Maximizing Self
I teach mortgage law and sales skills to industry professionals. I see all manner of individuals with varying degrees of drive and ambition. Everyone says they want to do their best and earn the greatest amount possible, but their actions don’t always follow through. In fact, often they don’t.
What does it take to be our best? Beyond raw ability and talent, what can we do to maximize our opportunities to be the best we can possibly be? The answer is easy. Work at it.
But there’s more beneath the surface than just work. We all work. Achieving greatness is not about work, or even working hard—although that helps. It’s not even about working smart, though that's also good. It's about targeting our efforts toward something of value we want to achieve; working with a specific goal in mind and understanding what it's going to take to get you to your target. It also means looking for, and engaging in, those habits and behaviors that will lift our efforts up and result in the greatest return on the investment of our time and talent. A large part of success is not just seeing opportunities, but identifying and utilizing the things that others don’t see or acknowledge, then leveraging them to our advantage.
Raw ability is a gift. But ability can be eclipsed by effort, drive, and determination while employing successful tools. This topic will continue through a few installments that will outline the things you can do to maximize “self” in whatever capacity that means to you. Whether you’re an employee working for others or an entrepreneur, we can all benefit from the habits and ideas this blog will put forth.
Goals
I’ll begin by encouraging you to set the specific goals you want to achieve in your life, in your work and in your mind. Write out exactly what you want them to be. A proper goal worth achieving is a specific long-term desire you want to realize. It could be a singular item or event, or it could be a set of things that define success to you.
You don’t just wish for a better life and it somehow magically appears. you have to set very specific intentions for what that better life means to you. What will be present—and not present—in your life when you achieve your goal? Once you’ve defined all that you want and what will be, then you set up the steps to get there.
Once you’ve made a detailed list of your long-term goals, then create a timeframe for you to achieve it in. Maybe your timeframe will be years or months away. The loftier the goal, then probably the longer you need to give yourself to attain it. But set up a timeframe that you hold yourself to.
Once the goal and timeframe are set, then you need to break it down to where it seems attainable. You do this by creating short-term objectives that will allow you to achieve milestones along the way to getting to your goal.
This is illustrated by the old saying, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” If your goal is to consume the entire elephant, you do it by setting the short-term objective of taking one bite at a time. That’s then broken down even further. What would be considered true success in each “bite”? Certainly not just the bite itself. If you’re really eating the whole thing, then the bite is just the start of each short-term objective. You also have to chew the bite and swallow it to complete the objective.
Here again, you have to be specific in defining what success truly means. If critical details are left out, then achieving your goal is much more difficult. It's frustrating because the map to get there is not clear. Clarity and understanding beget true success. By completing each and every necessary responsibility required in fulfilling each step is what brings the desired goal into view.
There’s a final key component of this plan. After setting the long-term goal, the timeframe to achieve it, and the short-term objectives that break it down into comprehensible segments, you then have to create checkpoints. Utilizing checkpoints along the way ensures you are on the right track. Are the short-term objectives calibrated properly to ensure you will achieve your goal in the timeframe you’ve allotted? If so, well done. If not, then something has to change. Either the short-term objectives need re-vamping or the timeframe needs to be lengthened.
The checkpoints are your evaluations of “self” and the habits you’ve created. Are they effective? If not how can you make them better? This is vital to keep yourself motivated and moving forward. Reward yourself for good behaviors. Make the tasks of achieving your long-term goal enjoyable. The more fun and/or rewarding the journey, the more achievable the goal.
That’s your first assignment. Set your intentions, then create the roadmap that will get you started in achieving your dreams. In the next segment, we’ll discuss some effective tools you can adopt in maximizing your opportunities.
