This is why you are not seeing your work pay off!
Today I want to talk to you about a very common situation that people face when they are setting and working towards their goals. The situation is this: you are busy, doing the work, executing, but you’re still not hitting your goal. You are trying, their is effort and organization, but the results aren’t coming.
I know when I talk about setting goals and working towards objectives, it can seen overly simplified sometimes. See the goal, set the precise objective, make sure it’s a SMART goal, and then do the work, but sometimes we can go through that process in earnest and it gets us no where.
So, I wanted to share with you my take on why this happens.
From experience with hundreds of productivity students, I have seen first hand that when we are taking action but not seeing the results, the primary issue is that your plans were made on expectations not actions.
What do I mean by this?
Sometimes we can set goals against outcomes that we can affect, but don’t have complete control over. We believe if we do x we can achieve y result. And while that may be true, when we set goals against our expectation of results and not against the precise actions we will take, we can find ourselves in situations where we don’t meet the result.
Let’s consider an example.
You would like to grow your following on a social platform, let’s say Instagram. So, you set the goal to hit your first 1,000 followers in 90 days. Now, realistically, that’s feasible. Someone getting started with Instagram right now could reach a following of 1,000 subscribers in a 90 day period for sure. However reasonable this expectation is, though, it’s not actually a good objective to set. The reason being, you can’t control whether 1,000 people hit follow. All you can do is post great content in order to attract those followers. So, really the proper objective to set in this situation is something like “post daily to a specific niche on IG for 90 days.” That is something you can do and you have control over, you don’t have control over whether people follow you or not.
Let’s try another example.
This time, you set the goal to sell 100 copies of your ebook this month. Again, you’re not the one controlling the outcome here. So you work and you work, write blog posts, make content, send emails, all that jazz, and at the end of the month, your sales goal comes up short. It’s a disappointment for sure, doing all that work and not hitting the target, but that’s because your target was for an outcome you didn’t control. So, next time, you choose a different target. Make a sales pitch to 100 target customers in your audience. As they say in sales, “if you want to make a million dollars, seek first to help a million people.” This is practical advice, because you can’t control how many people purchase your product but you can control how many people you reach out and pitch to. What this might look like practically would vary depending on your business. For someone it may be sending DMs to followers on IG, for another it may mean hosting some live streams where you can talk to followers on an individual level. Yet another business owner might open their schedule to free 15 minute consults. There is certainly work involved in each of these situations, but the objective is within your control and focused on the actions you will take, not the actions others will take.
Do you see the shift in approach necessary here? That we are going to change the objectives we set to be based on our own actions and not based on the expected or anticipated actions of others. We can’t control other people, but we can control ourselves. Once you make this shift you will see more and more than your work pays off. And when it doesn’t you can see where your shortcomings directly led to your results.
No more guessing or wondering what went wrong. When you set objectives against your own actions, you will know exactly what went right and what went wrong. You will either meet your own expectations or you will not, but you will see how your choices impact your results.
So, I hope you found this article enlightening, especially if you are someone who struggles to meet their objectives. I would love to hear how this advice and information helps you change your personal productivity strategies, so please do leave me a comment and share your thoughts.
xoxo,