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3 Words to Start Your New Year Right

Dec 27, 2022 | Business Growth, Goal Setting, Leadership, Leadership Development, Motivation, Productivity, Strategic Planning, Success, Uncategorized

 

3 Words to Start Your New Year Right

Here in the hustle at the end of one year and the beginning of a new, it seems like everyone is talking about resolutions. The Oxford Dictionary defines resolution as “a firm decision to do or not to do something.” Success does depend on deciding to do a thing; but there is more to achievement than deciding and leaving the results to chance.

If you want to achieve remarkable things in 2023, take the next few days to get Clarity around what you want to do, clear the distractions to Focus, and strategize to get those Results.

Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation Institute, said “If you aren’t making the progress you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals aren’t clearly defined.” Over the years this has proven so true in my life and the lives of my clients.

Clarity – Do you have extreme clarity on your goals for 2023? Far too many people have clarity around what they don’t want in business and in their personal life rather than what they really want their future to look like. What matters most in your life and business? Hazy goals produce hazy results. SMART goals produce tangible results – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.

Focus – Goals are meant to supply direction. This means you should have just a few significant goals. The more goals you have, the less focus is available. You will only achieve those goals to which you are fully committed.

Meyer also said, “Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.” Everything in that statement will exponentially take your power to focus to a new level.

Results – Results are tied to your system. A goal is the end-result you want to achieve personally and professionally. To really achieve an important goal, it is critical to have a system- a strategy.

You can’t keep doing what you’ve always done and expect different results. John Dryden said, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.”  Your daily routine and rituals, daily huddles with team members and focus on high payoff activities are the keystone of your personal and professional life. Putting these systems in place will earn you the desired results.

Now, find a little time over the next week to sit down with your notetaking app of choice and get some clarity, focus and results to guide you through 2023.

Asking the Right Questions to Lead Your Team to Success

Nov 20, 2022 | Business Growth, Business Owners, Goal Setting, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Success, Uncategorized

Are you asking the right question to lead your team to success?

What Really Matters Most in life, leadership, and organizational development?

As we prepare to move into the coming year, let’s take a deep dive into this question. Essentially is it a question? Or is it a matter of focus? I believe it’s both.

In order to focus on your life, leadership, and organization, you must first address “What Really Matters Most?” as a question. To transform it from a question to a focus, you must assess where you are now compared with where you want to be.

Rather than reacting to past results and current circumstances, focus on “what really matters most” requires an awareness of and commitment to your vision and purpose. As the saying from Proverbs goes “without a vision, people perish.” There is no pragmatic way to determine how to spend our time, effort, energy and resources without answering this question.

Without focus, you become a victim of current achievements, constantly reworking to compensate for unintended outcomes. We must do some deep work to design our vision.

Today’s leaders face unprecedented positive and negative forces on organizational management. These forces of change present special challenges to leadership and to the workforce. To become a results-driven team, you need extreme clarity on your vision, purpose, and strategy communicated to all involved in supporting its execution. Organizational performance measurably improves as everyone develops an absolute focus on results. This companywide focus on ‘what really matters most’ allows all members to consistently create, develop, and track the results in tandem.

You also need to develop your leadership team, creating programs that give them tools to change their thinking and behavior to achieve sustainable results, growth, and profitability. By developing your people into self-leaders, they will grow and move forward to answer “What Really Matters Most” for your business.

Future looking leaders will use the competitive edge found in developing self-leadership in employees at all levels of the company. Your people are the ones to make it happen. Hence the need for clarity, focus, and a real understanding of “What Really Matters Most” at all levels. Do you have a winning strategy to get you to What Really Matters Most?  

Clarity, Focus and Results are Three Keys to Success

Jan 12, 2021 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning

As I mentioned last week, I always talk about 3 words being the key to success in any endeavor in life. The 3 words are clarity, focus and results.  

Clarity – Do you have extreme clarity on your goals for 2021?  I find far too many people have clarity around what they don’t want in business and in their personal life rather than what they really want or would like their future to look like. Do you really know exactly what you want to achieve? What really matters most in your life and business?  Hazy goals produce hazy results at best. SMART goals produce the results you want.  

Focus– Goals are meant to provide focus and direction.  This also means you should only have a few really important and significant goals.  How many things can you actually focus on at one time?  The more goals you have, the less focus you have.  My favorite quote from Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation Institute, is, “If you aren’t making the progress you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals aren’t clearly defined.” Over the years this has proven so true in my life and the lives of my clients. Focus is so important because you will only achieve those goals on which you are committed to take action.

Paul J. Meyer also said, “Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.” Everything in that statement will exponentially take your power to focus to a new level.

What this means is you will have a crystal-clear strategy, a system and action steps to execute your goals. You will have a daily routine and daily habits to drive you toward your goals.  

Results – Results are all about your system.  The goal is the end-result you want to achieve personally and professionally.  Goal setting is easy – ask anybody! To really achieve an important goal; however, it is critical to have a system.  This is why you need software and  systems to drive your strategy and your goals program into the future.

You can’t keep doing what you’ve always done and expect different results.  You must identify the changes you will make in the future to achieve your goals.  John Dryden said, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.”  Your daily routine and rituals, your daily huddles with team members and extreme focus on high payoff activities are the keystone building blocks of your personal and professional life. Putting these systems in place will give you the results you want.

I hope these ideas and concepts will spark some interest in you having your best year yet in 2021. We have the tools, systems and software to make your 2021 goals a reality. Let us know how we can help you by emailing me at michael@achievable.com.

 

 

How to Make Next Year Your Best Year Ever

Nov 18, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning

First, you need to define what “Best Year Ever” means to you; you have to know what you want in order to achieve it. Your ability to get crystal clear about what a successful year looks like will help you make the leap towards that ideal year.

What is your personal strategic plan for your life next year? You can follow these three simple steps to make sure you have the best year ever in 2021.

Step 1 – Be Extremely Clear On What You What. Know what you really want in life and in your business. Know what goals and outcomes you would like to achieve by the end of next year and know exactly what you don’t want. Create a list of personal goals and business goals for the next 12 months. The fact of life is none of us is going to live forever and we don’t know when our number is up so it is so important to get clarity around what is most important for us to achieve. We need to remember to create goals for personal health and well-being and spend more time on our most important relationships. You should also pursue that special hobby or interest you have been putting off. Take time out of your busy schedule before January rolls in to recharge, relax, and reenergize with powerful and meaningful goals for next year. Get the pen to the paper right now and start mapping out your future.

Step 2. Review & Execute. After you create your goals schedule an appointment with yourself every week to work on the action steps to move your goals forward. Our lives are built on the foundation of these six major areas of our wheel of life: Family & Home, Financial & Career, Mental & Educational, Physical & Health, Social & Cultural, and Spiritual & Ethical. These areas are the pillars that you will build a totally integrated life on. Make sure you are spending at least one hour a week in your plan of action. Your personal plan of action is the master plan for the rest of your life. Your planner should contain a master list of priority business and personal goals. The world is infested with distractions and noise designed to take us off our goals program and put us on someone else’s goals program which is why we have to continue to be intentional about setting aside time to work in our plan of action on a weekly basis.

Step 3. Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing. Develop a relentless focus on what really matters most, what is most important and significant in your personal and professional life by setting up ironclad boundaries so you are not interrupted with the tyranny of the urgent which usually isn’t really important. Focus on what you want and not on what you don’t want. For everything that is not a high payoff activity for you – figure out a way to simplify, eliminate, delegate or outsource the activity. Take massive action on your goals – make this a daily habit.

Remember, “It’s hard by the yard, but it’s a cinch by the inch.” Concentrate daily upon doing the little things that eventually will help you accomplish the big things. You create and maintain an environment that is conducive to ongoing motivation. Create a work environment that energizes you and always surround yourself with positive, goal-directed, self-motivated people. It is true what they say – you are the company you keep.

The Right Questions Lead You to the Right Vision

Nov 10, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning, Success

How has your vision changed for your business and personal life over the past few months? Have you taken the time to think about how the current pandemic and economic turmoil has impacted this vision? Is it the same as it was before or completely different? Hellen Keller once said “The only thing worse than being blind is having no vision.” Even though we cannot completely know what will happen tomorrow or even five minutes from now, it is important to have a detailed image in our minds of what we want to achieve in the long-term. This may change and this is ok, too. But we must always be able to imagine how achieving our goals will look to us and the world around us. We might also imagine how it might feel to achieve those goals and how we might benefit the people in our communities.

A business vision is a crystal-clear image of the future we wish to create. It describes what our company aspires to be and how the world could be impacted, hopefully positively, by our company’s actions. If we want to consistently move toward our vision, we must know what it is, inside and out. We can ask ourselves questions to better understand this vision and in doing so, we can gain clarity on how to achieve it.

There are two main types of questions we can ask, inward questions and outward questions. Inward questions allow us to discover information about ourselves and our business. Some examples of inward questions include:

What do we do best?

 What are our strengths?

What is an ideal organization and how can we be that organization?

How do we want to influence the world around us?

Outward questions lead us to uncover information about our industry and customers. Some examples include:

How is our industry changing?

What is our competition doing in response to market changes?

What are we hearing from customers about their needs?

If you answer these questions you will have a solid jumpstart on developing a vision for your business that takes into account today’s reality and consumer needs. If you want to continue building this vision and begin designing a strategy to achieve it, join the FAST TRACK Challenge beginning November 16th. Click Here for more information.

3 Great Questions to Help Drive Your Strategic Plan

Oct 23, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Strategic Planning

Most of us are driven by operational inertia and default to doing what we’ve done previously. However, you already know that to get a different result, you need to do something differently.

In the case of strategic planning, the strength of the plan is determined by our current level of thinking and we are often inhibited by our cognitive blind spots. We need to do whatever we can to break through our self-imposed limitations! When working on your strategic plan, you want to think outside the box by creating new and innovative action steps to achieve our most desired goals.

All progress in our lives requires that we go against some kind of “gravitational” system. Gravity in this sense means the forces that hold us in place. Basically, inertia keeps us doing the same things over and over again.  There are forces, especially our current thinking,  that prevent us from moving or changing our position. But it is important to remember what Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our current problems with the mindset that created them.”

What drives our current thinking? Ironically, the answer is QUESTIONS! People think by asking themselves questions and giving themselves answers (or finding answers for those questions). Ask a bad question and you’ll get a bad answer. People say there are no bad questions, but in strategic planning, you have to ask yourself specific questions that will lead you to the answer you want to achieve. If you want to have a great plan, then you need to ask and answer a series of great questions.

The quality of the questions we ask ourselves and our teams accounts for virtually 100% of the quality of the answers we receive.  The brain is a brilliant servant and it will find an answer to any question you ask of it.

Ask yourself and your teams empowering questions like these:

  1. “What could we do to disrupt to our industry?”

 

  1. “What could we do that would make a real significant difference between us and our competitors?”

 

  1. “What are the unintended consequences of our current strategy that we should change?”

Perhaps you have been busy working in your business, but now realize it is time to work on your business. If you have not done a strategic plan for next year, right now is the right time. Join the Fast Track Challenge beginning November 16th. Click here for more information.