May I almost certainly not be the first person to wish you a very Happy New Year! I’ve lost count of the kind wishes I have received since the New Year began and thank you to every one of you who messaged me between midnight on 31st December, and in the days and weeks since. I’ve also received a steady stream of motivational emails and articles all encouraging me to grasp the opportunity that the New Year offers, the chance to stop doing something, to start doing something, to do more of something else, or to do another thing differently.
What will I be trying anew this year?
I find using the Start, Stop, Do More and Do Differently approach (also used as a PIG, Performance Improvement Grid in management development training) to be a good way to focus my thoughts and to pinpoint four things that are important. Why four? Well, it is easy to get overloaded when thinking about everything that you want to achieve at the start of a year; I’ve found that limiting my thoughts to just four positive performance improvement changes is actually very effective for focusing the mind and concentrating on what is most important.
Here are my four most important Performance Improvements for 2016:
- START packaging my services more. I tried something new in December and created five festive offers at a promotional price and told everyone about these offers via my mailing list. In fact, these were services that I have been able to offer for a long time, but packaging them up, specifying a price and listing what’s included had a profound effect on my customer base & I achieved instant sales, bookings into January and have gained new clients.
- STOP fiddling around on social media. The thing is, I know when I am wasting time and sometimes I just don’t stop it quickly enough. There are days when I am disciplined enough to allocated time to manage my social media activity, and then there are those other days…when I am in and out of my profiles, checking my feed, responding to comments and queries instantly and generally being reactive. Enough is enough, time to STOP.
- DO MORE scheduling and planning so that I can blog, write articles and create great content. My diary can get completely snarled up as I fall into the trap of feeling that I am somehow providing a better service by overbooking myself, not allowing enough prep and follow up time, completely forgetting to build in ‘slack’ and allowing myself to have time off. Since when was that good business sense?
- DO DIFFERENTLY… For this one it is less about work and more personal. I need to eat differently in order to meet the needs of my body and lifestyle. I often don’t think about ‘need’ when I eat…it is more about ‘want’. I’ve tried very many diets and actually love exercise so that generally isn’t the issue. The different behaviour that I plan to practice in 2016 is to be more conscious about how I am eating, to eat when I am hungry, to eat slowly and only when I need to. Not just when I want to.
What are your 4 most important Performance Improvements for this year? What will you START doing, STOP doing, DO MORE and DO DIFFERENTLY?