This is what I see in my field of view, just above my two computer monitors, every single day.
It’s my Score Board.
Now, you might be asking, what the heck is a score board and what’s it for?
A Score Board is basically a tool that I use to help me FOCUS on the most important quantifiable result that I want to achieve in my life right now.
Personally I use a very simple whiteboard that I hung on my wall, in a location where it is always in my field of view while I’m at my computer – which is quite often.
The “Score” that I have right now registers in my mind when I’m consciously looking at the score board, and also subconsciously when I’m just looking at my computer monitors.
I have nothing else in my field of view to distract me.
Why You Need a Score Board for Your Goals
So why do we need a score board for our goals?
What’s it for?
Well, what a score board does is it allows you to select ONE goal achieving metric that is most important to you right now that you can track on a daily or weekly basis, to help you reach that goal.
If you think about it, most of us have multiple goals that we’re pursuing at the same time in our lives and it can get pretty confusing trying to keep track of them all.
What usually happens if you don’t have a score board is that the EASIEST goals, which require the least effort and the least growth on your part end up getting completed first.
What a score board does is it highlights the MOST IMPORTANT, not the easiest goal that you want to achieve in your life.
Of course we all would love to be able to achieve all of our goals all the time, but in reality that never happens.
We set many different goals, and accomplish a few of them, while the majority usually fall to the wayside.
A score board can help you to make sure that doesn’t happen with your MOST IMPORTANT goals.
Think about sports.
In sports, the coaches and the leagues track hundreds of stats on each team and their players.
As you’re watching a game, you’ll hear the commentators spouting out all kinds of numbers, stats and percentages.
But at the end of the day, regardless what the stats are showing, there is only ONE set of numbers that everyone is paying attention to…
THE SCORE!
At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter if the players are playing well, and their stats are good or bad, or which team had the better stats…
…at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is the final score of the game – that’s it!
Everything else is secondary.
In the same way, you want to have a score board in your life, so that on a daily basis you can see if you’re making progress towards your most important goal – or not.
When you do this – you activate a part of your brain that is incredibly powerful at seeking out and achieving goals.
Our minds are VERY powerful, but most of us don’t know how to activate that power, because we confuse our minds with too many goals, too many metrics, and too many things to track at once.
By putting up a score board, you FOCUS your mind on what you want it to help you achieve.
In my example above, I wanted to make sure that I write 21 blog posts in 21 days for the 21 Day Blogging Challenge I am a part of with Empower Network.
Since starting the challenge, I have had MANY distractions pop up in my life, such as getting sick with the flu, having some flooding in my basement which required emergency drainage work to be done on my house, and MANY other things that could have easily thrown me off track.
But by being CLEAR on what goal was most important to me during the last 21 days, I was able to write my 21 Blog posts in 21 days no matter what else was happening in my life.
How to Use a Score Board
The first thing you’ll need to do is go out and get yourself a scoreboard.
A whiteboard is best, but you can also use a piece of paper that you pin to a wall or a cork board.
Ideally, you’ll want to place the score board somewhere where you can see it most often throughout the day.
If it’s in your field of vision, it will register better with your subconscious mind.
Once you have your score board setup, you’ll want to figure out what specific metric you want to track.
Here are some criteria for picking the best metric to track:
- Quantifiable – Make sure that the metric you pick can be easily and accurately quantified. For example, if your goal was to lose 25lbs of weight, you could track your daily weight on a scale. That’s a number that’s easy to track and it’s accurate.The score board has to track something that gives your mind an idea of whether you’re moving CLOSER or FURTHER away from your goal.If your goal is to make a certain amount of money online, you could track your total online income, or the last 30 day’s income etc.Or you could track certain stats that lead to making money online, such as total number of visitors to your site, or total number of leads generated, or total email subscribers, or Facebook fans or whatever you’d like.
Whatever you track, make sure it’s easily quantifiable and that the thing you’re tracking is something that brings you closer to your goal.
- Changes Often – Ideally you’ll want to pick a metric that changes often, such as on a daily basis or several times a week.You don’t want to track something that only changes once a month or once you complete your goal. For example, you wouldn’t want your score board to say “Lost 25lbs? Yes / No” as that would mean that your score board would just say “NO” the whole time, until you lost 25lbs and then it would change to “YES”.That would not be useful.The more often you get up to go and update your score board with a new score, the more you’ll activate the “feel good” part of your brain that was designed to achieve goals.
Of course, don’t overdo it either… you don’t want your score board to have to be updated 50 times a day otherwise all you’ll be doing is updating your score board!
I usually like something that I can update once a day or once every few days.
And if on some days I have to update it a few times, that’s okay too.
- Accumulated or Average Numbers are Better Than Numbers That Reset – I find that tracking numbers that accumulate or average over time is more exciting for me than something that “resets” often.For example, instead of tracking “Total # of Steps Taken Today” from a step counter, which would reset every day, I would track “30 Day Average Step Count”.Or instead of tracking, “Email Subscribers Today”, I would track “Total Number of Email Subscribers”.There’s something about seeing a number going UP and UP over time that gets the mind excited.
In the network marketing world, you could track “Total # of Presentations Done” or “Total # of Leads” or “Total # of Team Members” etc.
How I’ve Used a Score Board to Boost Sales by Over $500,000
I first heard about the concept of score boards about 20 years ago, but I didn’t actually learn how powerful they can be until about 10 years ago when I was in charge of growing the sales numbers of a technology company.
This was back in the days when I still worked in the corporate world and I was put in charge of a team of sales people who had reached a point of stagnation and very little growth.
One of the very first things that I did when I was put in charge was to put together a tracking system to accurately track each sales person’s statistics over a period of a year.
Meaning, once my tracking was in place, each sales rep was able to see EXACTLY how much their sales totals were for the past rolling 52 week period.
I had my assistant put in charge of tracking and updating our numbers on a weekly basis.
Every week, she would update the numbers for the previous week, and she would print them out and post them on the wall in my office.
Then, the sales guys would all run into my office and stare at their updated numbers for a few minutes.
By doing this, I gave my sales team FOCUS.
They knew exactly what I was tracking and measuring their performance on.
I didn’t really have to say anything to them. They just realized that I was tracking those numbers and they started focusing their energy on growing their numbers.
By using this tool I grew our yearly sales by more than half a million dollars.
Score Boards Work
If you study how the human brain works, and research systems and techniques for achieving goals and being productive, you’ll get a more in-depth understanding as to what makes something as simple as a “Score Board” so powerful.
But for now, you don’t really have to spend the next 6 months doing research.
Instead, get your Score Board setup today and you’ll experience how powerful of a tool it is first hand!
🙂
