Manifesting a fantastic life and career for yourself is a good start. If you’re motivated to achieve something, you’ve got a lot more chance of achieving it. But just asking the universe to give it to you is unlikely to make it so. You need to properly plan for it. You need a career plan.
Start with what success means to you. Define it. Break it down. Describe what each element of success will look like. Then plan how to achieve it, step by step, element by element.
What should your career plan include?
If your vision of success includes a list of team successes, a healthy bank balance or a series of trophies and awards, you’re starting to list the headline elements you can prepare and plan for. If you’re aiming to have a cabinet full of trophies and awards, list what they are for. Are they for league titles, customer sales, goals scored or wins in court? Are they for assets managed, deals done or savings made? Make each element of your planned success clear and precise.
Make sure to put an order and timescale on your planned success. What comes first? When are aiming to achieve that by? That will give you some sense of urgency, which will push and drive you towards each goal as the deadline looms.
What can you control?
Once you have your planned achievements listed, work out what’s needed to achieve each of them. What are the controllable factors you need to master? What are the standards you need to achieve? Analysing the Winning Controllables and setting Winning Standards for yourself can really help you to achieve your goals.
The Winning Controllables
What are the things that you have control over? Your own effort, commitment and working hours are three of them. They won’t include the weather, interest rates and oil prices. They will include strategy, skills and mindset. Of these controllables, which will make the biggest difference to you achieving the success you want? These Winning Controllables are the ones to focus your actions and activities on.
How do I work out what my Winning Standards are?
You need to know precisely what it takes to achieve your goals. All good analysis starts with the available data. If there isn’t any, how can you obtain or produce some? If there isn’t enough yet, how can you obtain or produce some more?
Data can come from various difference places. Some sources are free, such as self-collected data or data that’s publicly available. Some data can bought off the shelf. Some data needs to be researched. Some needs to be collected for you. Some data comes from speaking to people who’ve already achieved the same goals as you, or by speaking to the people who directly helped other people to achieve them. Can you find those people and ask them how they managed to achieve those goals?
Trying to reach a set of goals, without working out what they are and how they are reached, is a risky approach. The more you can work out exactly what’s needed, the more you increase your chances of you getting there.
Plan, plan, plan
Once you’ve worked out what’s needed to achieve your goals, you can move onto the ‘how’. How can I achieve each of them? The answer might be to copy what’s been done before. Or it might be to enhance what’s been done before and do that. For some challenges, there might not be any previous examples to review. Has anything similar been done in another field or sector? If not, use your imagination. What do you think you’ll have to do?
If you want to make the biggest sales at your company, you’ll need to build the longest and deepest sales pipeline of potential customers. Who are your ideal customers? Where can you meet them? What are their reasons to buy? What specification do they need? What’s the best price (it needs to be competitive in the market, but also worth your while). Once you have identified your target customers, target products/services and target prices you can put a sales plan together to make it happen.
As the old saying goes, if you fail to plan, then plan to fail.