There’s two ways to look at working towards your goals.
One works, and the other one might work, but might just as easily be the thing that keeps you from achieving them.
In business that distinction is extremely important, especially where it comes to goals related to number of clients, average sales value, and bottomline revenue.
Here’s where it usually goes wrong:
We set a goal, and then we make it about our ability to attain it.
This many clients, that many prospects, that dollar amount on December 12th.
But those goals, while inspiring, also bring a slew of sabotaging elements.
Things like self-esteem, self-worth, deservingness, belief in our ability to stick it out long enough.
This is the realm of deep psychological murkiness – the kind of thing that therapists get rich on.
Much better is to look at your goals in relation to self-efficacy.
And that means, your belief in your ability to do things.
You’re able to send emails, right?
Make phone calls, publish content, organise your work… these are skills that you have, correct?
Sure, maybe you procrastinate on things that would move the needle (oh hello, backlog of followup!) – but would you say that you’re not able to re-connect with a cold lead?
Of course you wouldn’t.
It’s simply that there’s some sort of reason why you don’t.
The default attitude with most people, is to then create a narrative that there’s something wrong with us, that we’re broken somehow, but that’s not true.
There’s nothing wrong with us – we simply don’t look at things in the most efficacious way. We look at the goal to achieve not the actions that make those goals real.
Those actions, they are well within your ability, and you know it.
So focus on, look at, those activities, and connect with your belief that you can do it.
Make it the smallest possible step – don’t task yourself with something as grand as ‘process all records of cold leads’.
Instead, pull up one record. You can do that.
Then, have a look at your notes. Well within your abilities.
Next, check their site and social media. Can do.
Pick something current in their life, out of what you see, and write it down.
Next, draft an email that hooks into that thing – not in order to send, but just to draft it.
Run a spell-check. You can run a spell-check, can’t you? Exactly.
Now you have one cold lead, reviewed, and ready to message.
All that now stands between you and a restarted conversation, one that might lead to a sale, is one action.
Click send.
Finally: pat yourself on the back, because you’ve just done a massively important action for your business, and all it took was taking a few small actions, the kind that you don’t even need to believe you can do, because you know that you can do them.
Outcome goals are nice.
But action goals have outcome goals for breakfast every day of the week.
Cheers,
Martin
