The achievement accelerator is a goal evaluation process that helps to draw your year to the most effective close.
It’s a great tool for mining out the clarity of your goals, what enabled you to hit the successes that you have just had this past year? And it also helps understand what you need to bring to the table if you’re going to be successful in achieving them in the year ahead.
Call it a rulebook for goal setting (well, it’s just one tool that helps actually!…..)
This is a two part article that will be concluded in next months edition.
So, review the past 12 months.
What did you actually achieve last year?
Work out every single thing that you achieved and make a list under the heading “Achieved Goals 2017”.
This might take a while, it’s worth taking some time to really think about all of the intentional and unintentional achievements in your life.
Do you have a lot more than you thought you had? How good does that feel?
Also, make a list of the Goals that you set, but have not achieved yet. Not such a nice exercise but essential for the awareness that this is going to give you.
You’ll need a journal or word doc. The first evaluation part of the process takes at least 2 hours.
Rules for Success:
Take each of the achievements and create a subheading. Underneath, describe what the achievement is, why it’s important and what motivated you to get it done.
Think about the rules that you had to impose on yourself to behave in a way that enabled you to win. You will have probably done this subconsciously, thinking into the values, emotions, habits and disciplines, will soon start to illustrate a pattern of behaviour that created your result.
What qualities did you need to focus on and discipline yourself to use? What did you have to stop doing to make room for the work that went into coming to this result?
Here’s my list and a few of my goals as an example:
What have I achieved in the last 12 months?:
Joined new Renegades Mastermind Group
Started new catering business
Created framework for new coaching business
Became a JMT accredited Coach
Found the confidence to grow my business without a high paid consultant
Slashed £20k per month off our overheads
Attracted more commercial clients
Raised my average order value by 42%
Raised my sales conversion rate by 11%
Bought my first BTL property
Signed up for a property investment seminar
Made money trading crypto currencies
Made research and content development a daily habit that I enjoy
Automated my quoting and admin systems at work
Bought some gold
Made money on some shares
Took my wife on a romantic week away
I took my family to Dubai
Joined new Renegades Mastermind Group:
Investing in myself by going to JMT Event in Florida put me back in the same environment as Dave Dean, Steve Matthews and Ashley Payne. This inevitably led to my recruitment into Renegades. Being open minded, brave, determined and confident allowed me to be open to new ideas and opportunities. I had to dedicate more time after work to invest into myself and the group in order to achieve this. I had to stop mooching around and stop spending time looking at pointless things during downtime such as Facebook.
Rules:
Exercise open mindedness, willingness, determination and be on the lookout for opportunities, then have the conviction to research and decide swiftly whether to chase them.
Have the confidence in your own abilities and the resolve to follow through on your decisions without wavering.
Find a way to maximise efficiency of time by eliminating all of the non-serving activities in your life.
Started new catering business: Following a lifelong dream of being in the food business and using my last bit of money from the sale of my property in France enabled me to make this goal a reality.
Being unafraid of failing, being willing to learn new skills and processes, being confident that I could make it work and just doing it when I spotted the opportunity enabled me to achieve this goal.
Rules:
Be open-minded and open to new ideas.
Practice willingness, courage and show conviction in seeing the dream through into action.
Be aware before that nothing is a huge success to start with and you will think about giving up early.
Be persistent.
Ignore your Ego when self-talk starts to criticise you for even attempting this new goal.
Practice the “be, do, have” paradigm.
Most people believe that if they “have” a thing – e.g. more time, more money, more love etc – then they can finally “do” a thing – e.g. write a book, take up a hobby, go on a vacation, buy a home, strike up a new relationship – which will allow them to “be” a certain thing – happy, content, peaceful, prosperous etc.
It’s easy to say “if only I had a little more time, or a little more money, I’d be truly happy”. However, we are failing to notice the connection between choosing to not be happy right now and the less than satisfactory results that are a consequence of that choice.
What’s really stopping you from choosing to have this goal right now?
In my case, I had told myself for years, I can’t be in catering, I’m a roofer! I’ll do this dream once I’ve retired.
When all I really needed was £10,000 and someone willing to work in the catering van.
Now I could start a new dream and wouldn’t have to be working in it full time. Win win!
Created the framework for new coaching business:
Why not capitalise on the new skills I have learned the past 5 years, at the same time in helping others progress with their journey.
The awareness I gained learning from my mentors has enabled me to put together a powerful framework of content and ideas which I can use to develop my own teaching processes.
This goal has been accelerated by “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Rules:
Practice huge levels of self-awareness and self-observation.
Spend a big amount of time reflecting and evaluating.
Use your natural skills of perception to decide what served you and what didn’t.
Practice willingness to document the journey so you can properly evaluate and re-structure to teach others.
Have the courage, motivation and discipline to keep writing & recording despite the self-saboteur. (anyone who judges your work negatively is not worthy of your energy)
Practice the “be, do, have” paradigm. (Don’t wait until you think you are good enough, be good enough now and then you will be good enough!)
Became a JMT accredited Coach: I wanted to explore my options for becoming more as a person, at the same time as learning how to help others. Taking the plunge and investing time and money to attend this course was just the lift I needed at a very dark time in my self education and improvement.
The highlight of the experience was spending time again with Dave Dean, which led to me becoming a member of the Renegades. The learning I’ve also been experiencing through the coaching training on the Maxwell website is invaluable in my quest to become a coach.
Rules:
Have the courage to invest in yourself at this level
Have the willingness, self discipline, open-mindedness and motivation to learn these new skills and the determination to keep studying and writing
What Goals didn’t I achieve?
Double my take home pay:
I managed to increase it by around 30%. I didn’t persist in finding a new salesperson in the business because I was too busy being the sales person! I convinced myself that this problem would solve itself and neglected my responsibility to persist with my recruitment efforts.
I convinced myself that I could not afford a sales person, when actually, he would have brought in more work, more revenue, more profit and paid for himself.
Rules I didn’t follow:
Persistence
“Be,do,have”
Self Awareness
Self Discipline
Take Family Skiing:
See goal “didn’t double my take home pay”!
Rules I didn’t follow:
Persistence
“Be,do,have”
(I also decided to change this goal and take the family to Dubai instead, if I had employed the salesman, I could have done both!)
Business turns over £100,000 per month.
Again, my lack of persistence in the recruitment area has impacted many of my goals. Without the extra sales coming in, we did not create enough cashflow and profit to feed the sales & marketing system and win more sales to increase the turnover.
Rules I didn’t follow:
Persistence
“Be, do, have”
Self Observation
Conviction
My business is not achieving 20% Net Profit consistently
Low turnover did not get us far enough above break-even to hit 20%
Rules I didn’t follow:
Self Observation
Self awareness
Persistence
Perseverance
Try this exercise over the next 4 weeks and next time we can look at how to apply the rules to the goals you have set this year using a version of S.M.A.R.T Goal setting.
