Accept 100% responsibility for doing everything that is necessary to achieve your goal. Repeat to yourself, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” Refuse to make 53
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excuses for not making progress. Refuse to rationalize or explain away your lack of success. Refuse to justify the reasons for your problems and obstacles. Instead, accept total responsibility for achieving your goal.
Become totally self-reliant.
Here is an interesting discovery. When you accept complete responsibility for achieving your goal, people will emerge to help you and guide you along the path to your success. But when you make excuses, blame others, and expect them to help you, they will ignore you and avoid you. When you look to yourself first, you are far more likely not only to be more successful, but to attract into your life the support of the people you need. If you look to other people to help you achieve your goals, you will almost always be disappointed.
4. Step Out in Faith
Once you are clear about what you want, “Act as if it were impossible to fail.”
As Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.” Act as though the achieving of the goal was absolutely inevitable. Carry yourself in your daily activities with others, in everything you do and say, exactly as if the achievement of your goal was guaranteed by some great power.
5. Do Something Daily
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Do something every day that moves you toward your major goal, or goals.
“By the yard it’s hard, but inch by inch, anything is a cinch.” When you do something every single day that moves you closer to your goal, you eventually develop an unshakable faith and belief that your goal will ultimately be achieved.
In the final analysis, every goal setting exercise must be reduced to specific, concrete action steps that you can take to achieve the goal. If you do just one thing each day, no matter how big the goal, or how far away it may be, this single action will keep you motivated and focused. It will keep your subconscious mind stimulated and active. Daily movement toward your goal will energize you and increase your confidence.
Achieving Income and Career Goals
Here are some key ideas for setting goals for your income and your career: 1. Focus on Customer Satisfaction
Everybody makes his or her living by serving someone else. Whatever you do for a living, you are always in the business of customer satisfaction. Your job is to determine your most important customers, inside and outside your company, and then dedicate yourself to serving them better and faster.
Who is your customer? Your customer is the person whose satisfaction determines your success in your career. It is the person who depends upon 55
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you for something that you do for them. Your customer is the person you have to please in order to be paid more and promoted faster.
In business, your boss is your primary customer. If you please your boss by doing the things that he or she wants or needs, you will be successful. If you please everyone else in your company but you don’t please your boss, your job will be in jeopardy. What does your boss need to be happy with your performance?
If you are a manager, your staff are also your customers. Your staff has been entrusted to you to help you achieve your goals of satisfying your customers.
In order for you to do your job satisfactorily, your staff must be happy with you, and with the way that you treat them. The very best bosses have the happiest and most productive staff members. Who are your most important staff members?
Your coworkers and colleagues, over whom you have no direct control or influence, are also your customers. Their help, or lack of help, can have a major impact on your ability to do your job well. Who are the people around you whose support and cooperation you require to get your job done well?
The primary customer for your business is the person who purchases and uses your product or service. Your ability to satisfy this customer with what he or she wants and needs in a timely fashion, at a reasonable price, and at an appropriate level of quality, is the key not only to your success, but also to the survival of your entire enterprise.
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2. Find Out What Your Customers Want
Keep asking yourself, “Who is my customer? How does my customer define satisfaction? What value does my customer expect from me? How do I best please my customer?”
Every company that is successful is continually asking its customers, “What can we do to please you better? What can we do to satisfy you even more next time?” Every individual should be asking these questions as well.
Once of the biggest problems in the world of work is that people are not clear about exactly what they need to do to satisfy their bosses. One of the best things you can do on a regular basis is to go to your boss and ask him or her, “Why am I on the payroll? What is the most important thing that I do around here, from your point of view?”
You can be doing your job extraordinarily well, but if what you are working on is not important to your boss, you will actually be sabotaging your career.
However, if you do the one or two things that are most important to your boss, those actions that generate the highest levels of “customer satisfaction”
in his eyes, this alone can advance your career faster than anything else you could do.
To succeed at work, you must ask yourself repeatedly, “Why am I on the payroll? What results have I been hired to achieve?”
3. Determine Your Primary Output Responsibilities
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Continually ask yourself, your boss and the people around you, “What are my primary output responsibilities?” In other words, what are you expected to produce as the result of your work.
There are three ways of defining an output responsibility. First, an output responsibility is measurable, concrete, specific and can be defined clearly on paper. You can attach a number and a standard of performance to it. An output responsibility is a certain quality and quantity of work that can be defined and measured by an objective third party, including your boss.
For example, “Getting along well with others” is not an output responsibility. It may be a necessary activity for you to perform your job, but because it is neither measurable nor concrete, it is not a key determinant of your success or failure.
Second, an output responsibility is something that is under your control. It is something that you can do from beginning to end. It does not depend upon someone else.
Third, an output responsibility for yourself is a task or result that serves as an input for someone else. In other words, every output that you produce serves as an input to someone else. It becomes a part of someone else’s job.
For example, if you make a sale, that output becomes an input to your organization which must now produce, deliver and service the product.
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Each product or service that your company produces becomes an input to the life or work of someone else. If your company manufacturers computers or photo copiers, those machines become the outputs of your organization and inputs to other organizations which then use them to produce outputs of their own.
The questions for you to ask are, “Who must use what I produce? What does it take to please the people or organizations that have to use what I produce?
How can I best satisfy my most important customers?” We are all in the business of customer satisfaction.
The most successful people and organizations are those who please the greatest number of their customers, by giving them what they want in the way they want it, at prices they are willing to pay.
4. Determine Your Key Result Areas
In setting business and career goals, you must be continually asking, “What are my key result areas? What can I, and only I do, that if done in a superior fashion will yield extraordinary results?”
This is a key question for business and career success. “What is it that you and only you can do, that if done well, will make a real difference to your organization?”
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This is a task that only you can do. If you do not do it, it will not be done by someone else. But if you do it, and you do it well, it can make a real contribution to yourself and your organization.
There are seldom more than five to seven key result areas in any job. Your ability to perform well in each of the key result areas of your particular position is the key to your overall success. You could do many of your jobs in an excellent fashion, but if they were not among your key result areas, they could actually be harmful to your career. The time you spend on them will take you away from doing the vital few things that your success depends upon.