We’ve all experienced it before – a sales seminar by a dynamic speaker who motivates you into thinking beyond what you ever thought was possible. You leave the seminar all fired up to take your business to the next level. You go to work the next morning, still excited and motivated, and you convert that exuberant energy into jotting down your strategy in the form of some concrete goals; maybe you even write the business plan you should’ve written so long ago.
For the next few days, you’re still motivated, but as the days pass, and the weeks go by, the motivation fades little by little, until you’re back to your routine with no inspiration at all. You’re now back in that rut, just working, just thinking about your day to day business affairs, with no time to think outside the box and get yourself pumped up the way you were several weeks ago.
So what happened to the motivation? How can you succeed if that feeling keeps going away every time you’re on track toward accomplishing something great? The problem is that motivation is a fleeting emotion. While we all need to be motivated at times, and those moments are wonderful sparks of creativity…when huge dreams find their first sign of life….where you feel unstoppable as though you can accomplish anything, motivation is not enough to carry out the goals you’ve dreamed of. A mere two weeks later, you’re not as inspired, and two weeks after that you’ve forgotten what that great feeling even felt like.
What will help you carry out your plan and really succeed? The answer is something just as important as motivation – FOCUS. Focus is they key to carrying out a plan which was born out of motivation. Once you have a goal, you must now break it down to the execution stage – down to mini-weekly goals which will dictate a daily plan. For example, if I’m feeling enthusiastic and make a goal to acquire 120 new clients this year, first, I divide that by each month, so I know my monthly goal is 10 new clients, or 2.5 per week. Now, how do I accomplish that? Hopefully, I have a system which will tell me that if my sales force makes a certain number of calls, I will gain a specific number of new accounts. Now I break that down into a daily plan. The daily plan is simple and straight forward, and not nearly as overwhelming as thinking of the huge annual goal – but the beauty of it all lies in the fact that if the daily plan is carried out, the big goal will be met.
The next time you get inspired – enjoy that feeling, and convert it into a detailed plan. This way, when the inspiration leaves you, FOCUS will keep you going.