Tom was a twenty-five-year-old high school basketball coach when he got his first chance to coach in college. The team he took over had been historically bad—with twenty-one losing seasons in a row. In Tom’s first week on campus, the football coach came by his office to meet the new guy.
“Do you have any idea what a mess you’re getting yourself into?” he asked.
Tom replied that he did, and set out to prove that the mess could be cleaned up. He was going to use the basics that John Wooden had established with his teams—a focus on fundamentals and conditioning.
Tom put his team members through an intense off-season conditioning program, having them run miles and miles in distance training, and following that up with brutal wind-sprints backward and forward up the big hill on campus.
When it came time to practice at the start of the season, the players were in the best shape of their lives. Tom and his assistant then began the exhausting process of establishing a set of common fundamentals in every player—starting all the way back at the beginning, with how to hold the ball, and graduating to passing and shooting skills.
With constant coaching and review, it took more than a month to establish the necessary work ethic, and another month to get some of the new skills ingrained. The players—and the coaches—were excited to put their improvements to the test under game conditions. But in the first eight games of the season, the team only won one game—even though they had run out to double-digit leads in six of them.
After the seventh loss, Tom was sitting in a dingy little hotel room in the middle of nowhere, replaying every game in his head and trying to figure out the missing piece. In one game, against Central Arkansas (National Basketball Association Hall-of-Famer Scottie Pippen’s alma mater), his team was up 18 points before halftime, only to let the lead slip away in the second half. And Tom had an epiphany: he realized that his players now had the ability, skills, and work ethic to execute, but when they were presented with adversity—the other team making a run—they folded.
So Tom made an adjustment. Every night, after practice, he had each player on the team go through a mental exercise. He asked the players to take one minute to think about one thing they did right during that day’s practice or game.
The positives from that simple act of self-evaluation and self-encouragement grew almost immediately. Over the next fourteen games, the team went 6–8 while they integrated the new routine. Then, over the last six games of the season, they went 5–1. They were beginning to be considered one of the toughest teams in the conference.
The next year, with the same core group of players, the team went 20–5, the basketball program’s first winning season in twenty-three years.
The athletes and business leaders we train in our practice and seminars all have different goals they’re trying to reach and issues they want to learn to deal with, but there are a surprising number of common threads in the conversations we have. And those conversations would almost certainly be familiar to you, too.
Whether you’re a professional athlete, an analyst at a brokerage firm, or an IT manager at the company down the street, you’re trying to work your way from where you are to the next rung on the success ladder. Performance is obviously the main driver, and evaluation is a critical tool. If you don’t have an accurate picture of how you’re doing—and a way to use that information to move you forward—you’re flying blind. Asking yourself what you’re doing well and what you want to improve is the first step of positive growth.
If you don’t have an accurate picture of how you’re doing—and a way to use that information to move you forward—you’re flying blind.
Virtually all of the successful people in any endeavor have the same basic “emerging pattern.” See if this sounds familiar.
When you first achieve some success, you begin to have the expectation that you’ll continue to be successful. If you’re a salesperson and you smash your boss’s goals for year one and get plenty of accolades, you’re almost certainly going into year two with more confidence than you had before and a built-in expectation that you’re going to do even more.
Athletes are the same. When the highly touted recruit comes in and plays right away as a freshman and has success, everybody starts projecting out what will happen in the future. Will he come back and play another year? Will he turn pro? They’re projecting that the player will continue to shine and improve at the same rate, and it becomes a given in the player’s mind as well.
This expectation of improvement is where the seeds of the “perfectionist mentality” are planted. Thoughts of, “Yeah, I did a really good job” are quickly replaced with, “Yeah, but I could always do better.” When you’re on that path of early success, you’re building a constant elevation of perfection into your measurement of success and failure. You tend to write off your success as “I expect that of myself” and focus relentlessly on your shortcomings.
We’re not here to criticize that effort and openness to learning and improvement. What we’re concerned with is the tendency to overlook those things you are already doing well. Evaluation is the genesis of improvement, however if the evaluation isn’t done correctly it will be counterproductive. Unfortunately most people learn to evaluate with the perfectionist mentality.
Evaluation is the genesis of improvement, however if the evaluation isn’t done correctly it will be counterproductive. Unfortunately most people learn to evaluate with the perfectionist mentality.
There’s a big problem with the perfectionist pattern. It works great at the lower levels of achievement, when natural talent and a strong drive will let you fix your mistakes, and when you can make gains relatively easily by outperforming and outworking the competitors in your immediate circle. But what happens as you move into more competitive arenas? When you move from the minor leagues to the big leagues, or from the regional office to the national office?
When the pool gets deeper and there is less separating you from the others in your group, you’re going to have a harder time “winning” as often.
At the lower levels of competition, the perfectionist mentality isn’t as damaging because there are so many external pats on the back available for solid performances. But as the level of competition increases it becomes more difficult to feel good, because those external pats on the back happen much less often.
You see it in the NFL all the time. A player who was able to freestyle and make plays with athleticism and field vision in college gets swallowed up when all the other players on the field are elite, too, and playing within a well-designed system. The level of play is so high that it becomes much harder to stand out.
There just isn’t as much room to win on pure talent or determination anymore, and it becomes natural to experience more failure than you’re used to.
When the level changes like that, the perfectionist method of evaluation becomes completely ineffective and often unhealthy. If your personal sense of measurement and worth is based on wins and losses and always doing better, what do you think happens when you aren’t winning as often?
If you aren’t evaluating yourself in a productive way, the losses and “failures” erode your self-confidence. When you aren’t as confident, you can’t perform as well. This causes you to fail more often—starting a vicious cycle. Let’s be clear: this isn’t the “everybody should get a medal” mentality. Quite the contrary, we are not asking you to feel good about things you haven’t done or achieved. Rather, we want you to learn to simply give credit where it’s due. Most people spend great time and energy focusing on the things they didn’t accomplish while totally overlooking all the things they did accomplish.
If you aren’t evaluating yourself in a productive way, the losses and “failures” erode your self-confidence. When you aren’t as confident, you can’t perform as well and you fail more often—starting a vicious cycle.
The problem resides in the fact that ultimately one cannot control “winning.” By focusing on things you cannot control, you minimize your emphasis on what you can control.
It happens to even the most talented athletes and businesspeople in the world—which means nobody is immune. To beat it, you have to learn the art of performance evaluation. Using the techniques we’re going to be talking about here, you replace those perfectionist tendencies with what we call the “performance mentality.”
Instead of burying yourself in negative thoughts and emotions, you will learn how to make effort and improvement (not perfection) your main priority, which in turn gives you the greatest possible potential for impacting results.
THE PERFORMANCE MENTALITY
One of our hockey clients had come into the NHL as a highly touted prospect, but after three seasons he was still trying to live up to his potential. He certainly wasn’t a bust—he was getting regular playing time on his team and was a solid contributor at the relatively young age of twenty-five—but he hadn’t blossomed into the star everyone thought he would become. He showed flashes of excellence, but he needed to make some changes to become consistently great.
In one meeting, Jason asked the player to tell him one thing he believed he had done well in the previous two weeks. He didn’t answer for a long minute.
Then he said, “I know we’ve talked about this before, but to be honest, I am not proud of myself for anything. I’ve been judging myself on my results. When things start going bad, I get discouraged and it just makes me play worse. And when good things do happen, I don’t end up working as hard—which causes me to make bad decisions off the ice.”
From that point, Jason worked out a plan with him where he would stop listening to what the sports talk radio shows were saying about him, and he would quit looking at his statistics after every game.
He started evaluating himself solely on his effort in that day’s practice or game. He came up with his own scoring system based on how he moved his feet, how he attacked loose pucks, and whether the shots he took were high-quality opportunities. It wasn’t just a matter of filling up the stat sheet in the traditional ways. After each practice, he would grade himself on a scale of 1 to 10 on effort. During games, he’d do the same thing after every shift. Anything less than a 9 was completely unacceptable.
Slowly but surely, he began to be more physical and active on the ice. Something else was changing as well. He was becoming a happier, calmer person off the ice.
Over the next few years, he began to get more and more attention as one of the NHL’s up-and-coming players. And, better yet, he knew that he was in control of that success because he was measuring the right things.
THERE ARE NO SPECIAL PEOPLE . . . ONLY THOSE WHO DESERVE IT
This is another one of those places where we’re going to tell you something right up front that might not be the sexiest solution you’ve ever heard.
There is no magic success pill. Success requires strong and consistent effort, and the act of evaluating yourself on that effort. Most people believe that it takes their best effort on everything, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Highly successful people give tremendous attention to the most important activities daily and then do fairly well with the rest. Remember from the earlier chapters: it’s key to have focused attention on your “3 Most Important” and “1 Must.” It’s definitely a different mindset than most people have, but once you try it, you’ll discover something that will give you all the motivation you need: when you give your best effort to your top priorities, the success that comes to you will be deserved.
That may sound simple, but it’s really very profound. When you define success by your effort, anything is truly achievable. And when you consistently work toward your goals—and honestly evaluate that effort—you will begin to deserve the success that comes. When it does, you will feel a tremendous sense of validation that doesn’t just come when you make your numbers or achieve certain statistics. You will own that success, and it will become a part of your foundation. You will finally have the ability to control the scoreboard. It won’t be something that just happens to you. It will be a part of who you are.
When you define success by your effort, anything is truly achievable. And when you consistently work toward your goals—and honestly evaluate that effort—you deserve the success that comes.
USING THE SUCCESS LOG FOR SELF-EVALUATION
Sure, it all sounds great. But how do you actually do it? How do you build a system of evaluation that not only tells you how you’re doing but actually helps you build on the effort you need to be successful?
It starts with establishing the right kinds of goals.
There’s no question that results are the main driver of almost everything we do or see in modern society. We’re all constantly being evaluated on job performance, earnings, looks—even the type of car we drive. It isn’t a big mystery, then, that most people have developed a very strong focus on “results thinking.” Process goes out the window, and results are all we think about.
But when the focus is only on results, you aren’t necessarily building the actual skills you need to be successful. You aren’t really learning the whys and hows that produce those results, which makes it hard for you to pull yourself out of a slump—and adds pressure you don’t need.
Imagine that a sales agent in the middle of a client meeting begins thinking to herself, “I have to close this deal if I am going to meet my quota.” She wouldn’t have the mental bandwidth to focus on listening to the customer’s needs, addressing his concerns, and selling the features of the most appropriate product.
The same holds true for a batter up at the plate. If he’s in the box thinking about how he needs a hit to get his average over .300, or to kick in one of the performance clauses in his contract, he’s probably going to have the bat on his shoulder as the ball blows by him.
In other words, focusing on results—or the end product—actually makes it harder to produce those results, and makes any results you do produce take longer to achieve.
And that’s the paradox. A focus on results doesn’t produce results. Reformatting your thinking to emphasize the process is the only way to effectively set goals that will actually produce the results you want to see.
What are the differences between product- or results-oriented goals and process-oriented goals? Product or results goals are the ones that can be measured on an income statement or seen in your job title. If you want to earn $1 million in commissions next year, that’s a product or results goal. If you want to become a senior vice president by the second quarter of next year, that’s a product or results goal. Write a novel? Another product goal.
Process goals, on the other hand, are the daily activities that cause the desired results or product goal. These will typically be your “3 Most Important / 1 Must” commitments daily. Using the same analogies, a process goal for a person who wanted to earn a certain level of commissions or a job title would be to make a certain number of contacts with high-net-worth clients per day, or to shadow somebody in the comptroller’s office one day a week to learn some new things. For an aspiring novelist, it would be setting aside two hours per day of quiet time for writing.
There is no magic formula for setting either kind of goal, as long as you follow a couple of core principles.
First, both kinds of goals need to be completely measurable. What does that mean? In the literal sense, they have to be something you can track, not some gauzy judgment call. Whether you made a call or not is concrete. Whether you were happy or not in a given day? Not concrete, and not measurable—at least for the purpose of this tool.
Athletes tend to get measured annually by their wins, their home runs per year, or the prize money they’re awarded. Corporations tend to break goals into quarterly chunks—earnings reports, performance evaluations, and so on. All of those are good examples of measurable results-oriented goals. A measurable process-oriented goal would be, for example, an athlete choosing to spend fifteen minutes per day on film study or a successful CEO spending thirty minutes researching development opportunities in emerging markets.
Second, it is of utmost importance that you choose wisely when it comes to both product and process goals. Product goals need to be realistically high—not so out of sight that you can miss and have a viable excuse for failing (“It was impossible anyway . . . ”). And process goals need to be completely within your control—something you have the ability to do every day.
Setting goals too high and hoping to “get close” is one of the most damaging things you can do to your performance. It gets you in the habit of losing. Set your process goals to a point where you can hit them daily, and you build confidence and your ability to “win” mental commitments in the future. It’s not about what you will do on your best days but, rather, what you will be sure to do even on your worst day.
Setting goals too high and hoping to “get close” is one of the most damaging things you can do to your performance.
The third core principle is where you have to learn to be abnormal. Normal people focus almost completely on product goals. And product goals are fine for spectators or stock pickers. But when you’re talking about your own goals, it is the process goals that need to be on the forefront of your mind and at the top of your priority list each day. You need to be tracking process goals at least weekly, and preferably daily.
The highest performers learn to devote much more focus—85 percent, at least—to process goals, and they evaluate themselves on how they do on that scale. The product goal—making a certain number or getting a certain title—is the destination. The process goal is how you get there.
In 2006, Jason started working with one of the St. Louis Cardinals players during spring training. The player was coming off an especially bad season the year before, and he told Jason that he felt like he played very “tight.”
Jason asked the player what he thought about when he stepped in the batter’s box, and the answer was astounding:
I’m looking at the Jumbotron and I can’t believe what it says I’m hitting—.253 or something. I start thinking to myself that this isn’t going to work—and that’s when it gets in my head. I can actually feel myself start to tighten and press. It’s so hard to stay in control of your emotions and thoughts when you have everybody watching and you’re under the microscope.
Jason helped the player start focusing on his preparation and performance process instead of the external results of each at-bat.
At the end of the season, the Cardinals had clinched a play-off spot, and the player had improved his average more than 30 points. He had been a key member of the team all season. This is what he said during his “exit interview”:
I basically had to say “screw it” when it comes to results. I made a point to judge myself on the process. Every day, I followed my routine. Every cut. Every ground ball. No matter what the result, I made myself emphasize the process, and I held myself accountable for doing the work. I stopped looking at results and forced myself to think “process” was the win. In the end, the results speak for themselves. Focusing on process flat-out works.
Another client came to us after a successful career as a television broadcaster. She was transitioning into financial advising, and she wanted to make sure she was putting strong building blocks in place at the beginning of her career.
One of the first habits we helped her establish was to be relentless in attacking her two main process goals every day—contacting two high-net-worth investors, and completing her Success Log evaluations. (We’ll describe this tool and supply a log form in a few pages.)
Focusing on the process instead of the results you’re getting is a challenging transition for most people to make when they go from a salary job to one that relies on commission for compensation—and our client wasn’t immune to that. Early on, there were nights when she went to bed wondering if she was going to be successful at this new career, and how she was going to pay her bills in the short term.
But she forced herself to control her thoughts, to the point where all she would allow herself to focus on was her process goals for the day and the game plan for tomorrow. Did she nail her process goals? And what was she going to do in order to do it again the next day?
After a year on the job, she came back to see us, and she said that the process orientation habit she learned was like a life vest keeping her from drowning in discouragement. As the years went by, our client kept to the same simple strategy. Over time, some of the process goals changed and grew, depending on where she was in her career, but the intention always stayed the same.
Now, she is one of the top-grossing advisors in her office, and she’s using her process goals for a completely different function. Focusing intensely on the process allows her to “ignore” the great sales results she’s producing and keeps her humble and hungry. She isn’t getting distracted by success; rather, she attacks her process every day to continue her winning ways. She’s on track to become one of the few female million-dollar producers in her firm, and she attributes it to what she calls the secret of success—process orientation.
The people in these two examples were extremely high achievers, and it still felt very strange to them to revise how they prioritized their goals. There’s no question it will feel foreign to you, too. But it’s the proven way to get you to where you want to go. And it all begins with effective evaluation. We have combined a series of evaluation questions into what we call Success Logs to help jump-start consistent improvement. They have been proven to help people win World Series titles, national championships, and Olympic gold medals and to significantly increase business production year over year.
The Success Log provided below will literally train your brain to focus more on your strengths, your effort, and your process. It prompts you to think about your process each day and to set goals for the next day accordingly. Take a look at the log on page 99, and then read on to learn how to use it.
GIVE CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE
As nice as it would be, life isn’t like kindergarten. You don’t get a sticker from a generous teacher for drawing an unrecognizable lump with your crayons on a piece of construction paper. All of us are getting judged every day. It’s a part of life in the business world. It’s something you’re almost certainly doing yourself already, as are your peers, supervisors, and competitors.
But one aspect of that kindergarten star system still works the same way it did when you were five years old: rewards encourage you to keep doing your best. But your kindergarten teacher isn’t around anymore, so you need to learn to recognize your own successes.
SUCCESS LOG
Knowing something does nothing . . . doing something does. . . .
Name: __________________________ Date: ___________
What did I do well in the past 24 hours?
What is one thing I want to improve in the next 24 hours?
What is one thing I can do differently to help make the above-mentioned improvement?
How did I do today with my “3 Most Important / 1 Must”?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Teachers give out stars because it makes children feel good about an accomplishment and motivates them to work toward the next task. One of the biggest problems successful people have when they evaluate themselves is that they focus only on the negative. It’s something known as “problem-centric thinking.” People have an innate tendency to obsess over the things they aren’t doing well instead of giving themselves credit for the things they are doing well. From there, the issue is compounded because of expectancy theory: whatever you focus on expands.
In essence, it is totally normal to focus on how you are screwing up; unfortunately, by doing so, you make it more likely that you will screw up even more in the future.
In essence, it is totally normal to focus on how you are screwing up; unfortunately, by doing so, you make it more likely that you will screw up even more in the future.
Many successful people often leave out the part of the evaluation that recognizes the good things they’ve done. They immediately go to the list of things they aren’t happy about and hammer away at those. Instead, we want you to build an evaluation ritual that takes advantage of expectancy theory by increasing confidence and performance. This is where the Success Log comes in: it forces you to focus on what you have done well, asks you to identify one thing you want to improve, and prompts you to pick one thing you can do to improve in that one area. In addition, it trains you to form the habit of evaluating your effort (on a 1–10 scale) on your most important tasks daily rather than your results. Evaluating yourself through the positive lens builds self-confidence and promotes action. Remember, whatever you focus on expands.
That’s it. It isn’t a laundry list of should-haves and might-haves. The whole process should take you no more than three minutes. Do it during the day—preferably at the same time each day—and it will put you in the best frame of mind to attack the upcoming twenty-four hours. You’re building what we call a “performance mentality.”
Without the log, your self-evaluations can easily go awry. If you’re living in the perfectionist mentality, you might have a tough day at the office, and then sit down to try to analyze what went wrong. There’s a real potential to beat yourself up there. You’ll not only think about the things you did wrong, but question yourself about how you could have possibly made those kinds of mistakes. The problem with that strategy is that it can put you into a downward spiral. Your focus goes to your faults and the mistakes that led to them, instead of being focused on improvements and solutions.
By identifying your “done-wells” for the day with the Success Log, you’re establishing a much more balanced scorecard. Another great way to keep track is to have a scratch pad on your desk and simply make a note each time during the course of the day that you’re happy with something you’ve accomplished.
It can be something substantial, like closing a deal, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. It can be as simple as reminding yourself after a call that you asked for the referral and even though you didn’t get the introduction, “asking is winning.” You want to use enough second-level detail in your description that your Success Log gives you a specific picture of what you did right: reinforcing the positive action will influence your confidence level in the future. “The call went great” is not as useful to know as what specifically went well on the call: “On the call with Roger, I listened well and used a great analogy to help him understand.”
Evaluating what you have done well sets a foundation of mental strength that you will eventually be able to build on. You’re setting the building blocks for mental toughness. Building your foundation of mental toughness is just like building a house. If the foundation is weak, the home will crack at the first sign of adversity. If it’s strong, the house can weather any storm.
Once you’ve identified three “done-wells,” it’s time to pick the one thing you want to improve. Again, you’re going to write this down with that second-level detail. The sentence you write shouldn’t be designed to bring you down, or be overcritical; it should be an affirmative statement of what you want to do. This isn’t about focusing on your screw-ups, but about identifying what you want to do better. For example, you might tell yourself that tomorrow you want to do a better job of making your ten proactive contacts and not stopping until all ten are completed. Then you want to spend a moment identifying what action step you can take to move you in the direction of the desired improvement. The rule might be that you don’t let yourself check emails until all ten contacts are made.
Active and positive statements are much more productive than passive and negative ones.
Active and positive statements are much more productive than passive and negative ones.
The last thing you want to write down in your Success Log for the day is a 1–10 rating on how well you did with your three most important scheduled items. Start forming the habit of evaluating your effort each day toward the completion of your priorities. Your mind will actually become trained to prioritize what is most important.
One of Tom’s favorite stories about the time he spent with his friend and mentor John Wooden is about how Wooden would evaluate his players during a game. It had nothing to do with the eventual score of the game, or the individual statistics any single player put up. Coach Wooden would watch to see how each player made his cuts from position to position on the court as UCLA ran its offense. If the players were making quick, straight-line cuts, they were doing their job. If they got lazy and made more banana-shaped cuts, they weren’t.
“You mean to tell me the greatest coach of all time is watching to see if his players are running banana patterns and doesn’t even care about the score?” Tom asked in disbelief.
Coach Wooden responded that winning was certainly important—and he knew that making sure his players were cutting properly was the best way to control the outcome. The ability to make the disciplined and correct cut time after time is purely a question of effort. Coach Wooden figured that if his players were winning on the effort front, the results would take care of themselves.
They did. Over sixteen seasons, Coach Wooden’s UCLA teams went 620–147. They won ten national championships—including seven in a row—and produced twelve consensus All-Americans. Four of those championship teams had undefeated seasons, and the Bruins won an unprecedented seventy-five games in a row between 1971 and 1973.
TURNING EVALUATION INTO ROUTINE
As you get better and better at the evaluation process, you can adapt it to give yourself a very useful running “dashboard” of how you’re doing in a given day. You’ll be able to perform “mini-evaluations” at regular intervals and be able to take quick action to get yourself back on track if you encounter a problem.
Back when Tom was working as a financial advisor himself, he adapted some of his coaching habits to his new life working at a desk. He built out a daily chart of the calls and tasks he needed to accomplish that was very similar in execution to the practice and game plans he had devised as a basketball coach. On that matrix chart, he included the list of clients he needed to speak to that day along with the topics he needed to address. As he worked his way through the list, he would check off the tasks as they were completed.
But the matrix morphed into much more than a task manager. It became a mini-evaluation instrument. Every time Tom moved from his seat—to get a drink of water, walk down the hall to talk to somebody, anything—he would pause first, look at the chart, and ask himself three quick questions: What have I been doing well? What is one skill I need to improve? What is one thing I can do differently to make the improvement?
Tom would then mark his chart with the improvement goals in the places where he needed it, so that when he got to that step he was primed to do well. Much like Coach Wooden, Tom wasn’t allowing himself to assess success with results—whether or not he made the sale. By evaluating with a performance focus, Tom was forcing his mind to emphasize what he could control—his process and effort—and he was doing it through a positive lens rather than allowing his mind to emphasize mistakes.
When done correctly like this, the evaluation process forces growth. The mere act of effective evaluation causes improvement. The evaluation element blends directly into the action phase, so that the two work as alternate footsteps in the same walking pattern. You’re evaluating, adjusting, and taking action in real time—when you can actually use the information you’re gathering—and you can get back on track quickly if you’re off course.
The mere act of effective evaluation causes improvement.
That’s something that a vast majority of people—even successful people—never accomplish. They’re measuring the wrong output—results instead of effort—or hammering away at the negative instead of reinforcing the positive.
That’s not evaluation. It’s punishment.
They’re measuring the wrong output—results instead of effort—or hammering away at the negative instead of reinforcing the positive. That’s not evaluation. It’s punishment.
One financial advisor told us a story that has become fairly common since we’ve been running our training program. He was doing about $500,000 in business, but he had been stuck at that level of production for several years. After hearing about effort-driven evaluation during one of our talks, he mapped out a plan for himself—along with some evaluation metrics.
His goal for the next year was to achieve $700,000 in gross production, and he decided that the three things he needed to do in a given day to make that happen were to Organize Tomorrow Today (Chapter 1), make twelve proactive client contacts, and complete the Mental Workout (which we’ll get to in the next chapter). The advisor also decided that he was going to stop looking at the commission summary on his screen, and instead judge his success in a given day by how well he did on those three process goals. If he completed them, the day was a win. If he didn’t, it was a loss.
In the midst of all this, the advisor went through a terrible personal tragedy, losing a family member and a close friend in a fire. Reeling, the advisor’s first reaction was to push work to the back burner. But after a few days, he saw the three straightforward process goals as simple, concrete steps he could take in a world that was swirling around him. It gave him a sense of control—and even escape—to apply his focus to something other than the terrible event.
On some days, it was all he could do to push his way through the calls and the Mental Workout, and he would leave for home by noon. But as the days went on, he started to heal. The process goals and the act of evaluating himself on his effort offered some needed day-to-day stability.
Six months later, at the end of the year, the advisor knew that he had been able to gain some consistency in how he approached his work day-to-day, and he knew that he had done well on his own self-imposed metrics. Still, the numbers blew him away. He had doubled his gross production, to just over $1 million. And even more incredibly, he had done it while reducing the amount of stress he felt over work and the number of total hours he put in at the office. The increased success and reduced stress obviously didn’t eliminate the sadness of the loss he experienced in his personal life, but they did help with the healing process.
He was finally in control of his success.
CELEBRATE . . . AND FORGET
When you do successfully evaluate yourself, you will inevitably start to see positive results—and you have to make sure to celebrate those wins. That kind of positive reinforcement helps to change your behavior in the long run.
Think about the most effective ways to discipline a child. You can rule by fear and intimidation, and threaten to punish the child if he or she does something wrong. Or, you can positively reinforce the behavior you want to see, by using rewards and praise. Which kind of process do you think the child is going to embrace and follow happily? And which kind is going to need constant policing, and then fall apart when the policing goes away?
Rewarding and reinforcing the good habits makes for a more lasting change than negativity and punishment—and adults need even more of that positive reinforcement than children do! We all are much more ingrained in our habits—both good and bad—than a five-year-old is, and we have a lot more freedom to make bad choices.
The reinforcement is more than just anecdotal. It’s chemical.
In Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself, he describes the chemical reactions that take place in the brain when you receive a reward for a solid effort. The brain releases acetylcholine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters that sharpen the mental map for performance and significantly increase motivation.1
Rewarding yourself for great effort creates a positive cycle of improved performance. You become smarter about how to make improvements, and you are much more motivated to search for and find those methods of increased success.
We’re not suggesting that you go out and buy yourself a $200 dinner to celebrate nailing your process goals two days in a row. The accomplishment needs to be meaningful, and the celebration should be relative to the size of the win. When you do get that win, recognize it and celebrate. Relax and get your mind off business for a while.
A common example of an effective reward is that you allow yourself to take a half day on Fridays each week that you totally nail your “3 Most Important / 1 Must” lists. One of Tom’s favorite strategies when he reaches a certain milestone is to go “off the grid” for thirty-six hours. He isn’t reachable by cell phone during that time, and he refuses to talk about business. It’s a time to spend with family and friends and decompress from the day-to-day business race.
When you’re able to disconnect for a day or two, you’re fresher when you come back, and you’re ready to pick up the tools again. Come Monday, you’ve “forgotten” your success, and you’re ready to build it all over again. Remember, the equation for lasting success is achieve, celebrate, forget . . .
The Big Why: Self-evaluation is arguably the most effective performance tool you can use—when used correctly. Unfortunately, most people evaluate things they cannot ultimately control, thus causing negativity, discouragement, and a lack of focus on priority activities.
The Inversion Test: The mere act of evaluation, if done properly, causes improvement. Failing to evaluate promotes failure.
Act Now: Take sixty seconds now and write down on paper three things you have done well over the past twenty-four hours. Remember, anything that promotes personal and/or professional health (even one inch of improvement!) qualifies as a “done-well.”
Some examples from our clients:
PRO ATHLETE
3 Done-Wells
1. Spent 15 minutes on FaceTime with wife and kids while on the road.
2. Did a nice job of attacking 50/50 pucks . . . won 2 out of 3.
3. Only drank 2 beers after the game.
FINANCIAL ADVISOR
3 Done-Wells
1. Started the day by calling 2 high-net-worth clients.
2. Asked one of my high-net-worth clients for a referral.
3. Didn’t get the referral, but reminded myself that “asking is winning.”
INSURANCE EXECUTIVE
3 Done-Wells
1. Finished all 3 portfolio reviews.
2. Sent my wife a nice text letting her know I was thinking of her.
3. After an argument with my son, followed up 10 minutes later and apologized for yelling and told him that no matter what, I will always love him more than he will ever know—he smiled when he heard that.