What is leverage? It’s any constraint that makes backing away much more difficult.
You may think it sounds foolish to put unnecessary constraints on your actions, but in reality it can give you new professional freedom. Leverage may be the best way to overcome psychological barriers that prevent you from staying focused. There are many different ways you can create personal leverage. Start by defining your motivation for achieving your goals.
My friend Kent Burns from MRI wrote a great book titled What’s Your Why? His premise: if you can define the reason to achieve a goal, you will be much more committed to it. Is it your career, your family, your kids? You need to know what is driving you to make it happen.
Below are five tips for creating personal leverage for recruiters:
#1—Make a written commitment.
Establish exactly what you will do on a daily basis. Put in writing the specific number of calls you will make a day or your daily phone-time goals. When things are in writing, instead of just mental notes, they tend to happen.
#2—Tell a friend or goal partner.
Now that you’ve written your objectives down and created a good why, enlist others to help you stay on track. This person must be someone who will be supportive and who has an understanding of the business, but also someone who won’t let you “off the hook” if you start to waver.
#3—Establish short-term commitments.
These can be much stronger than long-term goals. They allow you to focus your efforts and get great momentum early on. Short-term commitments could include calls per day, marketing presentations per day, or job orders per week. It is about establishing a new pattern of behavior, and that can be very powerful.
#4—Reward yourself for small victories and achievements.
When you find yourself meeting daily or weekly commitments, treat yourself to something special. You need to start feeling good about your successes, to condition your body and mind to winning. Repeated small success will end in big successes. Reward yourself. Then get right back into the game and achieve more.
#5—Punish yourself for not achieving results.
Yes, it’s the pain-and-pleasure principle. Wiser men than I have put forth that human beings are far more motivated by pain than pleasure because it is linked more closely to survival. While getting a big check or placing a senior executive is exciting and motivating, a loaded gun pointed at your head is even more so. Think of some small negative rewards for not achieving results. “If I don’t hit my send-outs for the week, I will run an extra five miles over the weekend.” Or “If I don’t meet my phone time goal today, I will go to work an hour early the next day.” Punishment can be a very effective way to keep you on track.
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Jon Bartos, a guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, is a premier writer, speaker, and consultant on all aspects of personal performance, human capital, and the analytics behind them. In 2010, Bartos founded Revenue Performance Management, LLC. The RPM Dashboard System is a business intelligence tool used worldwide for metrics management for individual and team performance improvement. In 2012, Bartos achieved national certification in Hypnotherapy, furthering his interest in learning the dynamics behind what motivates others to achieve higher levels of success. Click here to visit Bartos’s website.
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