QUANTIFYING YOUR SUCCESS INGREDIENTS

When setting target completion dates for your Success Ingredients, you may be puzzled about what to do if your Success Ingredient is a skill set instead of something tangible. Let’s say that you want to improve your networking skills. Pick a target date by which you would like to have this ingredient completed and imagine that you are scoring yourself on a scale of zero to 100 percent. If zero percent means you can’t network at all, and 100 percent means you are a star networker, what would be your score today? Perhaps 25 or 50 percent? Now what would you like your score to be by the target date you chose? That’s the answer you would write on your worksheet. For example, you might write “networking skills at 75%—Oct 27.”

You can use this same scoring technique to set targets for other intangible Success Ingredients, like “professional credibility” or “better service package.” Just pick your desired completion date and decide the score you would like to achieve by then. If this seems arbitrary, it is. Yet you are the only one who can accurately measure your own progress. The goal and your progress toward it have to make sense and feel good to you. That’s the only way a goal can work its motivation magic.

Even tangible Success Ingredients might require some quantification in order to be specific enough to serve as a goal. If you chose “writing venues,” for example, how many are enough? Pick a number that would make you feel as if you had satisfied that need for at least a month’s time, and write it on your worksheet—for example, “10 writing venues.”

Once you have chosen one to three Success Ingredients, written them on your Action Worksheet, assigned target dates to them, and quantified them in terms of number needed or scores you wish to achieve, you have completed four of the six steps in designing your Get Clients Now! program. In Chapter 5 you will be choosing the precise action steps you will take to get clients over the next twenty-eight days.