Are you relentlessly focusing AND executing on your career goals?

I wrote last time on the trade-offs many incur whilst building successful career paths. The ‘Career Trilemma’ reveals how we can only pursue maximum amounts of meaning & fulfilment, financial gain OR work-life balance at any one given time.

Maybe two, but rarely all three.

Focusing on your goals (a new career move or business idea for example) frequently entails sacrificing other things in their pursuit.

This is why you might find yourself talking about wanting something but not actually prioritising making it happen. It’s because you don’t want it more than the other things you also want. Read the full post to get up to speed and decide if you’re okay with that situation, or not.

Today we continue this theme of prioritising your career goals.

But the next level goes deeper: exploring why you could be prioritising said goal and still not achieving it. This situation happens because you lack the essential ingredients of relentless focus and execution — something I’ve seen time and time again in my clients’ (and my own) entrepreneurial careers that have led me to conclude some patterns and themes, let’s call them our Focus Pitfalls:

Three Common Focus Pitfalls

1. Poor time and energy management.

   • Imagine you’ve carved out four hours to work on this goal of yours but then came to this task exhausted, or burned out creatively. Those four hours won’t end up counting for much. Similarly, if you have too much on your plate (let’s say trying to tackle two big tasks at the same time like learning a skill AND creating lots of marketing content) then neither end up getting the attention they deserve. You end up doing too much task switching or you biting off more than you can realistically chew in the time available.

2. Lack of strategy or plan.

   • A big one for new founders (whilst still figuring out what their business actually requires of them each day means) is sitting down without a plan to ‘work’ but having a lack of plan. This derails focus: instead, the time is used deciding what the best use of this time would be based on rather than doing much of it. By sitting down to work without a plan, you can’t execute and waste a lot of mental energy (and sometimes confidence) in the process.

3. Lack of motivation or alignment.

   • Let’s say you DO have both the energy and the plan ready. But then something else keeps happening on this particular goal or project. You notice yourself not really giving it your all. Perhaps questioning if you should be doing this thing after all, if you are worthy or capable of it, or really want it deep down. This is a motivation and alignment pitfall and leads to procrastination, excuse making and not really exerting the energy required.

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   Sound familiar? All these states are the OPPOSITE of finding flow and sadly, we end up in these focus pitfalls all too often. So keep reading for solutions you can apply within your career/business to begin to overcome these pitfalls based on your own specific needs. I’ll also get personal with you today — revealing some recent challenges in my own life and business that can be mostly traced to this lack of focus!

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My energy, planning and alignment struggles….

I am living in Las Palmas Gran Canaria for 8 weeks, and took this selfie a few weeks ago on the sand dunes of Maspalomas.

But don’t be fooled. Despite amazing moments like this and the beautiful nature and plentiful opportunities to live out my “hashtag best life”, since I arrived five weeks ago I’ve actually had a fair few challenges.

It was tempting to write to you today from my high-horse about YOUR focus issues but instead I come humbly bearing the truth of my own in the hope it further embeds these lessons for you and is perhaps a little cathartic for me, too.

Some context to begin: in 2022 I’m on a 9 month travelling and working adventure across four continents and having the kind of adventure I never took in my 20s when I was relentlessly studying or working on my future. Before going back home to London at Christmas.

This whole year I’ve been in a constant quest to avoid either of these two extreme outcomes:

a) Finishing 2022 with regrets; having spent too much time on my business rather than truly enjoying the adventure

b) Giving so little attention to the business (due to having too much fun) that the business suffers and I lose the momentum I’ve spent years building, overspend, and run out of money for the expensive year I’m having.

I’ve put this into sharp focus here in this table that reveals where my energy has gone this month:

For those of you paying attention — my Reality did not match any of my Goals, in any given area. This has some some bad luck (eg my health issues made everything else harder) but nonetheless offers a clear picture my goals being at odds with one another.

Focusing on health, work and fun should be simple. But within each category I had conflicting wants and the ripple effect of one going badly impacted the others too. Leaving me feeling less capable, happy or fulfilled than I’d hoped.

In hindsight I see my lessons clearly:

• Had I rested more I would have recovered from the cold faster and perhaps avoided it becoming an infection. But I wanted to socialise and work hard so didn’t rest up.

• Had I not tried to run another Talent to Money Bootcamp I would have continued to work on the other business priorities that were bearing a lot of fruit in September (my new messaging and services had been landing me some of my most values-aligned and ideal clients to date!). Instead, I changed tact and worked on the Bootcamp; pulling focus and draining money and resources.

• Had I not been so keen to push myself eg frequent gym trips to lose some weight, to spent five hours on learning Spanish each week and ensure I attended every social gathering I could…. no doubt those other areas would have been simpler too.

Of course I wanted it all. I’m sure you can draw similar comparisons in your own life.

Let’s confront one of the big ones — the T2M Bootcamp launch ‘fail’. Obviously it hurts my ego to be so honest about this today and maybe my brand(?) but I believe that focus and execution issues are at least partly to blame.

You see, for those of you who are unfamiliar, The Talent to Money Bootcamp is a cohort based course that takes 5-10 new business owners through the fundamental stages of building a business together. I led a successful cohort this summer so had all the material ready to go again, plus timing wise, felt Autumn would be better for people to join. I could see no reason not to run it again.

But whilst running it felt easy, selling it was another ball game altogether.

What ensued was a lot of planning, writing, editing and scheduling emails and social posts. Designing assets, editing video testimonials, putting up landing pages etc. I wrote thoughtful, time consuming emails to people I thought would be interested. I read about launches, I paid for help and threw in a lot of mental energy into it. Worked 6-day weeks… you get the picture.

There was still many actions that I didn’t take.

Such as running a warm up event or workshop, running paid ads, sending personalised videos or offering any discounts, promotions or other incentives.

I didn’t do these things because I didn’t have enough time.

Poor planning — I only gave myself two weeks and on top of this wasn’t feeling up to running a workshop or a video in my state of ill health (see focus pitfall #1 and #2). When the results weren’t looking strong I began to second-guess every aspect of the Bootcamp — the right fit for my audience, the price point and timing. There were far fewer applications than in July, and many people didn’t show up for their calls. I lost a lot of motivation and questioned if I should try harder to turn things around or just accept defeat; pitfall #3.

Whilst there were lots of people showing interest — the final sales were not sufficient to run a group programme. This is partly my poor planning and efforts, and partly factors outside of my control or knowledge. The economy? Wrong fit for my audiences’ needs?

Would you please help me better understand? If you were aware of the Bootcamp but decided against, what was your reason?

Responses are anonymous and SO helpful 🙏!

• It didn’t seem like the right fit for what I need help with in my own entrepreneurial journey

• I could not justify the financial investment

• I was interested but the timing (sessions timings or time of year) wasn’t right

Despite this setback I am not giving up on running something similar again. But my lesson has been learned — stick to areas in your life and career where you can truly focus and give your all. This year shouldn’t have been about growing my business just maintaining it. Growth always comes at a cost, perhaps one I didn’t want enough. 2023 on the other hand…

So if you are still reading, and still feel like I am someone you can learn from despite my humanity and shortcomings(!) read on for a checklist of sorts to take into your own focus and execution efforts. I know from supporting hundreds of entrepreneurial people how these pitfalls commonly beset the most ambitious, big-thinkers who have no shortage of talent or passion. But it is precisely when you are capable of doing so much these traits can easily trip you up.

The strategies you need for focus

• Consider your true focus split.

  • List out the areas of your life (Wheel of Life is a great resource for this) and consider where you are putting your energy right now — its never equally weighted. Choose your top 2-3 areas of focus and accept the others can take a back seat whilst you prioritise those. Even within each of those 2-3 focus areas, ensure you are not piling on too much.

• Deeply question your goals and motivations.

  • We often pursue something because we should want it — we should want to scale our business, or land that VC job, or start a YouTube channel. Check in with the head vs heart. Here’s a post on setting goals you are heart-aligned to.

• Make sure you are clear on your Goals.

  • For every Goal you have, map out this proven coaching technique called the GROW Method.

    • 1 — Define the Goal and make it SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)

    • 2 — Define the Reality (right now) where are you in relation to this goal — aka how far away from it

    • 3 — Define the Obstacles that might stand in your way of achieving Goal, knowing your current Reality

    • 4 — Define the Way Forward, figure out what needs to happen next, and what those stages look like, and how you will get support

• When you have your Goal make sure it is translated into a realistic plan

  • This plan needs to objective — have you considered the timing, the energy, money, and resources required. Do you have the knowledge of the steps to take? Beware over-committing or burning out.

• Work on your productivity

  • Many gurus propose productivity hacks but in isolation they won’t help. So use them alongside knowing your true why and motivation etc. Then get your productivity toolkit ready. I’m due an updated post but for now check out this (pretty extensive!) post here many of my clients still refer to in their day-day.

Enjoy focusing on your biggest goals

As for me, I have decided to take a mini break for a few nights away to sleep and recharge and my antibiotics have cured my sinus infection (I hope).

As for you…. if you are curious about getting support that can truly move the needle towards your next career or business milestone then coaching is one of the best solutions I’ve ever come across. I’m biased, of course, but only because of the sustained results I’ve seen with clients over the past two years.

My core offer is 1-1 coaching held over a few months period designed to help ambitious, entrepreneurial people to navigate their next business venture or career pivot. Think clarifying your direction, aligning on a solid plan and taking sustained action whilst overcoming any mental or knowledge hurdles in the way.

You can read previous client testimonials & apply here. In November I have two spaces opening up for new clients.

Thank you as always for reading! I’ll be back in two weeks with more guidance to succeed in your entrepreneurial career.

Ellen Donnelly, Founder + Chief Coach, The Ask.

📩 A quick note to a handful of the people who recently unsubscribed from The Ask emails about T2M Bootcamp from my other email provider — it does not automatically remove you from THIS list — which is something I’m working on fixing! Apologies if this causes any frustration, me too, and again something I am really trying to find a solution to but perhaps you want to stick around for these emails! These are the bi-weekly essays on finding clarity and direction in your entrepreneurial career — not a specific sales campaign. Simply unsubscribe again if you are not looking for that content right now either!