How do you make the impossible possible? You break it down!
I am a big believer in reverse engineering. Start with everything you want and work backwards. If what you want doesn’t scare you a bit, you won’t have the motivation you need to map your daily behavior towards a goal. We set goals in order to change. Goals are not more of the same, goals are different results which will require different action.
Setting a goal that requires change and induces a sense of fear or makes you straight scared can shut you down before you start. Change is hard, facing fear sucks, and being scared is not the ideal situation we hope for. How do we get the results we establish as a goal while dealing with the natural human reaction to big ideas? This is where breaking it down starts to make sense.
By reverse engineering a big goal into smaller goals, we start to establish all the pieces that equal our total vision. Say you want to produce a million dollars in sales over a year. That number is a big number. Break it into 12 months – $83,333.33 a month. Still a big number so we take that down to 4 week blocks – $20,833.33. Take that down to days – $2,739.73…. Take down to hrs and minutes if you have to.
When you break things down, the parts become easier to see yourself achieving.
I have a friend who needed 30 new clients in his business. He felt that it was an impossible task to achieve in the timeline he needed to keep his doors open. He had 60 days of operating capital at the level he was at. He fixated on his lack of success prior and the number 30. 30 may not seem like a lot to some but for him it was a monumentally huge number.
1st we established that going under was not what he wanted. Followed by acknowledging that major change was required to not go under. The focus had to shift from the negative perception of reality to a focus on the possibility and potential if change was to actually occur. Now we had to address the 30 new people.
I said forget the 60 days and focus on 30 days. 30 new clients in 30 days. We had 72 hrs to come up with a plan and 30 days to implement. That gave us 33 days to actually achieve the number. The breakdown is easy, 1 person a day for 30 days. We figured out how many interactions we needed to achieve 1 person a day. It was 10 handshakes, 20 calls, 9 social posts across 3 platforms, and a daily email to his email list.
The process of breaking things down, having a serious problem to solve with a real deadline, and lots of thought dumped into this resulted in over 30 new clients in 30 days, an overhaul of the business, and a much more engaged business owner. Not having an end in mind allowed for him to grow complacent. Now every action has to map towards the established end goal. This was truly trans formative.
Don’t wait to be in trouble before you start reverse engineering your success. Do it now so you get what you want out of your business.
Brian Wright