What This Other Coventry Lad Surprisingly Does

I lived in Coventry in the UK until I was 24. Some years ago, I met a financial advisor called Asvin who had also grown up there at the same time I did. He came up to me after a workshop I ran at the Personal Finance Society conference in Birmingham (UK) and said: “I’ve been in business for 24 years. For the last seven, I’ve achieved Court of the Table, but I’ve never made it to Top of the Table. Do you think you could help me get there?” 

Top of the Table is the elite level at the Million Dollar Round Table, the most revered organization in the world of life insurance. I asked him the question I ask every new client: “What type of person do you need to be to make it to TOT?” He thought about it and said: “I need to be more consistent. I have great months and then other things seem to come along and distract me.” 

I told him: “What you need is what I call a Power Habit to prove to your brain that you’re becoming increasingly consistent. A Power Habit leverages the 80-20 Law (the Pareto Principle that 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities): it gets you a significantly skewed outcome for the time you put in. This is an activity you do week-in and week-out whether you feel like it or not. What’s the most important activity you need to be consistent with – and how can you measure it?”

 He looked over his numbers in recent years and replied: “I need to increase my average number of meetings from five to seven. If I can do that, I’m sure I can make Top of the Table.”

For the next twelve months, we talked every Monday for thirty minutes. Every week. The same commitment. It wasn’t sexy or fascinating. It was consistent. 

Most weeks he fell short of seven and sometimes it was hard to see where it was all taking him. But there was no judgement and his consistency paid off. Even though he ended up averaging 6.5 meetings/week, he exceeded his goal by an additional 21%. 

More importantly, he has exceeded it for the nine years since in an increasingly upward trajectory.

ACTION STEP: Identify Your Power Habit(s)

First make sure you’re clear about what type of person you need to be so you can be/do/have what you want in the upcoming months. Then your next step is to look over your 12-week goals and see if one of them could be a Power Habit. Is there one will get you the biggest bang for your buck to help you get to feeling the way you want to feel a year from now? Have one or two for your professional life and one or two for your personal life – no more. 

When my consulting is focused on prospecting and referrals, the answer is always around making a certain number of specific asks per week – usually five (and sometimes three for more seasoned professionals). If you knock on enough of the right doors, sooner or later ever better opportunities will come.

I’ve also had clients commit to making ‘stretch’ asks – by their own subjective definition an ask that gives them butterflies. These take longer to come to fruition (9 months+) but can be very powerful at helping you go bigger with your business. 

If you want to be increasingly healthy:

*Consistent workouts are going to leverage the 80-20 Law and be a great power habit.

*A diet of mostly veggies, protein and fruit will likely get you there too.

If you want more love or delight in your key relationships:

*A weekly date night with your partner or one of your children will have a much bigger positive impact.

An alternate way to arrive at your power habit is to answer this question that Gary Keller wrote about in his book The One Thing: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” This helps you focus on the most important goal you’ve set.

What’s Your One Thing?

Keller discovered the power of this when the board of his real estate firm reduced a brainstormed list of 100 ways they could grow their company all the way to down to ‘One Thing’: they decided that Keller should write a book about how to make $1m/year selling residential real estate. The book was so popular that it helped to catapult the firm to #1 in the USA as Realtors from other companies jumped ship to join them believing Keller Williams could do a better job helping them make $1m/year more easily. 

The premise of the One Thing is that you will become far more successful by spending your time on fewer things and doing what you do best. His power habit was to time block four hours/day to do what mattered most (which at first was to write his book) and guard that time with all his might. He recommended the same habit to his readers as well.

What ONE THING can you do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Now you can look at a power habit. Is it a time allocation to work on the big goal or something you can do daily in smaller chunks?

When you can only focus on ONE thing, your answers may surprise you because you can’t lean on the crutch of the laundry list of possible next steps.

What I’ve learned since I read this book in 2013 is that it may take you many attempts before you really are clear about your One Thing.

Another metaphor in the book that explains how your ONE thing adds up over time is the domino effect. Once you start with the right question, your focus and actions accumulate. Step by step these actions build MOMENTUM to create exponential results not incremental ones. And Keller did it himself by co-founding Keller Williams and building what became the largest real estate agency in the USA at the time. 

Apply an extreme version of the 80-20 Law to your focus. Whether that means spending much more time with your top 6 referral sources or top 3 clients who are most likely to refer you, stop trying to convert 80% of the people you know to refer you – it's a waste of time.

You only want 3-4 Power Habits for your life at any one time. You want to make it easy to focus on what matters most. When your day gets thrown off by the common unexpected events, it is the Power Habit that gets priority.

A couple of tips about power habits:

a) WATCH OUT! Routines can feel dull after a while but must be maintained: It’s like the Olympic swimmer who joked: “I only have to swim twice: When I feel like it and when I don’t.” We all have a need for the interesting and the new. You need to quiet the voice trying to persuade you to add variety when you already have a great recipe. We can unwittingly take our eye off the very habit that is getting us to where we want to go. 

b) WATCH OUT! Your lack of worthiness creates self-doubt: rather like a ship starting to steer in a new direction, what’s been normal and comfortable for your thinking will be challenged as you start to sense ever better results. This can prompt warning signals from your brain saying: “This direction is unfamiliar. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

This is why you work on your identity first: “I am a high performer. This is who I am. Get on with it.”

This is why you work on your new empowered beliefs: “I’ve worked hard for this. Yes, I deserve to be on this new path.”

You MUST identify your power habits. Without any doubt it is the consistent implementation of these that I have seen from past clients that leads to outstanding outcomes. This is where the ‘money’ is.

To Focus!

Matt

Copyright Matt Anderson, 2023