It's Time to Shut Out the Noise

Bright, shiny nonsense washes over your world on a daily basis.

The few meager morsels of focus-driving insights and ideas that are useful, stimulating, and success-oriented are hard to hear over all the noise.

So many should's and ought's -- not to mention the maybe's and possibilities -- it can just be too much.

How do you figure out what moves you forward versus what simply keeps you busy?

First things first: You have to be clear about your goal. Identify exactly what the end point looks like.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there.

I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get in a car to drive to… say… Powell River, British Columbia, without mapping out your route.?And I bet your GPS would be on to make sure you are on track to your destination.

Sadly, we see this lack of direction every day with small businesses in every industry.

That’s the bad news.

Here’s the good news.?You can change this today, and it’s not hard.

When you become crystal clear about your destination, and then develop the enhanced ability to ferret out the very few nuggets of insight critical to reaching that destination—only the things that are mandatory, that must happen to reach that goal—the clouds part, things get quiet and the path to the destination becomes very clear.

Two very simple actions will bring you this clarity, and in less than 45 minutes.

First, decide and write down your ONE, big, MEASURABLE goal for the rest of this year.?Note the words in CAPS.?There’s only one goal, not several.?You can’t drive your car to two places at the same time.?And the goal must be measurable.?If you can’t measure it, how do you know when you’ve arrived, how far you must still go, or if you’re off course?

I was working with someone the other day and she was super-clear on her goal: a certain number of appointments every month.?I asked her where she was against this month’s appointment goal.?She said, “We don’t check until the end of the month.”

Say what?

You can’t wait to fix this month’s shortfall at the end of the month.?When you know your measurable goal, check it against your present location all the time.?Just like driving to Powell River.

The second thing to do during this 45-minute assignment is to identify the very few things (no more than four or five) that are critical to reaching your goal.?Critical.?Mandatory.?Must happen.?Not nice to do or the next thing that pops up on your radar screen.?Those few things are so critical they will be markers for you all year.

Two very simple, fast assignments that will stop the noise that distracts you from making forward progress.

Listen to the sound of checking off the mile markers along your way. It will be like hearing the GPS tell you that you are on the route and will reach your destination right on time.

Isn’t that a great feeling?