Three Huge Rainmaking Habits To Develop

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle  

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In Rainmaking Recommendation 101, I wrote about building a Rainmaking Habit.  A habit is something we repeatedly do without the conscious knowledge of having to do them.  Anything, good or bad, can become a habit.

There are three habits you need to develop if you want to become a Rainmaker.

The Goal Setting Habit

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. – Jim Rohn

Goals:  Type in the word “goal” in to a search engine and 130,000,000 results pop up.  You have heard of all of the reasons to set goals –

•  they give you direction,
• they provide clarity to what you want,
• they take your dreams and turn them into a reachable path,
• they provide accountability.

There are so many wonderful reasons why you need to create your own goals but most importantly, you get to determine the directions you want your life to take.

You have heard it before, but how many of you actually have set goals in your life – in all areas of your life?

Start developing goals in all areas of your life:  Financial, Career, Family, Social, Intellectual, Spiritual, Physical and Health.  They all interconnect.  For example, your financial goals will affect your career and family goals; your social goals can affect your career and financial goals; your intellectual goals will impact your social and career goals; your physical and health goals will impact every area of your life.

Rainmakers also know that creating a goal setting habit will help them continue to grow.  When they have achieved that first goal they’ve set , they set newer, bigger and higher goals.  It’s just their habit to do so.

The Planning Habit

Stop setting goals. Goals are pure fantasy unless you have a specific plan to achieve them. – Stephen Covey

Just as Stephen Covey says above, you also need to have a plan to achieve those goals.  Just having a goal to lose 50 lbs is wonderful, but if you don’t have plans on how you are going to do it, chances are that you are going to still have 50 lbs to lose.  You need to know what steps you are going to take and when you are going to take them.

Start by putting your goal – which must be specific, measureable, realistic and have a deadline on it – at the top of a piece of paper.  Then list all of the steps you could take to achieve that.

So, using the example of losing 50 lbs in 5 months:

1. Eat healthy and smaller portions
2. Start walking
3. Work out at Gym

Yes, this is a bit basic, but now you have the start of your plan.  Notice each of these can then be given small steps and turned into goals.   For example:

1.   Eat healthy and smaller portions
2. Go to farmers market once a week for fresh fruits and vegetables
3. Learn new healthier cooking techniques
4. Measure food

You can keep breaking each and every one of these steps of your plan into smaller steps.   The cool thing about that is that you can cross of the ones you get done.

However, you do need to put deadlines on each of the steps you want to take or you will never get it done.

Get into the planning habit.   Know the steps you are going to take to help you achieve the goals you wrote.

The Taking Action Habit

Deadlines aren’t bad. They help you organize your time. They help you set priorities. They make you get going when you might not feel like it. – Harvey Mackay

You have a goals, you have a plan, now you have to execute it.

Too often, the plan sits on the corner of the desk, or gets buried in the files on your computer.   Instead, you need to start scheduling or planning when you are going to do the steps necessary to achieve your goal.

Rainmakers take action on a consistent and constant basis.  They understand that they need to keep rainmaking, all of the time, in order to avoid the feast and famine stages of their business.

Action breeds action.  You will be able to build this into a habit if you work the plan you developed with the goals you want to achieve.

And if all of the above isn’t enough to convince you to develop these three habits, here is a scientific reason to have goals, write plans to achieve them, and take action on them, from What They Don’t Teach You in the Harvard Business School, by Mark McCormack:

In 1979, interviewers asked new graduates from the Harvard’s MBA Program about their goal setting and planning habits and found that:

• 84% had no specific goals at all
• 13% had goals but they were not committed to paper
• 3% had clear, written goals and plans to accomplish them

In 1989, the interviewers again interviewed the graduates of that class.  And the results were astounding:

• The 13% of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all.
• Incredibly– the three percent who had clear, written goals were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.