12 Steps to Raise Your Game – 10 to 12
10. Track your progress
An often-used Management phrase is “What gets measured gets done”.
Collecting and analyzing your results helps you to determine if changes you’re making are having a positive or negative effect. Make your progress against this particular objective one of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you track regularly. You may feel like you are heading in the right direction and you are getting good feedback from your clients / boss but until you measure your actual performance against the objectives that you set, you will not know for sure. When you measure your performance improvement, you’ll have the evidence to back up that good feeling that you are making progress towards your goal.
11. Build your energy and stamina
There is no point putting into practise all of the above points and get part of the way through your day and run out of steam. You need to ensure that you have fuel in the engine to drive you forward.
During an aircraft safety briefing the cabin crew explain that you should put on your own oxygen mask before helping someone else with his or hers. How can you look after others if you do not look after yourself first?
I will explore ways of increasing your physical and mental energy in more detail in a future post. For now here are some quick tips:
- Keep yourself hydrated. Drink more water. Reduce your caffeine and increasing your water consumption.
- Be sure to get enough sleep. I know that the demands of the working week can make it very difficult to get enough sleep at times so be sure to catch up on sleep at the weekends and even treat yourself to an early night 1 or 2 nights during the week. You will notice a big difference in productivity.
- Exercise. I find that the more times I exercise aerobically during the week the more my energy level goes up, my tiredness goes down and I actually need less sleep.
12. Raise the Bar again
Now we are back full circle. The 12th point. Back to the top of the clock. Time to go around again.
In order to continually set ourselves high standards we need to continually raise the bar. This becomes a fun game and is fuelled by our need to grow and become the best we can be (see Step 1).
This time, see if you can raise the bar by a bigger margin. Remember we are looking for Step Change here, not incremental change. One of the great by-products of setting a stretching goal is that in order to achieve it we have to fundamentally change the way we think about it, the approach we take, the tools or systems we use. We have to think differently and ask ourselves different questions. The better the question we ask, the better the answer we come up with.
2 Responses to 12 Steps to Raise Your Game – 10 to 12
What a joy to find such clear thinking. Tanhks for posting!
Gee whiz, and I thohgut this would be hard to find out.