an exercise to help you perform a self assessment.
by bill reeb
everything in my posts is designed to help you become more aware of yourself, more aware of how you both propel and sabotage your own desires and efforts, and how to better harness the power of momentum into progress.
more: aligning what we think with what we do | don’t be someone else’s rug | are you a box or a funnel? | tension impacts performance | your perception will shape your experiences | for cpas: the road to wisdom is paved with failure | being judgmental is self-destructive | 3 ‘letting go’ actions to help you get unstuck | get better, work better, right now | constantly build on the basics | from martial arts to business: 5 steps of evolution | expect and embrace failure anytime you do new work | determining your desires should be an active process | know where you are running to | let go of what you think you know
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these articles are meant to facilitate the building of your self-evaluation and reaction skills to the point that when you determine you are feeling unsuccessful or unhappy about your progress or priorities, you can call upon the process and its techniques at a high level allowing you to alter your desires, plans, tactics, priorities, the way you work and the way you are thinking to quickly resolve your dissatisfaction and find the success and happiness you are attempting to achieve.
but as you work through this process, keep this in mind: regarding some objectives, you will begin to see a pattern of the same issue coming up over and over again in different settings creating dissatisfaction. while a technique might dissolve the frustration in the short term, when you find yourself getting stuck on the same issue repetitively, it is most likely because you have been unwilling to let go of something you think you know.
taking a high-level jog through the process
as you know by now, i believe that the core of whatever dissatisfaction you are struggling with is centered in desire. once you have identified what you want and have created a plan with tactics, realistic timeframes and reasonable expectations, it’s time to go to work. you imagine it, take the incremental steps, put in the effort and then you achieve your objective. much of the time, this is all there is to it. but because many overachiever objectives are complex or ambitious, the process focuses in on the evaluation step because we are notorious for constantly assessing our progress.
as long as we are happy or feeling successful about our progress or priorities, we are good about keeping our heads down and continuing to do good work. however, problems arise anytime we start feeling dissatisfied with where we are. therefore, it is important to watch for and be ready to respond to the early warning signals as they occur, like loss of momentum, diminishing returns or functional disconnect.
by quickly reacting to these signals, you can avoid the negative path of getting stuck by figuring out what to let go of and utilizing the action steps of replanning, reprioritizing and reaffirming to maintain constant momentum toward your goal. and if you want to even further protect yourself from getting stuck, set up routine self-diagnostics at certain designated intervals within an objective to take a close look at how your plan, work and progress are syncing up. doing this preventive maintenance procedure of replanning, reprioritizing or reaffirming before any early warning signals are fired allows you to less emotionally make the necessary alterations to stave off dissatisfaction and sustain your momentum.
once the early warning signals start firing, they will get louder and brighter until they eventually create enough pain (dissatisfaction and frustration regarding your perceived success or happiness) for you to respond to them. at this point, you have two paths to follow to get you back on course. it is time to consider “what you are thinking” and “what you are doing.” by embracing a technique or two from these stages, which are designed to help you determine what to let go of that you think you know, you will find yourself either consciously or subconsciously replanning, reprioritizing or reaffirming in order to regain your momentum.
if your solution is to replan, then you join back into the flow at the desired step to rethink or fine-tune what you want as well as your plan to get there. if reprioritizing or reaffirming is the answer, your updated perspective allows you to jump right back into the try (work)-evaluation loop making progress again.
but as i stated in the discussion of desire, it is critical to understand that when you pinpoint something you want to achieve, unless getting stuck is your objective, you need to embrace the idea that as you move toward your goal, you can expect and should be open to replanning, reprioritizing or reaffirming your desire as part of your normal process to achieve. the moment your plan is static and unchangeable, the second you take on a rigid approach to doing the work, the instant you lock in your current priorities, you will have started down a path to getting stuck.
experiential exercise
based on the fact that you decided to read this, and because you have reached this point, i thought it might be helpful to incorporate a summary exercise for you to work through. by thinking through the sections of the exercise, you will get a detailed look at how the process works and how you can work the process. this exercise is not meant to frustrate or deter you from any goal you want to achieve. and if you start feeling that way as you work through it, you might be experiencing an early warning signal to getting stuck. if this is the case, just consider “what you are thinking” and “what you are doing” to see if that triggers an idea that you should let go of. this should help you return to the exercise to continue working through it.
my exercise starts off by asking you to identify the top five goals you want to accomplish (desires) over the next three years. because the most common frustration point i experience working with overachievers is either an unrealistic timeframe or unreasonable expectations, i devised this exercise to provide you with some additional perspective.
by the way, i regularly use a variation of this format in strategic planning with my clients not only to ensure that their strategies, resources and expectations are in alignment but to verify that their available resources are ample enough to achieve their strategies and expectations. when a disconnect is identified between these three, the action to resolve is always the same: replan, reprioritize or reaffirm.
what are the desires (up to five plans or objectives) you want to accomplish in the next three years?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
for each desire identified, jot down some high-level plans and plan tactics. as well, for each plan tactic, consider the timeframe (how many hours you believe each tactic will require). by the way, consider doubling whatever hours come to mind because it is not uncommon for us (overachievers) to be far too optimistic in this area.
now it is time to summarize the hours for each plan as well as to identify a rough date of completion. fill in the blanks below to give yourself an idea about your current thinking.
next, let’s consider your available capacity. overachievers are often overly optimistic about our available capacity. so, i put together a very simple form to get you to think about how much time you have already committed, which will then give you a better idea about the amount of time available to you to accomplish new objectives. this set of exercises is intended to help you consider personal capacity outside of work, but you can refocus the exercises to identify your work desires, timeframes and expectations and then compare that information against your total uncommitted work hours. so let’s get started.
if you used all of the defaults (which would result to about 1,162 hours available), you ended up with a very conservative number because most overachievers work more than 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. we often don’t take a lot of sick time (but then my default was only 5 days total), and many overachievers struggle to take 2 full weeks of vacation (although they may be entitled to 3, 4 or 5 weeks off). as well, this version of the form doesn’t factor in time to take care of kids, spend with your spouse and spend on other important activities such as religion, volunteer work and so on. this example was meant to get you started thinking about your capacity, but you can create a customized version that works for you.
i also recognize that you can create more capacity by doubling or tripling up the number of objectives met with a single activity. for example, if you exercise with your family, you are spending quality time with your family while taking care of your health needs. if you eat dinner with a client, you are taking care of both work and nourishment activities at the same time. if part of your vacation is spent with both family and clients, you could triple up by building work relationships, spending quality time with family, and enjoying downtime or recreational activities together. as you can see, with a little creativity, you can come up with a number of ways to leverage currently committed time (or create additional capacity).
for me, as well as a lot of overachievers, we pick up some extra time by not always getting enough sleep. different people have different needs when it comes to the right amount of sleep required to wake up refreshed and ready for the day. but whatever that sleep requirement is, as you move from ample sleep to sleep deprivation, you have a very high chance of experiencing consequences in the form of marginal productivity, excessive mistakes, muddled thinking, and other negative outcomes.
when i go through this exercise, after considering my normal work schedule, sleep, working out, five sick days, a typical golf and skiing schedule, morning and evening routines, required ongoing household chores and nourishment, i have only about 850 hours left available to spend with my family, to spend on vacation or to spend in other ways. my 850 hours also assumes wonderful efficiency in everything i am doing with no unplanned events, health issues, family problems or any other chaos consuming my time. as you can imagine, my – as well as anyone’s – uncommitted time calculated here could easily be reduced by several hundred hours in the normal course of just managing life.
now that you have outlined your plans, plan tactics, time requirements and expectations, compare that with your available capacity. if you have plenty of time, then great, you are ready to move on! but if you are like most of us who go through this, you quickly realize you have a disconnect between what you want and what you have time to accomplish. as you are likely experiencing, even at the beginning of this process as we convert our desires into actionable plans, replanning or reprioritizing quickly come into play to reconcile capacity, timeframe, and expectations.
common options available to you are to
- stretch the timeframe to coincide with your availability,
- change the tactics within your plan to better align with your capacity or
- change the priority of your objectives and drop those of lesser priority off your list altogether.
the point is – you have a wonderful opportunity to keep yourself from getting stuck simply by going through this kind of thinking process to determine a realistic timeframe and reasonable expectations from the beginning.
once you have reconciled your time needs and therefore some aspect of your expectations with your available capacity, it is time to start following your plan and doing the work.
doing the work (try): are there some techniques associated with any of the objectives that you want to keep the top of mind that will improve your chances of sustaining your work effort and working better? are there some preset intervals you want to establish to do a preventive maintenance check to look for emerging signs of the early warning signals or consider the actions of replanning, reprioritizing and reaffirming?
at this point, as long as you remain unstuck and continue with forward momentum, you will continue to experience the try (work)-evaluate loop until you achieve your objective. for that reason, you can step away from the form and just “do the work.” however, if you begin feeling dissatisfied in some way (feeling unsuccessful or unhappy about your progress or priorities), reach a preset preventive maintenance analysis point, or encounter any of the early warning signals, it’s time to determine what to let go of so that you can utilize the actions steps of replanning, reprioritizing or reaffirming to avoid getting stuck.
evaluation point (a negative evaluation or at a preset preventive maintenance analysis point): are you experiencing any of the early warning signals (loss of momentum, diminishing returns, functional disconnect)? if you are dissatisfied, what are you feeling unhappy or unsuccessful about?
objective 1:
objective 2:
objective 3:
objective 4:
objective 5:
action step: after considering the various techniques related to “what you are thinking” and “what you are doing,” what bubbled up? did this material help you let go of what you thought you knew, positioning you to replan, reprioritize or reaffirm your desire? if replanning, how did this impact your plan, tactic, timeframe or expectation? if reprioritizing, how did it impact priority? if reaffirming, what are you going to do to disconnect the emotional link between your plan and your performance?
objective # (jot down your thoughts regarding whichever of the following applies):
change in tactics:
change in plan anticipated hours:
change in plan expectations:
change in priority:
change in emotional link:
the changes in your thinking or doing with regard to your progress or priorities will determine which form in this summary exercise to cycle back to and rework. if you have decided to replan, then you would cycle back to the beginning of this exercise to the first form, or you might skip to the plan tactics or plan expectations. if you have reconciled your source of dissatisfaction by reprioritizing or reaffirming, then sliding back up to the form under “doing the work (try)” will land you where you need to go.