Resolutions and…Practice makes perfect…

Resolutions and…better goals

New Year resolutions. We often make them too optimistically and later realize they’re not achievable so we write them off – maybe even before we’d really begun tackling them. Business goals can fall victim to the same problem. But if we’re disciplined about creating goals that are believable, achievable and measurable we can largely avoid that unproductive outcome.

If we added just two new accounts in 2024, what will be so different in 2025 that we can add ten? Just maybe that ten account goal fails that first criteria of believability and probably the second one as well!

Or if the goal is to increase sales ten percent to our current customers – but with no specifics as to which accounts, by when and by how much, then measuring our progress (or lack of) won’t be possible.

Goals are important, but in the absence of checking off those three criteria, they’re not worth much. And while it might be better to have loosely defined targets than to have none, we have to accept that those are aspirations, not goals.

But by taking a critical look at them and adhering to those three goalsetting principals, we can make them real and pave the way for a year that we’ll be happy with come December 31.

Practice makes perfect…or at least better

The 10,000-hour rule is one of those irrefutable facts of life. It holds that to really master any complex task requires pretty much that many hours of practicing it. That doesn’t mean we won’t be dangerous earlier on, but it does say that to really master anything difficult takes time and practice.

Consider how clumsy we were when we made that first real cold call. Chances are it wasn’t pretty. You might actually have made the sale, but probably not without a lot of difficulty (and luck).

Contrast that not so pretty experience with how smoothly you handled that same situation five years later. And considering that a year’s work is about 2,000 hours, five years of experience and practice magically equals that 10,000 hours!

The good news is that as we repeat any task it becomes essentially muscle memory. Consider how we can ride a bike years after we last rode or hit a golf ball as well or (at least as badly) as we once did – even after a long hiatus from the sport.

Next up: Dealing with bad muscle memory.