In today’s episode, I will talk about the importance of habits and consistency.
What is your minimum viable habit, or if you have another approach to consistent achievement that has worked well for you?
Join the discussion below and tell us what you’ve committed to!
Transcript
Here we are at the end of January already, and I’m willing to bet that life has caught up with you and at least some of those goals and resolutions you started the year with are already off track. Don’t beat yourself up, it happens to the best of us. What you really shouldn’t do though is just throw in the towel entirely. The road to success is filled with false starts and failures. The key is to recover as quickly as you can and start moving in the right direction again. One of the things that I’ve done over and over again is to start a marathon of a race, whether that be losing weight or trying to overachieve my annual quota, at an all-out sprint. There’s so much I want to accomplish, and so much I’m capable of and I’d slam the pedal to the metal and go for it. The problem is it was never sustainable. Whether it was a week later or a month later, at some point, the wheels were going to come off of that bus and I was going to feel defeated. Not that there’s anything wrong with sprinting. Sometimes that’s what it takes, but know that you’re never going to survive trying to sprint all out over a long distance. Over the years I’ve moved away from focusing on goals. Not that I don’t have them, but I work much harder on habits and consistency. I had a really eye-opening conversation with Jack Wilson in episode 57 of the Sales Success Stories Podcast. Jack went from being a top 1% producer as a Business Banking Relationship Manager at Citizens Bank to building to building and leading a team at a regional IT services company in Massachusetts called Cinch IT. 100% of Jack’s team is over 100% of their numbers, and the way they’re all doing it is through activity numbers that are quite small and totally achievable. I have thought so much about what Jack and his team are doing and why it works and now think of these as Minimum Viable Habits. It still starts with a goal. Whether it’s a sales goal, a fitness goal or any other type of goal. Then you have to break that goal down into the fundamental actions you’ll need to take to get to that goal. For reference you might also want to check out the Sample Story by Trey Simonton from the Sales Success Stories Book I shared on that podcast’s feed earlier this month about setting your goal at 2-3X your number where Trey walks through his process for breaking everything down. Then you simply take those actions and break them down into daily or weekly habits. Ideally, the actions required are totally achievable. The key is in the consistent execution of those habits or actions. These are your Minimum Viable Habits. One kind of silly trick that really helps me is what I think of as streaking. Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve any nudity. This was based on an idea actually wrongly attributed by Jerry Seinfeld and the story went that somebody asked Jerry how he became so successful and he talked about how he just worked on writing jokes every single day. He suggested that you get a big wall calendar and decide on the one most important thing they needed to do everyday. Every day that they do that thing they should mark the calendar with a big red X, and over time there would be a chain of red X’s. From there it was simply a matter of not breaking the chain. I don’t know why, but that idea is super motivating for me. I once went 175 days in a row of hitting at least 10K steps on my Fitbit before I got sick and broke that particular chain.
Will you give this a try? Define your goal, break it all the way down into a daily habit that becomes your Minimum Viable Habit and then track it. Then leverage some public accountability. Join the discussion related to this tip at DailySales.Tips/11 and tell us what you’ve committed to. I’m committed to delivering you another one of these daily tips every single day, and if that ever doesn’t happen I expect you to give me hell!
The question for today is just that. What is your minimum viable habit, or if you have another approach to consistent achievement that has worked well for you? Share it! Again that conversation is happening at DailySales.Tips/11.