Using Affirmations to Inspire the Optimal Behavior in Your Team

The type of success you will get to enjoy in your life or business is directly affected by the clarity of your vision, how serious you are about what you want to achieve, the quality of your goals and plans and your daily commitment to carry out goal specific actions, which will help you to realize your dreams. You can support your success by adding vision boards, daily affirmations, visualization, mirroring, etc. into your daily routine. The secret to sustainable success though, is to ensure that these supportive routines do not become the focus of your daily success habit set.

I can most certainly say that all my clients, who have supported their business and personal successes, by including vision boards, daily goal specific affirmations and visualization techniques, into their lives and businesses, have seen remarkable improvements in the results they have enjoyed, because of the following:

•They have had to simplify and clarify their vision and purpose into simple understandable phrases, which drive and encourage the right behavior, to support both themselves and their team members, to drive the proper daily activity.
•This clarity makes them and their team members more focused and determined to succeed.
•Everyone in their teams has absolute clarity about what they need to achieve.
•Their vision is clear and everyone in their teams knows their individual role for delivering on the overall vision.
•This clarity of vision and purpose is regularly repeated, so it is fresh in everyone’s mind throughout the day, week and month.
•It is easier to track their team’s performance and to see if the actions they are taking are aligned with the outcome they want, as they have refined their vision into daily affirmed success behaviors.

Yes affirmations, vision boards and visualization techniques do help improve the outcomes everyone within my clients teams enjoy. They are however never a substitute for daily goal specific activity on the part of your team members.

Making Affirmations Work for You and Your Team

The first step, when creating affirmations for you and your team, is to ensure that you have a crystal clear vision of exactly what you want your team to achieve. This must then be converted into goals, which stretch your team, but must still feel achievable to them. Break these back into projects or smaller bite size chunks, which your team can tackle and achieve in no more than 30 days. These projects must then be broken back even further into action lists, which contain the individual actions, which must be performed by each team member. Explore these individual actions and discover the type of behavior, which will support each team member to achieve their individual projects and goals.

For example: If you are leading a team of sales people. The overall vision may be to become the leading supplier of a particular product or service, in the financial services industry. To achieve this, one of the goals the team may need to achieve, would be a sales growth of 15 % for the year. The overall goal for the team of sales people would thus be to grow sales by a specific monetary value, within the next twelve months. This goal can then easily be broken back, into individual goals for each sales person in the team.

These individual goals are then broken back further, into smaller projects, which each sales person can achieve within the next 30 days. Breaking the individual sales person’s goal back into smaller bite size chunks does two things. It firstly makes the overall goal for each individual, feel more achievable and makes it far easier to track the performance of each team member. This helps to regularly test the results of each team member. If after 30 days someone has not achieved a project, you as their leader can take timeously take action to see why. Each project is then broken back into individual actions. Each sales person would design an action list, which they would take action on daily.

This is where visualization and affirmation now come into play. You as the leader of the team or the individual sales person would develop an affirmation to encourage the behavior; they need to perform daily, to support the outcome they need to achieve. If for example they need to make minimum of 10 telephone calls and meet with at least five prospects every day. They would develop an affirmation, which they would repeat throughout the day, which could be something as simple as “I am making ten phone calls a day, meeting with 5 prospects, who know like and trust me enough to partner with me and buy what I have to sell”

These simple affirmations help inspire the exact behavior needed by the sales person and have the added benefit of also helping them feel more positive when they meet with their prospects. As you know sales is not about selling at all, it is about developing mutually beneficial relationships with people, who can get to know, like and trust you and your product and service. The more positive the sales person is and the more believable and trustworthy they are, the more likely the prospect will be to choose to utilize their product or service to satisfy their specific need.

How Does my Team Use Affirmations?

They must add the expression of their affirmations to their daily routine; it should become an integral part of their new success habit set. They can repeat their affirmations as many times as they want throughout the day. The challenge with this random approach is that it does not easily allow the formation of a daily habit. I have seen the best success in my client’s team members, when they say and feel them at least three times a day. It’s a good habit to encourage your team members to say them when they first awake in the morning, at mid-day, and again as they prepare for sleep. Introducing this new routine will take willpower at first. They should help themselves to develop this new success habit set, by setting reminders in their phones to remind them to carry out the affirmations three times a day.

To successfully turn this new routine into their new success habit set, they must repeat this behavior, using alarms to remind them, for about 60 days. Research has shown that daily routines, when repeated for 60 days, become entrenched habits.

“Start Your Day with a Positive Push in the Right Direction”
When they say their affirmations in the morning, before their day even starts, they are setting the tone for their performance throughout the day. They are reminded about the activity they need to carry out that day, they feel more confident, focused and driven. This allows them to start their day feeling more inspired, and determined to achieve their goals each day. They will also be programming that portion of their brain, which filters what they notice, to be on the lookout for any hidden opportunities.

Re-Focus Throughout the Day

Encourage your team to also say their affirmations whenever they have time. If they are waiting for a document to print, stuck in traffic, or performing a tedious, repetitive task, they should repeat their affirmations, either out loud or silently. Saying their goal-specific affirmations in the middle of the day helps them to re-focus. Any time they find that they are being hard on themselves or they feel down, because of the challenges of the day, they must just relax and repeat their affirmations. They can teach themselves to turn the default, pre-programmed negative self-talk, they engage in all day, into a conversation with themselves, which is supportive and inspiring.

If they want to accelerate their growth and their ability to achieve their goals, it is very helpful to write down their affirmations on piece of paper frequently throughout the day. This can be repeated at least 10 or 20 times each day. The more often they repeat their affirmations, the faster they will reprogram their mind and eliminate any self-negating talk and limitations that linger within them.
The Last 45 Minutes before Bed are Key

At night, as they prepare for bed, repeating their affirmations is a great way to prepare their subconscious mind to align itself with their conscious thinking. The last 15 minutes before they sleep is extremely valuable. What they pay attention to during the last 15 minutes; just prior to going to sleep has a greater influence on your subconscious mind than what you focus on during the rest of the day. This is why it is an ideal time to meditate, visualize, and repeat your affirmations.

And remember, your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between what is real or imagined, and so will spend a great portion of the night focusing on what the conscious mind told it before it went to sleep.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za