5 ideas for a more productive year

Don’t wait to evaluate your performance. Instead, start early in the year to think about how you can improve in the upcoming months to create a successful year. Here are a few ideas from MDRT members and other experts on how to keep getting better.

1) Review goals weekly

Don’t wait until the end of the year to review your goals, because it could be too late by then, said 19-year MDRT member Ravi Pahlajrai Rajpal from Mumbai, India. If you break things down into weekly goals and review them weekly, you’ll find it’s less time-consuming and easier to track. Plus, tracking your weekly performance creates many opportunities to improve. “This is a good check on my consistency, and I can create a structure to be consistent week after week,” Rajpal said in his 2016 MDRT Annual Meeting presentation.

2) Push past limiting beliefs

If you’re doing the best you know how but getting the same results you’ve always gotten, it could be time to discover a fresh perspective and implement a new strategy. Consider hiring a coach to show you your blind spots and limiting beliefs and how to strategically move beyond those.

For more about the values of hiring a coach, watch “Dreams + coaching = success.” (MDRT member exclusive)

3) Hire staff

By hiring staff, you can focus on your areas of strength as well as delegate work that can be accomplished quicker by someone else for $10 or $20 an hour.

“You have to hire people to grow the business,” said 39-year MDRT member Marc A. Silverman, CFP, ChFC, from Miami, Florida. Ten people can do more work than one, he said. They also can run your office when you’re not there, allowing you to take more time off to recharge.

Read “ How hiring staff can make you money.”

4) Create or revise a marketing plan

How do you communicate with your clients? Do they understand how you can help them? What type of impression are your communications, office and staff making on your clients? How do you find new clients?

The answers to these questions can double or triple your business and should be covered in your marketing plan. If it’s not, it’s time to think about what you offer that’s different from other people in your area of business and put a plan of action into place to communicate that.

For more ideas about marketing, read “Marketing yourself as an expert.” 

5) Vanquish procrastination

All of your well-planned goals, depth of expertise and good intentions won’t matter if you never act on them. To end your procrastinating ways, try the five-second rule from Mel Robbins. She says, “If you have an impulse to act on a goal, you must physically move. Physical movement is critical. It must be within five seconds, or your brain will kill it.”

The five-second rule “is a tool for intentional behavior that’s tied to a goal,” Robbins said in her 2016 MDRT Annual Meeting presentation. “If you do this over and over, making a cold call or making a tough call becomes as easy as pouring a cup of coffee, because you’re making a physical impression in your brain. It all comes down to these teeny, tiny moments. That is where the power is in your life.”

 

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