Achieving Your Goals
How can you write a plan when you don’t know the future? Make no mistake about it: life isn’t always fair, and you can rest assured that things will probably not go your way at least once or twice. I simply call this, ‘life happens.’ Why does this happen? It may not be due to any mistake on your part. Sometimes you have to plan for the unpredictable element. You cannot predict the future, so attempting to determine the outcome of your every endeavor might leave you feeling disappointed. Instead, focus on what you wish to accomplish with the experience. You can certainly determine your own performance. Try and set goals that you have more direct control over. This way, even a financial or personal setback will not interfere with the achievement itself. There could be any number of obstacles that could prevent an outcome-oriented goal from being accomplished: Government law could inhibit your professional goals. Weather or climate could ruin an important event. A bad economy could prevent you from achieving high numbers for the year.
You must also beware that others should not influence you to set unrealistic goals based on outcome or performance. Your views on what success means could be influenced by the media, by employers or even by one’s own family. The problem is, when others try and set the standard for success, they do so in ignorance of your personal desires and ambitions. What makes one person successful does not necessarily make you happy. What one person sees as high performance in a short period of time, you may well consider exhausting or you don’t view it as high performance, based on your own circumstances, desires, and ambition.
Speaking of Client Satisfaction and Customer Service…
Invest in a copy of Rick Barerra’s book, Over Promise and Over Deliver. Read it cover to cover and apply the ideas that will have the biggest impact on your achieving your goals. This is a terrific resource with lots of great ideas.
How would your clients rate your customer satisfaction?
Do you have employees that make you shake your head because they just don’t know how to be customer service oriented?
Ruby Newell-Legner is an expert in promoting customer satisfaction. If you need to improve or enhance your customer satisfaction so you can increase your business, you may want to go to www.GuestRelationsTraining.com and review what Ruby can do for you.
Review the free Webinars and many other resources available. For a real life example of what your customers may experience and how to embrace exemplary customer service go to: http://tinyurl.com/l4jcw5.
You can contact Ruby directly at: Ruby@GuestRelationsTraining.com or 303-933-9291.
What are you doing to continually improve your client satisfaction?
Your Focus Needs to be on the Important Tasks
For the majority of us, the power to focus on one task at a time and see it through to completion is not an innate gift. Focus is a learned response, so if we want to achieve the professional, personal and social goals we imagine, we have to first learn how to focus on what we want.
We now live in a frenetic, activity-filled, multi-tasking, instant gratification society, so it is easy to get lost in the distractions that bombard us from every angle.
How many times have you found yourself on the phone talking to a client, while reading your emails, hitting the “Reply” button and then typing out a response? Where is your focus while you are completing a number of individual tasks at the same time?
Focus requires that we learn to differentiate between the “urgent” and the “important” tasks. Urgent tasks are distractions that cause us, albeit subconsciously, to put off or delay the important projects. And it’s the important tasks that lead us to our objectives and goals.
Responding to urgent emails, answering the phone, or checking your pager can all be categorized as urgent tasks. We are conditioned to believe that these urgent tasks require our instant attention because they keep us busy and make us feel important and needed.
We think, “This will only take a minute,” when, in fact, urgent tasks can often take a lengthy amount of “minutes” to complete.
What will you do differently today, tomorrow, this week, to make sure your focus is on the activities that put you in the highest probability position to achieve your goals – personal and professional?
How do people know you are really good at what you do?
Have you ever worked with someone who was really good or watched someone work and thought to yourself, they are really good at what they do? Providing marketing literature or telling someone how good you are isn’t always the best way to have someone believe you are as good as you are. Demonstrating how good you are by the questions you ask and how you conduct yourself in your professional environment should give people a good feeling that you are good and know what you are doing.
For example, I was in a bicycle shop one day watching a ‘bike fitter’ fit a person for their bike so they can work as efficiently as possible while riding their bike. I didn’t know this person fits very famous cyclists at the time. In a matter of minutes he made adjustments to this person’s bike and off the lady went. I could just tell by what he did, and how he worked that he knew what he was doing. He had a lot of confidence in his ability without openly showing it or providing any written materials. People know who he is by reputation.
I was in the PCS Connection phone store the other day and there were a few young men working. I could tell by how fast they worked when someone asked them a question and how confident they were in their abilities and they didn’t have to say much. They answered questions, told the truth (didn’t try to sell you something you really didn’t need), provided great customer service, and very efficiently got the job done for each person who was there. I had been to 6 phone stores and told that they couldn’t help me with a problem I had. This one young man listened to my problem and fixed it in approximately five minutes. WOW! I love these guys now and won’t go anywhere else. They really know their stuff!
If you live in San Diego, this store is at 4334 Convoy Street, Suite 0, San Diego, CA 92111. Their phone number is 858-278-1999. If you have any cell phone issues or just want to talk to experts about cell phones and blackberrys, you need to experience the guys at this store.
Do your prospects and clients view you as the expert? Do they send you lots of referrals to others they think can use your services or products? What has to happen for you to demonstrate to prospects that you are the expert in your field and they need you in their life? What’s one thing you could do even better to have people think this way of you when they first meet you and in the first few minutes?
Great Advice from Harvey MacKay and Richard Weylman
I thought you would receive value from an email Richard Weylman recently sent out, so I’m sharing it with you.
Author Harvey MacKay said, “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.” Even with the myriad of “time-saving” technological devices we now have, do you find yourself wishing for “just a few more hours in the day”? We seem to always be in a hurry, but never really accomplish what we hope to. The answer isn’t adding a few more hours to each day (we would just waste them in meaningless actions anyway), but the answer is to more effectively manage the time you have. How can you do this? Consider these ideas:
1. Instead of a “to-do” list, have a “not-to-do” list. Think of the many time-wasters you perform every day and resolve to eliminate them. Things like reading your junk mail, reading the entire newspaper, etc. Any of these things that don’t actually accomplish anything in the end you should try to “not” do!
2. Evaluate what your time is worth: take your annual projected income and divide it by 2,080 – this will give you roughly what an hour of your time is worth. Now evaluate how much time it takes to do everything you do. Is it worth your time? Or would you be better off delegating that task to someone else whose time is less expensive?
3. Delegate, delegate, delegate! The more successful you are, the higher up the ladder you climb, the more valuable and in demand is your time. Learn to give away any task that can be efficiently completed by someone else.
The ‘stuff’ in your head is distracting you!
Do you have things continually going on in your head of all you have to do today, tomorrow, next week, etc? Those are distractions! When you effectively use your calendar and master task list on a consistent basis you don’t have to have all these things going on in your head thinking you have to remember them and being afraid you are going to forget to do something.
Do some of these things you have in your head keep you up at night? When you take them out of your head and put them on your master task list and on your calendar, you can sleep better every night.
You will be more in control and you will feel a sense of relief. Don’t believe me, try this for yourself and you will be like the many people I coach who have that sigh of relief when they get all these distractions out of their head and in the proper place (that you review and honor – did I forget to mention this part…).
Stop distracting yourself with all your thoughts. Do it today. Let me know how I can help you.
How would you benefit by enhancing your discipline?
I recently listened to an interview with this Australian Fitness educator and she described discipline this way…
She said there are no secrets, but the key is discipline. If you want something badly enough you will do whatever it takes to achieve it.
Notice that she didn’t say willing to do whatever it takes – she said will do whatever it takes. Just because someone says they are willing to do something, doesn’t mean they will do it.
Sometimes you just have to suck it up and exercise the discipline to do what you know needs to be done when it needs to be done so we can achieve our goals.
“Discipline is doing what you know you should do at the time you should do it, even if you don’t feel like it.” – Rowena Szeszeran-McEvoy, Fitness Educator
How would you benefit by enhancing your discipline?
Create Greater Success with Effective Goal Setting
It’s relatively easy to set your goals, even if you have never done it or not done it much before. You start by breaking down a broad mission a dream into workable smaller parts. You begin by writing down your broad mission and dream goals so you can create goals today that will put you on the path of achieving these long-range goals. Put a specific date by each goal that represents when you would like to have it achieved. The more short-term goals you create, the better, because it will fill you with more confidence as you achieve them on your road to even greater success. Keep in mind that just writing all your professional and personal goals out on paper is not exactly a great accomplishment, in itself. True, by thinking your plan through this far you have already done more than the average dreamer out there. Thinking is not exactly doing though, is it? What really matters, and what will make you ultimately successful in life, is taking action.
This is why it’s important to write down your goals with specific target dates for completion. When you do this, it will help you actually accomplish your goals. When you accomplish your short-term goals you know that you are on the path to achieving your long-range goals. How would you feel to know this? How would it feel to know that you are more consistently achieving your goals?
5 Tips for Making Better Choices
Life is all about choices. Look around you. You have chosen everything. Your life is the resulting compilation of all of your choices. The neighborhood you live in, your job, the level of success you have achieved in your career, the number of children you have, your spouse, the car you drive…are all the result of your choices.
Now, take a moment to think about the things in your life that you’re not happy with. It may be hard to swallow, but what you have is a result of your choices as well.
Here are 5 Tips for Making Better Choices
If you are not completely happy with your life and the choices you’ve made, it’s not too late to turn things around. All it takes is a change in the way you think about things and the determination to make better choices for yourself.
- Think about the long term. Most people focus on instant gratification. They want to know what they will earn immediately from making a certain decision. Unfortunately, many pass up on good opportunities because the immediate payoff isn’t that great.
- Consider your priorities. Every choice you make should be weighed against your priorities. If you want to put the rearing of your family before everything else, your choices should reflect this.
- Bring in the family. Before making any major decision, you might consider asking for feedback from your family and friends. Talking things over with others will help you see things clearly. They may even be able to give you ideas or open up your mind to possibilities that you wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
- Adopt a mentor. Find someone who is everything you want to be and form a friendship with them. Not only will they be able to give you tips, tricks and the formula for their success, they will help keep you motivated and focused.
- Surround yourself with the types of people that you want to be. Bad associations ruin good habits. If you want to be successful in your career, you should hang out with like-minded people. Even though we enjoy certain people, they may not be the best people for us to be around. Sometimes people hold us back without realizing what they are doing and this does affect you achieving your goals at the pace you would prefer.
Success and happiness are not luck. It’s all about choices. So, if you are not happy with your life, you have not made the right choices. And sitting around moaning about it isn’t going to help.
If you want to be happy…If you want to be even more successful…If you want to live the life of your dreams, choose to do so. It’s that simple. Sit down today and think about how your choices have shaped your life. Do not wait any longer to live the life you want! Start making the choices today that will lead you to the life you really want and you will enjoy the benefits of these new choices.
Review all the audio learning programs on goal setting, time management, and many other personal and professional development topics that will help you to be even more successful. Go to: AccountabilityCoach.com/coaching-store/audio-store/ and choose the topics that will benefit you the most.
