(A simple structure to achieve maximum personal success)
We all want to be successful. Especially at a personal level. Many of us go into a life-long battle to achieve success at different levels. However we are often so overwhelmed by all the routine tasks and jobs we have to do, so overloaded by the pressure of time and succeeding at family and work, we forget to focus on ourselves and our own personal success.
This article puts forward a structured and systematic approach to achieve the highest possible personal success.
One of the biggest challenges we face in the day to day overload is remembering where we need to focus on, to achieve more success for ourselves.
A.C.H.I.E.V.E in PeopleAchieve stands for the 7 intangible balance-sheet areas that all companies have to focus on to add tremendous value to the company.
We can also use a mildly adapted variation to focus on our own personal success:
Attitude and Values
Do I have the right attitude and internal values?
Competencies and Skills
Do I have the right competencies and skills to achieve my personal vision?
Highest Reputation and Trust
Have I built up the right (professional) reputation and how much trust do I inspire?
Innovative Knowledge
Am I constantly learning new things and growing my knowledge?
Effective Relationships
Do I succeed in my relationships and achieve the most effective results?
Vision & Communication
Do I have a clear personal vision and do I communicate this to all my supporting team of family, friends and colleagues?
Enhanced Personal Processes and System
Do I have good habits, organisational skills and personal systems to achieve the maximum results?
Let us have a look at an introduction to each of these areas:
Attitude and Values
This is the basis of all human endeavors. If you don’t start out with the right attitude then it will be very easy to throw you off track.
We try many things in life and in some of them we don’t succeed. It’s not the fact that we don’t succeed that matters, its how we recover from that failure.
As an employer the critical attribute I look for is the right attitude. Almost everything else we can give to someone, who is willing to try.
High self-esteem, Belief in my self and a positive healthy self-image is probably one of the most important critical success factors in life.
My successful behaviour is often the result of deeply held values and beliefs.
Also what distinguishes people is how willing they are to learn from feedback and the mistakes they make. To do that they first have to feel good about themselves. What do you think of yourself?
What are your personal beliefs and values? Do they help or hinder you? There are some areas where if you developed your beliefs they would help you succeed more?
Competencies and Skills
Once you have the right attitude, you need to develop your competencies and skills to a level that are better than others if you want to succeed in a competitive world.
Whether we like it or not, the western business world (and increasingly the east) selects the best at something. The best company, the best products, the best proposals, the best people.
Individuals who invest in themselves and develop their skills from simple things like good P.C. skills to more difficult challenges like good Leadership, Management and Communications skills will inevitably succeed more. Yes some people are born naturally gifted, but I have seen many individuals with the right will and desire to pull themselves up, learn and tremendously develop.
What is your personal skills development strategy?
Innovative Knowledge
We can only personally grow if we constantly challenge ourselves to learn new and relevant things.
One of the concepts that I particularly like is that at any given time we can be working in one of these zones:
Comfort Zone – Where we are relaxed and comfortable but we don’t force our selves to do anything new
Stretch Zone – Where we motivate and inspire ourselves to reach out and constantly try new ideas
Panic Zone – Where we go too far and are out of control, under stress and as a result make many mistakes.
Obviously we need to balance ourselves and aim to be as much as possible in the Stretch Zone.
Only by constantly growing our knowledge can we stay ahead. It also makes for exciting, challenging and rich life experiences!
How do you stretch yourself every day?
Effective Relationships
Have you ever heard a teenager say “ All that matters is my friends” I have heard it often from my family. Perhaps, but more so, it is what support you give them and they in return support you. How effective are you in your relationships?
Social needs dictate that we live in a society - We are social animals that have many personal needs, that are met by living with other people. Depending on our character (e.g. extrovert, introvert) we have greater or lesser needs to spend time with our loved ones friends and relatives.
In business ‘Power is the ability to Influence’ so our network of contacts will often determine our success. A strategy that is often followed by ambitious people is a very focused, deliberate network building social life, that increases your influence in businesses and society in general.
How successful do you want to be?
What is your relationship strategy?
Vision and Communication
Everything starts from goals. A Vision is a long-term goal. A personal vision is having a very clear picture of what you want, where you are going and when you will get there.
(Probably the most value I have given to people in my life-time is to have inspired them to set goals!)
The more clarity about your personal vision, the more you can see, feel, touch, visualize where you are going, the more likely you will get there. (After all vision means to see!)
Many people ‘forget’ to set goals. You can be sure that if you don’t know where you are going then you will end up wherever the day, the week, the month, the year will take you. It is like getting in a car to drive the journey of life without having a clear destination and time-frame. Without goals there is no measure of success. We need goals in a wide variety of non-traditional areas (e.g. health, happiness, family, where to spend our time, etc).
Once we have set those goals then we need to communicate them to everybody whose support we need, to achieve them!
Do you have a clear Vision for yourself in every critical success area of your life? Have you communicated them (first to yourself) and then to others?
Enhanced Personal Processes and Systems
Finally, can I take all these areas of success and implement them. Without implementation everything is just words and ideas. It is the execution and implementation that counts. From a scale of 0-10, 1 is the idea, the theory, 10 is the 100% execution.
We need to enhance and develop our personal organizational skills and habits to maximise the chances of successful implementation.
Often many of us know the ideas and theories. However it is the percentage of these we build into part of our everyday working practices, that brings success.
Have you enhanced your personal processes and systems to maximise your full potential?
I have introduced the concepts behind A.C.H.I.E.V.E.
These have been designed to give you a complete frame-work for personal success.
In the following seven newsletters I will take each in turn and analyze in a lot more details, the specific tools and techniques, on how to be more successful at your personal chosen field.
(Please subscribe if you wish to make sure you do not miss an electronic issue).
