Why are you unable to get the influence you want? What is preventing you from reaching your influencing goal? Sometimes, events conspire to thwart your honest endeavour, and the reasons why it is not working become obscured.
If you’d like to find out what is wrong, what you are missing and, then, how you can begin to make progress, here is an exercise for you to try.
BUT, please do it one step at a time. Resist the temptation to read the full article before trying the exercise. Just decide you want to give it a go, find a ten-minute slot and go and have a coffee with your notebook.
When you are ready:
Step1: Write down an influencing goal that you’d like to make some progress on. I’m not going to ask you to get too specific ― just decide what you want to focus on and write it down as a title.
Step 2: Fill the next 2-3 pages with all the reasons why you think you are not making the sort of progress that you would like on this goal. Try to keep your pen moving. Don’t think too much about it; just throw the reasons down on the pages as quickly as you can.
Step 3: Now review your list and cross out those which, on reflection, you don’t think are meaningful or serious enough. This is the time to remove the flippant ones which you threw down on the page because I asked you to keep your pen moving. You may have duplicates or variations on a theme. The idea is to compile a list of discrete reasons why you may not be getting the influence you want.
Step 4: Write down how many possible reasons you listed. If you have been doing some serious thinking here, your list should contain ten or more items. If not, retrace your steps and try to think of more underlying reasons why you cannot get what you want.
Discipline Break
In order to help you gain maximum value from this, I’ve split this exercise/article into two parts. Once you’ve completed Step 4, continue with Part Two.
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