying that you can’t know how far you’ve come if you can’t measure the distance. When you see the gains that you’ve made and the goals you’ve achieved, it will further empower you to pursue your goals.
As you assess what you’ve accomplished, it will also offer you the opportunity to fine tune the steps you are taking to achieve your goals.
I have a plan for 2020. 2020 is the year I will see a huge uptick in people who walk through my front door and tell me that they’ve researched my website (thank goodness I just had it re-done), that they know that I specialize in collaborative practice, that they’ve already spoken with their spouse about a collaborative divorce, and that they are both on board with that plan. Let me share a few of my specific goals, because this is where the rubber meets the road.
I will sign fourteen collaborative matter clients in 2020. Four will be referred by non-family lawyers; two will be referred by AVVO; three will be referred by Google; two will be referred by my website; one will be referred by my sign out front of my building; and two will be referred by other collaborative professionals.
In 2020, I will also be the moving force in introducing twenty professionals to collaborative practice, getting them trained, and leading them to join one of our area’s local practice groups.
2020 will be the year when the posters and the toolkit I’ve created introduce the idea of the collaborative dispute resolution process, not only to my own clients, but also for the other collaborative professionals whom I know are deeply invested in this groundbreaking approach to restructuring the family. 33 of those collaborative professionals will purchase my posters to help them market collaborative divorce; seven of them will purchase Changing the Way the World Gets Divorced toolkits.
It’s just quantum physics. What are you doing to make your future what you want it to be?
Joryn Jenkins, attorney and Open Palm Founder, began her own firm here in Tampa after a 14-year career in law, two of which she served as a professor of law at Stetson University. She is a recipient of the prestigious A. Sherman Christensen Award, an honor bestowed upon those who have provided exceptional leadership in the American Inns of Court Movement. For more information on Joryn’s professional experience, take a look at her resume.
