Hello everyone! Thanks for joining me for the first installment of today’s blog post, which is about something I hate to love. I know it’s a little funny to say that I hate to love something, but part of this activity I despise. That said, I absolutely love the results that I get from engaging in it.
As I was training for my marathon several months ago, I had an app that tracked how far I ran. I had to open the app, track different things, and once I’m done with each activity, I track the days, my time, my speed, what I ate, what I drank, I had this whole log of tracking. The thing is I don’t like the process of tracking things like this. In fact, I often hate it. Yet there is no doubt that because I did that when the marathon came I got tremendous results based on where I was previously. With that being said, let’s talk about this activity and examples of how it works in life.
1) Time – So the thing that I hate to do but that gives great results is tracking, tracking, and more tracking. My number one example of this was the marathon and tracking my time. That allowed me to see myself progressing and my time getting faster.
2) Calories – Another example I realized after I finished training for the marathon was that while running 40-some miles per week I was eating like crazy. I was eating massive amounts of food because I was burning it so quickly, but I actually gained weight during marathon training. So I wanted to lose a bit of weight after training ended because I wasn’t running as much anymore. To that end, I began tracking my calories. And again, I have another app where I track all the food I put in my body and the calories I burn from working out. Eventually you get to the point where if you burn more calories than you eat every day, you’ll lose weight.
I don’t love tracking it personally, but it gives me great results. I’m already losing weight and it’s been proven that me tracking is going to give me the results I want.
3) Sales- Tracking and its ability to achieve results also applies to business, so we’re going to talk about that now. I’m going to use sales as an example of how tracking works in business. Think about what happens when you track your sales activity or keep track of how many phone calls you make. I work with companies and owners all the time who want to engage in more sales activity for their business, but the magic happens when they settle on a specific number and it’s “I’m calling 50 leads a week” or “I’m calling 100 leads a week”.
When it goes from just saying they want to engage in more sales activity to actually doing it and tracking it, they instantly get more results. Many people, myself included, are not naturally detail-oriented, for people that aren’t into details tracking things can be something that they despise. Yet it’s so important to do it.
4) Other- Now we’re going to get into other areas of business to track. Let’s say you want to hire someone, for instance, you might keep track of how many interviews you do. Or maybe it’s how many resumes you look at. For example, I tracked that I looked at 50 resumes, which led to five phone interviews, which led to three in-person interviews, which led to us hiring a top-notch candidate.
Tracking those numbers is so crucial especially as you go to grow your business and add more people to your team. For those of you who are free spirits out there who think “Oh, I don’t need to track” I can almost guarantee you that if you begin tracking you will get much greater results.
That’s all for now! Join me again next time for the second and final installment of this blog post. Until then, have a better than amazing day!
