This One Strategy Can Help You Stick With Your Good Habits Every Day
The Power of a Visual Cue
I believe that the paper clip strategy works particularly well because they provide a visual cue to perform a behavior.
Here are a few reasons visual cues work well for building new habits…
Visual cues remind you to start a behavior. Whenever you are excited and motivated about starting something new, it can be easy to convince yourself that you will simply remember to do your new habit. “I’m going to start worker harder with my SFI business” Or, “I’m going to focus and get some new advertisements placed more often.” A few days later, however, the motivation fades and the busyness of life begins to take over again. Hoping you will remember to do a new habit is usually a recipe for failure. This is why a visual stimulus, like a bin full of paper clips, can be so useful. There is no need to write a Post-It Note or set a reminder on your phone. The paper clips are sitting right there and staring you in the face. They are always reminding you to get started.
Visual cues display your progress on a behavior. Everyone knows consistency is an essential component of success, but few people actually track how consistent they are in real life. Without data, however, it is so easy to lie to ourselves about how reliable our habits are in real life. The Paper Clip Strategy avoids that pitfall. If the paper clips haven’t been moved, you haven’t done your habit today.
Visual cues can have an additive effect on motivation. As the visual evidence of your progress mounts, it is natural to become more motivated to continue the habit. The more paperclips you place in the bin, the more motivated you become to finish the task. (Visual cues can also be used to provide fear-based motivation. I have heard of weight loss clients moving glass marbles from one bin to another for each pound they lose. Once you move a marble over, you definitely don’t want to move it back.)
Visual cues can be used to drive short-term and long-term motivation. The paper clip strategy provides a visual cue that drives your behavior on any given day. Each morning, however, you start from scratch with no indication of how you have done over the previous weeks and months.
Creating Your Own Paper Clip Strategy
There are all sorts of ways to use the paper clip habit for your own goals.
Hoping to do 10 leads each day? Start with 10 paper clips and move one over each time you get one throughout the day.
Need to send 25 sales emails every day? Start with 25 paper clips and toss one to the other side each time you press Send.
Want to contact 8 affiliates each day? Start with 8 paper clips and slide one over each time you finish a glass.
Not sure if you’re checking your Affiliate Center three times per day? Set 3 paper clips out and flip one into the bin each time you check in.
Best of all, the entire strategy will cost you less than $7. Grab a box of standard paper clips. Then get two standard paper clip holders. Decide your habit and start moving those bad boys from one side to the other.
Everyone likes to believe they are the exception and that the standard rules of human behavior don’t apply to them. “I’ll remember to do this habit because I really care about it.” Or, “Trust me, I work hard every day.”
In truth, we all have a tendency to revert to the mean. We all drift back toward our default behaviors. We tend to remember our good days and brush away the below average performances by seeing them as exceptions. That is why we need visual cues to track our progress truthfully and provide a trigger to get us moving each day.
This should get your SFI business on track with visual cue motivation!
Use a calender with a list/code to record your number of paper clips for the day.
EX.
-Affilate Center VP's -12 paper clips =AC/12
-Advertisements-6-paper clips =Ads/6
-ECards sent- 10 paper clips =EC/10
You can now track your (coded) activity at a glance for the month! Hope that this is helpful.
Source: An edited version of an excerpt by Trent Dyrsmid
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