As we approach the end of the year, and whilst you enjoy your Christmas Day reflecting on how the year has been for you and your business you might be thinking about what your business ‘personal best’ was and how you might seek to achieve a new business ‘personal best’. To do this we need to have a plan, a strategy, goals and actions or steps to enable us to have clear focus, direction as well as be able to pace ourselves to ensure we can achieve what we’ve set out to do. The definition of ‘personal best’ according to Andrew Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New South Wales are “goals that are specific, challenging; competitively self-referenced goals that involve a level of performance that meets or exceeds an individual’s previous best”. Often, we spend more time focusing on our personal best for
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It’s interesting when we get to this time of year how we reflect on how our year has gone and divide these into what we did well and not so well. Our year is often based on what we achieved or didn’t achieve, however, we also need to balance this out by looking at what the circumstances were that helped us achieve and what the causes were that prevented us from achieving. When we look deeper into these events, we can find the root cause for perceived failure and / or the basis or reason for our success. There are various tools we can use to examine these; below are some examples of tools available for us to look at. The Five Whys is a root cause analysis – we repeatedly ask ourselves the ‘why’ question to dig deep into a problem or issue. The Five Ws also known as
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To enable us to make progress and achieve we know we need to get results and we know we need to set goals to do this, however, if it were that simple, we would all be achieving, and we don’t. We know if we want to get fit, we need to have a plan, make a decision i.e. join the gym, however, how many of us have joined a gym and never or hardly gone? Then we check our bank account statement and see the monthly subscription coming out every month and say, “I must get to the gym” and then we don’t! There’s a huge gap between knowing what we want and doing it, and it’s this huge gap we need to cover or close, but how? Perhaps you should follow the T-A-R-M-A-C steps to enable you to achieve. T – Triggers Sometimes before we move forward, we need
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I do love the quote below by Harvey Mackay “Time is free but it’s priceless You can’t own it, but you can use it You can’t keep it, but you can spend it Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back” It’s a well-known fact we can’t save time or make time, however we talk about time as if we could. We also talk about time as though it is something that’s outside our control. In other words, the clock never stops ticking and we are always trying to keep up. We almost act as if it’s controlling us! We also know that we can’t do anything with the past, the future but we can do something with the present. We know that “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst” William Penn. We feel time moves too fast and we wish we could stop
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