Keeping It REAL
Last week, I wrote about planning for success, and in that article, we talked about using SMART goals to help keep your goal setting and planning on track. This week, I wanted to write about how I write. What I have found is that how I write and how I try to plan and goal set are very similar. Here’s why:
I maintain two main blogs. Here at Average Joe, I talk about my personal hobbies, things that make me tick, etc. It’s a catch all journal that is really all about me. The Bunker Blog is my retail loss prevention blog, and there the conversations are more about my career and profession in the field of retail loss prevention.
Whenever I write at either blog, I try to follow a few simple rules to make sure that I keep my material interesting (hopefully it is). These same rules apply to our goal setting and planning, though, and I’d like to share that with you here. I call it Keeping It REAL:
Relevant: I want to speak to my audience, not in LP or professional terminology, but in real dollars and sense. I want my content to be relevant to their situation. That’s tough when you are just learning who your audience is, but by producing what I hope is quality content that is easily understood and applied in practice, I want to keep the blogs relevant to all who read them.
I apply the same rule to my goal setting and planning. If what I’m doing is not relevant to what my goals are, then it’s probably wasted time. I’ve had to put away some “childish things” because they weren’t relevant to who I want to be.
Educational: One of my main goals is that my readers learn something new every time they visit. My goal is to help retailers save money and add to their profit line by reducing losses through shrink. Or, at Average Joe, hopefully readers get to know me a little more each time they read a new article, and I am a little more credible to them.
In daily life, I have a very important rule: Learn something new about something new EVERY DAY. I make it a point to ask myself, “What did I learn today?” everyday. I need to be able to have a clear, relevant answer to that.
Attitude: I like to add a little of my own attitude to my posts. That is why I post commentaries on current news articles that are related to shoplifting, employee theft, and shrink reduction principles in general. I always like to make sure a little bit of me comes out in every post. I also believe it is important to have the attitude of a winner if you expect to win.
The same applies, again, in daily life when it comes to goals and planning. Be yourself, and let your winning attitude come through (if you don’t have a winning attitude, that’s a different story). It is very important that we are sincere and “ourselves” with others. I hope I never come off as fake or insincere. When it comes to my goals, I want to make sure they fit my personality, so if they don’t fit with “ME”, then they need to be adjusted or dumped.
Long Lasting: Although some of the articles posted here are very temporary in that they deal with current events and news related to theft, I do make every attempt to make each and every article memorable. I try to add my own experiences, successes and failures, to the mix so that the point made is memorable to the reader. I have posts from very early on that are still regularly visited, read, and commented on. That, I believe, counts as long-lasting content. As technology, trends, and programs change, so will this blog, but the core principles will remain.
I think the most obvious life application here is that our choices have long lasting consequences, good and bad alike. I know that what I do will follow me, so my goals, my plans, should reflect the knowledge that there are far reaching reactions to what we do in life.
So, my goal for my little piece of blogosphere real estate is to just always keep it REAL. If I can accomplish that, I think I can build on it to make the site a success.
So, what do you think? Is this blog REAL to you?
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