Are you doing your best? A good way to determine this is to look at your TARGETS and your progress toward achieving them.
Your targets should stretch you and they should be based on reality, not fanciful thinking about what you hope to get. Not only should you know how many listings, sales and asking price adjustments you will achieve in the month, you should also have a plan showing where your results will come from. As the result of this plan you will reach, or exceed, your targets.
Is this true of you?
Do you consistently reach or exceed your targets? By comparing your results against your targets, you will quickly see how committed you are. Committed people reach target. And goal-orientated people set targets that stretch them.
Goals, Targets, and then Plans is the three-step process that will almost guarantee that you will consistently reach challenging, yet realistic, targets.
I do not know of many, if any, people who manage to stay focused in the long term without undergoing this process, through which they gain a clear understanding of what they want from their careers and how they intend to achieve it.
People who set targets without first setting clear goals and and then planning how they will achieve those goals set themselves up to fail. You will have little success if you try and pluck targets from thin air – targets only become clear through careful planning.
It is like crossing a river. There is no bridge, only stones which you can use to step on to cross the river. Starting from one shore, you pick out the first stone, one you can reach by extending one leg. You place one foot on that stone, test it to see if it’s firm underfoot and if it is, you swing the second leg onto the next stone. You continue in this way, stone by stone, until you reach the other shore.
Your journey across the river begins with the first stone. You do not attempt to cross the river by leaping from one shore to the other, nor by leaping to a stone halfway across. Only stone by stone do you reach your goal – the far shore.
Your three ‘stones’ in the destination called ‘Doing Your Best’ are Goals, Targets and Plans. Setting targets without first setting goals and formulating a plan is like trying to jump from one shore to the other without using the stepping stones. In the river analogy, you end up wet. In the target analogy you end up not doing your best.
In our program, Winning Ways – Real Estate Sales [1], we show how important goals are to long-term success and happiness. So many leaders complain about how difficult it is to get their salespeople to focus and yet every time I ask them, “How many of these unfocused salespeople have clear written goals and are following a plan to achieve those goals?” never once does a leader name even so much as one salesperson who has these tools.
The fact is, had those salespeople undertaken based their targets on worthwhile goals backed up with firm plans, they would not have any difficulty focusing. They would be doing their best.
So my question to these people is:
When are you going to wake up to a ‘secret’ winners have known for years?