Question: What is your best advice for keeping momentum going? – Lisa, New York
Answer: Nothing like a nice tight, specific question. Without knowing your specific situation, I will give you a couple scenarios. Here is where I see momentum break down. You are saying keep momentum going, so I am assuming there was momentum to start.
I have seen people in a straight groove and then a deal blows up. And then they are persistent and goal oriented and achievers and they say to themselves, “Nope, I am not going to let that get to me”, and then another deal blows up. All along they are in a groove so they have continued to arrange interviews, but these landmine deals, shrapnel is affecting your psyche and they are blowing up, even if you did everything right. That is one of the things that I see as a momentum killer.
On the flip side, which is more often the case, I have seen, the following occur. you are in a groove. You make a placement, and it is $30,000 and you write the invoice and you say, “Okay, that is coming in February,” and then you arrange an interview next week. It goes to a second. It is another placement, and this thing that you thought was dead comes back to life, and all of a sudden you have this $60,000, 70,000, or $80,000 month, especially if it is now. It is New Years and you are thinking, I am on track to bill a million bucks. What were your billings last year? $250,000. It is just okay.
You exhale because these invoices are out and you have all this money coming in. You are significantly above your expectations, so when momentum breaks down usually in 2 scenarios: When you are significantly above or significantly below and the expectation you have set for yourself. The key to keeping momentum going is to know what it is you want.
A really good client who has been with me for years, started to work with me in one of our group programs and when we did our Game Plan Call at the beginning of the year, she set a very aggressive goal. We reverse engineered exactly what she needed to do to get there, since she had not tracked metrics, I used conservative numbers and she billed much more than she wanted to in her first 7 months. That is tongue in cheek. She actually hit her annual goal in July.
Here is where momentum broke down. She hit her goal and her activity went off target. So I had to jump in with her and have her set an aggressive 60 to 90 day goal and find and identify places for that extra money because she made significantly more by July than she had planned to. She could have actually taken August, September, until the end of the year off and been on target.
With my clients, that is where I see the biggest momentum killer. They tend to get to their goal early and then, it is nature with all of us, we exhale. Knowing what your metrics are to make a placement and knowing what each incremental placement is going to allow for you in your life both personally and professionally. Staying focused on that is the only real way I found to sustain momentum over time because when we are in fear mode, meaning when the whole world is blown up around us and we cannot pay our bills, for a lot of us that just kicks us in the butt and we get going. It is the when we are over our targets where I see momentum break down.
I would just challenge you to look at what it is you really want, reverse engineer it vis-a-vis the metrics and figure out the targets you need to hit every day, every week, every month to stay on target for that and just keep that connected visually either to whatever it is you desire. Is it paying down credit card debt? More free time? Is it a bigger house? Better car? A second home, vacation home, whatever.
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