Following on from Tuesday’s blog on success and its challenges, we discuss some top tips to increase your chances of being successful.
Define Success and Set Your Goals
Before you can succeed, you need to define exactly what that means to you. At the beginning of each year reassess all areas of your life: personal, financial and career. Remember, success cannot be defined by a manager, your partner, or your mates. That is up to you, and you alone. Start putting your personal goals together today to help define what you want to accomplish.
Identify Your Weaknesses
You know the old adage: Nobody’s perfect. Take a look at yourself in an objective way. Make a list. Identify your weaknesses and develop an action plan detailing how you will attain the skills and information you need to improve and get to the top of your game. How is your planning? Are you meeting your goals for calls per day and phone time? Do you have an in-depth knowledge of your niche? How are your selling and closing skills? Are you managing your time well? Never let yourself get too satisfied. Be a seeker: keep abreast of the latest professional trends and pertinent information to make sure you are constantly getting better at what you do.
Measure Your Progress
It’s essential to evaluate your performance every day, week, month and quarter. Measuring your activity and results allows you to determine if you are on track to hit your goals. If your stated objective is to deliver four hours of daily phone time, don’t leave the office until you achieve that. Often you can get that extra job order or send out just by making a few more calls. Success doesn’t fall into the laps of clock watchers. It is earned by people who know they need to work until they meet their goals.
Once you’ve achieved your goals one day, focus on hitting them for two days in a row. Then three days. Pretty soon you will be conditioned to do what you need to do to achieve your activity numbers on a daily and weekly basis.
Learn from Your Mistakes
Sometimes the worst times are the best times to ask yourself the hard questions. If you’ve gone the entire day, week or even month without achieving a specific goal – ask yourself why. What was I doing between calls? Why didn’t I get that sent out? Why didn’t the candidate accept the offer? How could I have avoided that? How can I make sure it never happens again? Be willing to evaluate your performance and make changes. It is the fastest way to achieve your goals.
Redefine Your Comfort Zone
People tend to hang out in their comfort zone. If a recruiter is uncomfortable marketing and not seeing a lot of success, it is natural to begin to do less marketing, with the result being little to no improvement. Recruiters who are uncomfortable qualifying and pre-closing candidates need to force themselves to go through these steps repeatedly to improve their skills. Every one of us needs to push ourselves to reach new professional comfort levels so that we see measurable improvement in our performance. When we get comfortable with that which once made us uncomfortable, we get stronger.
Get Personal Leverage
What is leverage? Any constraint that makes backing away much more difficult.
A few tips to create personal leverage:
Make a written commitment, establishing exactly what you will do on a daily basis. Put in writing the specific number of calls you will make a day, or your daily phone time goals. When things are in writing, instead of just mental notes, they tend to happen.
Tell a friend or find a goal partner. Now that you’ve written your objectives down, enlist others to help you stay on track. This person must be someone who will be supportive and who has an understanding of the business, but also someone who won’t let you off the hook if you start to waver.
Establish short-term commitments. These can be much stronger than long-term goals. They allow you to focus your efforts and get great momentum early on. Short-term commitments could include calls per day, marketing presentations per day or job orders per week. It is about establishing a new pattern of behaviour and that can be very powerful.
Reward yourself for small victories and achievements. When you find yourself meeting daily or weekly commitments, treat yourself to something special. You need to start feeling good about your successes, to condition your body and mind to winning. Repeated small success will end in big successes. Reward yourself. Then get right back into the game and achieve more.
By the same token, punish yourself for not achieving results. Yes, it’s the pain and pleasure principle. Think of some small negative rewards for not achieving results such as “If I don’t meet my phone time today, I will go to work an hour early the next day.” Punishment can be a very effective way to keep you on track.
The difference between a life well lived and a life half lived is as simple as a decision. Whether or not you choose to pay the price of success can determine whether at the end of the day you look back on your life with joy or regret.