My mission to get you to a pet industry seminar continues so I’m sharing tips on how to maximize your investment.
I’m having the best year of my life both personally and professionally and credit a seminar I attended last October as the key event.
While the seminar content was excellent, that was not the only reason for the positive impact on my year. Prior to leaving for the Coaching for Success five-day seminar I did something different.
Rather than just showing up and waiting to see what was going to happen I set an intention of what I wanted to receive from the experience. That shift in approach had a big impact on the results achieved from my seminar investment.
Try using my simple exercises that take less than 15 minutes to complete as you prepare to attend your next seminar.
- After you register spend five minutes writing down why you are going to the seminar and how you feel about making the commitment.
- A week before you leave pull out that piece of paper and add at least three goals you want to accomplish while you are there.
Take your goals with you to the seminar and at the end of each day spend fifteen minutes thinking about your day.
- What are the key learning points or tips that will benefit you and your business?
- What do you want to implement in the next month or quarter?
- Who did you meet that day that will be added to your resource network?
- Make a bullet list of these items so you don’t have to go back through all your notes to find them once you get home.
In the morning before you head out to the conference spend five minutes reviewing your goals.
- Check off the ones that are completed and make a mental note of those you still have to accomplish.
- Prioritize one goal to achieve that day.
- Review your goals daily to ensure that you don’t miss out on one or wait until the last day and scramble to get them all done.
Don’t underestimate the power of this simple exercise. The last evening of my Coaching for Success seminar I reviewed my goals and was a little disappointed that one of them had not been accomplished. I gave it my best effort that day, but could not connect with the person that I wanted to ask about being my life coach. I had a few cards for coaches and accepted that this goal would be accomplished once I got home.
The next morning as I left the hotel for the airport I ran into Douglas, one of my new friends from the seminar and we agreed to share a cab to the airport. During our ride, Douglas mentioned to me that one of his friends asked him if he was now a life coach. I immediately smiled inside and replied that if he ever wanted to try long-distance coaching that I was very interested and we exchanged cards.
Within a week Douglas was my coach and all the goals set for my conference were achieved. My life changed dramatically from this conference as I realized the power of setting my intentions. This exercise is now my routine whenever I register for a course or seminar and continues to produce positive results.
Too often we rush through our life and don’t take time to reflect on our why. We are not intentional about the goals we have for the investments we make in ourselves. We become disappointed as we wait for things to happen to us and in effect give away the power we have to create our experiences.
Making an investment in yourself sends a strong message of your commitment to personal growth. Accompany that with setting clear intentions and goals for your investment and you may create your own best year yet.
Hi Susan. Great advice once again! Here’s to hoping that next year will also be the best one ever!!
Do you have any tips on what specific KPI’s we should pull together prior to attending a pet services convention to be really well prepared?
Also, do you know of any spreadsheet templates that could be used to help calculate the relevant numbers and turn it all into an organized table? Right now, I’m running reports in Kennel Connection and then copying that information into excel. However, I constantly struggle with setting up formulas and links. Just trying to get some useful data without overcomplicating the process…
Dave, that’s a great question and would select 2-3 related to your current priority areas of your business. So if you are focused on growth then some of the marketing and website KPI would be my focus. I’ve recently done some searching for a KPI dashboard for Crystal Canine and think we are going to use Cyfe, but klipfolio was our runner-up choice.