THE FOUR BEHAVIORS OF THE ELITE!

I don’t know how many of our listeners remember back in the early days of the podcast, occasionally I would do an episode where we’d pull from the proverbial mail bag and do a whole show just off of a listener’s question on some topic. I miss those days, and the mail hasn’t stopped coming by the way, I just committed to coming up with content on my own as a challenge to myself and my own growth. As somebody always on the search for content ideas and topics, it would be fairly easy to just create content from listener questions each week, and I confess that sometimes the content does come, in some way, from listener generated ideas, as long as it fits within the broader message and content goals we have here at the coaching academy. We do get listener questions about appraisal topics and techniques and, as many of you know at this point, I don’t have much interest in talking about appraisal techniques and the minutiae of developing an opinion of value. There are other shows out there doing that, and doing an awesome job, by the way, so no need to duplicate that effort. This podcast is all about business, life, success, about finding the value in anything and everything, and about creating absolutely as much of it as we can. With that said, we’ve had some listener questions over the past month or so, all around the topic of ‘bringing it all together’, so to speak. Typically, the way the questions come across on this topic are, “Blaine, you’ve talked about KPIs, about getting your masters degree in value, 7 habits, 10 steps to money mastery, 5 levels of financial freedom, and so on, where do I even begin?”, and I can totally relate to with the question. 

Depending on where you are in your life and business, it can be scary and confusing to try and figure out where to start when it comes what you should be doing to build your business, have more life, make more money, what you should be tracking and measuring, how to save more, etcetera. I get it! What got you to where you are today won’t necessarily get you to the next phase, but what do you focus on? What’s more important to focus on than something else? Where to begin? The reality is that almost all of this comes down to 4 things, which we’re going to go over in this episode. Essentially, if you ever want to do a check in to make sure you’re on the right path, you check in against these 4 things all the time and you’ll know you’re on the right path. So that you don’t have to wait all the way to the end to know what the 4 things are, I’ll give them to you up front. If you want to turn off the podcast after that, you can. Of course, I’m going to go into each one of the four things briefly so that you have an idea of what each one is, but I’ve talked about all of these before so, if you think you know what I’m already going to say, I don’t want to waste your time. I’ll see you all next week with a different show. For those of you who want to hear a more in depth explanation of each of the 4 things, stick with me, I promise I’ll make it worth your time. So what are the 4 things? Quite simply, they are to focus on you’re A.I.M, your all important milestone(s), measure your primary results activities, check the scoreboard, and have an accountability team. That’s it, 4 disciplines or activities that, if you’ll just focus on those each week, you’ll do just fine, and likely surpass all of your previous achievements.

Since I talked about Dr. Stephen Covey in the last episode, I’ll mention Dr. Covey’s son, Sean Covey, since he co-authored the book the Four Disciplines of Execution. In that book, the authors talk about 4 things that all good implementers do to get stuff done and build successful lives and businesses. Their 4 disciples are similar, although they talk about them a little differently. At the end of the day though, these four things, if followed, lead to results so let’s dive into each one a little bit. I will tell you not to go into this thinking that this is a step by step process. These are four activities and behaviors, not steps. I’m a big fan of having the steps to accomplish something clearly laid out for me, but these aren’t steps as much as they’re behaviors and things that need to be followed, in whatever order you choose to follow them. Sean Covey calls them ‘disciplines’, which I think is a mistake because the word discipline is a turn off to anybody who doesn’t consider him or herself disciplined. You see or hear the word discipline and automatically your brain turns down the volume a bit. If you don’t consider yourself to be disciplined, then these things wont work for you and discipline sounds like a lot of work! The reality is that discipline is born out of small steps taken in some direction. Granted, some people are more disciplined than others, but its what makes them disciplined that is often misunderstood. Discipline is born in the small little steps taken on the way to something bigger. You see a bodybuilder with big muscles and think, ‘wow! That person must be really disciplined’, which is likely true. However, what most people miss is that discipline is really just a vast collection of tiny little efforts strung together over a period of time. The muscles are the results of tens of thousands of tiny little decisions made in the moment, and in advance, of something else. The decision to not eat that piece of pizza. Tiny little decision that has a minute effect on her muscles. The decision to have her gym bag packed for the next days workout so that she doesn’t have an excuse not to go. Tiny decision and action that has a minute effect on her muscles. Stack up hundreds of little decisions and you have a habit and discipline.

Discipline isnt a character trait that some have and some don’t. It’s simply doing the first 30 seconds of something, and then doing it again for 30 seconds, and then again, and again. In fact, James Clear and David Allen, authors of the books Atomic Habits and Getting Things Done, respectively, both talk about something called ‘the two minute rule’ in their books talk about it slightly differently, but the gist is the same. If something will take two minutes or less, do it now, that’s David Allen’s simplified version. I’m more a fan of James Clear’s interpretation of it since he talks about it from the habit side of the equation. He says, instead of thinking about the big thing that needs to be accomplished, say, getting to the gym to do a workout after a long work day, just focus on one small activity that reflects the first 2 minutes of that activity. So, in the workout example, he’s not even talking about the workout, he’s talking about any activity that is part of the getting to the gym part of the activity. So, instead of thinking about the workout, just do two minutes of whatever the lead up to the activity is. Maybe its just putting on your workout shoes and walking to the car. Just do that much and then check in. Can you do the next two minutes of activity? See, every activity is made up of these little 30 second decisions strung together to form a complete activity. You see somebody at the gym working out and you see the epitome of discipline. But that’s actually the easy part! Once you’re at the gym and working out, the hard work is pretty much done. Discipline exists in the getting your stuff together, getting in the car, fighting traffic, getting dressed, putting in your ear buds, and walking onto the gym floor. That’s where discipline is made into a habit. People used to call my martial arts school all the time and say they wanted to start a martial art to learn discipline. Sorry to say, learning a martial art does not teach you discipline. Discipline is hanging up the phone, putting on your shoes, grabbing your keys, starting the car, driving to the school, signing up for classes, starting classes, and then doing almost all of those little steps each and every week. Put all those steps together again next week and you’ve exercised discipline. 

So, I wouldn’t call these 4 things the disciplines of execution, I’d call them the big 4 things you simply need to find a way to fit into your days, weeks, and months and good things will happen. Alright, the first one…you guessed it, gotta have a goal. We call it you A.I.M, your all important milestone. I’m not even talking about sitting down and doing 5 hours of goal setting. I’m only talking about your all important milestone. Pick one thing that you want to change over some period of time and write it down as a milestone to aim for. Write it out using the formula: ‘from X to Y by Z’. From 100 to 200 by June 1st. From $10,000 to $15,000 by August 15th. From 195lbs to 175lbs by December 10th. A good idea without execution on it is next to worthless. We’re faced today with a never-ending stream of inputs, messages, and distractions. If you don’t make a habit of taking action on your ideas, they’ll always just be ideas. This first behavior is simply starting something with a deadline. That’s it. Pick what its going to be, set a deadline, and then start the first two minutes of activity toward that thing. I’ll share with you an analogy that helps add some color and context to this behavior and how your all important milestone is yours, and yours alone. Imagine being an air traffic controller. You’re in charge of thousands of planes moment to moment throughout the day and your all important milestone on that day is to make sure all the planes make it safely to the ground or safely out of the airport and off to their destinations. However, if you’re the pilot of one of those planes, you’ve got a completely different all important milestone and goal, and that’s to get your plane, your crew, and your cargo to the ground safely. For all intents and purposes, you don’t care about all the other planes flying around you, except as they seek to impede you from achieving your all important milestone. If you’re a passenger on that plane, you too have an all important milestone and its to get your butt on the ground safely and off to your next destination. 

Each of us has our own important milestones and that’s where our focus needs to be. We don’t have to focus on all the planes in the air, that’s the air traffic controllers job. We don’t even have to worry about what the pilot is doing, that’s his or her’s job. Our job is to focus on our important milestones, that’s it. Small steps in some direction with a deadline. That’s it, that’s all that the first activity and behavior asks of you. The discipline label will be placed upon you every time you take some small step toward your AIM. The next behavior or activity is simply to learn how to measure the behaviors and activities that will take us to the promised land. Whats the promised land? Its the achievement of our aim. You see, where most people give up on the discipline thing is when they take some action but see no immediate results. The problem with living on earth is that shit takes time! Almost everything takes some time to materialize. You can’t eat good one time and expect your health to change. You can’t lift one weight one time and expect to see results. You might feel results in the form of a sore muscle, but that’s not really an indicator of much. The results of almost any activity naturally lag behind the activity. You workout 2 days a week for a month or more before really seeing results. You diet for 2-4 weeks consistently before really feeling and seeing results. The results always lag behind the behavior. You make some cold calls, a few walk ins to some banks and mortgage companies and nobody is banging down your door with new business. What do you do? You stop that activity yesterday! No, friends, everything takes time! You have to start tracking and measuring the primary activities that you believe will lead to a delayed result, and then trust the results isnt far behind. At some point you’ll start getting some feedback and some results that will allow you to make course corrections if necessary. 

By the way, this second behavior speaks heavily to the idea of motivation and inspiration. What I mean by that is that most people use the idea of motivation to guide their behaviors in this regard. They’ll say, I’ll do X or Y when I’m motivated. Or, I’m waiting for the inspiration or the perfect idea to hit me before I begin. Sorry folks, that’s not the way it works. Back to the concept of discipline, discipline is stacking up the small behaviors on the way to something bigger and doing it without motivation! Motivation and inspiration follow action, rarely the other way around. It’s the reason so many people get stuck in ruts and patterns of activity that don’t lead them beyond their stalled results. They try something a few times and see no results so they give up. Then they wait for the motivation to try something else. For a lack of inspiration, nothing ever gets started. If you only ever measure the lagging results, which are almost always disappointing, you’ll likely give up. If you learn to track and measure the activities that you know will eventually lead to results, eventually the results will arrive and will fuel the motivation to continue the results getting activities. You have to be willing to put in the time over a distance with little to no results if you want real results. Take this podcast. If I looked only at results for the first year or more of my activity, I likely would have given up. The listener numbers and subscriber numbers were dismal, at best. However, I was committed to putting out an episode every single week for two years to meet my all important milestone. What was my milestone? To put out an episode each week for two years. That’s it. Nothing special. I wanted to do it to learn the ins and outs of undertaking such a project. 

Many have said that it must take discipline to put out an hour long episode every single week to which typically respond, ‘no, I just have to make sure I do something toward that effort every morning, that’s all’. If you saw my morning routine you might be tempted to use the word discipline, I wouldn’t. Discipline implies I’m fighting against my nature or maybe doing something difficult. I’m not. I’m just not waiting for the motivation to find a topic to talk about each week. I just sit down every morning and start reading, watching, listening, and writing. The motivation and inspiration always follow. I measure the behavior of the activity, not of the lagging results. I know that the behavior will lead to an eventual result. And it always does. I speak and teach to real estate, mortgage, and title companies several times per month, and have for many years. If I looked only at the lagging results of each one of those activities, I’d have given up that activity long ago. Sometimes you leave an event and nothing seems to come from it for weeks or even months. However, it’s the stacking of all that activity that leads to massive results. Doing it over and over every single week leads to being really comfortable at doing it, it leads to me knowing what I want to say without hesitation, it allows me to ask questions they don’t even know to ask sometimes, it makes me the unquestioned leader in my field, and it always leads to some kind of delayed result every single time. Sometimes the delayed result takes a year or more to materialize. Sometimes we’ll get business and it will be from somebody who says, “I was in your con-ed class at ReMax last year!” Or “I was on the zoom call with Keller Williams you did in 2019!” 

The big problem for so many people is that they wont do something without a guaranteed result. Its only if they can be guaranteed a result, and a result that is automatically and always in their favor, that they’ll take some kind of risk and dip their toe in the proverbial water. Even then, they tend to wait for some kind of motivation or inspiration to get started on something. Results almost always lag behind behaviors. Sometimes the gap between is relatively short, sometimes the gap is much longer. Let me ask you, if you knew you wouldn’t see any results from an activity for a full year? Would you do it? Of course, I know your answer; its, “depends on what it is!” What if it was an activity that is all but guaranteed to put an additional $100,000 in your bank account? Would you do it then, even with zero results from your efforts? You have to put in the work every single week and get nothing in return. Nothing to tell you you’re on the right path, you’re doing the right things, people are responding favorably to whatever it is you’re doing. Nothing! Would you do it? Maybe, but even then you’d only do it because I told you what the potential result was going to be. The questions you need to ask yourself are, ‘what would the result have to be for me to do this thing?’, ‘how long am I willing to do it with no results?’, and, ‘even if I don’t get the results I’m hoping for, will the benefits from the activities, or the behaviors, be enough for me to keep doing it?’ You need to focus on the activities and the behaviors, not necessarily the results. At least not right away. I’m not saying results aren’t worth tracking and measuring, they are. That’s essentially what KPIs are. Those are they key performance indicators that come from your activities. However, in addition to KPIs, and measuring the results of an activity or a behavior, we have to get good at measuring the activity and the behavior if we want to be able to improve each day, week, or month. 

I’ve talked before about one of my good friends in prior episodes. He’s also one of my coaches, but we’ve worked together for over 20 years now. He’s the founder of a large, growing mortgage company, he owns over 200 rental properties, he’s one of the country’s top mortgage professionals, and he’s one of the country’s top coaches for that industry as well. Not only does he have his KPIs down to a science, he has his activity goals and measurements down to a science. He has a weekly practice of calling 50 agents every Monday, he calls his top 25 VIPs every Wednesday, he calls every deal in process every Tuesday, he has breakfast, lunch, or dinner with somebody every week, and these are all in addition to his activity goals for his personal well being and health. He has two rocks glasses on his desk, one of them filled with 50 marbles. Every time he makes a call he pulls one marble from the full glass and places it in the empty glass. When the full glass is empty and the empty glass is full, he’s done. But not before that. That’s his ways of measuring his activity, not the results. As it happens, he nets well over a million dollars per year in personal income from those activities. That’s not counting any of his rental income, or the income from his other business activities. That’s just the income that comes from those 50 marbles in that glass moving from one glass to the next every single week. Now, you might be tempted to say, “yeah Blaine, I’d do that too if I knew it would make me a million dollars per year!” But that’s not what happened with him. I knew him 20 years ago when he was just starting in the mortgage business because we worked in the same office. He started doing the marble exercise back then when he was making $0 per year in the mortgage business. And I can tell you that its taken him 20 years of constant activity to get to where he is today. Small habits and activities stacked on top of each other over an extended period of time that eventually started really paying off. He wasn’t guaranteed one cent from his behaviors, he just trusted in the process and slowly, over time, it began to pay off. And I can tell you from having walked into his office on a Monday within the past year that he still does the marble activity religiously, even after 20 years. You’ve got to measure the lead behaviors and activities, not just the results. If you’re always looking for a response or a reaction from your activity, and you don’t get it, are you going to give up? That’s the question.

The third behavior is simple. You’ve got to keep score and have a scoreboard. When you don’t keep score, you don’t know if you’re up, if you’re down, if you’re behind, how close, you know very little. More importantly, if you have other people working with you, they need to see the scoreboard as well! When you aren’t keeping score, you’ll tend to lose motivation to continue the activity. Execution suffers when you don’t know where you are in the game. Maybe you’ve never played a sport before so the sports analogies fall short for you, but they’re the best one’s for getting this point across, so go with it. It doesn’t matter whether its an individual sport like golf, tennis, or track, or it’s a team sport like football, baseball, or hockey, the scoreboard is where its at. Every individual playing the sport is looking at the scoreboard for direction, for motivation, and for unspoken guidance on what to do. The scoreboard tells you if you need to step it up, if your activities and behaviors are having a positive effect, and what your strategy may need to be to alter the score. Imagine playing in some kind of game, heck, it could be a board game like Monopoly or Scrabble. All you need to do is look at who holds all the property deeds or hotels in Monopoly, or whose words take up most of the triple word score spaces to know if you’re up or down. That’s the scoreboard in those games. If you’re playing soccer, hockey, or football, without having a scoreboard to look at and see where you are, and what time you have left to either hold onto a leading score, or fight harder and smarter to pull ahead when you’re down, you simply don’t know. Unfortunately, most people and small businesses play with no scoreboard and no timer. There is no urgency, beyond making enough to pay the bills each month, and no tracking and measuring, in essence, keeping score, so its just drone on doing the same activities that got you results last month. 

You might be tempted to say, “well, yeah Blaine, last month’s activities brought in a lot of money for us!”, to which I would say, “great! Congratulations! Now let’s track and measure exactly what we did, how we did it, what we could’ve done better, and how we might be able to do it in less time next month.” That’s all! Just keep score and share the scoreboard with everybody! What do you keep score of? Three primary things: Your AIM, your all important milestone(s), your lag measurements; these are the results of your activities, and your activity measurements. Now, for those of you who have already begun this process and have some kind of dashboard with your KPI’s, I’m not telling you to stop any of that. This is for the people who haven’t begun that process and are overwhelmed with what to track and measure. They don’t know where to begin or why it’s important. You have to focus on your all important milestone, start tracking activity, not just results, and keep score of 3 things: your goal or goals, your behaviors and activities (think marbles moving one by one from cup to cup), and the results of those activities over time. That’s it for now! If you’ve started tracking and measuring and you’ve calculated that last month you billed out $87 per hour, great! Good thing to know. But it means nothing if you don’t have some kind of milestone or goal you’re shooting for, first of all. So, now that you know, the goal should be to set a new milestone of $100 per hour, and then decide what activities and behaviors might lead you there and get to tracking those activities. Where do you track them? On your scoreboard! Just make something up on a napkin, for goodness sake! Start tracking your activities, your time, and the results. At the end of that period, move the milestone! 

Where I tend to see this most is those of you who’ve reached a point where you’ve figured some stuff out and your dollars per hour are in the high $100’s to high $200s per hour. You have people working for you, you’re cranking out the work, and you’re making ok money. You might think its awesome money, especially when compared to how many hours you’re working, or not working. Rest assured, this only speaks to your beliefs about money, and your desire to compare yourself to other people. I hear all the time, “well, compared to so and so Blaine, I’m killing it!” Great! But why are you comparing yourself to so and so? Your milestones should always be moving friends! Once you hit $100 per hour, you should be shooting for $125 or $150 per hour! Why? Because of the principle of substitution. If you know you can do X, why not shoot for Y? Once you hit Y, why would you ever want to do less? The goal should be to shoot for Z, and in even less time than how you reached Y. Once you hit $150 per hour, you should be shooting for $175 or $200 per hour. You see, the thinking has to change at each level, and that’s the point. What gets you to $87 per hour, wont necessarily take you to $150 per hour. And what gets you to $200 per hour, wont necessarily take you to $500 per hour. That’s the point! And its only by keeping score and tracking your activities and behaviors that you’ll start to open doors to higher levels of thinking. You can stop anywhere along the way, if you choose. And most people do. It doesn’t make them bad people, but if you’re comparing yourself to them, you’ll only ever be as good as them, or maybe $1 or $5 better per hour. My job as a coach is to get you to see greater vistas of what is possible, not where you can stop. If you want to stop there, that’s your choice. I’m not going to stop pushing or encouraging you to keep expanding though. And, by the way, I know what most of you think when I talk about expansion and growth. You tend to think I mean more work! “Its going to be so much harder for me and I’m going to spend so much more time! I like my life and my cozy work schedule now!” Yes, growth and expansion takes some work, but it typically takes more mental work than physical work and that’s where people struggle the most. They’re comfortable with the day to day routine of staying busy. They know that routine and they’ve calculated the cost. They know they can work 46 hours and make $10,000 or $20,000 per month. 

But why stop? Why not push yourself to try to go to $25,000 or $30,000 in 38 hours per week? Why not then push to see if you can go to $35,000 or $40,000 in 32 hours? Why not then push to see if you can go to $45,000 or $50,000 in 30 hours? Why not? Why is your financial thermometer set where its set? Who set it there? Your mother and father? Your neighbors you’re always comparing yourself to? The other people in your industry? Why is it where it is? Ask yourself the question. I shared with you my personal mission statement in the last episode and part of that mission is to increase the self worth and net worth of people around the world. It goes on to say, “I was created to help people build a future that is bigger than their present…” You’re free to stop anywhere along the path you’d like, I cant change that. But it wont stop me from trying to push you to increase your self worth and net worth and build a future that is bigger than your present, and that means doing the tough mental and emotional work. That’s what this is friends, this is about doing the hard work of thinking that most people simply aren’t willing to do. Set up a scoreboard and start tracking at least 3 simple things: your milestones, your activities, and the results. 

The fourth behavior is also a simple one, but probably one of the hardest for most people, and its to pour yourself into an atmosphere of accountability. You heard me right, pour yourself into accountability! I know, I know, you’re a grown ass adult now and you don’t take kindly to people telling you what to do! I get it because I’m that way too! I have an issue with authority and people telling me what to do. I’ve searched and questioned for many years now where that may have come from and I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it, I just know it’s a trigger for me. However, accountability has nothing to do with authority. Accountability is you raising your hand and giving somebody else the power of feedback. Nobody can make you do something you don’t want to do. It doesn’t matter if there are laws around it or not. You can be punished for not following rules and laws, but nobody can make you do something. An accountability partner cannot do the work for you, they can only be there for you and give you feedback on what you’re doing and not doing, especially as it relates to what you said you wanted, or what you said you would do. Its one of the greatest aspects to our coaching program, in my opinion, because the power of accountability for most people is massive. For a guy like me, somebody who hates being told what to do, knowing I could possibly let somebody down who has volunteered to hold me accountable has a far greater emotional cost than, say, getting a ticket for breaking some arbitrary rule. I’ll gladly pay the fine, I will not happily let down my accountability partners. That’s too great of a cost to me. When you make a commitment in front of your peers, or to a coach, you’re 88% more likely to take the necessary steps to put points on the board than if you just make a promise to yourself. Promises to yourself are easy to break, we all do it all the time. Most of us on a daily basis in some form or other. But when you declare something in front of a group of peers, the fear of letting down other people carries a greater toll. Ask anybody who is part of an accountability group where they would be without that group and they’ll tell you. I would stake my annual income on the answer being something like, “nowhere near where I’d be without them!” 

Accountability can come in a variety of forms and they’re likely all around you. My recommendation, however, is to choose people you respect, people you can also potentially help in some way, and people that are not part of your immediate family. You can hold your spouse or partner accountable to certain things, and that’s one of the nice things about that kind of relationship. However, if it’s a business accountability partner you’re seeking, I don’t recommend family. You’ve got to find people who are doing what you do, in some way, even if its not necessarily in your exact business, and you’ve got to find people who are potentially doing more than you’re doing in some way. Maybe that don’t have the same number of sales or volume you have, but maybe they’re better at the health and wellness part of business life balance. Maybe they’re better at the organizational side of things than you are. Whatever it is, there is massive benefits to accountability and you owe it to yourself to get some accountability. The next question is usually, where and how do I do that? Well, there are a variety of ways to find accountability and it really depends on what you want to achieve by having accountability. Of course, if you’re in the appraisal or real estate industries, I would strongly recommend checking out our accountability offerings since I think ours are the best. However, you can start your own accountability group, you can join one locally, you can create a mastermind group of like-minded people to meet regularly, or you can join an existing group. We’ve got three levels of accountability, from our Level 1 group, which is only $67 per month, large group, lots of info being shared, monthly coaching and accountability calls, monthly guest coaching webinars, weekly techniques and tactics being shared on a variety of topics. Our Black Belt coaching teams are the next level up in accountability because its small group, 3-5 people on a team, several calls per month, massive goal setting accountability, and, of course, a higher cost. A much higher return as well. We also do one on one coaching for those who want that intimate feedback from an accountability coach. Higher cost, higher accountability, higher return for your investment. 

And that is, in my opinion, the key to getting a return, its having to make some kind of investment. I’ve been in dozens of mastermind groups over the decades and there has always been one common denominator with regard to the results I got: the more I paid to be a member, the more results I got, plain and simple. That’s not to say the free one’s had no value. The problem is that, when you don’t have to pay for something you don’t value it in the same way as the thing you do have to pay for. Again, its that simple. Give me all the resistance you’d like, studies have been done on this topic, the results and data are in. When you put your money where your mouth is, you get results. When its free, its optional. Let me give you an example from a different angle. If you came to me and said, “Blaine, I’d love to learn about investing in the stock market, where do you recommend?” If I say to you, “just google investing in the stock market, or search on YouTube, there’s tons of free info out there”, you might do it, you might not. What you are even less likely to do is actually start investing. However, if my answer was to set aside $500 and buy one of these 5 investing courses, and then I pointed you to 5 options of paid courses, not only would you learn more, you’d be likely to start investing and you’d start getting a return.

We live in the information age and information is free. Accountability is not. You don’t have to pay for information, what you pay for is the opportunity to be held accountable and to be in an elite group of people who are doing. When you join an accountability group or a coaching group, you are paying for an objective individual or group to hold you accountable, give you insight, help you see solutions to challenges you’re too close to, offer their own past experiences, and push you forward. If there’s no value in that for you, don’t do it. If you can see value in that kind of accountability, you’ll have to be willing to invest some of your time, energy, brain power, and money into that growth. However, the return you’ll get will, in most cases, more than cover the cost, with a healthy return on your investment because whatever growth you gain as a result of the accountability is yours to keep forever. Its like paying $20 to read a book. The author may have spent years learning something, and likely at a very high cost. You got to learn the lessons from them for $20 and you get to keep and use that information and knowledge forever at no additional cost. What you don’t get with a book is accountability. If you could buy the book for $20, but then join an accountability group for an additional $20 per month, lets say, you’d be 88% more likely to start putting the lessons in the book into practice than if you just read the book. 

Find and invest in accountability if you want the growth! So lets recap, focus on your AIM. From X to Y by Z date. Measure your lead behaviors and activities, not just the results. Results always lag the activity. Focus on the daily or weekly writing of the blog posts, not necessarily on what comes from the blog posts. Focus on consistent episode production, not on the results of from the episodes. Focus on moving the marbles from one glass to the other, not just on what comes from that activity. The third thing was that you must have a scoreboard. Not just keep score, but actually have a scoreboard. Those of you who say you keep score in your head, I call bullshit! You have to have it written and displayed somewhere so you can see whether or not you’re in the first quarter of the game, the fourth quarter, what the time is, whether you’re up or down, and so on. And finally, invest in accountability! Again, notice I said ‘invest’, not just be accountable. If you give something the option of yes, no, or maybe, they’ll almost always choose maybe. We love to give ourselves ‘outs’ and options. When it comes to getting results from accountability, sorry to say friends, you’re going to have to invest in accountability, and probably from people you don’t know yet! Put your money where your heart and mouth are and start to get results from accountability. 

I hope you’ve gotten some value from your investment of your most valuable currency this week my friends! Hopefully you’ve written down all four of these behaviors and activities you’’ll commit to looking at them every day, and then putting them into play in your life and your business. If you want to be held accountable and realize the growth that is awaiting you, reach out to me and I’ll show you how to get it. Until then, and until next week my friends, I’m out…