Hi everybody, it’s Richard Milligan here with recruiting conversations, we want to welcome you back. We are in the new year, it is now just after January depending on when you listen to this it might be later than that, but I want to be relevant, I want to be in the moment. I’m coming off a nine day sabbatical and it was a much-needed rest. I’m sure a lot of you like me press the limits in 2018 to get to the finish line strong and I pressed the limits, I had established some specific goals inside my recruiting organization that were really important to me. 2018 was the first year the first full year we started this summer of two thousand, fall of 2017 and so we really had some big goals that we wanted to accomplish with our with our vision with the things that are near and dear to our heart around recruiting and teaching recruiting leaders, how to become better recruiters and we finished that strongly. And so, my plan didn’t go as I had hoped, but I left town, we went to a place where I expected to have Wifi at the house that we were staying for the nine days. We get there and the Wifi wouldn’t function, it wouldn’t work, we tried everything we reached out to the owners of the house that we were renting they couldn’t get it to work. I actually the closest place to get Wifi like this is a first world problem, the closest place to get Wifi was to drive about 45 minutes away which had to drive off the island onto actual land we weren’t actually landlocked. And so I was able to drive to bridge to get to lane to actual land went to Starbucks their Wifi was down, I went to at Kinkos their Wifi was down. So, eventually I just said you know what maybe guys trying to give me a message here, milligan you’re gonna take the entire nine days off it’s going to be a sabbatical even though I’d only anticipated taking about five of those days completely off it worked out. I come back rejuvenated I come back refreshed actually I’m a big proponent of one word which if you’ve read John Gordon’s book “One Word” this will be my sixth year to have a single word heading into the year and so the nine-day sabbatical speaks perfectly to my one word for 2019 which is “restored” which is “restoration” and the first part of that word is “rest” so I come into 2019 with a amount of restoration already in place excited for the year, as I know you are and I want to take that say that mindset of the single word John Gordon’s book one word was a great book that he wrote a while back in cahoots with several other authors, it’s been a book that’s been a propellor for me in my leadership for a long time one of the things that I struggle with was goal-setting coming into a new year. You know a lot of people will teach to set these you know top 10 goals in the 8
balanced areas of your life and I can definitely see where that works for certain individuals and I can see where there would be a lot of value in doing that, unfortunately for me perhaps this is the season that I’m in, but I’m in a season where I have four relatively young children all of them are still inside the household, some of them are in the younger ages kindergarten, third grade, fifth grade, so there’s a lot that’s required of me as a father in that season. I also have a working wife that has now all the kids are out of the house and she’s gone back to pursuing her career. We have multiple dogs have a relatively young business I on a weekly basis coached 30 to 35 hours a week I do a speaking event about every other week right now, in the middle of writing a book, I’m doing a podcast, I’m constantly writing. So with that said, life is really busy for me and then waking up every morning and thinking I’m going to focus on the eight balanced areas that I need to have goals in and what am I going to accomplish it just is a bit overwhelming for me. So I share that with you at the beginning of the year in this podcast because if you’re like me and you say that’s just too much and you have a tendency to gravitate away from that, I would encourage you to just simply identify a word, a single word, my word for 2018 was joy, to give you some context around that, the word joy for me in 2018 was really relative to that season to that year. We were obviously we’re in a similar season with young children, it’s a busy season everything I just described he was very relative in 2018 and when you get busy and you had this ability to get overwhelmed or to take on too much it’s really easy to lose sight of something as simple as joy. So having that word relative to every moment for the last year was really important and actually the year-end trip that I’m coming off of was based off of that idea. I wanted to head out of 2018 with a lot of joy and I can look back just even in the past week and say man there was a really memorable moment standing on a beach with my 16 year old, an epic sunset going down behind us took a photo of that put it on my social media but most importantly capturing that moment, that night, that evening, we sat on the beach I actually found a place where I could pick up a truckload full of firewood, we burned the entire truckload in one evening it was pretty epic built a huge fire pit on the beach had my family of six that includes me, sitting around the fire pit and exchanging stories of the things that we experienced in 2018 and so hit that finish line intentionally simply because the word I had for the year was joy and so if nothing else that standalone single experience in itself came from that moment. So I give you that simply to say look if setting goals and seems to be setting yourself up for failure, I would encourage you to move towards something as simple as that single word. Here’s one thing I know, one change in your life changes everything. It’s a very simple concept one change, changes everything. Earlier today I was on a coaching session with someone that I’ve coached down for almost a year and the one change that they are going to make for the upcoming year is to become a information aggregator to become someone who moves away from this reading a book or two per year, to actually moving to a place where they want to be the go-to person in their market for ideas, for creative strategies, from marketing tactics, for helping their real estate agents and helping their originators grow their book of business. And so that single idea that one change of moving from being someone who picks up a book when it’s convenient or picks up a book when they’re on vacation, to actually becoming an information aggregator will change everything for them, I’m confident of that. So I want to leave you with this short podcast in this single idea and if you’re struggling this moment beginning of January with developing all of these goals and you feel like you’re setting yourself up for failure and you’re not sure whether you can sustain that over the course the year, excuse me, I got a cold I give you permission in this moment to take something as simple as the idea that one change, will change everything in your life and to move towards that. Hope to have brought you some value in this short podcast I’m back on vacation, I typically have recorded several of these per week, I’m going to get back to that this week and so we’ll have more content coming at you fast and furious as we get through the next couple of weeks, I hope you’re having a fabulous start to your year, have fun recruiting, make sure that it’s a big focus for you as you move into 2019 it is one thing that can change everything. Look most people are average recruiters and so if you will focus on developing this skill-set in the upcoming year it will change everything because you can’t become a great recruiter without becoming a great leader. The two go hand-in-hand, the book that I’m currently writing is called “Attracted Leadership the Intersection Where Leading and Recruiting Overlap” the truth is that both of those go hand in hand with each other great recruiters are great leaders. There’s a great idea of something you can move towards in 2019 and until I talk to you again on the next recruiting conversations all the best and we’ll talk to you next.
