Why Typical Business Goal Planning Doesn’t Work for Neurodiverse Entrepreneurs
As a neurodiverse entrepreneur, you may have found that typical business goal planning methods don't quite align with your unique needs and challenges. The traditional approach to setting goals and pursuing success often overlooks the specific considerations of neurodivergent individuals, such as different communication styles, processing information differently, and managing energy levels effectively.
In this blog post, we will explore why typical business goal planning doesn't work for neurodiverse entrepreneurs and provide alternative strategies to help you achieve success on your own terms.
Crafting compelling offers that work for you
Creating irresistible offers that align with your target audience's needs and desires is essential for converting prospects into paying clients. However, a great offer that you hate delivering won’t work!
You have to be excited about what you’re selling as well if you’re going to put in the time, energy, and capacity it requires to properly market, sell, and deliver those offers.
Traditional business goal planning often overlooks the importance of tailoring your offer to suit the way your brain works. So it’s important to spend some time exploring what you will and won’t include in your offers, how you can and can’t show up for your business, and what considerations and accommodations you want to give yourself as you work.
Understanding your target audience
Hand in hand with having offers you enjoy is figuring out who you want to work with.
One of the key reasons why traditional goal planning falls short for neurodiverse entrepreneurs is the lack of emphasis on understanding your target audience when they may or may not have brains that function the same way yours does.
So it may take you more time to understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and challenges so you can tailor your offers and marketing to attract the right people. You may also want or need to try some alternatives to traditional market research in order to figure this out.
Perhaps you aren’t the best at reading subtle social cues and asking people to do market research calls, then skip the calls and explore more direct research methods like SEO keyword research or competitor analysis.
Managing your time & energy
Something a lot of neurodivergent people deal with is fluctuating energy levels and difficulty managing their time. So when we think about setting goals for your business, it can be especially hard for neurodivergent entrepreneurs to set realistic benchmarks.
If you deal with unpredictable energy levels, rather than forcing yourself into a rigid time blocking system, for example, you might want to explore more flexible planning methods like my Elastic Planning method which lets you move your priorities around depending on your available time and energy while maintaining your productivity.
You may also naturally approach projects a little differently than neurotypical people, and that’s ok! And it makes sense you’ll need to approach breaking down your projects differently as well.
Personally, I’m a bottom-up thinker and find it easier to see all the parts of a project first vs seeing the end goal. Which means I’ll approach mapping out my projects and how they’ll fit into my available time very differently than someone who is a top-down thinker and starts with the big picture first.
Understanding the role of goals in your business
Most people find goals motivating and aspirational, which pushes them to make extra efforts in order to reach said goals.
However, for some neurodivergent people that’s not the case. We may find goals confining when we can’t predict how productive we’ll be at any point in time. We may struggle when a goal isn’t achieved feel a greater sense of disappointment at missing a pre-determined benchmark, so to save ourselves the stress we avoid them all together.
So ultimately, it’s for you to decide what role you want goal-setting to play in your business.
Do you want to set goals that you know you’ll be able to reach to motivate you to keep going?
Do you want to set goals for your business that aren’t linked to your time, energy or capacity?
Do you want to set goals that are focused on your own milestones and achievements vs outside forces such as sales #s?
Conclusion
Typical business goal planning doesn't always align with the needs of neurodiverse entrepreneurs. By understanding your own unique brain and the wat you work best, you can find more productive ways to plan for your business that lean into your neurodivergence instead of fighting against it.
