CoachEideHi All,
Here we are again, with the next step in the series on How to help yourself, in fact, the series is building on a step by step way to get yourself ready to be able to use a coach, before you manage step 1 to 1o in this series, you are really not ready to use a coach, but I can work with you to help if you feel that it is too tough to do this alone.
First I want to let you read the first 3 steps, in case you have not read them yet, Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3. There you are, you can now work them out one by one. It is a very good idea to start at number 1 and work your way through them, but it is by no means a requirement.
Todays topic is about ¨shoulds¨. This is a things that hangs over you and does not get done or goals you want to achieve but has been sitting as a goal for a while. In fact, if you have had a goal you wanted to achieve for more than a year, you should, no punt intended, delete it from your goal list or from your to do list, depending on where it is, and whether it is a goal or whether it is some other from of ¨shoulds¨.
Why is it important to remove them? Well, you may think that it is important, but it has not been done for the last year, therefore it cannot be that important to you. In other words, you think in your mind that it is important, but you do not find any motivation to do it, at least, for the time being.
Some goals are great to just delete, others are not so wonderful to just forget. First of all, the ones that are no problem to drop, just drop them, do not have them sitting on your list to do, when it is not important enough to be done in a year. Now you are left with a few ¨shoulds¨ that you do not feel like you can delete. The question than become what do you do with them?
The list of goals that you have not been able to do within a year of setting them, and is too important to give up on, are goals that you know you should do, but you do not really want to do, therefore, the point we are trying to make in this post is that you need to use some way to reinvent that goal before you put it as a goal again.
Reinventing the goal, how will you do that? It can be done in many ways; you could write the goal in a different way, you could look if you can motivate you to do the goal now or you can find a better way to reward yourself for achieving the goal, and maybe, just maybe, the goal is too big to get started at. I usually have a header with my experience, but in this post it will not be my experience on exactly a goal that was one year old, because I have always dropped goals long before the one year rule, if I have not achieved it by then.
However, there are many ways to set a goal to make it more interesting to work on, and not the least achieve it. The first thing you can think about is the size of the goal. Is the goal to big to do in one go, in other words, is the goal to big a change to do it all in one step. Maybe we need to reduce it into smaller parts.
Sometimes this helps the motivation to get started. Other times it can be the goal does not create the motivation we like. Even we know we should do it, we just do not want to do it. Sometimes we just have to admit that the world was not meant to be fair, get used to it, and do it anyway. After all, we are adults, and adults do what is best for them.
Now, we will look at a time when I did have to work on my goal, to make it more achievable. It is a bit of stretch to a time when I was successful in network marketing, and nearly did stop completely due to not having learned enough about setting goals.
My experience about rearranging a goal
Let us start at the beginning. I had just moved to Australia, and to start off, I was invited to join a Network Marketing company, nearly as soon as I arrived in Australia. It was a great way to meet friends, and it was a great business. It had very good products, and it had a bunch of great people, and everything seemed perfect.
However, I had just qualified to go 9%, that was called Leader’s Club, so I had just qualified to be a Leader, and in that club there was much talk about qualifying to become Direct, that meant that I would have to dobbel my business 10 times. In other words, right now I was at 900 points in my business, and I needed to do 9 000 points per month, to reach this goal.
The day I was convinced by my friend that introduced me to set this goal myself, I was told by him, that this was the main goal to reach after I had passed the level I was at now. The other levels just meant a few extra dollars, but this level was so important. I did not understand what it meant, and I did not understand what it would entail to reach this point, but I took my friend’s advice, and accepted that this was where I wanted to go next.
If you read the words above, you can see, that the goal I set, was not set by me. It was sort of forced upon me. In addition, the gap between where I was and the place I needed to go to reach this goal, was huge. There is the problem. I was given the goal by my friend that pushed me to set a goal I did not yet know what meant, and I was starting to work towards this goal without knowing there was anything wrong.
After a month I had achieved a few hundred points more, but the goal I had was way beyond this, I started to feel like a failure, and I little by little I started to feel like a failure, even I had never had so much success before. I started to feel like I could not reach this goal ever. This made me withdraw from the meetings and from my business friends. I felt more and more like I could not show my face there until I was an achiever, which would mean that I needed to achieve my goal, and become the person they wanted me to be.
That meant that I would need to stay away from them for a long time, I could not see how I would achieve this goal within the next few months, yes, maybe not even within the next year. I withdrew totally from the group, and luckily one of my friend’s friend, called me up and talked to me, and asked me why I did not come to the meetings anymore.
In trying to hide the real reason I tried to tell him that I had been busy, the meetings was at a time when I had worked overtime at work, and that I was going to come at a set date for a meeting. When I did not show up for that meeting, this person, came to my house, and talked to me. You can say he talked some sense into me that night.
Luckily, he came, because he understood what was going on. The goal I had set, made me feel unmotivated to do the business, my qualification this month had dropped 400 points, and I had not done what I normally did every month myself. Due to this lack of motivation towards the whole thing, that I felt.
When we talked he told me that my friend had been very pushy, and that he now had left the business because he did not get the results he wanted, and asked me what he had set for a goal for me, and I told him, that he had asked me to achieve the 9 000 point goal. He was extremely upset. He went through everything with me, and we talked a long time, and he apologized for his friend’s behavior toward me, before he tried to ask me if I liked the business. I said as true was that I was impressed by the products, and I had been very motivated to achieve Leader’s Club, when I was working towards that, but when he forced me to set that big goal, I had totally lost interest, after understanding the size of the task at hand, that big goal. He nodded in understanding, and told me that he fully understood what I was going thru.
That night, we talked together for 14 hours, in fact, I went straight to work the next morning, without sleep, but I went with new motivation towards this business, I walked with new confidence, all due to him helping me to see what was wrong with this kind of goal setting. I had never learned much about goal setting before this. So I had taken my friends advice as the rule for how one did it. Thankfully, this other friend, could set me straight.
We redefined my goal, to a point of achieving 900 points again next month, and then trying to work towards the next goal as 1 200 points. Instead of 9 000 points. The goal of 9 000 points became a long term goal, and I set a short term goal of managing 900 points again this month and doing 900 points every month, but trying to set a medium term goal of achieving 1 200 points.
This framework of goal setting was totally different to what I had met before. He also showed me how to set other goals. The fact that one grow as a person before one grow in a business. There was so much more I needed to learn at that time, that I did not know that I did not know.
It went well, 2 years later, I achieved 9 000 points. Unfortunately, the month after, I was to move to New Zealand, and since I no longer lived in Australia, my whole business had to stop, unless I could qualify for 9 000 points business in New Zealand. Hurray, that made me feel upset, probably I was angry and a bit regretting the decision to move to Auckland. However, I do no longer regret the whole thing, I see it as a learning activity. I should have checked out things before I chose to move to New Zealand, but since I did not, I just had to take it.
Still to this day, I love MLM and it is a business type I feel that there is room for improvement in. I mean, why should there be any difference which country you live in? But besides that, I feel MLM is the best type of business anyone can start to learn to do business in. There are a few companies that are not as good as others, but are there only perfect companies in other industries? I do not think so. There are many companies that do not manage to do the right things, and they disappear, no matter which industry you are in.
I have some advice for people that want to go into business in MLM, check out the policies on creating income. Do the company focus all its papers on you sponsoring people or does it focus on getting customers, it is not enough to read the written words. You must see and feel the culture in the company after you have started. I have a perfect solution for you, a company that are totally focused on getting customers, that use the products over and over again. If you are interested in earning money, and doing it with a great company, with the right morals, you can email me here. It is free to join, it gives you all you need to get started free, our team even have all the training you need to get started organized for free. Get in touch and we will start working together.
The end of the story today
There is a lesson in all this; I had to learn to set proper goals, not ones that killed my motivation, and that is what ¨shoulds¨ do to. One will lose all motivation to work towards something if one do not set appropiate goals. What that is, is different for all. We are all different. We are all achieving things in our own speed. Some have to learn things before they can move on, others are having the knowledge, but did not put it together in the right order, and others are ready to run, as fast as they get the opportunity too.
One should never compare oneself to others, one should always remember that there could be situations that are different, some obvious and some hidden, this is the reason why some can do something in 2 weeks while others can use a year to achieve the same. One must remember that we all come with different backgrounds, with different knowledge and there are not two equal people in the world.
Therefore; remember, we are all responsible for our own actions, or at least if we want to call ourselves adults. We must remember to only work on ourselves, and not compare ourselves to others. Set your goals, work your goals, enjoy the achievement process as much as the achievement, and when you achieve the goal, celebrate it. Put aside the ¨shoulds¨, find out if you want to achieve it, and if not, put it away, if you want to achieve it, then redefine it, maybe do like I did, and make the goals proper for you, maybe just be redefining them, or by stating them a different way, and maybe all that is needed is, to make the reward bigger.
Till next week, with next tip, enjoy removing those ¨shoulds¨ that has been breaking you down, and get on with achieving your real goals, the one that you really want to achieve.
Enjoy, till next week have fun, work hard, focus on yourself and your goals,
All the best,
John
