Getting confusing signals?
Time to rest from labours or prepare for the New Year?
Is this tug-o-war threatening to steal your joy?
Both are compelling options. Here is a bullet-point review.
Winding Down
- Remove the feeling of guilt from stepping back. Batteries need to be recharged.
- Treat winding down as a chance for objective introspection away from the normal day-to-day pressures. Take time to take stock.
- Grasp this opportunity for a calm check-up on your entire being. This could include a comprehensive medical examination.
- Use the winding down period as a time to fix and tidy up things. Take care of neglected relationships, correspondence, and other commitments.
- Fact-finding: This is an ideal time for organizations to gather information. A turn-key, logistically-friendly Employee Satisfaction survey could fit neatly in this time of year.
Gearing Up
- Gearing Up might give you the edge over others. Do not under-estimate its value.
- View Gearing Up now as protection against potential hassles next year.
- Success chain: Reflection >> Identification >> Corrective Action >> Implementation >> Completion
- Gap Analysis: Plan to go into the New Year better equipped than this year. Take a serious look at areas that could make a difference if you were better at them. Choose one area that will have the greatest impact and can be achieved given available time and resources. Be willing to stretch your resources and carve out additional time.
If the New Year is to be extraordinary you need to go beyond the ordinary.
- Goal Setting: Gearing Up must include clear goals for the New Year.
- Temper being overly optimistic by reflecting on some of the realities you experienced this year.
- Avoid New Year’s Resolutions and hyped up budgets that are never achieved.
- Avoid the “add 10% to last year” mentality. The goal-setting should really start from zero …with a clean sheet. Given what we have, what we know and what we can leverage, what milestones should we achieve next year?
- Use the Gearing Up process to entertain Day Dreaming or Magic Wand thoughts.
- “What if…” the obstacles were removed? “What if..” some windfall became available? This will broaden your vision of the future and prompt you to devise strategies to remove obstacles and access unexpected resources.
- Load Shedding: Get ready for the road. Lighten your load.
- Throw out physical junk. Do Spring-cleaning.
- Mind-set adjustment. Critically, the load shedding must address what’s going on in your mind.
- Get rid of mental junk.
- Banish malice and unforgiveness. Forgive so that you can live! Give up strife to get a life.
- Rise above negative thoughts. Don’t underestimate what you can achieve.
- Avoid envy and jealousy. Recognize that we really do not own anything or anyone. In the overall scheme of things, we and the things we crave are like grass that is green today but soon withers away.
- Manager anger. Get coaching if necessary. Your thoughts and your actions are YOURS – Own them and Control them.
- Accountability: Much of your planning and commitments will come to nought if you do not build in accountability. Think Milestones and Progress Police.
- Breakdown projects into mini-steps and milestones.
- Add identifiable goals for each mini-step and objective ways of verifying their completion.
- Link steps to the vision of the future you are working to create.
- Assign priority ratings to each step.
- Identify Progress Police in the form of people or authorities that you respect and who will hold you accountable for staying on track.
Call to Action:
- Conduct a customized Employee Satisfaction Survey or 360 Performance Appraisal Assessments. The process is swift, logistically-friendly and cost-effective. Listen to the voices that matter most at a surprisingly low cost. Request a no cost online consultation to see of this is a good fit for your business [email protected]
