personal excellence essentials presented by HR.com | 12.20133

Personal Excellence Essentials is published monthly by HR.com,124 Wellington Street EastAurora, OntarioCanada L4G 1J1.

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Vol.18 Issue. 12$9.99 a month

The current moment—the eternal now—is all you have. The future is created now; your dreams are achieved in the moment. Results are not the attainment of greatness, but confirmation of it. There’s a long list of things you know would improve your life, health, or career. Whether you do them is the difference between a life of greatness and one of mediocrity. Knowledge alone isn’t power: you need to stop gathering info, weighing the evidence, chasing new ideas—and just execute!

Changing the way you think about time can help you close the knowing-doing gap and start meeting your potential. You already know the Big Important Thing you want to do (and desperately need to do)? Perhaps it’s changing careers, or writing a book, or saving for retirement, or building the dream home you’ve talked about for years. Ever wondered why you can’t seem to just get it done?

People say knowledge is power, but execution is power. Despite our $60 billion diet and fitness in-dustry, two out of three people are overweight or obese. Most people know how to get in shape—eat better, exercise more—they just don’t do it.

You can be smart and have access to information and great ideas; you can be well connected, work hard, and have lots of natural talent, but in the end, you have to execute. Execution is the single greatest differentiator between great lives and mediocre ones.

You could double or triple your income just by consistently applying what you already know. Yet, you likely continue to chase new ideas—thinking the next one is the one that will magically make it all come together—when what you really need to do is apply the Nike slogan (just do it) to our lives.

So why don’t you just do it? You’re dropping the “execution ball” for the same reason companies can’t meet their goals: You’re thinking about time in the wrong way. You tend to think you have all the time in the world. Let’s say you have a baby and you have all these vague notions about saving for college. Well, before you know it, he’s 12 years old, and you don’t have a penny saved. You don’t do what doesn’t seem urgent.

The solution? Plan your goals in 12 week increments. When you do so, you’re far more likely to feel a healthy sense of urgency that gets you focused. And whether your goal is for business or per-sonal reasons, you’ll get far more done in far less time—and you’ll feel less stress and more in control. Here are nine tips on how you can better tackle life’s big to-dos.

1. Envision a future that’s worth the pain of change. You have to sacrifice comfort to execute your plans. So, you must create a compelling vision of the future that you want even more than you desire your own short-term comfort. Then can you align your short-term goals and plans with that long-term vision. To create a compelling vision, ask, What if? This allows you to entertain new possibilities and connect with the benefits. To create a breakthrough, you need to move through fear, uncertainty, and discomfort. Your personal vision keeps you in the game when things become difficult. Stay in touch with your vision by reviewing it each morning and updating it every time you discover ways to make it more vivid and meaningful to you. And share it with others to increase your commitment to it.

2. Live with intentional imbalance. Life balance is less about spending equal time in each area and more about intentional imbalance—being purposeful about how and where you spend your time, energy, and effort. At different times, you will choose to focus on one area over another, and that’s fine, provided it’s intentional. Life has different seasons, each with its own challenges and blessings. The 12 Week Year helps you live a life of intentional imbalance—every 12 weeks you focus on a few key areas in your life and make improvement.

3. Be committed, not merely interested. Kept commitments benefit both parties involved by im-proving relationships, strengthening integrity, and building confidence. Commitments are powerful and, often, life changing. When you’re merely interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit, but when you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results. You must be all in when you approach the commitments you make as part of your 12 week plans.

4. Put hard (and short) deadlines on what you need to get done. An annual execution cycle lulls you into believing that you can put off critical activity and still achieve your goals. Annual goals don’t spur you into action until a deadline you have to meet draws closer. But this urgency exists for just a few weeks. When you set deadlines for every 12 weeks, that excitement, energy, and focus happen all year long. Deadlines are near enough that you never lose sight of them. You have a time

Close the knowing-doing gap. By Brian Moran

The Eternal Now

horizon long enough to get things done, yet short enough to create a sense of urgency and a bias for action.

5. Write your plan. A plan in your head isn’t really a plan—it is wishful thinking. If you don’t have a written plan, you’ll soon drop the ball. The world is noisy—the unexpected happens, distractions arise, your desire for comfort tugs at you, and you lose focus on the things you know you should do. But if you write your strategy at the start of your 12 weeks, you think through potential pitfalls up front. With a written plan, you make your mistakes on paper, which reduces miscues during implementation. You no longer waste time on unimportant activities—your plan triggers your actions. Your action choices are made proactively, you get more of the right things done each day, and you reach your goals faster and with greater impact.

6. Give each goal its own set of tactics. Your plan should start by identifying your goals for the 12 weeks. Then, determine the tactics needed to meet each goal. Break your 12 week goal down to its parts. For example, if your 12 week goal is to earn $10,000 and lose 10 pounds, write tactics for your income goal and your weight loss goal separately. Tactics are the daily to-dos for attaining your goals. Tactics must be specific, actionable, and include due dates and assigned re-sponsibilities. The 12 week plan is structured so that if the tactics are completed on a timely basis the goals are achieved.

7. Take it one week at a time. To guide you toward meeting your goals, you’ll need weekly plans that encompass your strategies and priorities, your long-term and short-term tasks, and your commit-ments in the context of time. It helps you focus on the elements that

must happen each week to keep you on track to meet your goals and achieve your vision. Everything is powerfully aligned. Start each day with your weekly plan. Check in with it several times during the day. If you schedule a tactic to be completed that day, don’t go home until it is done. This ensures that vital tasks, your tactics, are completed each week.

8. Keep track of your efforts, not your results. Measurement drives execution. You need to know your numbers. But don’t measure your results (pounds lost)—instead, measure your execution (the extent to which you stick to your diet and exercise plan). You have greater control over your actions than your results, and your results are created by your actions. To measure your execution, you need to know to what degree you follow through on each week’s tactics. This allows you to pinpoint breakdowns and respond quickly. Unlike results, which can months or years behind your actions, an execution measure provides more immediate feedback, enabling you to make game-time adjustments much faster.9. Block your time. You gain control of your day through time blocking—blocking your days into strategic blocks, buffer blocks, and breakout blocks. A strategic block is uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. During this block you accept no phone calls, no faxes, no emails, no visitors, no anything: You do only the activities on your plan. Buffer blocks are designed to deal with all of the unplanned and low-value activities—like most email and voice-mail—that arise throughout a typical day. Breakout blocks provide free time for you to use to rest and rejuvenate.         In your efforts to not miss anything, you may be missing every-thing. Nothing gets your full attention—not the important projects, conversations, or people. The 12 Week Year provides a structure that helps you do the things you need to do to be great. PE

4personal excellence essentials presented by HR.com | 12.2013

The Eternal Now

Video

Read Brian’s blog article “A Little Extra”

“Inspired Mind,” Wayne Dyer, October 2007

Brian P. Moran is founder/CEO and Michael Lennington is VP of The Execution Company, committed to improving the performance and enhanc-ing the quality of people. They are coauthors of the NYT bestseller The 12 Week Year (Wiley). visit www.12weekyear.com.

Positive Transformation

By Chris Majer

These 10 obstacles tend to prevent it.

How can you spur real, positive change in your life and overcome the obstacles that prevent positive transformation?

Complacency kills! While cliché, this adage could not be more true for modern day businesses and those who lead them. Stagnation and status quo are veritable death knells for companies and career achievement-minded individuals seeking a dramatic, measurable increase in performance and profits. With this in mind, I reveal strategies corporate, military, and sports leaders have successfully employed to achieve greatness.

If you have reached a plateau in your personal or professional lives, and are seeking ways to affect real change, you can benefit from my easy-to-use practices that produce a positive transformation. Learn

how to conquer the most daunting challenges, make powerful choices, and maintain calm and composure amid chaotic situations.

You can’t transform your life until you transform your mindset. You have to continually learn and adapt new ways of functioning in today’s ever-changing world and tumultuous marketplace in order to achieve your ambitions, whether personal or professional. But, while continual learning is the only way onward and upward, there are several barriers that prevent the efficient and effective assimilation of new knowledge—the enemies of learning. Only when these obstacles are identified, addressed and rectified is true learning possible, which fosters that elusive, coveted forward momentum in kind.

True learning comes from training the body through doing, not idly reading and thinking you will absorb knowledge if you do not put it into action. Words can shape our mental reality and the importance of understanding the difference between real truth and declarations, assertions, assessments, requests, promises, and offers. No matter what the circumstance that you find yourself in, you always have a choice in how you react to it and what you do. You need

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