I’ve been progressing through the highly lauded Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy. It’s a pretty good book, and you would probably be better off if you read it. But if you’re like me, that is also true of 1,024 other books you won’t soon have the time to read. So I’ll let you in on its best tricks as I find them, and you can just send me the $12.00 you would have sent to Amazon for it… deal?
My favorite idea so far has been the Affirmation Technique. The basis of this technique is that you will considerably accelerate your progress toward your goals if you can visualize their end result while ignoring the steps between where you are and where you’ll be when you achieve the result. Tracy uses an example comparing how you would take in a movie if you watched it from beginning to end vs. how you would take it in if you watched the last 10 minutes, then watched the rest of it. His contention is that if you already know what the outcome is, you are calm and relaxed, and generally more able to witness the cinematography, dialogue, and the way the scenes are connected.
So it is with business. I am currently applying this technique to the increasingly deadbeat renter in one of my investment properties. I’ve had to call him the past couple months to get rent paid, and while he has presented a variety of plausible reasons why the checks arrive late, the bottom line is that they’re late (or in the case of this month, very late). Thus, my first inclination is to experience annoyance or unease as I think through what next steps will be necessary to either get rent from him or get him out of the house.
Applying the Affirmation Technique to this situation has helped me see that, even in a worst-case scenario, I’m still going to be making many thousands of dollars from this house. As distracting as the situation is now, the result of this house will still be a net positive. As such, I can experience today from the perspective of a successful investor who, in a matter of time, could be sipping down thousands of mojitos for his trouble. And in the meantime between now and then, I’m confident that I’ll be able to take the necessary steps to reach that goal, because I see it so plainly.
Likewise with Bonanzle, where there are daily challenges that, taken outside of the big picture, can be fatiguing. But zoom out, and there is plainly visible a site that people need, and I know how to make it. Put aside whatever challenge today will hold, and its easy to imagine a number of scenarios where things are going to end up very, very positively. In that reality there is a well of confidence to draw from while the finer details of the plan are worked into place.