Your Best Year Ever

by | Jan 10, 2017

I hope you are off to your Best Year EVER!

 One of my favorite quotes from Paul J Meyer is, “You are either green and growing, or ripe and rotting.  You are on the up escalator, or the down escalator!”  There is no standing still.  You are either growing and developing, or you are shrinking and deteriorating.

I love to watch movies (just ask my family because I drag them to movies all the time!).  One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption.  It is a great prison movie with Morgan Freeman and Timothy Robbins.  Robbins is in jail for murder, a crime he didn’t commit.  He is planning his escape from Shawshank prison.  He talks with Freeman about a great life he plans to have in Mexico living on the beach when he gets out of prison.  Freeman tells him he should stop dreaming and torturing himself, “You’re in here and Mexico is way down there!”  Robbins then talks about hope being the best of things and says, “I guess it comes down to a decision – get busy living, or get busy dying!!” Robbins escapes that night.

 

Your entire life comes down to this decision – Get busy living, or get busy dying!  Get busy growing, or get busy rotting.  If you haven’t made the decision to have your best year ever, then you have essentially decided to have a down year.  Trust me, life is too short to have down years!

I trust you have identified your 5-10 key goals for 2017 (and hopefully have been writing them out every day).  I hope you have also completed a Goal Planning System form on each goal.  These two actions have put you ahead of 80% or more of the people who make resolutions for the New Year.  You now have a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve this year and a detailed plan of how you will accomplish your goals.

The next step of course is to put your plan in action.  This is where most people stumble in achieving their goals.  There are many reasons for this.  One of the biggest challenges is that people try to change too much all at once.  Just like having too many goals is counter-productive, attempting too many changes is also a huge de-railer.

I have found that achieving any of my key goals is dependent on identifying the underlying behaviors and habits I need to change.  In sports, coaches talk about focusing on the process.  Certainly they have set goals for the team, to win their conference, win the national championship, etc.  But focusing on these goals/outcomes in the middle of a game actually hurts performance.  When you are on the “battlefield,” the key is to focus on process – the key behaviors and habits that lead to success.

Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Disciplinesaid, “Don’t push growth, remove the limiting factors.”  This is a great strategy for reaching your goals and having your Best Year EVER.  The accomplishment of any major goal is the result of a string or chain of specific behaviors and habits.  As we know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  You are only as strong as your weakest habit.  To achieve growth, remove this limiting factor in your business.

The key is to identify your weakest habit, this is the bottleneck holding you back, limiting your growth.  As long as this habit remains weak, your chain will remain weak, and you will remain weak.

To have your Best Year EVER, simply identify what your weakest link is and focus on improving that one behavior/habit.  Don’t try to improve everything at the same time.  Just work on one behavior/habit at a time.  Give yourself 60 days to improve this one habit.  This focus increases your odds of success a hundredfold!  If you can turn your one weakest link into a true strength, you can increase your business 20%, 50%, even 100% this year.  After you turn this weak link into a strength, you can move onto the next area that you want to improve.  Remember, on a day-to-day basis, focus on the process, not the ultimate outcome.  The outcome is just a natural result of the changes you make in your process.  Winning a national championship is just the result of what the team does in practice each day – which is focusing on key behaviors they want to improve!

So the next step to having your Best Year EVER is to clearly identify the behavior/habit that is limiting your growth, and work to turn that behavior into a strength.  Stop letting one behavior be a huge bottleneck to your success.  Imagine a huge flood of business that is dammed up by this one bottleneck.  Your entire business throughput is dictated by this one bottleneck.  Change it!  Tear down this dam and you will see a torrent of sales into your business!

Next, practice, practice, practice!

Make today your best day ever.  Make this week your best week ever!  Make January, your best January ever!!  Make 2017 your Best Year EVER!!!