Shortly after the first of the year, I put into play some adjustments to my real estate business to grow my portfolio of cash flow properties.

In the past, I’ve set goals and put plans together that have fallen flat. To prevent that from happening to these plans, I used a technique called inevitability thinking.

Inevitability thinking goes something like this: you come up with a set of conditions that virtually guarantee that some result that you’re looking for will come to pass.

Begin with a clear result in mind. For example, that could be a certain amount of money that you have in your bank account by a certain deadline. Maybe it’s a property that you buy within a certain period time. Having a certain timeframe, and it must be something you can measure and monitor along the way. The trick in inevitability thinking is coming up with some external conditions that you put in place that will virtually guarantee your desired result will happen. That’s kind of abstract, so let me give you a specific example.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve had a goal of losing weight before. Now I suppose that you have a goal of dropping let’s say 15 pounds in in two months. So I put myself on the scale and boy you see your right at 200 pounds. That means my goal is get down to 185 pounds within 2 months. If I just set that goal, “Yeah I want, I want to be 185 pounds” and then I flip on the tv and grab a beer, I’m not really moving in the right direction.

What I’m lacking is an external condition that would virtually guaranteed that I’m going to start loosing weight. What am I talking about? For example, I could get a gym membership down at the YMCA and hire a personal trainer. But I wouldn’t want to just leave it at that. I would want to set up an appointment with the trainer to work out three times a week. In addition, I could put in place a penalty for missing an appointment. Let’s say if I missed any of those appointments that you set up with the personal trainer then I would pay a hundred dollars each time to a charity.

All those conditions would serve to motivate me to get to the gym and work out. If I work out, I’m much more likely to start loosing weight. I could do the same thing with diet.

Back to the adjustments I decided to make to my business. The conditions I put in place were to increase focus on the vision for my business. To do that, I decided I needed to do pay close attention to my overall vision, and take a close look at that vision at least once per week. During that once per week look, I needed to put together a weekly plan.I committed to send an email to a friend of mine letting him know that I’d done my weekly planning.If I failed to do my weekly planning, I had to pay $50 to his charity. I also set up a monthly planning meeting to plan out my next month. I got several other people to agree to meet on the last Tuesday of each month at a specific place and time. We would all work on plan for the coming month.

This system of planning has worked very well in helping me to focus more on my vision.It is helping me to move closer toward this vision.