Goals and Reflection-How to Learn From YOUR Past
January 20th, 2009 Posted in Creating Success, How To Sell HomesThis time of year, the “goal” conversation becomes the popular thing to do. Managers want all of their employees to tell them how productive they will be for the New Year. The New Year always seems to bring new optimism and hope for better results. It never fails. The calendar rolls over from December to January and WHOLLA! Let the good times roll!!
Perhaps you sense a bit of sarcasm from me. It’s not that I don’t think the new optimism is good, because I do. It’s that I don’t believe in the fact that simply changing the calendar warrants misguided hope. What is always left out of the goal conversation is reflection. By reflection, I mean it is important to take the necessary time to digest the results of the previous year.
- What did you learn?
- How long did it take to learn it?
- Why did you learn it?
In most goal making scenarios, your manager asks you for your goals for the new year. You go back to your office and somewhat haphazardly create a results oriented goal. You do very little thinking of the previous year, except have the fleeting thought of, “boy, I hope this year is better.” Then you send your goals to the manager. BAM! The year ends, you fall short of your goals and start the process all over.
Obviously, this scenario does not encompass everyone, but unfortunately it does capture about 80% of the goal making public. So, with this knowledge, let me explain how to properly reflect on your actual previous results before throwing a dart and hoping to hit a new fake goal you set for yourself. Learn from your real past and you WILL create a much better future.
First, you MUST reflect on what you learned in the previous year. I’ll equate this to my profession and expertise of new home sales. In 2008, I learned that the people that have the desire to purchase a new home, have a whole new set of buying motives and fears that MUST be dealt with. People have a very real fear of job loss, a very real fear of not being able to sell their current home due to market conditions lowering their value, and a very real fear of not qualifying for a home loan. Have these problems always existed? Yes. But in the old days, these buyers were mostly ignored because they represented a small piece of the market. Today, they must be addressed, because they represent 95% of the marketplace.
**When searching for what you learned, be specific. You must be able to grab on to something tangible. Broad strokes of thought will not gain you any new productive information.
Second, how long did it take to learn this new change? The idea behind this step is to gain an understanding of your awareness and also learn what kind of time response to change you have. For me, I was ahead of my personal goal pace for 2008 until about the middle of June. When my personal goals began to fall short, I knew it was time to sit down and reflect on my daily prospect encounters on a much closer scale. It’s crucial to become aware that something needs to change.
**The idea is to improve your future response time to make the necessary changes to keep yourself relevant and current. The market changes quickly. If you want to keep up, you must be open and aware of the needed changes.
The third item to understand is why you bothered to learn about this new change. To go back to my example, I knew I had to sit down and analyze my process because something had changed. I wasn’t getting the same positive results from my same questions and inquiries with new clients. For me, I needed to try a new type of questioning tactic that would net the answers I needed to properly help people. As times became more difficult economically over the summer, people become a bit more withdrawn and less forthcoming.
The questions I would ask in April, no longer gained good results in June. If I had not learned this new change in the market, I would have missed countless future sales and probably would have wanted to blame the economy for a bad sales year. As it turned out, I continued to sell very well through the remainder of the year, finished in the top 3 for my company and I don’t have to blame my failure on anything, since I chose to be successful.
**Understanding that you need to learn a new skill to maintain or gain new success is really the first of the three steps that will occur. Remember that when you start to slide from your goals or ambitions, it’s okay to revisit some of your current strategies…perhaps they need a tweak or two.
Take note that changing your strategy multiple times during the year is not failing. It is learning. There is no failure if you learn something from the experience. You can only fail if you give up or if you choose to not learn.
While you are reflecting on last year’s results and experiences, you don’t have to do it by yourself. Get together with a co-worker or a few co-workers and brainstorm about your experiences. Try and figure out what didn’t go as planned and why you think that was.
The ability to have future success is without question directly related to your learned knowledge in your past. You hold your own key to success. I urge you to tap into yourself, grab that key and unlock all of your skills. It’s a new year, the game has started and you have the ball. What are you going to do with it?