How long do people stay active towards most of their goals?

We often start strong then start to drift away as a couple of weeks pass on. This isn’t just true for things like new years resolutions, but also business goals.

This is where I’ve found a lot of value in having checkpoints throughout any process or goal that I’m implementing. A deliberate place to stop, evaluate, and make any adjustments needed to move forward.

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Transcript

Adam Liette
What's up smooth operators, welcome to this episode, hope you're having a good mid week. Well, by this time it actually this episode will come out on Saturday. So hope you're having a restful weekend, hopefully getting some time to yourself, and maybe catching up on some of those projects. And here we are, we're at the end of the second week of the year, second week of the quarter as well. And by this time, people are starting to stray, right? We talked about this last time where like working from tactics rather than strategy. Well, we all know what starts to happen this time of year, people start to stray from their goals go, Gosh, this is our This sucks, or something's not working right. Or man, I wish I could just do what I used to do. Okay, so big topic. But a couple of things we can take away from that. And a couple of things we can start implementing, just to check yourself. I mean, it's, it's right there, where we can put things in our lives to encourage that accountability, to encourage that drive forward to keep us moving forward. And to provide a little bit of that motivation to continue down the road that we're on.

So there's a lot of talk does in the industry, like, hey, let's be accountability buddies, blah, blah, blah. If you're anything like me, or most operators, I know like, I'm an extreme introvert, I don't want people in my Cheerios, I don't want people knowing when I'm messing up or when I'm not doing something, I know, I'm going to be more accountable to myself just because that maybe it's the Catholic guilt thing, maybe it's just like the inner drive that I have. But like, I'm going to be the hardest critic of myself, rather than someone else just telling me what to do. That's just me personally, if you need accountability partners, or someone to check you definite, that is an approach that I know a lot of people have a lot of success with. It's just not really my bag of doughnuts, but whatever works for you. Because yeah, just I'd rather catch it myself. So I like to use internal checks to review the progress that I'm making after a couple of weeks. And also looking at St trackers. So trying to maintain a streak. So like just one example, is like I'm doing the whole dry January thing, and probably going to extend it even further the way I'm feeling so far in the year. So in my daily planner, I do keep a daily physical hand planner that I write every day, because there is a definite advantage to putting pen to paper and writing something down.

Like I write the number of days that I've been completely sober. So like in my calendar today, it has Day, the day I'm recording it is day six. So as you see I record a week ahead of time. So this is day six. And I'm going to keep that count running. And every day I want to see that count go higher. So like striking that tracking that streak. That's just why I do it physically. I know there are all sorts of like streak tracking apps you can use to, like I'm not really a fan of that just because there's like really no emotional connection. It's just an app. But if that's your thing, hey man, go for it. I'm not to tell you what to do. I'm just to tell you tactics that I like to employ, again, strategy and employ tactics to serve said strategy just like our last episode. So typically, in addition to that daily thing I'll I'll take as part of my weekly planning, just to check on the progress that I'm making and internal checks to make sure I'm doing the right things to get to where I'm trying to go especially on the broader strategic things like sales, marketing, operations, those kinds of things that can't always be measured on a day to day unless you want to drive yourself absolutely crazy. The main thing you need to be as absolutely realistic. When you're doing these checks when you're looking at your own behavior and how you're working through your life. You need to be absolutely absolutely realistic. There's no need to put on rose colored glasses during your checks on yourself. Be brutal. Be honest, be succinct. That is how you're going to end up winning at the end of the day. This is another reason it's imperative to break down any project you're working on to into stages. So as an example, if we're looking at physical well being and physical strength or like physical fitness, like you can't just go out tomorrow and run a marathon. Right? There's stages along the way. There's different measurements you have to take. There's different goals that you're trying to achieve. Yes, have the big, broad, hairy, audacious goals, but also look at like micro wins that you can gain along the way. It's those micro wins that are going to keep you moving forward and are going to prove as those checkpoints in order to make sure you're achieving the moment and tell them that you need to maintain in order to achieve achieve those goals.

A lot of us can do this on our own. And again, I do encourage doing this in your own life as a way of practicing was one of those personal goals that you have. But let's go a little bit deeper and look at our teams, because most of us are working with multiple people are working on goals and strategies require different people's inputs, that gets a little bit more difficult, because you need to have these kinds of checks together. So this is no longer something that's just on an independent thing. But like actually implementing this into your project management software or into like how you're doing your your weekly or bi weekly meetings with your team is to have these these points, I like to call them decision points. That's just something I inherited from the military way of thinking. But having those decision points. And having those in your plan as a deliberate stop here, let's check to see how we're doing. It can be a very effective way of giving your team even those like intermediate finish lines, where we're able to say we're done with phase one, let's move to phase two, let's move to Phase Three. Like they can see how we're winning along the way. And winning is contagious. getting stuff done is contagious. And there's a certain level of excitement that gets generated amongst a team when we're doing stuff like that.

Because it is cool, it is cool to know you achieve something it is cool to know that you had a goal, you went out you did XY and Z and now you've achieved it. And when you can use those moments, his way of saying Great job, let's keep going. Those internal celebrations, like that's how you're leading. That's how you're using your planning and your strategic objectives and your project management software as a tool to aid in your overall leadership. So here's some things I do, just to prepare myself prepare my team, as a team leader, you know, I let them know straight up front, and hey, man, we're gonna be doing a progress check on Friday, I'll give them a day of the week, I'll put on the calendar, I'll mark the time, here's the date, here's the time, here's what I want to have done by that point. If I can put it in the project management software, I do if not, I don't really worry about that as much more of just knowing that it's going to be done at some point. And it's fully communicated to the team, I think give the team the time to do their own homework. So I make sure they have the appropriate amount of time in order to achieve what they need to without feeling too rushed. If we can help it, sometimes it happens, what are you going to do? But if I know they're going to be rushed, I come out right and say it back, Hey, man, like you gotta get this done, I need you to get this done. And here's how much you have to do. Here's your timeline. So that way they can project forward and they can start organizing their life and their time around that, versus always feeling like they're in a reactive mode, you know, give them agency give them the ability to do that kind of of their own planning. I'd like to encourage my team that 100% Truth is the only answer. You know, if you're not going to achieve a goal, if you're not going to be able to do something, if you ran into a problem, if you know something broke in the implementation systems, that's fine. It's fine. If something happens, I get it like Murphy's Law is a thing. But I need 100% truth. I need to know as soon as you know. And I need to know why. And if it is something completely out of your control, I'm like, Hey, man, I get it. Thank you for telling me. Thank them too. I mean, that's part of being supportive.

During the process. being supportive is not just you know, you know, giving them their tools and be like, Alright, you're supported now, like support is definitely a process. It's something that has, you know, leading and lagging indicators. And people know when they're being supported versus being dictated to versus being told what to do. We all know that person that walks into room issues, their IIDX tells everyone what they want, tells demands what they want, really, and then walks out of the room without giving you a plan to achieve it. Don't be that kind of leader at the tactical level. Instead, cast the vision and then support them along the way. With information with timelines with decision points with guideposts with no real deadlines, not nothing fake, give them real deadlines in order to end up like in order to push to because we know that working from deadlines working from actual endpoints that we can put on a calendar we can put on a map and see visualize feel, they work much better. So if you don't have a team yet, if you're still running solo, no big deal. Have this in your process, though. Like if you're working on a project by yourself, literally put it on the calendar, saying I'm gonna have this project done by this time and here's where I'm gonna do my final checks before I ship it. You'd be amazed how much more likely you are to achieve that project to get things done. On by doing something as simple as putting it on your own calendar

that you're going to get it done. It seems silly, it seems stupid, I promise you it works. I've seen it 100 times. And now you're working from a system, you're working from that process. So when you do bring someone into the picture, they're just going to fold into what you're doing. And so you're not having to reinvent the wheel, you're not having to make things up on the fly. But you've already adopted a mindset of putting checks putting guidepost in putting deadlines in place. So it's going to make it much much easier once you do have other people working with you. So if any of this connected with you, and you feel the need to go check yourself right now, it should be most of you go ahead and do that. Make sure you're on the right path. And if you're not be forgiving of yourself, and move on, work on a plan to get back on track. And keep rolling because we're only in week two, and we got a long way to go this year, but it's going to be a good one if we keep to our strategic objectives. Thanks so much for joining me, please go to Adam liette.com and give us a quick review on iTunes. I genuinely appreciate it. In the meantime, I hope you all have a great rest of your week. If you have any questions please do reach out. And remember operators lead the way.