Look Back Before You Look Forward

The end of the year is often a time for reflection. Most people will take a moment to evaluate all of their personal hits and misses over the past 12 months. A lot can happen in just one year’s time. You may have entered the business from a steady 9-5 job and closed a few deals already or even taken your business to a whole new level. Whatever your accomplishments were, the end of the year is a time to look back and note everything you did and what can be improved on. If you don’t take the time to look back, you will have a hard time knowing what you can improve on in the future.

Everything you do in business will either have an impact or a consequence. This relates to your marketing, networking, deal making, budgeting and everything you do in your real estate business. Look back to see what worked and what you need to improve on for 2014. If you made a list of your goals, take a peak and see how well you performed. The more honest you are in your grading and self-assessment, the better off your business will be. You should be hard on yourself, as your goals are there to give you something to strive for. If you set the bar too low, you will only attain mediocre results.

As the New Year hits, it is important to take the temperature of your business and see where you need to improve. Write any goals you want to achieve for 2014 and how you plan to achieve them. If you don’t have an action plan, than any goals are nothing more than pipe dreams. If you have a plan, you can work every day towards that goal and eventually you will start to see results. Most people will give up or get sidetracked when obstacles enter the picture. If you really want your goals to come true, you need to accept the fact that it won’t be easy and there will always be something that can stand in your way if you let it.

There are many people who will hit the reset button and start over on the first of the year. Diets, personal habits and goals are all often reset with the start of another year. After a few weeks, when things become difficult to maintain, people tend to revert back to their old ways or habits. To make your goals easier to attain, make smaller goals every week and even every day. Break your tasks down in order of importance and strive to achieve whatever is on your list for that day. Soon enough, you will finish a day, a week, then a month and the next thing you know it will be a year. If you hold yourself accountable to doing something to improve yourself and your business every day, you will. It is when you get sidetracked one day that the spiral tends to begin.

Look back on the past twelve months and think about everything you did and what the consequences were. After you take that into account, look forward to what you want and need to do to be even more successful in 2014. If you focus on one day at a time, your large goals won’t seem so daunting.