Sunday Night Success

If you take a look in the upper right corner of the SNS homepage you will see a brand new sign up form for the Sunday Night Success newsletter. Like the new “Weekly Environment” posts on Tuesdays this newsletter is another experiment to see what happens.

At the moment the sign up form breaks one of the most common internet newsletter rules: I am not offering anything free with the newsletter….yet. At the moment it was most important that I get the sign up form live on the blog. I have what I think is an important and valuable freebie that will come with the newsletter I just haven’t quite figured out the technicalities of setting up the distribution of that freebie.

Freebie or not I hope you will sign up for the SNS newsletter and join me on this new experimental journey. Then, when the freebie is actually available you will be twice as happy!

What to expect from the newsletter

The newsletter is set up to provide a brand new environment for my, and hopefully your creative environment. I am working on writing a book that brings together some of my new ideas about success that I have learned over the past year through my own self-improvement work and my work with coaching clients.

These ideas are raw at the moment, and need to be developed. You can check out the very start of one of the ideas in my post on personal geography. My hope is that you will work with me, by sharing your comments and ideas about the newsletter, and help me write the book one idea at a time.

What other benefits?

Even if you are not interesting in helping develop and clarify the ideas everything I write in the newsletter is helpful in how you operate in your daily life. These are the ideas that I use with my clients and in my own life to be successful. Not all of these ideas will end up on the SNS blog so the newsletter gives you a unique look at some really interesting ways to help yourself move forward and be successful with whatever you are working on right now.

Or, you read a few issues and decide I am a lunatic and it is all pointless. Really, no harm done, and you would get the chance to peek inside the head of a madman.

Will you be selling stuff?

The answer is yes, but only at the very bottom of the newsletter after all of the non-selling information has been provided. If reading offers in a newsletter bothers you, it won’t be a huge problem, you can just stop reading before you get to the bottom. If I ever decide to change this policy (and this is an experiment, it may evolve) I will give warning so you can jump ship.

My number one purpose is to develop my ideas and provide value to you with my thoughts and writing. I would also love to have some of you join me in coaching relationships so we can start moving your ideas out of your head and into reality. For those of you who decide to take me up on the offers I look forward to working with you.

So, I hope you will enter your information below. It should be an interesting time that we spend together.

“To reach our goal a straight path we will not follow.” Yoda

There is a vast amount of information written, and being written on the concept of setting and achieving your goals; Sunday Night Success being one of the contributors. Interestingly, within the first few weeks of 2010 I have already fallen behind on, delayed, or completely changed a couple of the goals I set for myself.

Why?

Opportunity came knocking.

The destination or the journey

Goals are your destination: they are the bigger idea that you are working towards. Losing 25 pounds, making $50000, publishing a book, going to Mexico, switching jobs. You set your goal as something you will try to achieve, and, once you achieve it you are done, you have reached your destination.

What is often forgotten is that there is also a journey to enjoy. How you work your way towards that goal can be just as important to changing who you are as finally reaching the goal. In many cases how you get there may actually end up being more important, and more interesting, than the final goal.

Straight path or twisting trail

Not only is the journey important, so are all of the different routes you can follow during that journey. Just because, in January, you determine a certain path will get you from point A to point B doesn’t mean that you have to follow that path. In fact, following such a rigid path may end up restricting you so much that, in the end, you limit your growth, or you are unable to reach your goal.

The journey between now and then, here and there, needs to be flexible. If something changes then be willing to adapt. You may need to change your approach or change the entire original goal; the point is to pay attention to how you are getting there and allow new opportunities to be part of the process.

Sometimes the best decision is to do something entirely different and see where it takes you.

Words versus intent

When an opportunity presents itself that at first appears to be in conflict with one of your goals, take a moment and look past the wording of your goal. Take a long look at what the INTENT of the goal really was.

If a new path presents itself you may find that the way you worded your goal doesn’t fit, but the intent, the real reason you set that goal for yourself fits perfectly.

Or, you may find that the intent of that goal was all wrong in the first place and the new path you have discovered fits you much better.

Opportunity example

One of my big goals for 2010 was: grow my private coaching practice financially to a point where I can cover all of my family’s basic living expenses by September 2010.

In January I received two new opportunities to do coaching work, enough work that it will be difficult for me to grow my own practice as quickly as I wanted too. At first, I struggled with this idea as I realized it directly conflicted with what I had set as a goal for myself. However, when I looked at the intent of my goal: to support my family through my work as a coach, I realized that both of these opportunities fit perfectly.

Yes, growing my private coaching practice will probably slow down, but my ability to provide for my family from my coaching work will rise much faster. The opportunity goes against the goal, but fits the intent and that is what is most important.

Try reviewing your goals for 2010 and determine the real intent of each goal. Does switching from goal to intent open up any new and interesting possibilities you hadn’t considered?

Need some assistance with setting your goals for 2010? Check out Jocelyn’s post on creating a vision board.

I had an amazing 2009!

I underwent a lot of exciting changes in my life, both personal and professional. In today’s post, just before the coming of 2010 I have decided to look back at my 2009 and acknowledge some of the highlight “wins” I have experienced.

I think this is an important reflection for all of us to do as, in general, I don’t think people spend enough time acknowledging and celebrating their accomplishments. If everyone could spend more time celebrating the smaller wins they have throughout the year I think everyone would be more successful. Celebrating wins helps you to enjoy life more, and also helps you build up momentum towards being even more successful in the future.

So, join me and celebrate some of your wins in 2009.

Wins for 2009

- Finished my training as a professional coach.
- Built my coaching business from zero to seven clients.
- Helped Andrea Lee organize and produce several coaching resource books.
- Started Sunday Night Success.
- Wrote a 50000 word novel for NaNoWriMo.
- Ran a coaching workshop for small town, small business owners.
- Joined a Mastermind group.
- Learned to meditate.
- Spent first full summer in my new house.
- Watched my son have his second birthday.
- Went on two trips with just my wife to spend some “couple time” together.
- Improved my ability to respond to situations instead of reacting to them.

What were some of your most valuable wins for 2009?

For the end of 2009 I decided to focus on one of my goals: to complete all requirements for my coach training program with the International Coach Academy. Here is a pencast example of how I planned my goal using mind mapping:

What techniques do you use for planning your goals? What do you think of the mind mapping technique?

For another pencast on goal setting check out backward planning your goals.

At the start of each year, and over the course of each year you may set specific goals for yourself. When you set these goals you have the clear intention to complete each of them. Over the course of the year you can accumulate a number of different goals, and by the time the end of the year rolls around you may not be able to achieve all of them.

End of the year focus – pick one goal and do it

I am writing this post on Thursday, December 17, 2009 exactly two weeks until the end of 2009. This past year was the first year I moved forward with a clear strategy on goal setting and goal achievement. As can be expected, and is not a bad thing, I set myself too many goals, and have a number of them still on my list to get done before 2010. There are two strategies I think I can use for the next two weeks:

1. Work on all the goals and try to get as much done as I can, with the risk that I only partially complete each of the goals.
2. Pick one of the remaining goals and put all of my energy into completing this one goal. I will only work on a different goal once my focus goal is finished.

As you can probably tell from the words I used in each possibility I am favoring the second option.

What is your focus goal?

Setting some of my other goals aside is going to be difficult, but I am excited with the prospect of getting one of the really big, and really important goals completed before 2010. My focus goal for the rest of 2009 is:

Complete all of the class and written requirements for my coach training certification

That is my commitment, and that will be the only major project, unless I complete it, I will be working on for the rest of 2009. There is a definite lightness, excitement, and energy I am feeling now that I have made this decision. The weight of the other goals has been lifted, and I am ready to focus on this one goal.

How would the end of 2009 be different for you if you chose one focus goal and did nothing but work towards its completion?

Share your focus goal in the comments section below and let’s get to work on ending 2009 with a successful bang!

If you need help with being accountable for you goals check out this post on accountability.

Writing this week has been a challenge.

Correction. Writing anything that is not the story I am working on for National Novel Writing Month has been a challenge; a huge challenge.

To succeed at NaNoWriMo you need to write 1667 words every day of the month of November. I guess after writing that many words for the novel each day (some days less, some days much more) my brain has run out of words to write anything else.

My other writing tasks, which are all attached to important goals I set for 2009, have fallen by the wayside so that I can focus on completing this personal writing challenge.

Do I regret pushing back important goals that I planned and set months ago in order to complete 50000 words for NaNoWriMo?

Sometimes you need to make changes

I don’t regret my decision for a second.

Yes I have pushed some of my other goals aside for the last month. Yes, some of these goals may not be completed until early 2010. I don’t consider missing any of these goals as a failure, because I see my accomplishment in winning at NaNoWriMo as a stupendously, incredible, huge success:

- Writing a novel is on my 100 goals list, and now I get to check it off.
- Writing a novel is giving me incredible insights, ideas, and skills that I can use with my clients that are undertaking similar creative challenges.
- Writing a novel is pushing me beyond my current limits and evolving me into a different and more exciting person.

A video to help explain

When the opportunity to experience NaNoWriMo appeared I had to make a decision: stick to my current plan, or make a quick decision and change everything. In the world of football this is called “calling an audible”.

Check out Scott Epp’s blog and watch his video post which explains what an audible is and how we can incorporate the idea of “calling and audible” into our lives.

If Scott’s video has your interest piqued, then check out this SNS post about taking action, then adapting to the results.

Can you think of a change that you could make in your life, right now, that would allow you to experience something exciting and new?

The normal action planning process at Sunday Night Success in its simplest form is:

1. Set your small action steps for a one-week period.
2. Work on your actions over the next seven days.
3. As you complete an action mark it off your list.
4. Review your accomplishments at the end of the week. Reflect on what didn’t work.
5. Move incomplete actions to your new list for the new week.
6. Add new actions for the new week.
7. Repeat the process each week.

The new experiment

My weekly list is usually a combination of actions that are carried over from the previous week, and new actions that I am adding to the list. This is a great process and gives me a lot of variety in the actions I can choose to work on.

However, sometimes by adding new actions to the list the incomplete actions from previous weeks get pushed down further and further. These actions are eventually removed from the list: if I ignore them for four weeks then they obviously were not as high priority as I thought they were.

That works fine if those actions can be set aside with minimal consequences, but what if the actions are really important and you are simply stuck in a place of delay: “I will just do it tomorrow”.

My solution, or at least the solution I am going to experiment with over the next few weeks is working your list to zero

Working your list to zero – how it works

I have set my current action list with a whole bunch of important actions that I absolutely need to get done in the next few weeks. These actions are important for both my business and my personal development: they are must dos.

So, I am going to make one important change to my action list for the coming weeks:

No new actions can be added to the list until all of the actions from the original list are completed. The action list must be completed, worked down to zero remaining actions.

Working your list to zero – why I think it will work

By not adding any new actions the list will get smaller each week. A smaller list means fewer actions to choose from, which means I will have to focus on the actions I have been putting off. With nothing else on the list to divert my attention I will have to get the actions I am stuck on completed, and I will have no choice but to move forward.

Will the experiment work? Only the coming weeks will provide an answer.

This is how I am going to focus on my “delayed actions”. I would love to hear any strategies that you are using to get your important actions off your list.

This week I am working on gapping one of my goals which requires me to focus all of my attention on accomplishing this goal. Therefore, instead of writing a new post this seemed like a perfect opportunity to summarize some of the action setting ideas I have covered in the past few months.

Action Setting System: Evolution One

The Vision: This post outlines the purpose of the website and why I am writing about what I write about. You will notice that this post discusses vision, goal setting, and action setting. So far, I have definitely focused on the action setting portion of this vision.

Time frames: This post discusses the idea of using different time frames for action setting and explains my rationale for using weekly action setting.

Using small actions: Action setting is more successful when you break ideas down into smaller chunks and work on these chunks.

Accountability: One of the most important parts of the whole process is explained here.

Making Action Setting Sustainable: action setting is pointless if you tire yourself out.

Flexible Action Setting – the why: flexible action setting increases the chance of successful action setting.

Flexible Action Setting – the how: how I make my action setting flexible

Action setting and feelings: analysis guides action setting, but so do your feelings

Action Paths and Action Themes: two ways to group your actions together to improve focus and increase success.

Backward Action Planning example: a visual pencast of how to backward plan your actions into an action path.

Summary so far
If you read through all of these posts you will have a good idea of how and why I organize and set my actions, and, hopefully, you will become interested in joining the Sunday Night Success community and start working towards the results you truly want to achieve.

The idea of gapping a difficult goal intrigues me as I discussed earlier this week. It didn’t seem to make sense to write an article on gapping goals and not make an attempt at doing it myself. So, today I begin my gapping challenge.

The S.M.T. system

1. Pick a goal: I will be working on creating my coaching website.
2. Specific Result: I will create a heart centered coaching website using the thesis theme.
3. Clear measurement: I will be successful if: all content is live, autoresponder is functional, and free product is ready for download.
4. Short Time Period: I will complete this goal by September 6, 2009.
5. I will accomplish this goal by focusing on all of the actions for this goal in my weekly action list; setting aside other actions so I can maintain focus.

Summary

I will build a heart centered coaching website with the thesis theme including an autoresponder and free product by September 6, 2009.

I have created a page of the small actions associated with this goal here. I will update this page as I complete the different small actions and move forward towards bridging the gap and creating my coaching website.

If you have a goal you would like to gap let me know about it in the comments.

I am notoriously bad at setting my actions for the week, and then not reviewing them until much later in the week. I have, of course, a general idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but sometimes I will forget about something I wanted to get done until I actually go back and look at what I wrote down.

Today, while trying to complete an action that I had left to the last minute, I was reminded that I could have saved myself some time and energy if I had only reviewed my list earlier. I had an action down to scan some documents and email them to someone. This would have been a task that would have taken all of 2 minutes and cost nothing if I had remembered to do it earlier in the week when I had access to the office scanner. But I left it until Sunday, leaving me with the options of either going to the Staples to get the documents scanned, costing me time, energy and a little bit of money, or not completing the action. In the interest of getting it off my list, I did go to the store and get the action completed, but it was a lesson I will remember.

Procrastination rarely pays off, it is my intention to be more conscious about checking in with my list more frequently during the week.