Mastering CiviCRM #0: Winner's mindset

I'm not a big fan of the “power of positive thinking” school. I am a cynic at heart.

I won’t try to talk you out of trying it if it works for you, but looking at myself in the mirror and delivering positive affirmations every morning has always seemed ineffective and a little silly.

So I'm not going to give you a list of pep-talk aphorisms or mantras you can repeat to buck up your spirit when things get tough.

But I am a realist: Life is beautiful, and life is hard. Resources are limited. We always want more than we have.

If you want to master your CRM system, I assume there is a reason.

I assume it's because you want to achieve specific and substantial results in your mission, your career, and in the lives of people you care about.

Because any CRM system has, as its primary value, the strengthening of relationships in support of those goals, mastering that system is obviously an important step in achieving them.

So it's counterproductive to believe that such mastery is beyond your ability. It is not.

Yes, there will always be things you don't know. There will always be tough decisions and uncertainty, and tools that you wish you had but don't, and policy requirements or funding limitations or time constraints that make your life hard.

But you are the one — the only person — who will decide how you face those limitations and what goals you will pursue in the face of them.

This is the winner's mindset.

• No tool will ever be perfect for your needs, and resources will always be limited, but you are in the position to use all available resources however you see fit, in order to achieve your goals.

• You are in the position to celebrate your successes and use them to gain momentum.

• You are in the position to acknowledge your failures and learn from them what you can.

If you want to win, you have to define what winning is.

• Achieving your organization's publicly stated goals is winning.

• Achieving your personal goals for your department is winning.

• Trying something, observing that it didn't work as well as you hoped, and learning from that is also winning.

• Building systems — both automated and human — that help you to remove uncertainty and increase confidence for you and your team is winning.

In this series I'll cover topics that are critical to mastering CiviCRM, but many of them are not specific to CiviCRM itself.

That's because winning with CiviCRM is not about becoming an expert in a specific tool set.

It's about remembering the connection between your tools, your people, your resource limitations, and your goals.

And it's the goals that matter. The reason you got into this work in the first place. The positive impact you can make in the lives of people you care about. The satisfaction of being damn good at what you do.

We'll talk more about goals and mission tomorrow.

In the meantime, think about how you handle the fact that resources will always be limited, and that your capacity for continual improvement is not.

All the best,
A.