Leverage Your Biggest Winning Behaviors

You may have heard of the Pareto Principle, or better known as the “80/20” Rule.

The rule goes like this:  80 percent of your performance gains will come from 20 percent of your growth efforts.  A typical pattern will show that 80 percent of outputs result from 20 percent of inputs; that 80 percent of consequences flow from 20 percent of causes; or that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of effort.

A few targeted efforts, aimed at a few particular goals, result in making the major contribution to our personal growth.  A few critical behaviors will account for most of your rapid growth towards your goals.

Just think how much you can accelerate your growth by allocating your personal resources more carefully.  Spend your time, energy, and attention in the high- payoff areas and you could easily double or triple your personal development.

The few things that work incredibly well should be identified, cultivated, nurtured and multiplied.  At the same time, the ‘waste’—the majority of things that will always prove to be of low value—should be abandoned or severely cut back.

If you’re looking for maximum rewards and maximum personal or career growth, don’t make the mistake of seeking balance in your workday routine.  Instead relay heavily on leveraging the biggest winning behaviors that will accelerate your growth and maximum output.

Be Gutsy in How You Begin Your Development

Start your growth program in a bold way.  Courageous acts.  Your starting point should be strong enough to overcome resistance, give you instant momentum and create excitement inside.

Audacious action energizes a person.  It’s like the initial power that a rocket needs to clear the launch pad.  Gutsy moves will power you forward, enabling you to escape the gravity field that pulls you back toward your same old daily patterns.

New habits are not easy to come by and old habits are even tougher to break.  You need to start by hitting hard and fracturing your routines altogether.  Shatter the status quo in how you’ve been growing and developing as a person.

Starting boldly in the way you begin means you’ll have to invest more of yourself.  You’ll be gambling a bigger amount from the very outset.  And that’s a good thing!  That goes a long way toward keeping yourself in the game.  A person is less likely to call it quits if it means leaving a lot on the table.  Do you have it in you???

If you start boldly enough you’re essentially throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool.  You have to stick it out and swim your way to the top or a shallower end of the pool, basically to survive.   What this amounts to is placing yourself in a position where you’re more or less “Forced To Grow”.  When you begin with bold, courageous acts you have to Rise to the Occasion

The way you begin says a lot about how you’ll finish. 

Bold growth shouldn’t start slow.

“Stretch Out” When You Hit Resistance

When you push yourself to grow in a hurry, you hit yourself where it hurts: right smack in your habits.  You start to interfere with familiar routines.  You disturb the comfortable patterns you’ve established in the way you live your life.  Before long, something deep inside starts pushing back.

These are the moments of truth.  You’re about to find out how much you REALLY want fast growth and change.

The biggest challenge to overcome will be your negative reactions—your own resistance to change. Human nature—being what it is—states that a part of you will fight hard to keep the ‘current you’ exactly the way you are.

An exercise to practice when you feel this resistance is to get to know (gain an understanding) of the enemy within.  Understand how resistance operates.   What triggers, specifically, cause this resistance to occur? Expect that it will attack, and learn how to conquer it.  Otherwise, your growth efforts are likely to fizzle out far short of what you hope for as resistance overcomes your ambitions.

Resistance is a great con artist.  It tries to make you believe that sticking with your growth plans will be too painful.  Too difficult, or not worth the struggle.  It wants to manipulate you into selling your future for a small amount of immediate comfort.  But just like stretching out prior to exercise and continuing your exercise plan helps you work out the potential muscle soreness, staying with your fast growth program will push you past the resistance.

Remember this very important point:    RESISTANCE GROWS STRONGER WITH ANY EVIDENCE OF WEAKENING RESOLVE, BUT IT YIELDS TO ANY RENEWED EFFORT. 

Resistance is your mind (and body's) method of telling you that something unusual and different is going on--Don't misinterpret this message.  It is simply a signal that you're at the edge of GROWTH.

The best thing you can do to conquer the enemy within is to meet it—head-on.   Stretch yourself a little more and push for faster growth and change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LEARN ON THE FLY

  Growth doesn’t get started until YOU do…You must move….take action…mobilize yourself.

It may sound easy enough on the surface.  But people get ‘paralyzed’ by planning.  They freeze up by just getting ‘prepared’ to grow.  This occurs because we want to figure out the answer BEFORE we begin working on the problem.   We like to do our learning First, then put it into action.

Faster career growth calls for a more freewheeling approach.  It calls for learning AS you go, not BEFORE you go. 

Getting ‘ready’ often gives a person the feeling of progress, but it’s usually a delaying tactic that gets in the way of growth.   Getting “growing” is what puts you further down the road.    All you really need is the willingness to move.

If you want to see how this works, just plop a kid down in front of a computer—or behind the wheel of a car.  The young child has little patience for ‘learning’ before getting started.   Kids just want to ‘go for it’.  They use an action-based strategy of learning as they go.  And that enables them to master the machine much quicker than most adults who are also starting from scratch. 

Active pursuit of your personal development goals provides a steady stream of feedback.  Actually doing things---trying out different approaches—gives you hard data on what works and what doesn’t.  Mobility is the secret.  Constant movement keeps you supplied with fresh answers.  Forward motion feeds you new insights.

Of course-- allowing yourself to learn on the fly carries a price: You must also become more willing to make mistakes.  More trials mean you can expect more errors.  Going forward before you have everything figured out generates a potentially higher failure rate.

But here’s the payoff—it’s in the Learning Curve.   Forward motion offers the fastest education you can find!

Benchmark Yourself

How rapidly would your results improve if, starting today, you did what the highest performers do?

You can take a lot of the mystery out of personal growth simply by studying people who are great examples.  Find people that you would call “best in class”.  Carefully observe their behavior—watch what they do, how they go about their roles, and the fine points of their approach.  Then once you’ve sorted out how they do things differently from you, start copying their techniques.

Sounds straightforward?

It is a more direct way to go about building a better ‘you’.   But most people fail to do it in a deliberate, disciplined fashion.  Instead of analyzing the most successful individuals and adopting their moves, we grind along trying to get better at our own way of doing things.

Fast growth comes much easier when we rely on our role models to guide our actions.  Their methods can serve as a shortcut.  They offer visible proof of what’s possible and how to pull it off.

Why don’t we use this benchmarking exercise more often?

Maybe it’s because we believe the top performers are just blessed with more potential then we personally have to work with.  But those who set the standards—the high achievers—aren’t necessarily the brightest or the ones with pure talent.  Sometimes they’ve just developed a better formula—they do things differently, and it delivers much better results.  Sure having brainpower helps, and an innate ability gives an individual an advantage, however, we’ve all seen talented people outperformed by others who actually have less potential.

Begin practicing the moves of those you admire most and see what happens.  Keep analyzing how they operate.   Continue comparing it to the way you go about doing things.  If their performance really does represent “best practices”, it’s probably the result of several factors, including attitude, work habits as well as basic skills.  Watch their subtleties and weave them into your personal style.

Benchmarking is based upon imitating the best, but it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your individuality.  You’ll still have plenty of room for your own personality to show.  It will just shine through more powerfully than ever.