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The Challenges of High Achievement

September 15, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Five Things to Bear in Mind when It Comes to High Achievers

(click below to view the video or read on if you’d prefer!)

 

happy at workHello and welcome to this ‘back to school’ edition of Career Tips 2014! I hope you have had the chance to relax over the summer months and have returned to your desk "full of beans" as my personal trainer says! During the summer, we took a break from tips to work hard and perform to consider, first, whether you are even reasonably happy at work and, second, how to create for yourself a supportive mental environment in the office so that you maintain a cool composure despite the many and frequent irritations inherent to any workplace.

If you missed the last two months’ articles, you catch them up here.

In this month’s offering, we are going in yet an entirely different direction: I would like to chat with you about high achievers. It is my personal view that high achievers are bit of a unique breed in the office. I workedhigh achiever alongside many of them during my corporate career and many are clients nowadays. I consider that I was myself a high achiever. High achievers are unique in that they demand a lot of themselves but also of others. So this article is designed for those among you who consider yourselves high achievers – so that you may consider easing off a bit and enjoying your work life a tad more possibly – and for managers who have high achievers in their team – to offer some food for thought around how to adjust your style with this type of team member.
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Keys to Maintaining Motivation – for You and your Team

June 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Reflections on Motivation and How we May Lose it

(click below to view the video or read on if you’d prefer!)

Welcome to the sixth edition of Career Tips in 2014. Earlier in the year, we talked about your work goals for 2014, we discussed your blind spots getting things doneand how they can prevent you from making the progress you seek against your professional objectives, we reviewed techniques for working efficiently and finally we explored identifying and therefore being in a position to better play to your strengths. We then took a break and I shared with you a webinar on career transition which I trust was informative. If you missed it, you can catch it up here.

Indeed, achieving goals – in a professional context: performance at work – is about the capacity to keep doing what is required in order to progress and eventually achieve your goals. We have discussed how your blind spots will obstaclesinterfere, just as lacking in personal effectiveness is also likely to slow you down, while being unaware of your strengths will mean more hard work than is strictly necessary. But what we haven’t yet discussed and that which underpins any achievement is motivation. It is therefore time for an article which unpacks the components of motivation and helps us understand how we get demotivated.

The articles on goals, strengths, blind spots, etc. are available here.
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Top 3 Tips to Set Goals which Motivate

January 13, 2014 by Leave a Comment

A Fresh Look at Setting your Team’s Work Objectives

(click below to view the video or read on if you’d prefer!)


In this first offering of 2014, I am returning to the topic of work objectives as many of you are likely to be or soon will be engaged objectivein considering your objectives at work for 2014 and then discussing them with your line manager. For those among you familiar with these Career Tips, you may recall that I have previously written about the subject of setting work goals. You may find some of these articles of interest and they are available by clicking here.

Beyond the well-known techniques to set objectives – such as the SMART acronym – and then to stay on track, achieving goals – whether at work or at home – is all about motivation. The motivation to get started but, even more importantly, to keep moving until the objective is achieved, despite setbacks and obstacles along the way. As such, as self-empowered individuals but alsomotivation as line managers responsible for delivery, we need to identify goals which motivate because those will stand the most chance of being achieved.
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3 Steps to Setting and Achieving your Goals in 2013

January 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A Recipe to Keep your New Year’s Resolutions

(click below to view the video or read on if you’d prefer!)

Hello and a happy and prosperous 2013 to all! For many, January is the month of so-called "resolutions". And yet, I just read that one in four New resolutionsYear’s resolutions are broken in the first week, that is to say 7 days – at most – since they were made. Impressive! That is to say: impressively depressing!

So how can one do better and keep to more New Year’s resolutions in 2013 of course but also for the following years? Here is a small recipe with just three ingredients that will allow you to make the right New Year’s resolutions for you and to stick with them. I have been using it for years so I know it works!

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Stretch to Impress!

September 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

End the Year on a High Note by Delivering on a Stretch Objective!

(click below to view the video or read on if you’d prefer!)

In my last post, I recommended you proactively take stock of where you are at with respect to your work objectives for 2011. Even if you had a midyear performance review, I hope you gave the ‘3 list’ method a go. Not only will it serve you well when the annual performance appraisal process kicks off in a few weeks but being clear today about where you at with respect to your 2011 objectives will make it possible for you to precisely focus your energy for the last 3 months of the year.

If you missed my article on the ‘3 list’ approach to work performance self-assessment, you can see it here.

Now you’re got your three lists, there are two main scenarios:

  1. You’re doing well. In this article, we’ll work on this assumption and look at making use of your restored energy to lift the bar a bit higher and thus end this year with a flourish!
  2. It’s clear that you won’t be meeting all your objectives for 2011. This delicate situation will be the topic of next month’s series so you can still have a decent yearend evaluation.

If you’re doing well with respect to meeting your 2011 objectives, this quarter could simply be about making sure that you steadily complete all outstanding tasks by their due dates. While you should clearly do this at a minimum, it is possible that you may also have the opportunity to raise the bar and exceed your objectives. You could set yourself one or more stretch objective. [Read more…]

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To Achieve your Objectives, Stay Connected, Confident and in Control

February 21, 2011 by 2 Comments

The Secret to Achieving your Objectives is Staying "in the Zone"!

If you practised setting goals the SMARTEY way, I hope you found it helpful in getting clear about your goals, both in your head and in your gut so that you felt energised about starting to work on making your goals happen.

In my experience, the SMARTEY way of setting goals is not just a memorable acronym for a useful process, it is also key to staying motivated to make steady process on your goal and do whatever it takes for however long it takes until you achieve your goals.  

And this is because using the SMARTEY method gets you to a special space of comfort around your objectives from which you can draw strength and motivation until you succeed. I call that place the "zone" and when you are in the "zone", you:

  • stay Connected to your goals,
  • remain Confident about your success and
  • retain Control over your objectives.

Let me illustrate how staying in the "zone" will help you achieve your goals as well as share the pitfalls of not being Connected enough to your goals, not feeling Confident enough to achieve them and not being in Control enough. [Read more…]

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How to Set Yourself Objectives — the SMARTEY Way

February 1, 2011 by 3 Comments

Why you want to set yourself objectives at work using the SMARTEY method

Once you have identified a personal goal or a work objective, it will make all the difference how you actually articulate it so that you are clear about your target and you feel energized to keep working towards it until you finally get there.

I want to show you how setting so-called ‘SMART goals’ can help you do that. There is no official definition of this very famous acronym so this is my reading of it but I hope it will be helpful to you.

  • ‘S’ is for ‘Specific’.

Let me illustrate this with an example: let’s say you set as your goal: "I want to lose weight". Now how what about if you said instead: "I want to lose 10 pounds between by the end of June"? What is the difference between these two sentences?

Simply put, the main difference is that, with the second sentence, you have told yourself what things will have to look like so that you can know that you are losing weight. So being ‘specific’ when setting an objective is about answering the question: "what does my objective look like for me?" and fleshing out what starts off as a vague discomfort (here around the current weight) or a loose aspiration into something tangible and therefore real. In that way, your goal goes from one which is shared by millions to one which belongs only to you.    

When you have a specific target, you are clear about what it is in your mind but you also feel it in your gut. A sense of capability emerges; you feel that you will be able to achieve your goal! This is why I also think that ‘S’ stands for ‘strong’ because when you set a specific goal for yourself, you will most likely feel imbued with the strength to pursue it! [Read more…]

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What Are Your Objectives for 2011?

January 31, 2011 by 1 Comment

Back to basics: what is a goal anyway?

The start of a new year is typically a time when goals are at the forefront of many people’s minds. But January has come and gone so: did you set New Year resolutions? If so, did you make a start? And how about at the office: have you started to work on your objectives for 2011?

In my experience, setting goals is not always easy so, in this post, I want to reflect on what a goal is.

For me, the ‘G’ of ‘goal’ puts me in mind of the ‘G’ in ‘gap’.

In that sense, you can visualise achieving your goal as simply a way of filling a gap between where you are now and where you have identified you want to be.

Or who you are now and who you want to be. Or what you have now and what you want to have.

That gap can usually be expressed as ‘more’ or ‘less’ of something in your life.    

For example, after celebrating the arrival of a New Year, many of us might want to lose a bit of weight. So let’s look at the goal of losing weight and let’s rephrase it as "I want to weigh less" where ‘less’ is the goal to bridge the gap between your current and target weight. [Read more…]

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