Are you committed?
Commitment to anything or anybody begins at one hundred percent. Anything less is just not a commitment. As we near the halfway point in this year, think about the “resolutions” you made at the start. What about your goals for this year? Were they commitments? If they are, you should be on your way to having a terrific 2012. If you’ve strayed, you’ve got time to get yourself back on track.
We have a tendency to set goals that seem to meet the SMART standard (SMART stands for “specific, measureable, achieveable, realistic and having a time completion set”). Often times though we set goals and haven’t fully thought them through or broken them down in smaller ones. We forget to try to hit singles or just get on base and instead are looking to hit home run after home run. To switch from the baseball analogy to a football analogy, an NFL franchise sets a goal to sell out their season tickets and sell out all of the home game seats. They didn’t start out by trying to come up with a snazzy new marketing campaign. They asked themselves, what do the other teams that have achieved that objective do? They win the Super Bowl. How can we win the Super Bowl? They then looked at the statistics of the teams that win Super Bowls. They looked at the stats for each position. They then set goals for each player based on those stats. A linebacker may need to make 3.5 tackles per game. So the player was coached and encouraged to raise his average to hit that mark.
In your game, what do the winning players and teams do? For you to move your numbers up, you will have to do some things consistently that make the numbers go up. It could be to attend one business networking function every two weeks, to call up three current customers and offer them a friendly greeting or bit of information that will help them do their job better, to order and present one spec sample every week, to send out three handwritten thank-you notes every day or any of a number of things that have been proven to work in this industry.
It’s not about knowing what things work. It’s about doing those things. And then doing them again. It requires commitment. It requires doing it when you don’t feel like it. It’s about making success a habit!
