“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I read an article on Stepcase Lifehack on Why You Should Start Your New Year in February.  The main idea is to use January to recover from the holidays and make February your focus for getting down to business.

So, if you didn’t get the start you wanted in January, then don’t sweat it.  Instead, get ready to make things happen in February.   Use January as your time to plan things out, decompress from the holidays, and get clear on what you want out of the year.

I like this idea on multiple levels.   For one thing, it’s a forward-looking mental model.  Instead of trying to play catch up or worry about how you missed your great start in January, plan your great start for February. Rather than feel behind on things, you can feel on top of things.  It’s along the lines of, “If you miss the train, catch the next one.”, or, “I’m not late for today, I’m early for tomorrow.”

It’s this forward looking view on life that helps you rise above the noise, and take advantage of windows of opportunity.

To make the most of my months, I use 30 Day Improvement Sprints, a practice from Agile Results.  I pick a theme for the month, and I do a little something each day towards the goal.  It’s a simple way to keep taking action, a day at a time, and achieve big things.   I’ve used 30 Day Improvement Sprints to change habits, tackle tough challenges at work, work on personal projects, explore new interests, and learn new things.

If you’re looking for a way to make this year different, consider 30 Days of Getting Results.   It’s a timeless collection of little lessons you can use to get a fresh start and bring out your best.

Photo by Jack Bachelor.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

As more people ask me about Agile Results, the system inside Getting Results the Agile Way, I realize I need a simple summary page.  Here it is.

What is It

In a nutshell, Agile Results is a simple system for meaningful results.  It’s a personal results system for making the most of work and life.   It’s a way to be the author of your life and write your story forward.

I created Agile Results as a way to help you do great things and to think, feel, and be your best in any situation.   It’s a synthesis of best practices for time management, goals, focus, motivation, and more, as one simple system, to help you make the most of what you’ve got.

Why Agile Results

Getting results in today’s landscape is tough.  Our world is changing faster than we can keep up.  Worse, we don’t always have the best practices for focus, managing our time, managing our energy, or even basic productivity.  I created Agile Results as a way to put it all together and help you write your story forward:

Problems Addressed by Agile Results

Agile Results is more than just “how to manage your time.”  Here are some of the key challenges that Agile Results helps you deal with:

1. How to be the author of your life and write your story forward
2. How to make the most of your your moments, days, weeks, months, and years
3. How to use a simple system to achieve meaningful results
4. How to achieve work-life balance
5. How to focus and direct your attention with skill
6. How to spend more time on the things that really matter to you
7. How to play to your strengths and spend less time in weaknesses
8. How to motivate yourself with skill and find your drive
9. How to change a habit and make it stick
10. How to improve your personal productivity and personal effectiveness

Three Keys to the Agile Results System

There are three keys to the Agile Results system.  Here is a mental model of the three keys:

The three keys are:

1. The Rule of Three - Think in three’s.   The Rule of 3 helps us deal with information overload.  It’s a simple way to set limits and chunk things down.  It’s easy for us to remember things in three’s.
2. Monday Vision, Daily Wins, Friday Reflection – is a simple pattern for your weekly workflow.   It’s a weekly system for getting results that helps you get a fresh start each day, and a fresh start each week. Each week and each day is a new chance at bat.
3. Hot Spots – Hot Spots are simply areas of focus.  They might represent a lot of pain, or they might represent a lot of opportunity.  Either way, it’s a quick visual way to map out what’s important for you.

Weekly Workflow

The weekly workflow is effectively the Monday Vision, Daily Wins, Friday Reflection pattern.   Here is a way to visualize the pattern:

The workflow is very simple to follow if you remember The Rule of Three.   On Mondays, think of three wins for the week.   This is Monday Vision.   Each day, think of three wins for that day.   This is Daily Wins.  On Friday, think of three things going well and three things to improve.   This is Friday Reflection.

A Story-Driven Week, One Day at a Time

Another way to think of your weekly results pattern is in terms of stories.   Here is a way to visualize the model:

What this means is that each week, you may have a lot of things to do, but the “art” part is about choosing what to do and achieving your wins and your meaningful results.   Rather than “call a customer back” you “win a raving fan.”   This little shift helps you connect to your work, and thrive against your challenges, and makes your results more meaningful.   Best of all, you are the author, and it’s you that writes your story forward.  It’s the ultimate path of personal empowerment.

Getting Started with Agile Results

Getting Started with Agile Results is easy.   Here are some key ways to get started with Agile Results:

1. Buy Getting Results the Agile Way on Amazon.
2. Check out the case studies and video on http://Getting Results.com..
3. Explore the Getting Results Knowledge Base.
4. Try out Getting Started with Getting Results.
5. Read How To – Adopt Agile Results.
6. Team up with a  friend and pair up on a challenge.
7. Share your success story by writing to GettingResultsTeam at gmail dot com.

One of the simplest ways to get started is to simply write down three wins you want for today on a piece of paper.   Just by writing down your three wins, you focused on what you want to accomplish, you identified what’s meaningful to you, and you shifted from writing down a laundry list of tasks, to a short list of wins and achievements.

My Related Posts

• 30 Days of Getting Results
• Now Available: Getting Results the Agile Way on Kindle
• Getting Results the Agile Way is Now Available in Print

Photo by Tigr.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by best selling author, Lisa McCourt.  Lisa is here on Sources of Insight to share with you insightful and actionable steps to be comfortable in your own skin.

If you don’t know Lisa, you’re in for a treat.  Lisa specializes on the topic of self-love and her books on unconditional love have sold more than five and a half million copies.  Lisa’s latest book, Juicy Joy –  Seven Simple Steps to Your Glorious Gutsy Self is all about leading a life that is rich, real, and powerfully satisfying, while embracing your biggest, gutsiest, and most authentic self.  It’s you, at YOUR best.

I asked Lisa to write a guest post to share her best lessons learned on how to be comfortable in your own skin because of her personal experience.   I’m a fan of people sharing what they have learned the hard way or what they have had to work at.  It’s always deeper and more meaningful.   Most of all, it’s keeping it real.

Whether or not you are already comfortable in your own skin, I think you’ll really enjoy this post.  I’m impressed with Lisa’s ability to distill and share such pragmatic wisdom on the fine art of loving yourself, flaws and all.  This is more than a beautiful piece of prose.  It’s life wisdom that you can use to live a little better every day.

Without further ado, here’s Lisa with her top ten lessons learned on how to be comfortable in your own skin …

Imagine being blissfully comfortable in your own skin, knowing with the utmost clarity exactly who you are and feeling eager to lovingly, proudly share that authentic you with the world. Imagine being perpetually sustained by an inner source of joy—not the smiley, fluffy kind of happiness we sometimes associate with the word “joy,” but the rich, meaty, substantial flavor of joy that comes with extraordinary self-knowledge and self-appreciation. That’s the vantage point I want for you. From that vantage point, in the words of Franz Kafka, “the world will offer itself freely to you. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

In uber-consolidated nutshell fashion, here are the top 10 ways to be comfortable in your own skin:

1. Get real.

Do the work to get clear about who you are—not just who you routinely consider yourself to be, the person you habitually show the world—but who you are in the deepest recesses of your authentic heart and soul.

The word “authenticity” is misunderstood sometimes. People think of it as a virtue, like honesty . . . like you owe the world your authenticity and you should feel bad if you’re not authentic. That’s not the case. I’m not suggesting you should become more authentic because it will make you a better person—you already are a phenomenal person. I’m telling you that becoming more authentic is your golden ticket—to joy, to success, to vibrant health and energy, to easily manifesting the life of your dreams. It’s every bit that transformative. You’re not doing this to better serve the world; you’re doing it to better serve you. But—happy bonus!—it happens to be the best way to serve your loved ones and the world as well.

2. Adore YOU.

If you’ve been on a personal development path for a while, I’m probably not the first to suggest that you need to love yourself. But I’m surprised to discover how often my students don’t really seem to know why I’m so insistent on that point. Are you tired of hearing about how you need to love yourself more? Does the thought of it feel kind of like of a burden—one more thing to check off your To-Do list? Does the whole concept feel a bit worn-out and cliché? Maybe you just need to understand what’s in it for you.

Self-love is the fastest route to literally anything you want right now. Money, love, health, romance . . . it all hinges on your level of self-love. The circumstances of your life are always providing you a crystal-clear, precisely accurate measure of how much you love yourself and what you believe you deserve. All you can ever create is what you believe you’re worthy of experiencing. It’s an immutable energetic law. That’s why elevating self-love is the not-so-secret path to elevating everything else.

3. Trust your wants.

Stop trying to justify and rationalize your most heartfelt desires. Your desires are the clearest indicator of who you are. Denying them is denying you. No one needs to understand why you want what you want. You don’t even need to understand it yourself. Just trust it, and trust yourself to manifest it. The reason you don’t already have everything you want is crazy-simple. You don’t love yourself enough yet to deeply believe that you deserve everything you want. My students argue that sometimes, but they always discover it’s true. You might even believe, on a conscious level, that you do deserve a certain thing, but I promise you that if you were fully, wholly believing you deserved it—even in the cobwebby corners of your unconscious belief system—it would already be in your life.

4. Stop trying to vanquish the “bad stuff.”

And stop whining about it, too. Celebrate our unwanted circumstances because there’s so much valuable information for us in them. Get clear on why your unwanted circumstances are here and why you created them. Then use them as a springboard. Once you can start genuinely thanking “the bad stuff”, it’s pretty easy to move past it.

5. Take responsibility.

Own every last drop of everything you’ve ever created. We’re so conditioned to blame our unwanted circumstances on other people, or on the “system” or the world . . . What if it’s really all within your control? Taking full responsibility for the life you’ve created for yourself and the life you’re in the process of creating is hugely empowering. But it requires first getting uber-honest to a degree that’s terrifying for most people. Don’t be “most people.” Understanding that you alone are holding the reins on your life is the first critical step toward learning how to operate them.

6. Stop tolerating.

Tolerating is slow emotional suicide. It sucks the life out of you, drains your energy, numbs you, depletes you, and keeps you immobilized. There’s no reason for you to ever tolerate anything. We sometimes confuse tolerating with accepting—we all know it’s good to accept the things we can’t change, right? If we make very clear distinctions between what can be changed and what can’t, then it’s astounding the kinds of life-altering adjustments people are able to easily, joyfully make when they understand the underlying reasons they’ve been tolerating things.

7. Get out of the spin cycle.

Where in your life are you on autopilot, creating the same situation for yourself (in essence) over and over again? Maybe you keep dating the same romantic partner. Maybe the current model is better looking, or more successful, or slightly more open than the one before, but in essence you’re with a lover who triggers your tried-and-true insecurities, defense mechanisms, and familiar unhealthy spirals. Or maybe you find yourself in the same employment dynamic over and over again—even if you change careers completely. Maybe you’ve attracted a series of supervisors, or a series of friends, who stir up the not-good-enough feelings a parent invoked for you as a child. Escape the spin cycle by learning how to look closely at how these patterns develop and how to benefit from the opportunities they offer.

8. Permanently shift your beliefs.

Focus on the deliberate rewiring of your belief system because your beliefs are determining everything you experience as your reality. That’s not New-Age speak anymore; it’s common knowledge. It’s why researchers always have to use placebo control groups whenever they test any drug. If they don’t have a group taking a sugar pill, their findings won’t be considered valid by the agencies that govern pharmaceuticals. In pain-control experiments, when a new pain pill is tested, fully half of the sufferers who are given a placebo will report having less pain. The mind is that powerful and the scientific community knows it. Changing your mind will change your life.

Many of your limiting beliefs are not unique to you; our culture suffers from a long-standing epidemic of crappy shared beliefs. Most of us, at some level, harbor the same fears, the same tragic self-doubts, and the same profound longings to be liberated from our self-made prisons. In our outer circumstances, we may vary greatly, but at deeper levels, this is seldom the case. If you aren’t living the precisely blissful, richly textured life you crave, take the steps to discover which of your beliefs are keeping you from it and what you can do about that.

9. Dream loudly.

Stop limiting yourself according to what seems practical. Practical goals do not inspire enough passion to propel you toward their certain fruition. As John F. Kennedy wisely surmised, “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” Be those men (and women.).

10. Live passionately.

Once you’ve done the self-examination work to uncover your most delicious desires, don’t pussyfoot toward them. Hurl yourself recklessly in their direction! Trust that the Universe wildly adores you and is always orchestrating on your behalf. It’s been waiting for you to get pumped and grow a pair so that it could swoop in with divine assistance that will leave you breathless.

The author Natalie Goldberg has a cake analogy I love. When you bake a cake, you have ingredients, right? You have eggs, butter, milk, sugar, flour. The ingredients are the different parts of your life. You mix them all together in a bowl but this doesn’t make a cake. It makes goop. To turn it into a cake, you have to add the energy of intense heat. To turn your life into a life worth living, you have to add the heat and energy of your whole heart and soul. Otherwise it’s just goop.

Being comfortable in your skin and living with authenticity is knowing precisely who you are and passionately adoring who you are—with all the countless accoutrements and benefits that come along with that practice. You are spectacular. Not the elaborate representation of You that you routinely show the world, but the raw, uncensored, vulnerable You underneath all of that. Find that You and learn how to deeply love and honor that You. That’s feeling blissfully comfortable in your own skin, and it’s the secret to everything you’re longing for.

One of the big ideas that stuck with me in my Change Leadership training is — “The value is in the change.”  It’s such a simple concept, but it got me thinking.

If there’s no change, then it’s like treading water.  It’s like the hamster on the wheel.  It’s like below the line vs. above the line.  The value is in the change, and the change is about raising the bar and rising above your status quo.  It’s about changing your game.  If you invest time and energy, then you expect some sort of return.  The return is supposed to come from the change.  Some of the changes might be:

• Can I do this a little better?
• Can I do this a little faster?
• Can I do this a little cheaper?

Sometimes the change is doing what you already do, but better.  Other times the change is doing something new entirely … out with the old, in with the new.  When it comes to personal change, that means changing your thinking, feeling, and doing.   The easiest thing to notice here is a clear change in behavior.

You can use “the value is in the change” as your lens, to help remind you where the value is.  Whether it’s adopting a New Year’s Resolution, or buying a personal development program, or reading a new book, remind yourself that the value is not in the thing itself.  The value is in the change.  Knowing and doing are two different things.

The more that you actually apply the new insights, strategies, and tactics that you learn, the more value you can realize from your efforts.

With that in mind, what will you do differently, to realize more value from the time and energy you already spend?

Photo by Ian Sane.

A friend at work suggested I share a practice they’ve adopted on their team.  It’s “Thanks Thursday.”

They’ve made it a habit to thank each other, and show a little more appreciation, at least one day of the week.  It’s all too easy for time to slip by, and to either take each other for granted, or to think the words of appreciation, but not voice them.

What I like about this idea is that it’s anchored to a day of the week.  I think anchoring things to the day of a week, make it a lot easier to remember.  If you wake up on a Thursday, it’s easy to remember, that it’s “Thanks Thursday.”  Oh yeah, and I like that the name has alliteration.

Cicero taught us that gratitude is the parent of all other virtues.  I can see why.  One of people’s deepest needs is appreciation and acknowledgment.  It’s no wonder that empathic listening (listening until the other person “feels* heard), is the most important communication skill.    An attitude of gratitude also helps us appreciate what we’ve got, while we’ve got it.   There’s a lot of truth in the song, Big Yellow Taxi, that says, “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

With that in mind, I’ve reached out to various folks today to thank them.  I also want to thank the readers of Sources of Insight.  So many of you have spread the word.

Photo by eflon.

It’s not achievement for achievement sake.  It’s achieving your purpose and making meaning, while spending more time in your strengths and connecting to your values.  This is where your best results come from, and it’s how you can enjoy the journey, no matter what life throws your way.

Free Time Management Training

As an introduction to the system, I created a free 30 Day Boot Camp for Getting Results.   It’s called a boot camp because it’s hard-core.  It’s a 30 day, self-paced time management training course.  If you want to take your time management skills to the next level, then take the 30 Day Boot Camp for Getting Results.   Keep in mind that because it’s self-paced, you could do all 30 lessons in a day, if you choose to.  This may be one of the best time management training courses you ever take, and the price is tough to beat.

I originally created this on Sources of Insight, as part of a 30 Day Improvement Sprint, but I wanted to spin this off to give it more focus.   By having its own little spot on the Web, it’s easier for me to make improvements, and to send folks there that just want focused and free time management training.  I’ll also use it as an experiment as I find ways to simplify the information and make it more insightful and actionable.

Time Management Skills

Here are some of the time management skills you will learn, tune, and improve as part of the time management training:

• How to manage your time
• How to focus and direct your attention with skill
• How to spend more time on the things that really matter to you
• How to be the author of your life and write your story forward
• How to make the most of your your moments, days, weeks, months, and years
• How to use a simple system to achieve meaningful results
• How to achieve work-life balance
• How to play to your strengths and spend less time in weaknesses
• How to motivate yourself with skill and find your drive
• How to change a habit and make it stick
• How to improve your personal productivity and personal effectiveness

You will learn time management tips and strategies as part of a system, each lesson can be used by itself or “better together” with other lessons.  I tried to make each lesson as useful as possible, so you can keep building on your skills, as you learn new time management techniques.

Time Management Training Lessons at a Glance

Here are the 30 Lessons at a Glance that make up the time management training:

• Day 1 – Take a Tour of Getting Results the Agile Way
• Day 2 – Monday Vision – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Week
• Day 3 – Daily Outcomes – Use Three Stories to Drive Your Day
• Day 4 – Let Things Slough Off
• Day 5 – Hot Spots – Map Out What’s Important
• Day 6 – Friday Reflection – Identify Three Things Going Well and Three Things to Improve
• Day 7 – Setup Boundaries and Buffers
• Day 8 – Dump Your Brain to Free Your Mind
• Day 9 – Prioritize Your Day with MUST, SHOULD, and COULD
• Day 10 – Feel Strong All Week Long
• Day 11 – Reduce Friction and Create Glide Paths for Your Day
• Day 12 – Productivity Personas – Are You are a Starter or a Finisher?
• Day 13 – Triage Your Action Items with Skill
• Day 14 – Carve Out Time for What’s Important
• Day 15 – Achieve a Peaceful Calm State of Mind
• Day 16 – Use Metaphors to Find Your Motivation
• Day 17 – Add Power Hours to Your Week
• Day 18 – Add Creative Hours to Your Week
• Day 19 — Who are You Doing it For?
• Day 20 — Ask Better Questions, Get Better Results
• Day 21 – Carry the Good Forward, Let the Rest Go
• Day 22 – Design Your Day with Skill
• Day 23 — Design Your Week with Skill
• Day 24 – Bounce Back with Skill
• Day 25 – Fix Time. Flex Scope
• Day 26 – Solve Problems with Skill
• Day 27 – Do Something Great
• Day 28 – Find Your One Thing
• Day 29 – Find Your Arena for Your Best Results
• Day 30 – Take Agile Results to the Next Level

Key Links

• 30 Day Boot Camp for Getting Results
• Getting Results the Agile Way (Amazon) (Now available on Kindle!)
• Getting Results Knowledge Base (Checklists, guidelines, and how tos for focus, motivation, prioritizing, setting goals, time management, etc.)

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin

It’s time to rattle the cage  People have been asking me for this, and now it’s finally here.  The Kindle version of Getting Results the Agile Way is now available.   It’s a personal results system for work and life.   Whether you want to find your mojo, or take your personal effectiveness to the next level, or simply have a better day, this book is for you, or somebody you know.

People around the world have shared with me their personal stories and wins.   I know a restaurant owner that renovated his business using Getting Results the Agile Way.  I know a teacher inspiring her peers to get their game on using Getting Results.  I know teams of consultants using Getting Results the Agile Way to achieve better, faster, simpler results and it’s contagious.  Even my Mom used it to tackle a few big projects on her house.   You can read the testimonials and success stories on Getting Results.com.

This books puts in your hand the same system I’ve used to create high-performing teams, help individuals flourish, and coach teams to unleash their best.

Make the Most of Work and Life

Getting Results in today’s landscape is tough.  Our world changes faster than we can keep up.  Worse, we don’t always have the best practices for managing focus, managing our time, managing our energy, or even basic productivity.  Agile Results is a simple system for meaningful results that combines some of the best methods for thinking, feeling, and taking action.  To put it another way, Agile Results is a way to help you make the most of work and life.

You are the author of your life.  I created this system as a way to put it all together and help you write your story forward.  By using three wins to drive your day, your week, your month, and your year, you take charge of your life and live life on your terms.  By spending your time on the right things, with the right energy, with the right approach, you unleash your best. As you learn and respond, you build momentum.  This momentum carries you forward, supporting everything you do.

This is the playbook I wish somebody gave me.  Now, I’m sharing it with you.

Key Features of the Book

The book has several compelling features for slicing and dicing the personal effectiveness body of knowledge:

• Principles, patterns, and practices.   It’s a rich collection of proven practices, smart success patterns, and timeless principles.   Because it’s a principle-based system, you have wisdom of the ages at your finger tips.  It’s wisdom in action.
• Meaningful results.   It’s not about getting more things done.  It’s about meaningful results.  By getting clarity on you want to accomplish, you
• It’s a system.   It’s more than a book.  It’s a system.  With the system on your side, you automatically build better habits and practices that bring out your best.
• It’s simple.  By simple, I do mean simple.   There is no other system like it.  If you simply write down three wins for your day, you’re doing Getting Results the Agile Way.  More importantly, if you fall off the horse, it’s easy to get back on.
• It’s flexible.   It’s incredibly flexible and it stretches to fit your needs.  Rather than hard and fast rules, it’s a platform of principles, patterns, and practices that you can easily adapt or modify to suit your personal style.  It’s YOUR personal results system.

Contents at a Glance

The full Getting Results Guide is available for free on Getting Results.com in HTML.  This is the contents of the guide at a glance:

• Forward by Michael Kropp
• A Word from the Author
• Introduction

Chapters

• Chapter 1 – Why Agile Results
• Chapter 2 – Agile Results Overview
• Chapter 3 – Values, Principles, and Practices
• Chapter 4 – Hot Spots
• Chapter 5 – Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection
• Chapter 6 – Design Your Day
• Chapter 7 – Design Your Week
• Chapter 8 – Design Your Month
• Chapter 9 – Design Your Year
• Chapter 10 – Results Frame, Personas, and Pitfalls
• Chapter 11 – 25 Keys to Results
• Chapter 12 – 25 Strategies for Results
• Chapter 13 – Motivation
• Chapter 14 – Mindsets and Metaphors

Getting Started

I’m a fan of making it easy to get started.  Like I said, if you simply write down three wins for your day, you’re doing Getting Results.  But to help you get started fast, here is the one-page guide on Getting Started with Getting Results.

The Knowledge Base

The Getting Results Knowledge Base picks up where the book leaves off.   It’s a serious collection of patterns and practices for improving your focus, motivation, time management, and more.   The knowledge base includes:

• Cheat Sheets
• Checklists
• Guidelines
• How Tos
• Templates
• Visuals

By the way, these are no ordinary guidelines in there.  For example, somebody I know is using the focus guidelines to build coping mechanisms for ADD, as an alternative to drugs.  If you get a chance to explore the focus guidelines, you’ll see why.

Watch a Short Video Story of Getting Results the Agile Way

Ed Jeziersky hops around the world helping doctors and patients deal with large-scale disasters.  What does he use to lead his teams?  … You guessed it.  Watch Ed Jezierski on Getting Results the Agile Way.

Acknowledgments

I have a lot of people to thank for helping me make this book happen.   In addition to my loyal readers of <a href=”>Sources of Insight, I’d like to thank the following people for helping me with this book:

Adam Grocholski, Alik Levin, Andrew Kazyrevich, Andy Eunson, Andrea Fox, Anutthara Bharadwaj, Brian Maslowski, Chaitanya Bijwe, Chenelle Bremont, Daniel Rubiolo Mendoza, David K. Stewart, David Wright, David Zinger, Dennis Groves, Don Willits, Donald Latumahina, Dr. Rick Kirschner, Eduardo Jezierski, Eileen Meier, Erin M. Karp, Ethan Zaghmut, Gloria Campbell, Gordon Meier, Janine de Nysschen, Jason Taylor, Jeremy Bostron, Jill Heron, Jimmy May, John Allen, John deVadoss, Julian Gonzalez, Juliet du Preez, Kevin Lam, Larry Brader, Loren Kohnfelder, Mark Curphey, Michael Kropp, Michael Stiefel, Mike de Libero, Mike Torres, Mohammad Al-Sabt, Molly Clark, Olivier Fontana, Patrick Lanfear, Paul Enfield, Per Vonge Nielsen, Peter Larsson, Phil Huang, Prashant Bansode, Praveen Rangarajan, Richard Diver, Rob Boucher Jr., Rohit Sharma, Rudolph Araujo, Samantha Sieverling, Sameer Tarey, Scott Hanselman, Scott Stabbert, Scott Young, Sean Platt, Srinath Vasireddy, Steve Kayser, Tom Draper, Vidya Vrat Agarwal, Wade Mascia.

Key Links at a Glance

Here are the key links at a glance:

• Kindle version of Getting Results the Agile Way (Amazon)
• Getting Results.com
• Getting Results Knowledge Base
• Testimonials
• Success Stories

Photo by seanmcgrath.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from David Straker on his best lessons learned in managing change.

If you don’t know David, he is the creator of ChangingMinds.org, the largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.  He is also author of the amazing book, Changing Minds: In Detail. As you can imagine, this is no ordinary post on the art of change.  David has a lifetime of experience as a student, teacher, and practitioner of change management. As you will soon see, David simplifies complexity and he hones in on the essential principles, patterns, and practices that work.

Without further ado, here is David with his top ten tips for managing change.

Change in business is something that affects most of us for a fair part of our working lives. We’ve all got tales of disaster and incompetence, with battle scars from perhaps both sides of the line. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we may even put ourselves in the culprit’s seat for the problems caused.

Creating a ‘top ten’ list is not magic. Just because we have ten fingers it does not mean there are ten key factors for anything. It is, however a useful limit for an article as a list of ‘things to think about in change’ could be very long. Anyway, enough talk and down to action.

Here’s my ten:

1. Take time to understand the real question

Change projects often start out with a whole set of assumptions that are based on limited data or wholesale opinion. This is often accompanied by urgency and unrealistic expectations of what can be done by when. In the contracting phase where I take on the project, I always insist on a period ‘discovery’ in which I talk to everyone involved to get a range of views of the need for the change and the likely support or opposition that may appear. Key question are ‘Who benefits? How? Who loses out?’ There may also be desk research, reading previous reports and so on. From this, I get a better picture and define the project in terms of what is wanted, what is needed and the best approach to take to achieve this.

One of the tricky issues you may well face is where the commissioning manager assumes that the problem is ‘them’ and not ‘me’. Yet with some careful listening you may conclude that the manager is a key part of the problem if not the root cause. Now you will have a nice problem – how to get them to accept this fact without kicking you off the project and getting in someone who will support their innocence.

2. Have courage and integrity

Managing change can be tough and unpopular. You may have to confront a manager who believes that they have a ‘get out of jail free’ ticket that absolves them from engaging in the change. You may also have to face an angry meeting of people who are going to personally lose out big-time.

It can be so tempting to soften the blow by backpedalling and avoiding what you know really must be done. Managing change is not a popularity contest, yet you should do it with compassion and concern.

When people see your courage, they will be less inclined to fight. When people see your integrity, they will trust you more to do the right thing.

3. Engage and impassion the people affected by the change

Deployment of the change starts on day one. It’s easy to start with offline, backroom musing and plotting and then spring it on an unexpecting audience as a fait accompli. This may work in command-and-control cultures but in most businesses you will likely hit a wall, which may feel like foam rubber, but it will still be effective at deflecting and derailing your carefully-plotted rational actions.

The best approach is almost always to get as many people involved as early as possible. Be clear about the problem and engage them in finding the best way forward. Expect integrity, monitor for defensiveness and be up-front if you see it.

4. Believe what people do, not what they say

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been involved in change where managers say they are ‘right behind it’, yet when problems appear they turn out to be right against it. Likewise people will agree to all sorts of things in meetings, yet somehow their agreed actions slip down their priority list as procrastination becomes the order of the day.

When people avoid change or engagement with it, try to understand why. Get inside their heads and identify the thinking processes. People always justify their actions to themselves. If you can understand this inner talk you can speak their language and so persuade them to better ways.

5. When things start going wrong, act quickly

Between college and business, I was a school teacher for a while. I quickly learned there the way that classes operate. The first lesson they are well behaved. The next lesson, someone puts a toe out of place. If you don’t respond, then the next toe and foot follow and before long you have chaos.

People in business are not as obvious as school children but you can see the same kind of incremental resistance. A typical example is change meetings, where they all turn up for the first one, but then a bit at a time they have ‘more important’ things until you end up chairing a mostly-empty room. One of the main activities of the change manager is chasing. Relentlessly follow up with people who miss things or have commitments. Get senior managers to help by first making clear imperative statements and then follow up with real corrective action.

6. Change the motivation system

It is pretty common for businesses to try to change how people behave without changing the underlying system by which they are motivated. A typical example is where the change seeks to make people more collaborative, yet the personal performance system compares people with one another and rewards individual performance over teamwork. In fact the simplest way to change how people behave is to go straight to these performance systems. When you do this, don’t forget to train managers in how to use the new systems.

Also watch out for the informal systems of motivation, which may be embedded in the unwritten culture and in particularly in the way that leaders behave. One of the biggest factors is what managers do when individuals act against the change. If there are no personal consequences then resistance will spread and the change will die.

7. Use positive methods

Change happens through a combination of pain and pleasure, carrot and stick, push and pull. People are more likely to buy into things that use positive pleasure, carrots and ‘pull’. This can be difficult to envisage when you have been brought up in a punishment culture, which can be common in families, schools and workplaces. With thought and innovation, a more pleasant pull can be applied remarkably well.

Positive methods, such as Cooperrider’s ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, work on the principle that people do more of what they feel good about. This is also confirmed by psychoanalysis and ‘Object Relations Theory’. If we feel bad about something we will push it away or run away from it. If we feel good about it we will ‘introject’ it, taking in as a part of our being.

Sometimes negative methods can be used, for example in shocking people out of complacency. But keep this to the absolute minimum. Sometimes you have to show the stick, but it’s the carrot that motivates the most.

8. Burn bridges

One reason people go back to former ways is because they can. It is too easy to keep the old systems going ‘just in case the new one fails’. This not only gives a path for retreat, it also says that you doubt that the change is really going to work, so encouraging people to hang back and slip back to old ways.

A courageous way forward is to ensure there is no way back. If you are implementing a new computer system, have a clear date by when the old one is turned off. If you are changing attitudes, ensure there are systems that catch and address any and all instances of old attitudes.

9. Get help

Sometimes when you are charged with managing change you feel you are responsible for it all and must carry any problems all by yourself. Doing this can weigh you down and wear you out.

Let’s face it: change is difficult! Otherwise there wouldn’t be so much written about it and perhaps you would be reading a nice novel rather than this list of tips. Reading around the subject is a good way to get help and I’d suggest chewing into psychology if you can. Otherwise get help from those who have, and from those who have done it before. Or even just from someone you respect who can step back and see things with a new pair of eyes.

External consultants specialize in change, so you might want to look here, especially if it’s a big change and you have the budget (good consultants are not cheap). Be careful! It is too easy to become dependent and some consulting firms will play on this, with ‘land and expand’ strategies that have more to do with their revenues than your success.

10. Look after yourself

Managing change can be a thankless and very stressful activity. Even if your job is not called ‘change manager’, you may still be mostly making change happen in one form or another and it can get you down. Listen to your body, which will punish you for over-stressing yourself. Take time out to refresh. Get regular exercise. Watch your sleep. And otherwise do whatever works for you to keep yourself energized and enthusiastic.

If you can make it work, I think creating real change that multiplies value is the best fun you can have!

Photo by chrisbb.

“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.”— George Burns

Do you have a proven system that gets you the results you want, each and every time? Better yet, do you have a way to speed up your results and jump to the end in mind? Do you have a success formula you can count on?  Read on to learn about a success system you can use for the rest of your life to produce outstanding results in all areas of your life.

If we look across the stories and studies of success, we find some common themes. By looking to the patterns of success, we can identify a repeatable system. Let’s call this system, The Way of Success. The Way of Success is basically a method for improving your success in a systematic way. By making the approach explicit, you can improve it, and fine tune it, to achieve better, faster, and simpler results.

One of the most useful things in life is to have an approach for achieving what you want in life. That’s where”The Way of Success” comes in. You can use The Way of Success as your personal recipe for success.

Why The Way of Success?

The beauty of The Way of Success is that we can enjoy both the journey and the destination toward achieving our success.

If we have a trusted system, then we can explore and experiment with speed and skill in a more reliable way. We can learn at a faster pace. We can enjoy a higher level of success. We can reduce the pain along the way. We also learn how to more effectively avoid the dead ends and fruitless paths.

The Way of Success

Here are the key steps to The Way of Success:

• Step 1. Envision the Future
• Step 2. Map Out the Goals
• Step 3. Model the Best
• Step 4. Map Out the Possible Paths
• Step 5. Identify Your Tests for Success
• Step 6. Test Your Results
• Step 7. Change Your Approach Based on Feedback

Step 1. Envision the Future

In this step, imagine how the world will be different when you accomplish your goals. Ask yourself, “What will success look like?”

This is the most important step. This is about painting a picture of the future with enough clarity and conviction that it creates a burning desire. Imagine the possibilities and make it vivid. Step into this future and feel what it would be like if you were to make this happen.

The key outcome of this step is a vivid mental model of the future. Your mental model will guide your actions, thoughts, and feelings. The richer your mental model, the easier it will be to get resourceful. Your mind will get creative in finding ways to make your vision a reality.

Perhaps the most important reason for getting clarity in your mental model is to reduce conflict. If your mind, heart, body, and spirit want the same things, then you have all of you working on your side. The last thing you want to be fighting against is yourself. A fractured or conflicting vision will fork your focus, fork your energy, fork your priorities, and basically make anything you do, ten times more difficult. The opposite is also true. When all of you is fully aligned to the end in mind, you fire on all cylinders and your mojo helps you make things happen. Almost like magic.

Step 2. Map Out the Goals

In this step, you map out the goals that will inspire you. Your goals turn your vision into achievable steps and results along the way.

State your goals as clear and simple wins. Keep them simple and to the point. As a suggestion, write down the wins you want as simple one-liner statements. By keeping your goals lightweight, you can easily evolve them as you get a better picture of what success will actually look like. It’s like a picture slowly coming into focus.

Step 3. Model the Best

In this step, you find the find the best stories, people, and examples to model from.

You can start from scratch or you can start from examples. By starting from examples, you can “Stand on the shoulders of giants” and leapfrog ahead. More importantly, you can use the examples to model from and inspire and guide yourself with skill. They will help you avoid dead ends and glass ceilings.

You can always choose to ignore what other people have done. But that should be an explicit decision. One of the best ways to speed up success is to build on the patterns and practices that work. Success always leaves clues. You can learn from the success of others to tune and prune your own success path.

Another key reason to have models, examples, and case studies to draw from is so that you can see whether you really want what you think you do. There is an old saying to the effect, “be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.” This is true. The grass is not always greener, on the other side of the hill. What might look great at first blush, might not be so great when you take a closer look. For example, you might find that the life style just isn’t worth it because it conflicts with your values or how you want to live.

Step 4. Map out the Possible Paths

In this step, you map out the various paths you can take.

The key is to identify, figure out, and explore possible strategies. Aside from inspiration, the models you found help show you the different potential paths you can take to reach your goals.

The key here is to cast a wide net before locking down on one particular path. By mapping out the different paths, you can compare and contrast the time and effort that the different paths take. You might find that one path takes a week, while another takes a year. You may also find that one particular path requires some extraordinary sacrifice that you just aren’t willing to make.

The key here is to find the path that will most likely succeed based on your goals and constraints, while looking for the most effective results. At the end of the day, it’s all about effectiveness. You want a path that works.

Step 5. Identify the Tests for Success

In this step, you identify tests that help you know when you are on track, and to know when you are done.

Having goals is one thing. The key here is to figure out how you will test them. Having a short set of test cases helps you make your success criteria even more explicit. This helps give you clarity, but it also helps provide a way to evaluate your results, and to help keeping shaping your actions towards your final result.

Step 6. Test Your Results

In this step, you take action. You break your big goals and big wins into little goals and little wins. The most important thing is to take action. Taking action will produce results, and as you produce the results, you’ll get feedback.

The point behind testing your results is also to find the best paths forward. As you take action, you may get surprised as new opportunities, new doorways, and new possibilities unfold. Success is often serendipity. As my friend’s father put it, “Luck is when skill and opportunity come together.” By taking action and testing your results, you’re increasing your “luck.”

Step 7. Change Your Approach Based on Feedback

In this step, you change your approach based on the feedback you are getting from taking action. This is where your tests for success help you see whether you are getting closer or further from what you want to accomplish.

A very simple cutting question here is, “Is it effective?” If the actions you are taking are not being effective, then you go back to your models, find the insight, and change your approach.

When you take action, you produce results. Those results are either going to be getting you closer or further to your goals. They will also be leaving clues and insights. You can use these clues and insights to do more of what’s working and less of what’s working, or to decide and change the approach all together. As obvious as it sounds, sometimes the best approach is to do the opposite of what’s not working. You can at least test this as a strategy.

This is also a key stage to leverage your mentors. You can share the approaches you tried and the results you got, and an experienced mentor will help you evaluate your results and perhaps identify alternative strategies or tactics. One of the best things you can do here is start asking better questions to help reveal more insightful answers. If you’re not getting the results you want, it can be helpful to ask “how” questions over “why.” When you ask “how” questions your engage your brain in a more resourceful way and it starts helping you find a way.

An Example of The Way of Success

One of my key achievements was creating a book that was downloaded 800,000 times within the first six months. This was an extraordinary result at the time, and I used The Way of Success to achieve it.

I started by having a compelling vision for how the book would change the lives of many practitioners in the field. I identified the goals in terms of challenges that the book would solve and awards that it would win. I didn’t care about the awards, other than to create some aspirational benchmarks to shoot for.

I then rounded up the best of the best books that I could find within that space. I also met with several authors to find out their approach to explore possible paths. By taking a look from the balcony, I noticed that the most successful books were more action-oriented, were more task-based, and made it easy to “execute” the guidance. I also noticed that the best books had very simple way to organize and share complex information in a sticky way. A common pattern of the best books was to have simple headings that made it easy to skim and take away key insights from the book.

By using all of these patterns, I was able to design a more effective way for building knowledge platforms and writing guides to help change the world.

A Simple Way to Think About The Way of Success

A simple way to think of The Way of Success is — dream it, plan it, do it. The most important point here is to actually figure out what you truly want to make happen, and create a vivid model of that in your mind. When you can see it in your mind’s eye, you’ll have an easier time focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions that bring you closer to your goal.

Mapping out your success plan is a great way to see the journey before you start. While you don’t need to know every point along the path from A to B, you do need to have a frame of reference, and a way to keep getting back on track. Your map will be your guide.

Making it happen means taking action and testing your results. The trick is to keep taking action, and testing your results. If you are moving closer to your goals, then great. If you are moving further away from your goal, then change your approach, and keep changing your approach until you start getting the results you want. Use your model and your maps to guide you. Use your failures and setbacks as feedback. Keep finding the lessons and use them to propel you forward. If your approach is not working, then change it.

The fastest thing you can change in any situation is yourself. If you keep changing your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions, you’ll keep producing different results. Use this insight to keep making progress and finding your way forward.

May The Way of Success serve you well and help you achieve the results you want in a more effective way.

“Never try to solve all the problems at once — make them line up for you one-by-one.” — Richard Sloma

How well can you solve your problems?  Solving problems is one of the most fundamental skills in life, and it’s something we get to practice every day.

I learned early on that wishing away problems didn’t work and that it was more effective to embrace challenges as a part of life, as a chance to grow and expand myself.  One of my favorite sayings is, “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

Unfortunately, we don’t always get taught the best ways to solve our problems.  Some of the less effective ways include anger, blame, avoidance, curling up into a little ball, etc.  The good news is, you can improve your problem solving skills by using problem solving techniques.

One of the most effective problem solving techniques to add to your problem solving skills cache is the Osborne-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, or CPS for short.  It’s strength lies in casting a wide net over the problem, and testing multiple paths and possibilities before locking in on a particular solution.

In the book, Creatively Ever After: A Path to Innovation , Alicia Arnold writes about how you can use the Creative Problem Solving Process to tackle your challenges in work and in life.  It’s about getting science and structure on your side, while unleashing your creative powers to solve the tough stuff.

The Creative Problem Solving Process
According to Alicia, you can think of the Creative Problem Solving Process in six main steps:

• Step 1. Identify the Goal, Wish, or Challenge.
• Step 2. Gather Data.
• Step 3. Clarify the Problem.
• Step 4. Generate Ideas.
• Step 5. Develop Solutions.
• Step 6. Plan for Action.

While the process may look simple and obvious, the key is to compare it to your current approach:

• Do you know your goal?  (Can you state it in one line?)
• Have you gathered any data and sorted facts, opinions, and fiction?
• Do you have true clarity of the problem you are solving?  (Can you state the problem as a simple question, such as, “How to ….”?)
• Do you generate multiple ideas or just run with the first thing that pops in your head?  Do you look across the ways other people have solved this problem before, and find the patterns?
• Do sketch out solutions and possibilities and test for fit or do you dive into the details?
• Do you turn your ideas and solutions into actionable steps?  Do you break the steps down into mini-goals that you can test and get feedback?

While a lot of problems can be solved by jumping to conclusions and drawing from experience, many of the problems we face cannot.  Whether you’re solving a health problem or changing the game at work, a process like the Creative Problem Solving Process can help you tap into your creative potential.  Better yet, with a process like the Creative Problem Solving Process, you can harness and leverage the collective brain power of multiple people in a coordinated way.

My Related Posts

• Solving Problems with Skill
• 4 Types of Problems
• What’s the Challenge?

Photo by Alaskan Dude.