Well, the Christmas tree and all the baubles are up, the flashing LED lights are at the window and I feel like I am living in a Santa’s grotto! Perfectly the snow which fell last week in Hertfordshire looks like it will be staying around now until Christmas day. I went out for a lovely long walk in the countryside yesterday finished off by a thaw in front of an open fire and a roast dinner and got to thinking about what the New Year will hold for me and my business. It’s that time of year, isn’t it, looking back at the old and looking forward to the new.
Apart from the usual business planning I do each quarter, a more holistic personal approach to use is the Wheel of Life. Imagine a wheel divided into 8 sections which together represent one way of describing a whole life. The sections are divided Career, Money, Health, Friends and Family, Significant Other/Romance, Personal Growth, Fun and Recreation, Physical Environment.
You can measure your satisfaction in each area on a scale of 1-10 and plot this on the spoke dividing each section of the wheel, 0 being the centre point and 10 the outer edge of the wheel. The ideal, of course, is to have a smooth wheel with each section having the same high 10 score. Overall if some areas have low scores you are in for a bit of a bumpy ride! Low satisfaction scores are of course the areas to work on.
The Wheel can be individualised by considering your own 8 job or career priorities. For example, 8 Management Competencies to consider might be Communication, Results, Managing Change, Strategic Planning, Customer Service, Team Development, Risk Taking and Decision Making.
The next step is to set your Goals and Commitments for each area. Make a list of the 8 areas and against each write one goal and commitment. With goals there is a specific point in time when you will or will not have accomplished it. (We all know about SMART goals). Commitments are different and are an ongoing quality of life shift and will not be measurable. For example, under Health my goal is to complete 3 x 10k races by the end of 2010 and my commitment is that I am committed to a healthful lifestyle and a fit body.
Break this down further by thinking about the daily habits which taken together on a regular basis will be the foundation on which these goals and commitments can be achieved. For example, under the Management Competency “Communication” my daily habit is to go and speak to each of my team members each day (rather than e-mailing them!) and have lunch with them at the canteen once a week. You can track this with a simple monthly tick table where you list each daily habit against each day of the month.
Although quite formulaic, this approach will give you a focus against which you can measure your success – or failure! The bit I find most interesting is the section of the wheel which you consistently fail at. As an NLP Practitioner I believe there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Identifying then exploring the areas which you don’t meet your goals and commitments can often be linked back to strong values and limiting beliefs and the first step in changing these (and yes the good news is they can be changed!) is identifying them and starting to think about them in a different way.
For example, a friend of mine had tried for a long time to lose weight. She identified the value linked to this was that she thought it vital to live life to the full. For her this originally meant saying yes to another glass of wine or slice of cake. Revisiting this value, she found this was not working for her and she decided that in order to live life to the full meant living longer, exercising more and an extra slice of cake would not achieve that!
Best wishes for the holiday season, and a prosperous and healthy new year!
Comments
Post has no comments.