2020: Time to Set Your Sights on What You Want to Achieve by This Time Next Year

I know exactly what hundreds of millions of people will be doing a year from now. The question is, “What will you be doing?”

A year from today the 2020 Summer Olympics begin in Tokyo, Japan, and hundreds of millions of people will be watching the athletes perform.Fortunately, as advisors, we don’t have hundreds of millions of people watching us, nor do we have our presentations going live around the world. But, they do, and the athletes are ready for it. Years ago when they set down the objective of making the Olympic Games, they committed to longer-term goals and exercises and training that needed to take place to make their life-long goal happen. But from that, they then reduced those life-long goals to incremental steps – small steps, done daily, weekly, quarterly – and they mastered them. They kept doing the same things until they became excellent at doing them.What do you need to do, as an advisor, to ensure that in twelve months’ time, you’ve mastered important increments for your business?So, Consider what those items are.Maybe you want to be succinct at clarifying to clients how to use Zoom or how to use GoToMeeting so you can communicate with them when doing portfolio reviews and allow them to stay in the privacy of their own home and avoid the inconvenience of coming into your office. Maybe you want to bring on a new advisor. Or maybe you want to take on a personal goal, like losing weight. What are those things that you want to tackle, that in twelve months’ time, when you achieve them, will have you really performing optimally, at your best. Then break them back to 90-day goals and objectives.What is it that you need to master or pursue over the next 90 days to have you tracking closely to toward achieving that goal within a year. For instance, if you want to have online meetings with clients, maybe you need to write out a checklist for them to walk them through at the next person-to-person meeting you have, so they become more confident. Maybe you want to be losing weight; maybe you want to lose fifteen pounds over the next 90 days, losing roughly a pound a week to drop your weight and feel more healthy. Personally, for me, that’s my objective: I want to drop 15 pounds, go from 225 to 210 pounds by November 1. That’s 99 days, but I’ll put it out there publicly. You need accountability.I’ve put that out there publicly to you. What do you need to make yourself accountable to somebody for, so they can ask you how things are going relative to achieving your longer-term goal?