Are You Making Progress in Your Business?
Are you making the progress you ultimately want to make?
The key is to ask yourself the right questions so you can see your trends clearly. Many times we are simply trying to do better with big visions for what can be. We may even have a plan in place, but then we fall short of what we know is possible.
Why? Perhaps it’s because we haven’t faced reality. What’s the real deal about the last three years? How are you trending in terms of life progress, business progress? We often think we are dealing with reality, but are we really? Are we dealing with reality with ourselves?
Self-awareness is often an important missed step. It’s more fun to look forward toward what we want, than to craft a great plan.
Ask yourself questions that will produce productive personal growth.
- Do you feel like you’re accomplishing the level of progress you truly want?
- How much progress did you make in 2011 compared to 2010?
- Whose opinions are holding you back?
- Are you asking for help from the right people?
We are several weeks into 2012, which brings a vital question to ask:
How is your year going so far?
The initial response might be, “It’s too early to tell.” But it’s really not, and here are questions to ask yourself so you can find out:
- How different is January then the previous 12 months?
- What methods or approaches are we intuitively believing in, that are really conditioned thinking?
- What positive behavioral changes have you stayed the course with in the last 2 years?
- Where has evidence of your personal growth revealed itself in new results in the last three months?
- What are the areas of personal ineffectiveness you have identified and have been working on for more than a month?
- What is a vision you have stayed the course with and consistently communicated for more than 12 months?
- What fundamentals of your endeavors have you stayed average at for more than a year? Why?
None of this should be a discouragement, be strong!
This line of questioning is to get to the real issues, to get to the real answers that are personal to you so that you can create the progress you know deep down is possible.
Let’s say things are going great for you, and you were able to answer these in a way that makes you feel accomplished. That’s great, but now what? Many go in cycles of progress to regression, back to progress and then we regress again. It’s like a slightly upward trending stock market over time. Dan Casetta, Vector Marketing’s Bay Area division manager shares a good piece of advice:
“In order to grow, you have to do everything as well as you did last year, then add to it.”
The “adding to it” for these achievers is the easier part, what usually happens is the trading of a few key ingredients of success in the past for a few new ingredients. At best this results in incremental overall growth over our best year of progress.
This is your life, right now! The life you are living is your life!
Get clear about where you are now, make one to three distinctions about why you will grow and stay the course with your focus on these things.
To get the external progress we desire we must experience first, the same level of progress within.
