4 Learnings I apply to Achieve my Personal Development Goals

I am an enthusiastic reader but my wife always challenge me on what I really learn out of all the books I read. This month I achieved all my personal goals and I would like to share the methods I used to get there. Were these objectives stretched? Maybe not. But whether you are a high achiever or you are getting starting on your personal development, I believe this can help you.

"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems" - James Clear

• Start by being SMART when deciding your goals.

Everything starts with how you set your goals. We often overestimate how much we can accomplish. Then we fall short and we blame ourselves for not reaching goals which we knew from the beginning were too stretched. This is a vicious circle. If you are an occasional runner and you suddenly aim at running a half-marathon next month, you better have a serious process in place to enable this otherwise, it's very likely you will miss your goal.

"People often overestimate how much they can achieve in one year but underestimate how much they can achieve in 10 years" - Tony Robbins

I personally really like the concept of "1% better everyday" where it is not about aiming to improve very fast, but actually to sustain small gains everyday so that long term the impact is compounded (see below chart). So think about what tiny change you can make to your life which if done regularly for a long time can deliver a great outcome. One change which I made this year was to start every working day by a 10 min meditation. It doesn't look much, but I did it over 200 time this year already and I can feel it helps in making me feel better and saner.

• Break down your goals to daily need and keep up with it.

Much of what we can achieve is actually an addition of many little steps. I like this concept because it's very "revenue management". In RM we look at a daily pick up needed to achieve our monthly forecast. Everyday we assess whether we are on track to achieve this forecast and revise strategy accordingly, evaluating at the same time whether we have risks or opportunities. Reading is pretty much the same. I had set myself the target of reading 2 books this month. This equals to roughly 600 pages in total. That number looks huge and could be discouraging for many but actually if you divide it by day, it's roughly 20 pages a day which for an avid reader like me is doable. I admit that some days I didn't read as much and it added for future days however I always kept a clear view on how much was my daily reading need. This enabled me to achieve my reading goal this month.

• Anticipate your hurdles and don't push back to tomorrow what you can do today.

This month, like for many of my Hospitality industry colleagues, was 2021 Budget review month. I knew as the month started that I will have almost a week where I would not get much done personally. When you have several long budget review meetings in a day, you likely don't have the energy nor the time in the evening to get much done as you actually have to try to catch up on your normal work. So on this occasion I applied another revenue management concept: market share risks & opportunities. This is about understanding where you might fall behind during a month so you can build enough cushion ahead of time and still achieve your objective. I had set myself the objective to do a physical activity every 3 days with 5 times yoga and 5 time running in total. As I reached the start of our budget review period (October 22nd), I had done already 8 of the 10 sessions. I was therefore largely ahead time which enabled me to achieve my goal, even with almost a week pause.

• Cue - Routine - Reward

Author Charles Duhigg argues that we can't stop a habit. We can create new ones, but we can not stop doing something that has become a habit. A habit is a behavior that has become engrained so much in us that we do it out without thinking about it. The only way to stop a habit is to actually change it and he explains it with "Cue > Routine > Reward". If you cue is for example that you entertain yourself by watching too much YouTube, you should change your routine and then reward yourself for achieving your goal. This could be that you set an alarm to switch of your computer by 9pm, you then pick up a book and read for an hour or so. You then reward yourself at the end of the week by watching a great movie on Saturday evening.

"If you use the same cue and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and the reward stay the same" - Charles Duhigg

In my case this is how I tackled my overweight problem. I have been for years overweight and was trying to get better without really putting much effort on it. It also didn't help that I got the opportunity with my job to travel to so many fantastic hotels across the Asia Pacific region and experience amazing restaurants. But this year it all started with the confinement in February for us in China. All restaurant were closed. My mother in law was locked on the other side of the city. She normally does a lot of Shanghainese cooking for us which is not always the healthiest. It was down to me and my wife to cook and I realized after a while that, if we cook differently, I could lose weight. It was down to how suddenly my eating habits were changed due to an external factor. My cue was eating sweet food. This is challenge as I was a pastry chef in a previous life. So we stopped buying cakes and we replaced it with fruits. The rewards was that we would cook French pancakes every weekend for breakfast (yes I am from Brittany so this is not boring to me) to compensate and I knew that if I behave well during the week, I would get my reward. As everything returned to normal in April, I continued on this modified habit. I would be strict to myself during the week in controlling how much I eat and what I eat, while during the weekend treat myself as a reward for behaving well, often a nice burger with my son. Did it drastically change my weight in one month? No, however I have lost 7 kg over the past 9 month and I am today at the lightest I've been in 12 years since arriving in China.

Focusing on my personal development and helping other with theirs is a passion of mine. I hope this article is useful and thank you for reading it. Please like or comment below if you have any suggestion or if you would like to share your experience.

Mikael

Further resources:

The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards by James Clear

How Habits Work by Charles Duhigg

Say "No" to New Year's Resolutions by Tony Robbins