Finish The Year Strong

I ran a session this morning for a client on finishing the year strong and thought it may be useful to share some of the insights with you.

I always find this to be a pivotal moment in the year and a great time to check in with your goals. Go back to the start of the year and think about your goals for 2017;

Are you on track?

What is going well?

What isn’t going so well?

What needs to change?

With just over 3 months left of the year, this is a significant period of time to make sure we finish the year strong and not just let the year fade away, which it will if we don’t make sure we get clear and committed on exactly what our plans are.

Here are some of the key points we discussed in the session:

1.      Focus

In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, they were producing lots of different versions of the Macintosh computer. They had lots of products and versions and Jobs found it far too confusing. After weeks of product reviews and brainstorming sessions, Jobs had heard enough. One day, he grabbed a pen and made his way to a whiteboard, where he drew a grid of four squares.

At the top of the grid, above each column, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”. Down the sides of the grid he wrote “Desktop” and “Portable”. He told his colleagues there and then that they were going to focus on four great products, one in each quadrant. Everything else? Cancelled.

The room was stunned to silence.

“Is he crazy? Does he know how much time has gone into those products?”

Jobs got Apple focused on making just four computers, and by doing so, he saved the company. Jobs understood that execution is often about eliminating the distractions and the unnecessary.

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” said Jobs. “It’s true for companies and it’s true for products.”

Once Jobs got the company focused again and back into a strong position, he started taking his top 100 people away on a retreat each year. On the last day of the retreat, he would stand in front of a whiteboard and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?”. People would be doing their utmost to have their suggestions on the list, with Jobs policing the ideas and writing down the ones which he approved of. After lots of discussion and strict elimination, the group would get the list down to just ten ideas. Then Jobs would take his pen and cross out seven of them and announce, “We can only do three.”

It is very easy as the year progresses to get side-tracked and lose focus on the important things that will truly make a difference. We live in a time where there are more distractions and opportunities than ever before and re-calibrating our action plans to make sure we are on track is a crucial exercise for us all to do on a regular basis.

This might mean you have to do what Jobs did and decide ‘what not to do’ first and foremost so you can concentrate your efforts on the things that will really make the difference.

2.      Response-Ability

In the book Legacy, which is about the leadership lessons we can learn from the famous All Blacks rugby team (statistically the most successful sports team of all time) the very first chapter is all about the character of the individuals and the team. The author talks about a moment that comes after a game versus Wales in 2010 which they won 42 points to 7. After the game, once the manager and senior players had reflected on the game he said he watched in amazement as two senior players then picked up a brush each and started to sweep the changing room.

When he quizzed the players about this later on he found that these acts taught them personal discipline and responsibility. To never expect things to be done for you, which of course carries itself onto the field, meaning they all take ownership of their performances and excuses are removed.

Understanding that we (and we only) are fully responsible for our actions and our progress is a powerful and critical mindset to adopt in the pursuit of our goals. It is very easy to make excuses for our lack of progress, especially when things do not go to plan.

Taking responsibility does not mean the same thing as taking the blame when things go wrong. The word itself is made up of two words, response and ability. We all have the ability to respond to the events, setbacks and obstacles we will all inevitably face in the pursuit of our goals.

Crucially, this puts us back in the driving seat. When we assume responsibility we take control and this is an empowering state of mind to operate from - where as blame can make us feel like a victim. By assuming control and ownership we put ourselves in a stronger position to find the solutions we need to overcome the challenges in our way.

3.      Action

Psychological research shows that self-control and willpower draw upon a limited resource of mental energy, and this can affect our ability to make decisions.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have researched this area heavily, finding that efforts of will and self-control are tiring. They showed that people who initially resisted the temptation of chocolates were subsequently less able to persist on a difficult and frustrating puzzle task. They also demonstrated that when people voluntarily gave a speech that included beliefs contrary to their own, they were also less able to persist on the difficult puzzle.

They termed this effect “ego depletion”.

The evidence is fairly persuasive. When we have to exert self-control in one task, we feel less like making the effort in another. Hence the reason productivity leaders advise us to start the day with our most difficult or important tasks.

If you need some help deciding on which actions to take, consider the discovery of the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.

In 1906, Pareto made an interesting observation about the spread of wealth across Italy. He noticed that 80 percent of the land was owned by 20 percent of the population. He then noticed the same pattern in his garden, of all places, observing that 20 percent of the peapods contained 80 percent of the peas. This pattern, showing that the distribution of things in life is not spread evenly, was named after Pareto as “the Pareto Principle”. The pattern has many applications to multiple scenarios, however the basic premise is that in most situations, there are a few vital causes of the overall result.

In any given task, for example, 20 percent of the actions you take will likely generate about 80 percent of the results you produce.

Apply this principle in the pursuit of your goals so you are focused on the actions that will have the biggest impact – get those actions done first.

One of the biggest enemies to action is what I call the deadly P and we are all affected by it to some degree. I’m referring to procrastination - the act of delaying what you should be doing in favour of something easier and less meaningful.

Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and economics, has done some interesting research in this area. Ariely noticed that procrastination is something very prevalent with his students. I’m sure you can recall leaving assignments and projects to the very last minute plenty of times, just like Dan noticed with his students.

He decided to run an experiment to examine what was going on. He gave his students the choice of when to set the deadline for three assignments they had been given. The condition was that once they chose a date, they must stick with that date or they would receive a penalty for a late submission.

Rational thinking would tell us that the more time you have to work on something, the better the work will be. Thus, it would be in the interest of the students to choose the very last date available to hand their work in. Interestingly, Ariely found that most students decided to spread their deadlines out across the semester, showing they were aware of their tendency to give in to procrastination the more time they had.

To test this further, he gave a second class rigid deadlines on the fourth, eighth, and twelfth week. A third class was also told that they could submit their work at the end of the semester.

When he compared the results of all the groups, he found that the students with rigid deadlines performed the best and the ones with all the deadlines at the end did the worst. The students who got to choose their deadlines were in the middle. The results showed the tendency for students to procrastinate on their work, affecting the quality of it, and that restricting their freedom produced better results.

Deadlines work. They create a sense of urgency, which in turn gives us a greater sense of accomplishment and self-esteem when we get things done. Accountability is a key part of this too, so perhaps you could partner with somebody and hold each other accountable to your own action plans.

I hope you found this article useful and if so please share it with others who you think could benefit.

Here’s to a strong end to the year…

With Positivity,

Martin Robert Hall

www.martinroberthall.co.uk