Normal Service Is Being Resumed...

Have you ever had times where you're convinced that there's some sort of fiendish plot to keep you from achieving your goals?

Me too. In fact, every single time I try to build a business that will fulfil my ambitions and goals, my family or my work life conspire to derail my progress.

You couldn't make this up - since I decided to stick to a 90 day plan and dual-blog:

- A second car has had to be replaced at short notice. My first was in October 2011, courtesy of a charming woman who ran into the back of me, gave me false details and then disappeared, leaving me with a written-off  Volvo. So I bought my partner's car off him with the insurance payout and that promptly threw part of its gearbox linkage within 10 weeks. I'm now driving a carpeted Transit Van (aka a VW Sharan) that drinks fuel.

- My partner decided to live in Rugby from Monday night to Thursday morning, because it's more convenient when he's decided to do a Masters degree in London to have a personal taxi service that is prepared to pick him up after 11pm and drop him off at the station before I go to work. Oh, and have a housekeeping service that provides him with breakfast, sandwiches, does his washing, loses his socks, etc. After a discussion where, apparently, it's my fault if I'm late for work because I'm not getting up earlier and managing the family better, he's decided to spend the next two weeks in West Oxfordshire, to sort out his tax returns and write his essays. I presume the wild-eyed, manic Harpy that dropped him off at the station at the end of that discussion may have had something to do with it...

- My eldest son has decided to move back in, with all the hassle that entails. I need to convert my office/music space back into a bedroom, move furniture into other rooms, etc. All whilst doing a full-time job, a two hour commute and failing to run a Kleeneze business.

- My mother is having serious kidney problems, which mean we're now stuck with a cycle of visits to GPs, specialists, etc. I'm scared it's kidney failure this time - her legs are swelling up and she seems to be permanently on antibiotics.

- Then there's this year's flu, which knocked me out for several weeks. I haven't felt this weak and lethargic since I had glandular fever in my early 20s.

All in all, it's been an interesting 90 days. Something had to give, and that was the blogging. However, I'm already drafting the next 90-day plan, whilst sticking to the remains of my original one to give me some forward momentum. 90-day plan blogging will re-commence in two weeks.

90 Day Plan - Day 9: Culling the To-Do List

How big is your daily to-do list? The one with all the things you meant to do the day (or week) before but never seem to get around to?

If you've got a short, punchy to-do list, then congratulations. You get to sit back and feel smug for the rest of this chat.

For the rest of us, the ones who have to juggle a full day's work with travel, parenting and the pretence of having other activities, today's focus is on culling the herd of things clamouring for your attention.

At the end of today, after your planned activity, look at your to-do list. As we've discussed before, prioritisation is the key to control, so mark on your list the number of days those activities have been carried forward.

If any of them are marked 7 or higher, ask yourself if you are ever going to do that particular activity? No? Then draw a line through it and forget it.

Repeat for anything 5 days old and over.

Is your list more manageable yet?

Now go back through the list and prioritise as usual. This time, however, you're going to detail one small action you can take for any item that has sat on your list for 3 days or more.

And tomorrow, make sure you do those small actions first.

All of a sudden, you'll find you are less resistant to actioning those old items. You might even get motivated enough to fully complete one or two. When you do, remember to reward yourself.

Finish off by asking yourself those two important questions:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on, tomorrow?

90 Day Plan - Day 8: Building On Week 1's Efforts

With your first week's activity behind you, now is the time to build the momentum that's going to get you achieving the goals you set earlier.

Just like last week, action is the key to success. So take your plan and your to-do list and get moving.

Take the opportunity to remind your family and friends of what you'll be focussing on over the next few days, too. They'll forget otherwise and prioritising their less-urgent needs could derail your progress rather nicely.

I'm not talking about missing school events or avoiding pre-arranged meetings with the in-laws here, by the way. Those should blocked out on your calendar already, as should 'quality time' with your family. But does your child really need you to drop everything and get the latest toy for them?

Remember to review and track your activity before the end of the day and ask yourself those questions:

What am I proud of today? What can I do to improve tomorrow?

Well done! 8 days in and you're going strong.

90 Day Plan - Day 7: The First Weekly Review

By now, you've completed your first 7 days of your 90-day plan and you should have 7 days of tracking to show for it.

What does that tracking tell you?

- Are you sticking to your plan?

- Are you slipping behind?

- Are you doing better than expected?

Whatever the results of your tracking, there are three things to remember right now:

Don't get complacent and start slacking off. You'll lose all the momentum you're creating before it's had a chance to take effect.

Don't beat yourself up if Life! got in the way. You're working towards goals, not trying to win the marathon tomorrow. Get back on track and work the plan.

Don't allow yourself to make excuses. If you haven't been doing enough to work towards your goals, then don't let yourself off easily. Clear the decks, stop playing computer games instead of working and quit procrastinating. Just do it.

Of course, if your plan is completely unsustainable in terms of time and effort, you'll need to make changes. But not in the first week. Look at your tracking, map out what extra effort you need to put in for the next 7 days and add that to your to-do list and plan.

As always, ask yourself:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on tomorrow?

Write those things down. Place them somewhere prominent - on your desk, next to your wallplanner; wherever you are likely to look and take notice.

Now congratulate yourself - you've completed the first week of a 90-day plan. You're part of a very rare breed!

90-Day Plan - Day 6: The Importance of Tracking

All successful people track their behaviour and performance. It's how they know whether they are improving or not.

Your business success depends on how you track your activity. Too much detail and you will waste time you could be spending on getting new sales, new contacts and new team members. Too little? You'll have no idea where you've tried to expand your business or what the results really were.

Tracking needs to be done at the end of each day as a bare minimum. If you can do it as you are going along, even better. A simple notebook that you take along with you is all you need; you can transfer the information to your tracking sheets later.

If you aren't completely convinced about the benefits of tracking yet, try this simple exercise:

List every single thing you eat and/or drink for three days, together with the time and date.

You'll be surprised. It might even encourage you to track other parts of your life as well.

As always, finish today off with the questions:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on, tomorrow?


Don't forget to track your dietary habits!

90-Day Plan - Day 5: Baby Steps

You've prepared, planned and practised for all of 5 days now - surely there's something special to show for all your hard work?

If you're amazingly lucky, yes. For the rest of us, we need to remember that we are still taking the baby steps that will one day allow us to run that marathon in record time.

This is a 90-day plan, not a 7-day plan.

Today is the day for putting your half-week review changes into action. Then getting on with the baby steps.

Remember to track what you do, or don't do!

Finish off with asking yourself:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on, tomorrow?


And remind yourself - every successful business owner started off small once.

90-Day Plan - Day 4: Half-Week Review

So you're half-way through the first week of your 90-day plan? Congratulations! That's 3 days further than 80% of those who started. Mind you, 79% of all statistics are made up ...

How has your plan gone so far? Tonight, after doing all of your plan and to-do list activities, take 10 minutes out to look back on the first few days. Be honest with yourself about where you have let yourself down, but also make sure that your plan is working.

Are you tracking everything you are doing?

Are you doing everything you planned?

If not, why not?

As always, finish the day with those two key questions:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on, tomorrow?

Well done on getting this far.

90 Day Plan - Day 3: Creating the Routine

How do you master anything? Practice.

And how do you master practising? By building your routine until it becomes second nature.

This is what a 90-day plan is all about - creating and building a routine until it becomes a habit.

The secret is in how we practice. If we're aiming to be consistently a little better than we were yesterday, we're on the right track. We're not aiming to be perfect today.

When we practice our 90-day plan, we should be paying attention to the way we are doing it, rather than on the outcome. Yes, we're working to achieve an outcome, and we've set SMART goals, but we designed our plan to reach those goals in 90 days, so we don't need to obsess about them today.

We practice to get better at what we are doing, be it finding and retaining customers, delivering catalogues or leaflets, generating leads or building a team.

Needless to say, if we don't do the activity listed on our plan and daily to-do list, we won't be getting better; we'll be slipping downwards and backwards. It's better to see this as practicing to improve rather than a plan where every step has to be perfect straight away.

That way, you've taken the pressure off - it's nowhere near as scary if you're "just practising".

As always, finish your day with a to-do list for tomorrow, and write down the answers to these questions:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on, tomorrow?

Happy practicing!

90 Day Plan - Day 2: Improving on your first efforts

After the euphoria of actually finishing your first day of a 90-day plan, what's next?

If you're anything like me, your to-do list is longer than it should be, due to Life! and other circumstances. It would be easy to look at your plan, look at the to-do list and start getting negative thoughts.

Don't let yourself slip.

You are building up momentum at present - you don't want the momentum to be downwards or sidewards.

Take 30 minutes to review your plan and your to-do list and then prioritise your activity. First write a 1, 2 or 3 against every item on both your daily plan and your to-do list. 1s are extremely important to move your business forward. 2s are important, but not essential. 3s are everything else.

Now look at the items marked with a 1. Prioritise those in order of how much that activity will move your business towards your goals and targets.

Now go and do those activities in order of priority. When you've cleared all of those tasks, go back and do the next set of prioritisation with the items marked with a 2. Then and only then, move on to the 3s.

If necessary, and you've run out of day, move any remaining activities to Day 3. For your own peace of mind, make sure you carry forward less tasks than you started Day 2 with.

Again, finish the day with writing down the answers to the following:

What am I proud of today? What can I do to improve tomorrow?

And pat yourself on the back; you've reached the end of Day 2 and you're still moving forward!

90 Day Plan - Day 1

New Year, New Plan.

Harking back to my post on creating your plan, you should have daily detail, weekly detail, monthly and 90 day overviews.

So you know what you should be doing on day 1.

Go do it.

When you've done each action, get out the associated tracking sheet and track it.

When you get to the end of your day, you need to spend 30 minutes on reviewing the day's activities and preparing tomorrow's to-do list that totals up any additional tasks you need to complete alongside tomorrow's planned activity.

Pin that to-do list on the wall next to your planner.

Now ask yourself:

What am I proud of today? What can I improve on tomorrow?

Write those things down. Place them somewhere prominent - on your desk, next to your wallplanner; wherever you are likely to look and take notice.

Now smile - you've completed the first day of a 90-day plan. Most people don't even get that far!

90-Day Plan: D-1 Reviewing Your Plan

With D-Day (as in Do It!) only a day away, it's time to focus on step 4 of the pre-90-day plan activities: Reviewing Your Plan.

By now, you should be comfortable with the goals you've set, you should have your working area organised, and your plan should be created and detailed.

Ready?

I've covered reviewing before, in the 3 Rs of Network Marketing. This time, we're focussing on making sure our plan is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely, or SMART. We need to answer the following questions:

1. Do I know EXACTLY what I'm doing for each of the next 90 days?
2. Does my family know and understand what I'm doing?
3. How am I tracking my activity?
4. What are my back-up plans when/if Life! gets in the way?
5. How exactly will I get back on track if I drift away from my planned activity?
6. How will I reward myself for goals I have achieved, and when?

In addition to the last-minute checks that your plan is fit for purpose, you'll be reviewing your activity every evening with one simple question:

How have I done today compared to what I planned to do? What can I do tomorrow to improve my activity and/or results?

You should also use the 3 Rs of Network Marketing every week to review the week's progress and every 4 weeks to review a month/period's progress compared to the plan. This way you will stop yourself drifting too far off track.

Remember, where your future's concerned, it's not an attitude - it's a way of life.

Now THERE's A Surprise....

Despite my best intentions, Life got in the way again and poor little Kleenezelady found it took a lot longer to do her 90 day plan than she'd expected. Pop over to my other blog to find out what happened.

That got in the way of me writing the next thrilling instalment, which follows hot on the heels of this apology. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible...

Still, at least it proves I'm blogging this experience live.

90 Day Plan: D-2 - Creating the Plan

You've spent time on preparation activities and you've organised yourself a little better. Next up, creating that 90-day plan.

This is where that extra effort over the past few days begins to pay off.

You need a year planner, a diary, a list of everybody's commitments over the next 90 days, tracking sheets, to-do sheets and a 90-day plan template. You may also want to use 7-day plan templates.

Got all of those together in one place? That's OK, I'll wait...

If you haven't got tracking sheet, to-do list and 90-day plan/7-day plan templates, contact me through the comments and I'll send you a set.

Welcome back.

1. Get the year planner up on the wall and draw a border around the 90 days you'll be working your plan.
2. If your business 'weeks', 'months' or 'periods' don't line up with the standard Sunday - Saturday or Monday - Sunday options, mark those out on your planner as well.
3. Mark out ALL commitments for the 90 day plan duration on your wall planner.

You now have a visual reminder for yourself and your family for the next 90 days.

4. Take your 90-day plan template, which should be marked out in 30 minute blocks from 6am to midnight.
5. Block out periods of time for all normal activity - bathing, exercise, meals, housework, gardening, travel to/from work/higher education studies and, of course, the day job/lectures.
6. Block out periods of time for all other commitments - family events, club meetings, holiday away from home.

Take a good, long look at the gaps in your schedule. What you are looking for are blocks of 1 to 5 hours that you can devote to your business for at least 6 days out of every 7.

Found them? You need to be working on your business for 20 hours per week part-time, more if you're full-time.

7. Block out your business activity for the next 90 days. You will be sticking to this plan; make sure it's sustainable.

The next section is optional, but advisable:

7a. Take a 7 day plan template and block out your business activity for each day. This time, be more specific. If you plan to hand out leaflets, deliver catalogues or do surveys on a particular day, write down the streets or area now. If you don't use a template, this information needs to go in your diary for those days.

7b. Repeat 7a for all 13 weeks.

Back to that wallplanner:

8. Block out your business activity on the year planner; one simple way to do this is to use stickers of different colours, shapes and sizes depending on available time and type of activity. Remember to create a key to those stickers and display that on your wall, too.

You now have 3 levels of information for your 90-day plan - a high level summary on the year planner, a mid-level management report in the 90-day plan template and detailed operational activity in the 7 day plans.

9. Create activity tracking sheets for each type of activity you intend to undertake and ensure you have enough copies to cover 90 days of activity. You will be using these every day, in conjunction with to-do lists, to maximise your time and effort.

10. Make sure that you have a central store for all your planning and tracking paperwork, be it in a computer folder or in a filing cabinet or lever arch file. Don't give yourself opportunities to fail.

Tomorrow, we'll cover the pre-action review phase. Have fun planning!

90-Day Plan: D-3 - Organisation

After preparation, organisation is the key to a successful, active 90-day plan. Spending some time getting organised will save you time later, as well as providing you with a morale boost as you improve your 'competence confidence'.

Organisation is closely linked with determining your priorities for the next 90 days. If you've done your ten point preparation homework, you'll have a list of your five goals. Those are your key priorities. So what's next?

Your aim should be to declutter your life as far as possible - physically and mentally. Irrespective of your own mental image of who you are and what you want to become, you won't grow yourself or your business if you are dragging junk around with you.

In other words, your 90-day organisation phase should include the following:

1. Set up a dedicated email account for your business. DO NOT clutter it up with subscriptions to the latest "wonder guru" email lists. If you're subscribed to certain lists, re-evaluate their usefulness. Unsubscribe from all those you can't be bothered to read on a regular basis. Then unsubscribe from those that spam you with sales offers - you can subscribe later when you've reached your goals. Keep your final list of subscriptions down to a maximum of 5. Now change those email subscriptions to RSS feeds. That way you can look at them via your browser and declutter your inbox.

2. Use the 2 minute rule for all incoming email, post and phone conversations - including anything that crops up in your contact manager websites. Deal with it, dispose of it or decide to tackle it at a specific date and time. Your inbox/in-tray should be almost bare. Work on it until it is.

3. File receipts as soon as you get them. If you don't have a filing system, start one. File by category, such as car, petrol, order payments, invoice payments and bonuses/commission.

4. Set up a business bank account as soon as possible. If you can't manage to do that, at the very least you need to set up a separate savings account with money transfer capabilities. This helps you to separate out your personal life from your business life as far as the taxman is concerned.

5. Make sure you have immediate access to customers, team members and prospects contact details at all times. If that means using a filofax or daytimer rather than a computer-based system, then that's fine. Just make sure it goes with you at all times.

6. Set up activity tracking for all plan-related activities. Talk to your upline, or contact me for a selection of templates. If you are involved in direct sales, you should be tracking sales generation activities, quantity of orders placed, by whom, projected and actual delivery dates, order value and retail profit. If you are building up your team, you should be tracking prospect contacts, follow up calls, autoresponder subscription and unsubscription rates, amount spent on advertising, advertising source to prospect ratio, prospect signups. When coaching your team, you should be tracking their retail and recruitment activity with them, as well as tracking your coaching activity.

7. If you are running your business from your home, ensure anybody else in your household knows how to answer the phone in a professional manner. Roleplay is useful here - practice phoning until they get into receptionist mode automatically. If you can't manage that, invest in call diversion and send all phonecalls to a number you can control and access. If your company provides a voicemail facility, subscribe to it - it's worth it.

8. Invest in a whiteboard and place it somewhere prominent in the main part of the house. This will be where you and your family/co-habitees can update each other as to what's going on. Consider investing in a "family" calendar - the sort that lists daily activity by person.

9. Invest in a cashbox, so that business income can be kept securely until you can get it to your bank. Make the habit of banking your takings before you spend them.

10. Set up a system so that everybody, including family and customers, know when you are working on your business. Use your whiteboard, update your wallplanner, and decide on a routine that suits you and your customers. Then stick to it for the next 90 days.

Good luck. We'll deal with creating your plan tomorrow.

90-Day Plan: D-4 - Preparation

Before you even start implementing your first proper 90-day plan, you need to make sure that all the ground work has been covered. Otherwise, you'll be on your sixth 90-day plan by day 10. That's just wasting your time and energy.

So what ground work is there?

1. Preparation
2. Organisation
3. Planning
4. Review

Preparation

From personal experience, this is the easiest step to overlook, primarily because it can encompass a wide range of activities.

Depending on your personal circumstances, preparation could involve creating a specific work environment, buying in supplies of leaflets, work clothes, stationery and other consumables, investing in business equipment (new printer, 'new' car) and, of course, warning friends and family about your diary commitments for the next 90 days.

Some organisations provide their own checklists for fledgling distributors to help them get started; your own team leaders may provide you with a preparation checklist that they find works for their business. If you have the opportunity to use tried and tested methods, then use them, at least for your first 90-day plan. You can always tweak the plan to suit yourself as you go along.

If you don't have access to a 90-day plan checklist, contact me via the comments and I'll send you the one I use. It is not tied to any specific business or network marketing company.

Essentially, your preparation should include the following:

1. Identify in generic terms what you want to achieve in the next 90 days - is it improved sales, a larger team, or both? Is it the deposit for a car, a holiday? Is it paying off debt? Write down 10 to 15 items.

2. Then write down a list of 5 specific goals that you intend to achieve within the 90 days. That means taking the initial 10 to 15 items and determining a realistic target date for each. You'll find a lot eliminate themselves at this point. If you find you have more than five goals that you feel are realistic, then prioritise and pick the first 5. You can always replace completed goals with ones from the list later. Don't pay attention to hype at this point, you want to set realistic goals so that when you achieve them, you build your confidence for the next 90 day plan.

3. Write down how you will achieve those 5 goals. For example, if a goal is "To save £300 per month", then how you achieve that may be "To sell £1600 of products", or "To recruit and train 5 new team members", or "To stop spending £100 at Starbucks every month, sell £800 of products and recruit 1 new team member and train them to sell £800 of products." Only you can determine how to reach your goals.

4. Collate all know diary events for yourself and your family for the next 90 days. You'll need to know what blocks of time are available to you. Include everything you can think of, including "together time", gardening, shopping, nights out, school sports days and teacher meetings. Don't plan anything yet.

5. Check that you have everything you need for the first 28 days of your 90-day plan. That includes a designated space to work (even if it's the dining table), leaflets/flyers, samples, catalogues, opportunity brochures/dvds, pens, stamps, diaries, wallplanners, paper, ink cartridges, work clothes, money to cover petrol costs, postage, etc.

6. Identify any gaps/omissions in what you need and identify when/how you will address those gaps.

7. Take a realistic look at yourself and identify any issues that may stop you from achieving your goals in the next 90 days. Do you lose enthusiasm quickly? Do you have a PhD in procrastination? Do you promise things and then not deliver? Are you disorganised?

8. Decide what you are going to do to prevent those issues. If you are competitive, then creating a set of small, weekly targets that gain you rewards may be a great solution. If you prefer doing things at your own pace and finishing one thing before you move onto the next, rewarding yourself for a small task that's well done may inspire you. Bear in mind that you are the master of your fate; nobody else is.

9. Write down your baseline results so far. Break those results down into weekly, monthly and quarterly if you've been in business for long enough. If you've only just started - great! If your figures are 0, 0 and 0, you can only improve from now on.

10. Tell your family that you are committing yourself to a 90-day plan of activity and discuss the effects with them so they know what to expect.

Once you've completed your preparation checklist, you're ready for the next step - getting organised.

Get the 90 Day Habit

Image © Gualtiero Boffi

Everybody who runs a business understands the need to plan ahead. Everybody who joins a network marketing company gets told that you can't succeed without a 90 day plan. So why are there so few coherent, full explanations of what a 90 day plan is, what it entails and what it's like to follow one?

Google for '90 day plan' and there's loads of generics, a lot of waffle and a lot of incomprehensible text that should have caveat emptor watermarked through it. Finding the gold in the dross is difficult, although there are some good articles, such as Michael Hyatt's, which do encourage us to step up and be accountable.

So, as I firmly believe in personal responsibility and accountability, I will be dual-blogging for the next 94 days on both the mechanics of 90-day plans and my personal experiences of implementing them.

Why 94 days rather than 90? Because I want to show the prior preparation and planning that goes into the creation of a 90-day plan.

This is likely to be an interesting project. I'm hoping the extra exposure will force me to up my game enough to quit the day job in a year's time. Here we go!

Why Aren't You Successful?

A newsblog article caught my eye today, prompting some introspection of my own.

If you look at your network marketing business, you can, as I and others do, justify your results due to a number of factors including the time available to you, other demands on that time and so on. If you're focused on justification rather than results, those factors will include the weather, rottweilers, lack of chocolate or whatever your preferred excuse is.

We can play the self-development game and point out we're better than we were, we're reading all the right books, we're really trying hard but ...

We can toy with self-analysis and before you know it we're on this month's sixth 90-day plan.

But when it comes right down to it, there's only one question that we need to ask ourselves each day. There's only one question that deserves our total honesty, regardless of how painful the answer is.

Why am I not successful yet?

Life! The Soap Opera - Episode 3

There are times when I seriously wonder if I'm borderline insane. We live in a society where striving to be your best is no longer acknowledged, let alone rewarded, yet I still try to push my way forward out of my comfort zone through self-development and personal challenges.

In the past few weeks, my retail activity has slowed and my recruitment activity needs serious TLC. There's a number of factors involved:

1. Due to rising fuel costs, I'm now car-sharing. Unfortunately, it's adding 6 miles and another 15 minutes to my existing 90 minute round trip each day, and I doubt if either of us would pick each other as anything more than a work-based colleague. Despite a number of efforts on my part, it's very difficult to prolong an in-car conversation past the "do anything last night?" stage. Obviously, my conversational skills need some work.
2. Office politics is alive and well, which means that I'm getting sucked into various disputes no matter how hard I try to stay neutral. Only those who've worked in this sort of atmosphere for any length of time know how enervating that can be. If I didn't have my Kleeneze business to focus on, I'd be heading for a long stress-induced break from work.
3. I'm working for a company that has an intriguing approach to personnel matters. My personal development plan, for example, states that I will be rated on, amongst other things, identifying and attending certain training courses. Despite identifying 6 separate courses, and trying to sort out the details for two of them directly when it became obvious that my line manager had no intention of doing anything, I have not received any training and am extremely unlikely to do so before my next review. Plus, despite asking for feedback regarding the team leader position I was unsuccessful in applying for, I have received none. I don't enjoy being set up to fail - it's one of the reasons I want to run my own business.
4. The workload in the office is so great that our team resource is spread too thinly, leaving all of us trying to fit 80 hours work into every week. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't provide good service, nor does it motivate the team. What it does do is ensure I have very little time during the day to field Kleeneze calls.
5. My family is going through one of those phases that drains you of both time and vitality. I have a mother whose health is deteriorating rapidly, one son who is trying to avoid school due to various issues (bullying, poor teaching, etc.) and my eldest son and my partner are trying to re-enact elements of a David Attenborough programme on male lions' territorial displays. Again, I'm finding more and more time is taken up in dealing with all of this.

I need to act decisively and I need to act fast, or my initial momentum will be derailed completely.

I'm taking the time out this evening to revise my plans (see my blog post http://itsnotanattitude.blogspot.com/2011/01/network-marketing-for-beginners-3-rs.html for more details), after which it will be full steam ahead on building a large enough team to allow me to quit the commuter life for good. Of my current salary, I spend 20% on petrol, so I only need to match 80% of my current salary consistently to provide an equivalent standard of living.

Tomorrow will mark the start of a whole new 90 day plan. I intend to stop commuting no later than 1 March 2012. Time to make that happen.

Gratitude Journals and a 90 day plan

I stumbled across the 30 days of gratitude site today, whilst looking for a motivational quote. I'm very glad I did (no sarcasm intended).

It turns out there's been a lot of research done on the positive effects of gratitude on both physical and psychological wellbeing. Increased optimism and enthusiasm, better sleep quality and lower levels of depression or stress were all noted. Active gratefulness appears to help people achieve their goals as well.

To be actively grateful, you need to document that gratitude. There are a lot of lovely suggestions on various gratitude sites about investing in a special book, but, let's face it, not everybody has the time or money to nip down to Journals 'R Us for the superb £50 pressed flower covered notebook and scented pen. Not only that, but the emphasis on the tools detracts from the core message.

Don't bother with the leather-bound journal, the fountain pen and the dedicated timeslot. If you focus on that, your gratitude journal will last as long as that teenage "Dear Diary" Christmas gift - and be as unsullied.

Open up your office software, create a new document or spreadsheet and go for it. Follow these instructions on how to write powerful "gratitudes" and set yourself a target of 6 gratitudes per day. If you've got a smartphone/iPhone/Android, you could use that instead.

Finally, here's a suggestion. Why not keep a 90 day gratitude journal alongside your 90 day plan? By actively focussing on your psychological development, you can help support the development of your business at the same time. Not only that, you have a permanent record of the improvements in your life to refer to in the future. 

Consistency = Success

Well, I've proven something to myself - and I can't stop smiling because of it...

A bit of background - I spent several years working with another network marketing/direct selling company and although I moved a couple of steps up the payment plan, I never really achieved what I wanted. Part of that was due to my own inconsistency (life got in the way A LOT, including divorce, kids changing schools, teenage angst, parental ill-health, you name it). Not once did I achieve a bonus from the company for any of my efforts.

After 3 months with Kleeneze, including more upheaval, a holiday and a really bad bout of bronchial infection - all of which wiped out 4 weeks and 2 potential bonuses - I have received my first bonus payment and achieved my first retail goal 8 weeks ahead of schedule!

That's big.

I have a story I can tell others now.

In my first committed 4 week period since I started the business, where committed is defined as sticking to my revised target of 400 catalogues out every week, my retail income from Kleeneze, including my bonus is:

 
I am truly delighted about this!
 
Week 1 of Period 12 has just finished and I've already achieved 50% of the sales that got me the bonus payment in Period 11. Talk about an incentive to hit my next target ahead of schedule.
 
I now know that I can achieve regular Kleeneze bonuses and that I can teach others to do likewise. Time to build up that team.
 
Here's to a fun and prosperous month.