What holds a lot of people back from getting the results they want is that they’re focusing on the results they want!
I know, that might sound odd and you might be asking, “How can I get something that I’m not focused on?”
Well, that’s true to an extent. You must clearly know what you want to have in order to get it. However, once you know what you want, and you’ve created a personalized ACTION plan to achieve it, it can be very dangerous to continue focusing on the results as a motivation strategy.
For instance, if you’re continually focusing on becoming a sales director, you’re generally just reminding yourself constantly about the fact that you’re NOT a sales director now, which usually leads to thoughts of all the other results you haven’t gotten, or never get, leading to a negative cycle of emotions.
Most people are reminding themselves of their failures ALL DAY LONG. And then they wonder why they’re not getting what they want. Hmmm…
The main outcome that most people get from focusing on their results is to beat themselves up for not having the results yet. And since you don’t control the results anyway (you have no control over whether someone says ‘yes’ to your offer), you shouldn’t be judging yourself on them.
The only things you control are your own ACTIONS, so that’s all you should judge yourself against. I’ll explain more about that in another post…
The bottom line is this – in order to get the results you want, you must do the necessary actions. So what really matters, from a motivation standpoint, is to implement whatever strategies you can to help you do the actions, right? And focusing on the results they’re not getting doesn’t motivate most people to keep doing the actions.
In fact, it causes most people to STOP doing the actions, because we tend to project our poor results into the future and choose not to endure all that disappointment.
For example, let’s say you sit down to make “booking” calls, with the goal of getting 2 bookings. If don’t get any bookings in your first 10 calls, you’ll feel like you’re failing, and you’ll usually decide not to continue failing since it doesn’t feel good. And, since your stated goal is to get 2 bookings (which depends on someone else saying ‘yes’), you are failing because you’re not getting any wins.
If you ever even get to the 11th call, you’ll probably not be too excited about it, right? And that negative energy won’t attract many people. Which leads to more frustration, more disappointment, more doubt, and on and on and on. Sound familiar???
The reason most people play that game is because they’re pretending they control other people’s circumstances and decisions (whether they answer the phone, what they say, what’s going on in their life) and judging themselves negatively for the poor results.
And they usually take it a step further…check out my next post to learn more!
