The 2nd International Leadership Blogathon Preview

February 27, 2013 by

2nd-Annual-International-Leadership-Blogathon-Todd-NielsenOn March 1st, a large conglomerate of leadership experts, coaches, speakers, authors, and leaders will come together for the 2nd Annual International Leadership Blogathon on http://www.ToddNielsen.com. For 31 days we will read amazing stories, unparalleled experiences, and leadership wisdom oozing from every crevice of the Internet. There are a total of 41 writers for the blogathon, gathered from many countries.

Last year’s blogathon brought an amazing source of wisdom, much of which would be hard to come by collectively on any single blog or book. This year’s articles raise the bar so much higher.

Below are the 41 writers for the blogathon. I’d invite you to read more about them and make sure to sign-up for updates to receive the articles in your inbox every day. Plus there will be some prizes and contests, here and there, throughout the month to win books and some other leadership products.

DATE

AUTHOR

COUNTRY
March 1st Lolly Daskal USA
March 2nd Kate Nasser USA
March 2nd Susan Bagyura USA
March 3rd Dan Forbes USA
March 3rd Chris Lema USA
March 4th Brendan Howe Canada
March 5th Dave Bradley UK
March 6th Martina McGowan USA
March 7th Joan De Winne Belgium
March 8th Kai Roer Norway
March 9th Ali Paskun USA
March 9th Susan Thorn USA
March 10th Susan Mazza USA
March 10th Andy Phillips Colombia
March 11th Heidi Alexandra Pollard Australia
March 12th Lora Crestan Canada
March 13th Ogwo David Emenike Nigeria
March 14th Susan Bowen UK
March 15th John Thurlbeck UK
March 16th T. Hampton Hopkins USA
March 16th Barry Smith USA
March 17th Colleen Jolly USA/UK
March 17th Ray Attiyah USA
March 18th Janine Garner Australia
March 19th Alli Polin Australia
March 20th Frode Heimen Norway
March 21st Kimunya Mugo Kenya
March 22nd Karin Hurt UK
March 23rd Tanvi Bhatt India
March 23rd Henna Inam USA
March 24th Sean Glaze USA
March 24th Jonathan Creaghan Canada
March 25th Peter Sterlacci Japan
March 26th William Powell Finland
March 27th David Hain UK
March 28th Sandro De Silva Netherlands
March 29th Paul Jolicoeur Canada
March 30th Richard Andrews UK
March 30th Tom Shulte USA
March 31st Todd Nielsen USA

 

I can’t wait to take part with all of these great minds, as well as the thousands of readers to create a fantastic leadership event that helps enhance the world of leadership acumen, the world over.

Filed Under: International Leadership Blogathon Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Desire Team Failure? Don’t Read This – It’s a Secret…

February 18, 2013 by

Team-Leadership-Teamwork-Team-LeadersIf we could amass the volumes of information written about team leadership, teamwork, leading teams, participating in teams,  we could probably fill a stadium full of paper. In my early years I honestly did not pay much attention to the dynamics that exist within teams. While the intricacies of making a successful team can compare in some ways to making an organization successful, they are two different beasts that usually require different leadership skill sets and behaviors. Try leading a team the same way as an organization and one is bound to experience a whole subset of unexpected problems.

When it comes to the dynamics of teams, I have two favorite books, one of which is the Secret of Teams by Mark Miller. The Secret of Teams is a delightful story of a struggling organization that finds that developing high performance teams is the burning imperative for fixing the company. In the story, the team responsible for figuring out how to fix the team problems, goes out and interviews experts in military, sports, healthcare, and other areas. Through these interviews they start formulating a framework to building a high performance team in their organization.

On top of this framework is an umbrella of leadership. It doesn’t matter how good team members are or what skills they bring to the table; if a team leader does a poor job leading, the results will be mediocre. Under this umbrella of leadership lie 3 vital ingredients to make a high performance team: Talent, Skills, and Community. They seem like 3 simple enough principles, but I was surprised by a few aspects of how these principles were described in the Secret of Teams.

Talent in High Performance Teams

A team leader needs to identify the talent needs of the team, both in the present AND the future. Understanding the talent needs and always being on the lookout for talent is important to create results.  It is important to not just look outside the organization for new talent, i.e. recruiting, but also trying to understand the talents of the existing team members, even those that might not be well-known or might not seem like they apply. Mark also teaches that in regard to talent development, a team leader should never compromise on character, competency, or chemistry.

Having the right talent starts with having the right leader.” ~Mark Miller Tweet This!

Skills in High Performance Teams

Similar to talent, a team leader needs to identify the skills needed for success, and understand any gaps that exist within individuals or the team as a whole. Learning should be a huge part of the culture of a team as they strive to learn new skills and close the skill gaps that exist. Team leaders should provide resources to help close skill gaps and help increase the chance of success for the team and each individual.

The real power will be unleashed when your #team members have individual skills and team skills.” ~Mark Miller Tweet This!

Community in High Performance Teams

I have personally seen the positive effects of community in teams, as well as the negative effects when it is missing. I was pleasantly surprised to see Mark include this as a critical ingredient of high-performance teams. This ingredient should be considered just as important as the other two ingredients.  Team leaders need to foster transparency and vulnerability. They need to ensure that the teams invests appropriate time on community– building activities and always look for ways to help the team “do life” together.

Great teams don’t just occur; they are created over time, through hard work and good leadership” ~Mark Miller Tweet This!

Many organizations are moving to a team type of infrastructure and even your organization is not, there are still teams, though you may not call them teams. I invite you to purchase Mark Millers book, The Secret of Teams: What Great Teams Know and Do, digest the information, then create a high performance team in your organization.

Please share your thoughts on leading teams and your experience with the ingredients from Mark;s book below.

Filed Under: Leadership in Teams Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Leadership & Management: What Behaviors Are Your Staff Copying from Your Example?

February 14, 2013 by

Leadership-Management-Behaviors-ExampleWhen the television show “Undercover Boss” made its premier a few years ago, much of America tuned in to watch the antics. What the show’s producers were probably looking for was a way to entertain the masses while they watched poor “unknowing” bosses do things like clean toilets and flip burgers. Of course in the end, there’s always that pivotal moment when the boss realizes the hard work his staff is doing behind the scenes. He learns to be more appreciative of them and looks at them a little differently than ever before.

What this show failed to capture though, is the importance of great leadership within an organization. Dwight Eisenhower gave a great definition to the word leadership when he said, “Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” There is not better way to get people to do what you want, then to inspire them and be an example of the behaviors and actions you desire.

Like a young boy imitating his father, employees will also follow your example.  They want to follow your example, and they need you if they’re going to properly understand how the organization functions. Leaders have far more power within their organizations than most realize. If your staff see you cleaning toilets, they will see the importance of cleaning toilets. They might not enjoy it anymore than you do, but they’ll see the importance of it. If they see your actions align with your your words and instructions, they will understand the importance of that instruction. If they see your constant focus on improvement, they will understand the importance of it

Unfortunately the same is true on the flip-side of leadership.  Bad habits that are exemplified by leaders, will often be duplicated by staff. Do you ignore customers but expect your staff to treat them wonderfully? Do you talk about cutting expenses, but then fly first class everywhere?

Bad habits that are exemplified by leaders, will often be duplicated by staff.” Tweet This!

Sometimes it takes an outsider’s insight into your leadership style to find ways that you can improve.  A mentor or coach, can offer guidance with an outside perspective. Without a mentor, no business owner can be as successful as they want to be. I have seen leaders do horrible things, that they had no clue they did. An outside perspective can help you see what you don’t.

When is the last time you did the work of someone a couple levels under you? You should try it. You’ll get valuable insight into what your employees go through each day. Even more though, you’ll show them that you want to understand, and that what they do is important.

Please share your thoughts and leave a comment below.

Filed Under: Leadership Example Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Personal Leadership: It’s All About the People, Stupid!

February 7, 2013 by

Personal-LeadershipIt’s been reported that Henry Ford once said, “Why is it that I always get the whole person, when what I really want is a pair of hands?” While Ford may have only wanted to hire sets of hands to run his assembly lines, the only way to do that was to hire the people attached to those hands: people with complex baggage, personalities, and expectations.

One of the important elements of personal leadership is to lead the people within your team. After all, if there are no people to lead, then there is no leader! I have worked with lots of leaders that absolutely HATE dealing with people. Many leaders just want to tell their people the goal, and then expect them to just go out and create amazing success without any guidance, coaching, managing, or …leading.

Part of being a great leader is to master the art of valuing the people you work with, while at the same time holding them accountable for the results. By creating a culture where people are valued, we can be more effective in achieving desired results. In other words, people are not just means to an end, but must be valued for their contributions and perspectives. This does not mean they need to be coddled or sheltered.

Personal leadership is all about relationships with those you lead. Simply learning the names of one’s team-members is not sufficient to building a strong team of committed workers, although it s start.  By learning their values, skills and dreams, you learn how they see themselves within the organizational structure.  Instead of simply evaluating their work, seek opportunities for them to provide feedback on the organization.  Take care to listen, and see if you can incorporate their ideas.

As you demonstrate that you value the contributions of your team-members, you will find that they are more likely to think outside of the box.  They may see things you may have missed, and you may discover a wealth of skills and abilities you have previously missed.  As morale improves, so will productivity and results. Creating a culture of creativity and excellence will require you to view people as ends, not simply as means to an end.

What ways have you found to lead the entire person, instead of just hiring a pair of hands?  What are some of the complexities of leading people with their personalities, perspectives, and personal baggage?  Please leave a comment below to continue the conversation.

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The 2nd Annual International Leadership Blogathon

January 27, 2013 by

International-Leadership-Blogathon-Todd-NielsenHold onto your seats, because this March is going to be a thrill ride through the world of leadership in the 2nd Annual International Leadership Blogathon. Last year I held this event and it was phenomenal. The nuggets of wisdom from all over the world were inspirational and enormously valuable for any leader. We had leadership experts from every corner of the globe take part; and the buzz on social networks still continues to this day for many of the articles.

This year is going to be better than last year’s event. My platform is triple the size of last year, so news of the blogathon and the articles will get out everywhere to help drive discussions. We are going to give away prizes this year, mostly leadership books, to help drive engagement and attract more readers, and my website is way cooler 🙂 than last year.

What Is The International Leadership Blogathon?

Ok, so imagine leadership writers and experts from all over the world gathered together to share their leadership wisdom with the world. The experience and lessons of working with different cultures and organizations helps to fuel an avalanche of knowledge that is not easy to come by.

So what I do is get around 30 experts from every possible country I can, and they each write an article between 400 to 1,200 words that explores some aspect of leadership. Last year we had many different topics and my heart lit up every time I read a new article. I mean, how often do you get to hear the inner thoughts on leadership from someone in Kenya, India, The Netherlands, New Zealand, the U.K., Japan and a bunch of other remote locations? It’s awesome! Subscribe now, and get ready for the flood of leadership wisdom to enter your inbox.

Awesome, the 2nd International Leadership Blogathon begins in March! ” Tweet This

Who Can Write For The International Leadership Blogathon & Why Should You?

Well, let me address the why first. Usually the best reason to write a guest post is to receive valuable backlinks to your own site from a reputable domain, to help grow your own platform, and get your knowledge in front of a bunch of people that might not know who you are. My site has an excellent Alexa rating, I get a lot of traffic, and I have a huge social network in which I will be broadcasting all of the articles – every single day. I’ll will also setup a private Facebook group for all the bloggers to collaborate, and I have a special surprise to rock your social world and help make sure all the articles are shared among all the blogger’s networks.

So who should write? Well anyone throughout the world that has leadership knowledge, that they want to share with the world. But there are some qualifications:

  1. You must be able to write in English
  2. You need to be able to write 400 to 1,200 words in good grammar and punctuation. We will help out as much as we can, but last year I spent way too much time re-writing articles that had great messages but were written poorly. So reach out to others that know English before submitting your article.
  3. You have to have a Twitter account and actively participate on social networks. You do not need to have a big following.
  4. You must be willing to commit to sharing all the articles on social networks and not just your article.
  5. You must be able to enter and edit an article in WordPress. My assistant will setup all the approved bloggers up on this site to submit their article.
  6. The post needs to be all original work from the author, and CANNOT be shared on another site. (Google does not like that)
  7. Your topic needs to be related to leadership or a leadership subtopic. Ask below in the comments section, or send me a message if you are unsure about your topic. It could also be about the intricacies of leadership in your country of residence.
  8. Your article needs to be in the system before March 1st, 2013.  We need to time to get everything setup and organized.
  9. You need to love leadership and want to engage with other writers by commenting on articles and helping to drive more discussion.

I am expecting a lot of interest this year. So if you are interested in writing, please fill out the form below and submit it ASAP. I look forward to a successful blogathon, I know my readers will love this content and it will be a hugely successful event.

[Form id=”10″]

Woohoo, I just signed-up to write for the 2nd International Leadership Blogathon” Tweet This

 

This is going to be an exciting event with wisdom oozing from all over the globe. Stay tuned for more information. Please share your thoughts below. Also what kind of articles are you hoping to see?

Filed Under: International Leadership Blogathon Tagged With: , , ,

Do You Suck at Setting Goals? Stop Sucking on this Key Principle of Effective Leadership

January 25, 2013 by

Targets-Goals-LeadershipThe story has been told of the young man who took his archery set out in the field behind the barn. After carefully taking aim and launching his quiver full of arrows at the barn wall, he walked up to the barn, took a can of red paint, and painted targets around each arrow. Celebrating his excellent marksmanship, he entered a local competition and was soundly defeated, unable to hit any of the targets.

Leaders often find themselves in crisis management, reacting to the situations around them (i.e. Firefighting). Often this is because of a lack of clearly communicated goals and objectives. If we as leaders do our job first and then paint targets second, it’s bound to look as though we succeeded (even if we didn’t accomplish anything of value). If we properly paint our targets first, we will have a much better chance at achieving  our goals.

Effective Leadership Understands the Value of Goals

A key component of effective leadership is to identify and communicate the key goals and objectives of the organization.  Here are some tips for setting goals:

  • Mission Driven: Goals should clearly fit into the overall mission and purpose of the organization.  Team members need to understand how their responsibilities fit into the larger picture.
  • Measurable: Goals should be specific and quantifiable.  Nebulous goals leave employees uncertain of their success and always hoping that they are on track with your expectations.
  • Attainable: It is OK to reach for the stars, but if it is impossible to reach, we’ll achieve nothing more than to maintain the status-quo.  However, you want to make sure that your team members know that the goals are attainable, and that you will support them in accomplishing the goal.
  • Controllable: The best goals are the ones in which we control the outcome.  Instead of setting a goal to grow your customer base by 10 new clients; set the goal to contact 40 potential clients,  make 30 presentations, send 30 care-packages, etc… By setting the right small steps, you can practically guarantee the success of a higher goal, i.e. closing 10 clients. Completing the goal is entirely within the realm of your control, as it doesn’t rely on the potential customer’s response.

Communicate your goals often, and be sure to support your team members and celebrate their successes (no matter how small).  Incorporate team members in the creation of these goals, so that they have ownership in the process. You might consider reading up on SMART Goals as well.

Continuing The Conversation on Developing Effective Leadership Through Goals

The Ultimate Personal Annual Success Plan for achieving your goals is meant to help individuals create greater success in 2013 and it really is an awesome format for defining, tracking and achieving greater success. Get it before the price goes-up. For organizations please check out my workshops and consulting.

Have you successfully changed the culture of your organization through effective goal setting?  Have you ever fired first and painted targets second? Please share your thoughts below.

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Naked, Wet …and Getting an Education at “Shower University”

January 15, 2013 by

Shower UniversityFor more than a year now I haven’t had a commute. I don’t miss the commute, but recently I had a realization – a longing even, for something I did enjoy while commuting… listening to books. I used to read & listen, through an insane number of books and I loved it. Learning and growing is something core to my motivation. With no commute this last year, I have missed that aspect greatly.

In my own Ultimate Personal Success Plan, one of my goals is to read more, but I just have not found the time. No matter how much I finagle with my schedule, and no matter how early I got up, I just wasn’t been able to dedicate enough time. There is always something to fill the gap. That was until I created “Shower University,” oh yeah, things were changing now!

What I realized is that I have at least 30 minutes every day when I have down-time. This down-time was when I showered, got dressed, and groomed myself each day. I realized it was the perfect time to educate my mind, while my body was in autopilot. I came across the Water-Resistant iShower BT Shower Speaker and fell in LOVE WITH IT! It easily connects via Bluetooth to my phone, where I can stream all by Audible.com books. I also have a waterproof pad, similar to the Aqua Notes – Waterproof Notepad so I can jot down ideas or thoughts while I am learning.

The lesson in this is to look for efficiency in all you do and look for ways to be creative, or accomplish more in the “down times” of your day. Execution sometimes requires being creative with your time and resources. Learning and growing likewise might require creativity. So use your creativity to find time to learn and become a better leader. All great leaders are staunchly dedicated learners.

All great leaders are staunchly dedicated learners.” Tweet This!

Here are a few Audible.com offers I found. I’m a huge fan.

Special Offer – Get Your First 3 Months at Audible for $7.49/month!

Try Audible Now and Get A Free Audiobook Download with a 30 Day Trial. Choose from over 100,000 Titles.

Have you done anything to bring about more learning, growth, or greater execution in your life? Please share below.

Filed Under: Leadership Growth, Personal Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – Get It NOW!

January 1, 2013 by

The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan Todd NielsenSuccess Plan – The last couple months have been a whirlwind of activity, especially surrounding the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan. I’m happy to say that the plan is finally completed, and it ROCKS! The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan is a Microsoft Excel Workbook that is meant to not only help define your goals, but it will help you to align, track, measure, and execute on the plans to reach your annual goals and dreams.

I had planned on creating 12 posts around the content of the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan, but with 3 pending book deals, the chaos of the holidays, and other end of year madness, plus the desire to create greater value for you – I changed the plan. I’ve also been planning to offer the e-book for a couple months, but have become disenchanted with that idea; because honestly, I felt it wouldn’t be very valuable for you.

The new tool, plus the videos below are much more powerful than any e-book. The 5 Videos below are meant to explain how the plan works, and what you need to do to create your own. You will want to watch these short videos and then scroll down to learn how you can get the Ultimate Personal Success Plan Excel Tool.

If you are ready to download the success plan and want to come back and watch the videos later, scroll down below the videos, to get started!

The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan Training

The following 5 videos are meant to explain, “The Success Plan,” and “The Tool” together. It will take more time than reading a blog post to get through these, but we are talking about a tool and system to help you reach all of your goals for the year, so take as much time as you need to set yourself up for success. You can  refer back to these videos anytime after getting the tool to refresh your memory.

Video 1: Define Your Goals

Video 2: Monthly Planning

Video 3: Weekly Planning, Tracking, & Review

Video 4: Dashboard & Notes Report

Video 5: Wrap-up & Extending the Tool

Success Plan Triple Lines

How to Get the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan

Success Plan Triple Lines

Those that have seen and used this tool over the last couple of weeks, have told me that giving it away would dilute its value. I’d rather have a few people achieve their goals with my tool, then have thousands of people download an e-book that just sits around on their hard drive.

What I have decided to do is to sell the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan Excel Workbook for $79.95, but provide a HUGE Subscriber Discount of $50.00 to reward my subscribers that have been awaiting the eBook. So this amazing tool will only cost $29.95 for subscribers …at least until the end of January 2013. 

I cannot provide this kind of discount forever because it will be too much work for us to handle the volume and support at such a low price point. So this deal ends on January 31st 2013. On February 1st, 2013, the discount will be reduced or eliminated for subscribers. So don’t delay! If you are already a subscriber you should have received a discount code, if you have not subscribed, type your name and email below and a discount will be emailed to you right away.

[wps_custom_form id=2]

 

[catalog-product id=”3933″]

thin_medium_triple_line_black_long

I’ll Be Your Personal Performance Partner and Coach + Receive The Success Plan for FREE! (Read Below)

thin_medium_triple_line_black_long

[catalog-product id=”3934″]

 

Need More Information about The Ultimate Success Plan?

Here are other posts I have written on the topic:

The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – My Confession, A Lesson Learned, & A Super Cool Sneak Peek
The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – Part 4 – Goals, Vision, Focus
The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – Part 3 – Define Your Focus Areas
The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – Part 2 – How High Are You Aiming?
The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – Part 1 – Let’s Get Started!

Still need more information? Leave a comment below, leave me a voicemail to the right, or send me a message here. I’m dedicated to your success and pray that I can be of service to you; in order to make 2013 the best year ever.

Filed Under: Personal Success Plan Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – My Confession, A Lesson Learned, & A Super Cool Sneak Peek

December 17, 2012 by

Success-Plan-EmbarrassedFor those that have been following the ultimate success plans posts, you know that this has been a pursuit that I have been perfecting for over 3 years. I have a big and embarrassing confession to make though. You see, when I first started preparing to write the Ultimate Personal Success Plan e-Book and the posts for this new version; I actually wasn’t sure how it was going to end. Due to some successes, failures, and struggles I had in 2012, I knew I needed to make some changes to the plan, but I wasn’t sure what to do. So I delayed, and delayed as long as I could.

The really embarrassing part of this is that I consult with organizations on creating a culture of execution in organizations, and here I found myself, utterly failing to execute because I was not sure of the direction I was going in. I tell my clients when they are struggling with this same problem that it is usually better to start executing in any direction, than no direction. I also felt compelled, OK stressed to start the posts because many were asking me for it.

So I took my own advice and just started writing, i.e. executing, in hopes that the answer would work itself out. Two weeks and 4 posts into the writing and I still was not sure exactly where this was going, nor what I was missing. Then it all came together. A friend sent me something that gave me an idea. That idea then blossomed, and then blossomed again, and again, and again until I had created something I was passionate about and confident about. Now I truly feel like I have the recipe for the ULTIMATE ANNUAL PERSONAL SUCCESS PLAN, and IT’S AWESOME!

Everything that has been written so far is valuable for this plan. So don’t worry if you think I wasted your time. I have greatly extended the power of the plan and built huge changes to make for a more successful year, but more than that, I have created an execution structure for your success plan. The images below are of a self-contained excel workbook. This is a thing of beauty, because it not only lets you define everything, and there are some important new parts to define, but it lets you track your progress the whole way. It has a completely self-contained dynamic database to keep the sheet clean throughout the year.

Images for the NEW Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan!

This is the page where you will define all the parts of the success plan for the year. I’ll be writing more about the components in another post.

Success-Plan

 

This is the monthly goals sheet. This is where you will track your your progress each month. Again, I will be writing more about this in another post.

Success-Plan-Monthly-Goals

Next is the most important sheet and the one you will use the most. It is the Weekly Planning, Tracking & Review sheet. This is the first part of the sheet. There is a drop down that connects to an internal excel “database” so you can track your goals all year long.  It’s super cool, and provides part of the execution structure I mentioned earlier. I will explain this in more detail in a later post.

Success-Plan-Weekly-Goals-Part-1

The second part of the sheet is for tracking habits and reviewing your week. How can you be a success without mastering your habits and constantly reviewing your progress. More on this in a future post!

Success-Plan-Weekly-Goals-Part-2

Below is a report for reviewing all of your consolidated reports from the weekly review section. This will be great to tracking yoru progress over the course of the year. More in another post…

Success-Plan-Notes-Report

You can’t have a cool excel workbook, nor success plans, without a dashboard. This dashboard tracks your achievement ability over the course of the year. Much more on this is forthcoming…

Success-Plan-Dashboard

 

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. I hope you are excited to have the best year you have ever had!

Filed Under: Personal Success Plan Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

The Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan – Part 4 – Goals, Vision, Focus

December 12, 2012 by

Success-Plan-Vision-Goals-FocusSometimes the best laid plans get derailed, which is exactly what happened to me last week. I had a epiphany that completely changed the outcome of the Ultimate Personal Success Plan. It took me a week to figure out exactly what I was going to do, but the result of this blast of revelation makes the Ultimate Annual Personal Success Plan so much more powerful. So for a week posts were not published and I have been pretty silent as I developed this plan, more on this later…

So let’s get back on track now you should have a bunch of notes and thoughts from the previous three posts.

  1. You should have all your focus areas defined and narrowed down to 5 to 7 important areas. My focus areas for the coming year are:  Family, Spirituality, Health, Professional Growth, Writing, & Renewal.
  2. You should have a document of your hopes and dreams and thoughts for high-level goals for 2013.

We are going to use that information to narrow down and define the path for the next year. There are three things that we will focus on next. They are the Annual Goals, the Focus Area Goals, and the Annual Vision. Let me explain these.

The Annual Goals

Last year I did not have top annual goals, I only had the vision and the focus area goals. The fallacy I found is that the vision did not really define an absolute and definite ending in mind. It had an end in mind but it was somewhat subjective. My focus area goals were measurable and very well defined, yet the vision left room for argument. I still think the vision is very important, we’ll talk about that in a moment. This year I have added annual goals to the line-up. In order to keep myself focused I chose to not have more than 3 annual goals. These will not be easy goals, but I wanted to focus so precisely that it would make me keep those goals front and center. After the last post you might consider this a bit contradictory with what I said about the focus areas, but in reality the focus areas should help in defining your annual goals.

These three goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. In other words they should be a S.M.A.R.T goals. My annual goals for this year are personal, but they go into three areas of my life: family, financial and professional. They reinforce my focus areas and will help to bring greater purpose to them.

So your homework is to define 1 to 3 top annual goals for the next year.

The Focus Area Goals

Last year I had 8 focus areas and between 2 and 5 goals per focus area and it was just way too much. I felt very unbalanced and overwhelmed.  Sure I got a lot done, but the sacrifices were too much. So this year I simplified it even more. I limited myself to only 5 focus areas, I suggest you do the same. This was not easy to do, because it meant sacrificing something for the success of something else. Not only did I narrow the number of focus areas, but I also limited the number of goals per focus areas to a maximum of 3 per area. In some cases this was even harder. These goals should be definite and measurable, so you know when they have been achieved.

***Warning!  I want to make you aware of one thing that I find difficult and many people I have worked with also find difficult. When writing your annual goals and focus area goals, be very careful about goals that span the entire year. For example instead of saying “I will exercise 5 days a week for 20 minutes,” perhaps think about changing the goal to: “I will exercise for 100 minutes a week.” I am all about setting up positive habits, but life comes in ups and downs and I have seen too many people give-up on their goals, when they have a little failure on these habit type of goals.

So your homework will be to define the 1 to 3 focus area goals for each of your focus areas. 

The Annual Vision

The annual vision should be written in past tense as if it already had occurred. The annual vision is not so much a goal, as it is a place where you will end up at the end of the year. It might describe the person you became, the accomplishments you achieved, or even the way you feel after the successful year you have experienced. It encompasses, at least in part, your focus areas and your annual goals, but it is not a repeat of them. Like the other thing I have laid out, this also needs to be focused. I suggest keeping it to 3 sentences or shorter.

For example, my vision for 2013 is as follows, “This was the most successful year I have ever had. I grew closer to my family, and became a better husband and father. I  achieved the most financial success I have ever had in my life and established myself as THE execution expert for organizations. My health and spirituality have increased exponentially, making me a better person both inside and out.”

If you look at these three areas you can see that they are creating alignment from top to bottom. That is a critical aspect of this plan and will help to make your goal achievement more powerful and focused.

For your homework, develop your own 2013 personal vision.

Summary & Things to Come

These three things will take a bit of a different role this year, but you have to have these three things established before you can move onto the other areas. I am really excited to share with you the epiphany I had this last week. It includes a whole new mechanism to track and accomplish your goals. I actually had to hire a programmer to make this functionality. I showed this to someone that is highly successful and has succeeded a lot in their life and their response was, “WOW, when can I get it!“

Filed Under: Personal Success Plan Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
«Previous Page
Next Page»