Measure Your Progress

“There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience.” By Jean de la Bruyere

You have incredible mental powers that you habitually fail to use to their full extent. By systematically setting goals for your life and making detailed plans to achieve them, you will save yourself years of hard work in reaching the same level of success. Goal setting enables you to use vastly more of your thinking powers than the average person.

Your conscious mind is the “head office” of your life. Its role is to deal with the information in your environment and then to identify, analyze, compare it against other information and then to decide what actions to take.

But it is your subconscious mind that contains the great powers that can enable you to accomplish vastly more than you ever have before. At least 90% or more of your mental powers are “below the surface.” It is essential that you learn to tap into these powers to motivate, stimulate and drive you forward toward the achievement of your goals.

Program Yourself With Goals

Your subconscious mind functions best with clear goals, specific tasks, deliberate measures and firm deadlines. The more of these with which you program your subconscious computer, the better it functions for you and the more you will accomplish in a shorter period of time.

As you set your goals and begin moving toward them, it is essential that you establish a series of benchmarks or measures that you can use to evaluate your progress, day-by-day and hour-by-hour. The more clear and specific the measures you set, the more accurate you will be in hitting your targets on schedule.

Your subconscious mind requires a “forcing system,” composed of deadlines that you have imposed on yourself for task accomplishment and goal attainment. Without a forcing system, it becomes easy for you to procrastinate and delay, and to put off important tasks until much later, if at all.

Three Keys To Peak Performance

There are three keys to peak performance in achieving your goals. They are commitment, completion and closure. When you make a firm commitment to achieve a particular goal, and you put aside all excuses, it is very much like stepping on the accelerator of your subconscious mind. You will be more creative, determined and focused than ever before. Great men and women are those who make clear, unequivocal commitments and then refuse to budge from them, no matter what happens.

Completion is the second ingredient in peak performance. There is an enormous difference between doing 95% of a task and doing 100% of a task. In fact, it is very common for people to work very hard up to the 90% or 95% level and then to slack off and delay the final completion of the task. This is a temptation that you must fight against. You must continually force yourself, discipline yourself, to resist this natural tendency and push through to completion.

Nature’s Wonder Drug

Every time you complete a task of any kind, your brain releases a small quantity of endorphins. This natural morphine gives you a sense of well-being and elation. It makes you feel happy and peaceful. It stimulates your creativity and improves your personality. It is nature’s “wonder drug.”

The more important the task that you complete, the greater is the quantity of endorphin that your brain releases, very much like a reward for success and achievement. Over time, you can develop a positive addition to the feelings of well being that you receive from this “endorphin rush.”

Even when you complete a small task, you feel happier. When you complete a large task, you feel happier still. When you finish the various steps on the way to the completion of a large task, at every achievement, you get an endorphin rush. You feel continuously happy and exhilarated when you are working steadily toward the completion of an important job.

Create the Winning Feeling

Everyone wants to feel like a “winner.” And feeling like a winner requires that you win. You get the feeling of the winner by completing a task 100%. When you do this repeatedly, eventually you develop the habit of completing the tasks that you begin. When this habit of task completion locks in, your life will begin to improve in ways that you cannot today imagine.

In psychology the reverse is always true. The “incomplete action” is a major source of stress and anxiety. In fact, much of the unhappiness that people experience is because they have not been able to discipline themselves to follow through and complete an important task or responsibility.

The Pain of Procrastination

If you have ever had a major assignment that you have been putting off, you know what I am referring to. The longer you wait to get started on an assignment and the closer the deadline approaches, the greater stress you experience. It can start to keep you up at night, and affect your personality. But when you finally launch into the task and push it through to completion, you feel a great sense of relief and well being.

It is almost as if nature rewards you for everything that you do that is positive and life enhancing. At the same time, nature penalizes you with stress and dissatisfaction when you fail to do the things that move you toward the goals and results that are important to you.

The Balanced Scorecard

One of the most popular movements in modern management is toward the “balanced scorecard.” Using these scorecards, every person, at every level of the business, is encouraged to identify the key measures that indicate success, and then to give themselves scores every day and every week in each of those key areas.

Here is an important point. The very act of identifying a number or score, and then paying close attention to it will cause you to improve your performance in that area. For example, if someone were to tell you, before a meeting, that you were going to be evaluated on how well you listened in that meeting, your listening skills would improve dramatically within a few moments. You would listen far more carefully and attentively throughout the meeting because you knew that this behavior was being observed.

In the same way, whenever you select a goal, measure or activity that is important to you, and begin observing, or paying attention to it in your day-to-day life, your performance in that area improves.

One of the most helpful actions you take in your own career is to set benchmarks, and create scorecards, measures, metrics and deadlines for every key task that you must complete on the way to one of your goals. In this way, you activate your subconscious forcing system.
This forcing system will then motivate you and drive you, at an unconscious level, to start earlier, work harder, stay later and get the job done.

Close The Loop

The third “C”, after commitment and completion, is “closure.” This is the difference between an “open loop” and a “closed loop.” Bringing closure to an issue in your personal or business life is absolutely essential for you to feel happy and in control of your situation.

Lack of closure, unfinished business, an incomplete action of any kind, are all major sources of stress, dissatisfaction and even failure in business. They consume enormous amounts of physical and emotional energy.

The Key Ability

Perhaps the most important ability in the world of work is “depend- ability.” There is nothing that will get you paid more and promoted faster than to develop a reputation for getting your tasks done quickly and well, and on schedule. Whatever your goals, make a list of all the tasks that you will have to accomplish in the achievement of those goals. Put a deadline on every one of those tasks. Then, work every day and every hour to hit your deadlines. Measure your progress each day as you go along.

Speed up or slow down where necessary. But remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. The greater clarity that you have with regard to deadlines and measures, the more you will accomplish and the faster you will get it done.

A goal or a decision without a deadline is merely a discussion. It has no energy behind it. It is like a bullet with no powder in the cartridge. Unless you establish deadlines to which you are committed, you will end up “firing blanks” in life and work. Sometimes people ask, “What if I set a deadline and I don’t achieve the goal by the deadline?”

Simple. Set another deadline, and then another, if necessary. Deadlines are “best guess” estimates of when the task will be completed. The more you set and work toward deadlines, the more accurate you will become in predicting the time necessary to complete them. You will become better and better at achieving your goals and completing your tasks on schedule, every time.

Eating An Elephant

You have heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” And the answer is, “One bite at a time.”

This metaphor applies to achieving any big goal, as well. How do you achieve a huge goal? You accomplish it one step, one task, one measure at a time.

Break your long-term goals down into annual, monthly, weekly and even hourly goals. Even if your long-term goal is financial independence, look for a way to break that down into how you are going to use each hour of the coming day in such a way that long- term financial independence is far more likely.

If you want to increase your income, you know that all income is a result of “added value.” Look at everything you do and then ask yourself how you could add more value so that you can be worth more than you are earning today.

Identify Your Most Valuable Task

Go and ask your boss, “What one thing do I do that is more valuable than anything else?” Whatever his or her answer, look for ways to perform more and more of that task, and to get better and better at doing it.

It is absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish if you break your tasks down into bite sized pieces, set deadlines and then do one thing at a time, every single day. You have heard the old saying, “By the yard it’s hard; but inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.”

Continuous and Never Ending Improvement

If you want to increase your hourly rate and your income, look for ways to get a little bit better at the most important things you do, every single day. Read one hour per day in your field. Listen to audio programs on your way to and from work. Take additional courses whenever you can. These activities will propel your entire career onto the fast track. When you invest an extra one or two hours per day in self-improvement, the cumulative effect on your greater ability to get results can be extraordinary.

Get Healthy and Fit

If you want to lose weight, there is a simple five-word formula: “Eat Less and Exercise More.”

If you discipline yourself to eat a little bit less, but eat higher quality foods, and simultaneously exercise a little bit more each day, you can get into the rhythm of losing one ounce per day. No matter how much you weigh today, if you lose one ounce each day that will equal about two pounds per month. Two pounds per month will be 24 pounds per year. In no time at all, you can retrain your body and your appetite so that you lose the weight and keep it off for the rest of your life.

Save Your Pennies and the Dollars Will Save Themselves

If you want to become wealthy, begin to question every single expense. Set a goal to save $3, $5, or $10 per day. Put this money away in a savings account and never touch it. As it grows, invest it carefully in well-chosen mutual funds or index funds. Make daily, weekly and monthly saving and investment into a habit and keep it up for the rest of your working life.

In no time at all, you will become comfortable living on slightly less than you are spending today. As your income increases, increase the amount that you save. In a few weeks, a few months, a few years, you will be out of debt and have a large amount of money put away and working for you. A few years down the road, you will be financially independent.

Become A Learned Person

If you read 15 minutes each evening, rather than watching television, you will complete about 15 books per year. If you read in the great classics of English literature for 15 minutes each day, in seven years you will have read the 100 greatest books ever written. You will be one of the best-educated and most erudite people of your generation. And you can achieve this just by reading 15 minutes each evening before you go to bed.

Increase Your Income

If you are in sales and you want to increase your income, keep careful track of how many calls, how many presentations, how many proposals and how many sales you are making each day, each week and each month at the present time. Then, set a goal to increase your number of calls, presentations and proposals per day. Set a goal to increase your number of sales each week and each month. Every day, measure yourself against your own standards.

If You Measure It, You Can Manage It

In each area of your life, analyze your activities carefully and select a specific number that, more than anything else, determines your level of success in that area. Then focus all of your attention, all day long, on that specific number. The very act of focused attention will cause you to perform better in that area, both consciously and unconsciously.

If you want to be healthier, you could focus on the number of minutes per week that you exercise, or the number of calories per day that you eat. If you want to be successful financially, you can focus on the amount you earn each hour, or the amount that you save each month. If you want to be successful in sales, you could focus on the number of calls you make each day, or the number of sales, or the size of sales, you make each month. If you want to be successful in your relationships, you can focus on the number of minutes that you spend face to face with the most important people in your life, each day and each week.

You have heard the saying, “What gets measured gets done.” There is another saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Your ability to set specific measures on your goals and then to keep an accurate record and track your performance each day will assure that you achieve your goals exactly when you have decided to, or even before.

Measure Your Progress:

1. Determine a single measure that you can use to grade your progress and success in each area of life. Refer to it daily

2. Determine the most important part of your job as it affects your income, and measure your daily activities in that area.

3. Set a minimum, specific amount for daily, weekly, monthly saving and investment, and discipline yourself to put away those amounts.

4. Break every large goal down into measurable, controllable parts, and then focus on accomplishing each part on a fixed deadline.

5. Make it a game with yourself to set benchmarks, measures, scorecards, targets and deadlines for every goal, and then focus on those numbers and dates. The goals will take care of themselves.

6. Resolve to accomplish at least one specific part of a larger goal each day, and never miss a day.