Hi everybody, it’s Richard Milligan and we’re back it’s another recruiting conversations, it’s the first of 2020, and you know it’s just I don’t know I’m just a loss for words. it’s the beginning of the year, you know and this is a moment every year where it seems like we’re more clear on where we want to go. It’s a moment where we look back, as much as we look forward, and we assess kind of in you know remembering the things that happen over the past 12 months and then it gives us a fresh slate to kind of look forward and say “what’s possible” there’s just so there’s a lot of power in dreaming, and this is a few time one of the few times per year where people will just clear their heads and really truly get to a place where they can really dream about what they want to do and what they want to accomplish, there’s just there’s not the powerful about it. So, I take this really seriously I’ve had several seasons in in my business as a recruiting leader, where I would dare say for about 10 years I was successful but I didn’t accomplish the level of success that I could have accomplished, and I think one of the reasons for that was I’ve always been a goal setter but I haven’t always been more specific around my goals into making them actionable and while we’re not going to talk about that on this podcast, we’ll talk about this on the next podcast that I do.
I do want to talk about like once you’ve gone through a process I’m gonna give you here today. I’m gonna give you a handful of questions that you should have already asked herself I mean we’re into the first year if you had ask already, asked herself that she really should it’s never too late ask yourself these questions and then next week we’re gonna talk about how do we make these things not just these arbitrary goals these arbitrary dreams that are kind of pie in the sky dreams. How do we actually make these things some think that’s so specific that we could actually map them into a day-to-day measurement to determine whether we’re going to win or lose on a daily basis, instead of looking at this in such a large window of time. I think that I kind of look at a goals from this end to beginning mindset, right? Go all the way to the end what do you want to accomplish and then bring it relative to today and if you can’t do that in a way that’s not abstract it’s got to be concrete. So, abstract in the first 10 years I was in a recruiting leader role was work harder be more tenacious be more disciplined, right? It’s in these generalities it’s not in the specifics and what you have to do is if you want to accomplish whatever X is you might say I’m gonna hire 12 people on my team in 2020 a lot of people go that’s a specific goal. When in reality it’s a very general goal until you can make it relative to the day like what’s the actual action or behavior that you’re going to do today that’s going to lead to the larger goal. And so, but we got to start first with doing some dreaming. So, let’s just talk about that today like there’s a handful of questions I asked myself at the beginning of every year the first question is just a general question “what do I want to accomplish this year?” So ask yourself that “what do I want to accomplish in 2020?” and this is really where you’re setting vision for yourself I love the Hebrew definition of vision which is “dream” it’s pretty simple right like, like anything so I think one of the reasons why we love the beginning of a year is because it allows us this opportunity to actually dream, like anything’s possible, right? Anything’s possible one of the things I think that I’ve done well is not just dream in the current year but actually dream into the future. One of the reasons why I love just dreaming farther into the future is because of this, I think we overestimate what we can accomplish in a year but on the flip side I think we underestimate what we can accomplish in larger quantities of time, three years, five years, ten years. So, I love to look out in a 10 year window of time and what that allows me to really do is truly dream because within a 10 year window of time, more so than this year anything’s possible like literally anything is possible. And so, I asked myself that question what I want to accomplish in a 10-year window okay and then what I want to accomplish in this current year. So, my method is my method my madness is to go out to ten years what I want to accomplish and I bring it relative to this current year and that gives me this the size of the objective in 2020 so as an example when I started this company in October 2017 one of the things I said in that moment was in a 10-year window of time that as an organization we would impact 10,000 individual recruiting leaders. Now, that was a really big number given the fact that in October of 2017, I didn’t have a single coaching client, I was just starting the company. So, it was a huge number but it allowed me to dream and from that larger dream some really, really big things took place, right? Allowed me to have the vision for this podcast, it allowed me have the vision for a book, it had allowed me have the vision for a digital recorded coaching component, it allowed me to think in terms of moving from not just coaching and consulting but into actually being a strategist, a recruiting strategist. So, a lot of things came from having the larger vision but then in the moment I got to make it relative to this year. So, our objective this year is to impact 2,500 individual recruiting leaders. That’s an enormous number, it’s almost there’s some vulnerability and even just sharing it with you because we’re an organization that’s twenty six months old, 25 months old, something like that. And so, that’s an enormous number that’s what I want to accomplish in 2020, And so I think that’s good framework go out ten years figure out what that is bring it relative to this year and dream around all of that, okay?
Now, with that said there’s two components of that what is that what is that personal and what of that is business. So, inside that inside what I want to accomplish in this current year I asked myself what are my personal goals and then I asked myself what are my business goals. So, a lot of times for me and the personal goal like my word for this year is “intentional” I want to be more intentional. Now, I think most people look at me and say that I’m I’m pretty intentional, right? Now, I’ve got regular routine and habit in my life but there’s a handful of things that that I’m not real intentional about and those are the things I want to focus on this year, is like I’m never going to arrive I’ve come to that conclusion. I’m never going to arrive I’ve always going to be on this journey of growth, and so in the year to year I look to see like what’s this year’s journey going to look like. So, when you heard me just say right now I may be able to elaborate on this I said my word for the year is intentional for the last eight years I followed John Gordon’s principle that he wrote about in the book one word, and I’ve had a single word as part of my larger goal planning every single year. For I think the last eight years that’s been a really cool journey for me to look back and to see like the things that have happened in my life and how those words have had meaning to me over those seasons. So, it’s a powerful exercise, if you haven’t picked up John Gordon’s book one word I’d highly recommend that it’s great framework to begin the year with, okay? So, what I want to accomplish in 2020 as it relates to personal and as it relates to business analysis that we’ve got those set.
The thing that I asked next next is this, “why do I want to accomplish that like” why like if I said I don’t know I will cope with some arbitrary goal here let’s just say you, you want to make seven figures you know this year and then my question behind that would be why like “why do you want to make seven figures?” If you can’t answer the question clearly here’s one of the things I know is that at some point in 2020, you’re probably gonna get slapped upside the face with something pretty difficult, right? If you’ve got a family with four kids like me, that that’s not gonna happen, you know I look back at 2019 man on the personal side with four kids where there were some struggles you know, and so then we move over into the business side and again like we’re we’re kind a stage in this business just over two years old where we operate more on the business level as a as an adolescent or a teenager than we do as an adult, you know because the business is maturing, And so man, it was a difficult season even though we celebrated some enormous wins last year as an organization. So, you know but you recognize hard times are going to come they may not stay but hard times are going to come and if you’re not clear on the why you want to accomplish that it’ll be pretty easy to give up on those on those goals. The data around this is pretty staggering most people do not okay and when I say most people most people do not accomplish the goals that they set and I think there’s multiple reasons, why we’ll talk more about that next week but one of the things I know is that man you better be really committed to what these goals are, or you’ll simply just give up on them, and look all of us say this is a podcast here I love meaning, I mean you know not meaningful things ultimately in life like my brain loves novelty, I mean like I’d rather watch a youtube video than work hard, and that’s just being honest. I would rather watch a cool YouTube video than work hard, I’d rather eat chocolate cake than work out, okay? Like there’s something about my brain that says go for the trivial verses I’m doing the hard things, doing the right things, right. I don’t know what it is I’m sure that most of you if not all of you can relate to that so if I’m not clear on why I want to accomplish something, there’s no way there is no way that I’m going to accomplish these enormous goals that I set out, okay? So, you’ve got to be clear on the why okay so the process is now we know what we want to accomplish in a 10 year, we know we want what we want to accomplish in the current year, we know what part that’s personal what part of that’s business now we know why we want to accomplish that the next part of this is I asked myself is where could I double down on my efforts and get my biggest results. So, I’ll say it again where can I double down on my efforts and where can I get my biggest results so for me this podcast has been a huge part of the me being able to accomplish a couple of things, okay? One is this part of my larger content strategy and if you’re recruiting leader you have to have a leadership brand that’s and that’s just a quintessential to successful recruiting today. The data is all over this we’re not here to talk about that today’s I want to get off of that as a side note but the thing is that this is at the top of my content strategy. So, I record this as a as a video that allows me to break this down into multiple short form videos, I’m taking the auto audio from this and it’s obviously being turned into a podcast, and then taking some of the audio from this and turning this into sound bytes, and then transcribing this and turning this into articles and short form content pieces, some of the if I say something that’s of interest or good and short form quotes we put it into memes. So, one of the reasons why this makes sense for me is that this is is there’s a lot of content that comment can come from a podcast, okay? That’s part of that now the other part of that is the reach of this of this podcast I’m reaching a couple thousand people with this now and I could never do that and as a small company as an individual that’s trying to grow a company that’s something of significance, and so we’ve done well over the course of 2019, throughout the year we were always in the top 200 and there were a lot of times we broke into the top 100, even the top 70, in iTunes. And so, because of that I’m able to actually create influence and reach in places that I could never do and so when I this year coming in this year, I said gosh what’s been working, okay? What do I need to double down my efforts on to get better results, This podcast is gonna be one of those, and so I asked that set myself to get questioned every single year “where can I double down on my efforts to get my biggest results?” what that does is a couple of things one it forces me to say “no to the good and yes to the great” you all probably heard that before Jim Collins wrote a book called good to great so that framework has been around for a while but what it forces me to do is say “no” to things okay if I’m gonna double down on something like this podcast then I’m gonna have to say no to some other things that don’t that aren’t as meaningful to my business. And so, what it does is allows me to get hyper focused on the things that are working and it forces the answer that question what’s been working so I’m doubling down on that, and I think you should consider that as well where could you double down your efforts and get your biggest results. and then the last the last question I asked myself coming into this year is this what events could I attend that would open my eyes to where something bigger is available you know I I say this and it’s a pretty dumb down statement but it’s so simplistic and when I say it you’ll know it’s true “you don’t know what you don’t know until you know something different” I’ll say that again “you don’t know what you don’t know until you know something different” and how do you know something more is available something bigger is available unless you actually put yourself in a position to see it. So, I’m attending just here in in the first quarter in the first two months the year. I’m attending an event that’s a four-day event and another day event that’s almost a four-day event that are not really in my particular Lane these are going to be venues I’ve never attended in the past, they’re way outside the industries that I’m coaching in but the reason why I’m going there is because this year I’m really challenging myself I think that recruiting is changing very quickly, and I think that the recruiting leader is lagging in the understanding of what’s changing quickly. Look because of social media and because of things like social proof being a being very legitimate, very real. Your leadership brands matter more today than they’ve ever mattered in the past so that’s a component most people don’t really grasp and don’t understand until they move into this space and then they realize “oh my gosh are you kidding me this is available”. So, I’m going to some events where there’ll be some there’ll be a number of people there that have built and you know subscriber lists north of 3 4 5 million people and I want to tend those that I can innovate myself. So, I can help you all innovate into the future and one of the things I’m also very well aware of is that in one industry alone and I’ll just give you this number one industry alone, that I that we serve a lot of people which is the mortgage industry, there is fifty four thousand five hundred leaders that recruit, okay? So, we know this data just pulling it from sales navigator which is a LinkedIn tool now beyond that there’s approximately seventy two hundred internal recruiters and then beyond that there’s about eight thousand external recruiters, that’s service one industry, okay? I say that kind of like laughing because that’s like you start working the math you’re like oh my gosh it’s like seventy thousand people that are recruiting inside one industry and while a lot of those are into specific markets and pockets like regions, but that’s a lot of noise that we’re up against, and it’s growing and this is true of most industries today. What do you do when you open the door to the gym and there’s 70,000 people already yelling someone’s name and you become the 70th thousand and first person to yell someone’s name. People are becoming deaf because the noise is so because the noise is so loud. What do we do in that environment, right? One of the things I know Einstein said this he said “creativity rules the world” and if creativity is the key which I think it is a key to this, then one of the things I’m aware of was that man I got to get outside of like the normal places that I would attend an event or people that I would see and I got to get to some places where I really stretched myself in 2020, and I think you should be asking that question too. What events could you attend that would open your eyes to something bigger being available, because when you see that when you have that moment where you see it, you can’t go back because now you know something different, that statement “you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it” when you do know it it almost always influences you to change. So, now those are the questions what do you want to accomplish in the 10 year window what do you one accomplished in 2020 what part of that’s personal what part of that’s business then we’re gonna define why do we want to accomplish that then I’m asked myself those these two questions where could I double down on my efforts and get my biggest results, and that’s a space you should move towards and then lastly where could you go in terms of events or in terms of engaging with people that would open your eyes to something more being available than you currently know, and I think if you can answer those questions, when you come back here next week then I’m going to really challenge you to take those components and to make them very specific and intentional in like a day to day action plan. So, I’ll give you context around that next week so I am confident if you do this you will exceed the expectations that you have for yourself in 2020, there’s a challenge. So, I encourage you to do it so until the next recruiting conversations will get more specific about this, enjoy this share it with somebody as we’re going into this year maybe you’ve got someone that’s a recruiting leader, that’s you know extension of your team or someone in the company that you that’s in a similar role as you, or maybe you know someone in another industry that’s a leader that’s got a team they manage that is also responsible for recruiting that team you could share this it would be honored if you would share the podcast. It’s our goal here to reach the recruiting leader who has very limited resources in the area of recruiting and training around recruiting. And so, we want to reach more people in 2020 than we did in 2019 and we will with your help. So, thank you for sharing this and I look forward to seeing you again here next time on recruiting conversations have a great week everybody.
