Long ago I discovered an important strategy that has allowed me to continually improve my personal and business performance every year and to reach the level of career success I nnow enjoy.
It’s simple common sense and it’s called an After Action Review (AAR). AAR will help you leverage your knowledge and experience.
To experience consistent growth you need to leverage you past experience for all it’s worth. In this post, I’ll give you some career advice on exactly how to go about doing this.
To make 2012 the best it can be, you need to perform an AAR and analyze what took place in 2011. You need to identify every nugget of knowledge your past performance offers and leverage it for all it’s worth.
You and I both know that no matter how good or bad your results were in 2011 – you can always do better.
Yet, the single biggest key to improving both your performance and your results seems to go ignored by almost everybody. If you want to be at the top of your game you absolutely must review, analyze, and learn from what has already happened.
Seven Steps That Can Change Your Life
There are seven steps in the AAR process, and you must begin implementing the ideas that you are about to generate immediately.
Step 1 Identify Your Three Greatest Accomplishments In 2011.
Even if 2011 was a challenging year for you, odds are if you look close enough there’s something somewhere to be proud of.
Step 2 Analyze What You Learned from Each Accomplishment.
Now that you have identified your three greatest accomplishments, go back to each one. This time though identify exactly what you learned or were reminded of by each of them.
Step 3 Identify Your Biggest Disappointments Of 2011.
Practically every company and individual resists analyzing their mistakes. That’s a shame because this is where the best learning comes from.
Step 4 Analyze What You Learned from Each Failure or Disappointment.
No matter how great everything in life is going – we all make mistakes. The trick here is to really analyze them, what preceded them, what could you have done differently, and how can you prevent them in the future.
Step 5 Identify How You Limited Yourself in 2011 and How Can You Stop It in 2012.
Were there certain actions you took or didn’t take that came back to haunt you?
In order to make sure you don’t limit yourself again – you need to bring these self-defeating actions to the surface, confront them, and most important determine what you must do differently to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes all over again.
Step 6 Pragmatically Review the Information You Have Gathered.
The goal of this exercise is not simply to know yourself and your business better but to actually use the information to make certain 2012 far surpasses 2011.
What are the big takeaways from answering each question? What do you know about yourself or your business that you didn’t realize or weren’t thinking about?
Obviously, having this list isn’t going to do it all, you still need to take this new knowledge and USE IT!
Fortunately, that’s what the last point centers on. And here it is…
Step 7: Use This Information to Astonish Yourself in 2012.
The purpose here is to build in to your schedule, your interactions, your management style or whatever else you’ve surfaced in the previous questions and build yourself a new better approach.
Ok, now that we’ve uncovered a lot of useful information, the final step is to incorporate it into a plan for 2012.
If you’ll allow me, I’d like to help you make 2012 the best year of your life by introducing you to a very special program put together by a very special guy.
The program is called the 100 Day Challenge and it was created by one of the brightest strategic thinkers on the planet, Gary Ryan Blair.
http://www.goalsguy.com/Affiliate/tgg.php?id=1036103
Gary is a leading consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Professional Sports Teams and high-achievers throughout the world.
“The 100 Day Challenge” is a life changing program that will help you to light the fuse on a performance EXPLOSION and personally experience successes you only dream about!
If you want to perform better than you have in the past and to achieve more than you have so far, you have to make sure that what you do today – this very day – not tomorrow – will move you closer to those dreams.
So why not mark today as the day you decided you are going to reach all of your goals and change your life for the better, and I mean MUCH BETTER?
http://www.goalsguy.com/Affiliate/tgg.php?id=1036103
I wish for you a New Year of abundance, prosperity and ever increasing opportunity. Your investment in this 100 Day Challenge will put you in the best position possible for success in 2012.
http://www.goalsguy.com/Affiliate/tgg.php?id=1036103
All the best!
Bud
PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained. The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less. The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail. Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy. You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.
PPS: I opened a membership site last September. It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations. You can find out about the membership site by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.
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