The Power of Structure

There are lots of books and articles written on goal setting and chances are that you had also read a few of them.  But no one tells what to do after making goals i.e. how to achieve them.  You need to understand that the Law of Attraction also does not work unless you do. 

In almost 95% of cases, people know that what actions bring them results but are still not able to achieve their goals.

The number one reason for their failure is that they do not make a proper structure to achieve their goals.

First, understand what is structure?  Here we are not going to talk about the structure of the building, but the structure to achieve our goal, small one to large. The structure here means the kind of system/tools you create for yourself to accomplish your goals. The purpose of our mind is to protect us. Whenever the mind realizes that we can harm or fail to achieve something, it diverts our attention. But it is your choice to listen to your mind and relax in your comfort zone or come out of your comfort zone and take action to achieve an extraordinary goal. Now to ensure that we would achieve our target, we need a structure that ensures that we take the actions to achieve our goals.

During my childhood, I heard a story of a Queen.  On one particular day, Queen makes a plan to go to the temple once King falls into sleep at night, as her husband was against her going to the temple.  The King also got this information that his wife has made a plan to visit the temple at night, as he didn’t like her going to the temple, he decided to awake full night.  The King was feeling sleepy after having his dinner, but he knew that he needs to be awake the whole night to keep watch on her wife. He took the knife and cut his little finger so that he didn’t fall asleep due to pain and got success in achieving his goal of keeping watch on his wife.

I narrated this story to explain the structure.  Different structure works for different people.  It is up to you to put what kind of structure work for you. You do not need to cut your finger but do whatever works for you to achieve your goals in life.  We will see examples of some structures, which you can put to make your life easy and achieve your goals.

One of the most important goals for most people is to wake up early in the morning.  In most cases, it has been seen that they wake up on time one or two days and after that come back to the normal routine.

Now to wake up on time, you can put many structures.  You can put an alarm.  Now the mistake most people do is that they put one alarm and when it rings, they press the snooze button and fall asleep again. If you knew, that you have a habit of putting an alarm on snooze, in that case, you can put multiple alarms in intervals of 5 minutes or 10 minutes. Apart from that, you can enroll your family members to wake you up in the morning on time. You can make morning walk partners and ask them to wake you up in the morning. Do whatever works for you but make a structure to ensure the achievement of your goal.

Let see one more example – Ram knew from his experience that on every 100 cold calls he made to prospects, he got time from 10 prospects to meet in person and for every 10 people he meets in person, he would be able to sell 2 policies on which he got $100 per policy as commission.  In case, he wants to earn $500 in a week.  Now it is very easy for him to create a structure and ensure that he would follow the same.  He gets $100 as commission per policy that means he needs to sell 5 policies in a week to earn $500 and for that, he needs to meet 25 prospects and to meet 25 prospects in person he should make cold calls to 250 prospects.  It is very simple now that he needs to ensure that he should make cold calls to 42 people per day i.e., around 11 calls per hour considering he makes calls 4 hours in a day and rest 4 hours to keep meeting people.  This is very simple.  It is also important to create a structure so that he can ensure that he is doing 11 calls per hour.  He should note it down somewhere and check every hour.  He can also ask his colleague or friend to check with him whether he has done the calls as per plan or not.

Let’s see one more example – I remembered my boss never forget to wish me and other employees on birthday.  I was amazed at his memory, on how he can remember the birthday of so many employees but when I came to knew about his structure in place, I also started following that structure.  Whenever an employee joined the company, on the same day of joining, I started saving his/her birthdate in google calendar and schedule recurring reminders every year on the same date. Now I never miss wishing my colleagues and friends on their birthdays.

In case of scheduling meetings also.  Earlier I used to schedule meetings and note them down on my notepad, and usually, it happened that I got busy with some tasks and forget about the meeting, and sometimes it happened that other participants of the meeting forgets about the meeting. 

Now I started scheduling meetings through Outlook calendar and put reminders in Outlook. So whenever any meeting is scheduled, I got pop-up on my screen ten minutes before the scheduled timing, and to double ensure that I never get late or forget about the meeting, I check my calendar in the morning and put an alarm for all scheduled meetings.  Now I get pop-up on my screen and in case I missed the pop-up, my alarm buzz on.  It is just an example.  You can make any structure that works for you so that you never get late for meetings.

Another important structure, I learned from my boss is, whenever he sends any mail to anyone, and it is something related to get some information from him/her, he put that mail in Outlook folder named “Follow up” and whenever he received any mail and not able to reply that mail, he put that mail in Outlook folder named “Pending”.  Every morning, after reaching the office, he sees those two folders and then starts his work accordingly.  He never forgets to give a reply and to make follow-up for his work.

The best structure, I learned to get top on the activity on my table is by maintaining an activity list.  When you are working in a responsible position in any organization, you get new assignments/projects/activities on your table every day. It is very difficult to keep on track of all the tasks on your table if you do not have any proper structure for them. I started maintaining an Activity List, which I learned from a consultant, we hired from Netherlands to improve our operations.  Whenever I get new assignment/task/project, I write it on my activity list with the date and also assign it importance – High, medium, or low and put the deadline date.  I update it on daily basis at the end of the day and write actions taken on each project/assignment. It helps me to keep track of all the activities and schedule my work based on the level of importance of that project. Each morning, I check that list and plan my work accordingly.

You get knowledge about creating structure, so create structure now to accomplish your goals.

I would love to hear about your success! Email me directly at sumit.k@winspiration.co with your own success story or which structure works for you.

ABOUT SUMIT

Sumit is an experienced HR professional having 14 years of experience in different corporates.  He is a certified Life Coach from the American Union of NLP.  He is currently helping Companies, Business Owners, and Individuals to grow to the next level.