GOLD MEDAL SUCCESS: 3 Benefits & 2 Things to Remember when Measuring Your Success

 “I always thought it would be neat to make the Olympic team.”

          –Michael Phelps

This week, Michael Phelps has captured the imagination of Americans young and old.  It is quite an accomplishment for any person to win a gold medal in the Olympics, let alone 8 in one Olympics and 14 overall, both records!

If you are an athlete, making the Olympic team, winning a medal, and winning a gold medal are all incremental measurements of success. 

Here are 3 benefits of measuring success:

1. It keeps you on track towards reaching your goals.  Whatever your goal is … to make the Olympic team or to make a profit with your home based business … having a measurement of your success will keep you focused.  Let’s take the latter.  By comparing your expenses and income on the last day of each month, you have an accurate assessment of how well you are doing.  You get accurate data to determine what is working and what is not.
2. It tells you when you have reached your goals.  While this may sound silly, having a signpost has many advantages.  It gives you the right to brag!  You can add this to your list of accomplishments.  It gives you an opportunity to take a well-deserved break and celebrate.  Go to a movie.  Order out.  Treat yourself to a massage.
3. It holds you accountable.  In the $300 billion grant/fundraising industry in which I’ve carved a niche, funders give a lot of money to individuals and charities that are accountable for the money they receive.  It’s absolutely necessary when public dollars are being used.  On an individual basis, you may not know this but holding yourself accountable for reaching your goals builds your self-confidence and makes you more trust-worthy.  If you believe that more resources are bestowed on those who are good stewards, you are likely to make even more money, too!

Here are 2 things to remember when measuring your success:

1. Make sure the process of measuring is “fun”.
2. Make sure the process of measuring is “natural” (part of your everyday routine). 

For example, a goal of this group of experts is to “succeed, thrive and be balanced while working at home.”

Let’s see how measuring can be fun and natural in these three areas:

·         Succeed – To succeed is to grow and show incremental improvement. My grandfather taught me this in a great family tradition.  He used to notch the height of his grandchildren in one of his doorways of his home on their birthdays. Looking at your measurements over time will show you patterns.  Comparing notches, I noticed that I had grown at least 6 inches each year between 10 and 13 years of age. 

Likewise, students in grants/fundraising keep “success logs” (click here to download yours).  Success logs show improvement in “success rates,” “amount funded” and “time spent.” I got this idea after I created a “success log” for myself and noticed that I had a 91+% success rate.  I got 42 out of 46 proposals funded and raised over $5.3 million.  I had reduced the time I spent writing a proposal from 100 hours to 6.25.

Success logs reveal patterns.  Because of my success, I now show students specifically how they can increase their success rate by at least 25%, double the amount funded, and reduce time spent by at least 100%.   

·         Thrive – One of my “thrive” goals is to enjoy vibrant health 24-7.  A fun way to measure this is to ask how alive you feel.  I make this a natural part of my daily routine by including the measurement as a fun activity at the beginning of teleseminars I lead.  Up front, I ask everyone (myself included) to measure their aliveness on a scale of 1-to-10 (1 being the “lowest” and 10 being the “highest”). 

·         Be balanced – One of my “be balanced” goals is to eat a healthy, balanced diet.  Recently, I had lunch with a parent who shared a fun way she measures a similar goal with her 2-year-old.  She told me of a way she learned to get her son to eat a balanced meal, not just desert. 

What she did was tell her son that he could have the same percentage of desert that he ate in the main course.  If he ate 25% of his meal, he could have 25% of his desert, 50% of meal … 50% of desert, and so forth.  A natural part of their meals is that the child reports the percentage eaten before giving him his desert.

Whatever your goals are, Olympic gold, “succeed, thrive and be balanced while working at home,” or something else, I wish you outrageous success in reaching them in fun and natural ways!

Warmest regards,

Phil Johncock

Founder/Mentor of 4Grants.Net

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