Day 4 of 31 days to Creating Your Inspiring Personal Plan for 2012.
I hope that all of you spent yesterday honoring yourself by completing your prioritized list of 2011 accomplishments (Step 3). I am thrilled by the number of you that have communicated to me – either on Twitter, or on Facebook – with how good it felt to get some perspective on what you did get done in 2011.
Well if you liked what you learned yesterday, you will love this step in the planning process. It is time for you to hear just how blessed you are with experiences, talent, and attributes. Today is the day for you learn more about how well thought of you are by friends, colleagues, mentors, or clients.
Before telling you how you going to hear about your strengths, it is important for you to understand why knowing your strengths is so important to this planning process. I grew up in the consulting world learning that the foundation of any good planning process was SWOT analysis. SWOT is a widely used acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Through my 25+ years of consulting and mentoring, I have come to believe that too much planning – for both business and for individuals – focuses on the notion that it is important to fix weaknesses. For my clients and my mentors, the focus is on how to better utilize strengths. Instead of trying to fix weaknesses, I recommend that people focus on learning to embrace their weaknesses (this is a subject that will be covered later in the process).
Look at that list of accomplishment for 2011. You accomplished what you did because of your strengths. And that will be the case in 2012. What I want to help you to figure out is how you use your strengths even better in 2012. If you use your existing strengths better in 2012, your results will improve. If you use your existing strengths much better in 2012, your result will improve dramatically.
To effectively leverage your strengths in 2012, you must have a solid understanding of your existing strengths. Not what you would like your strengths to be, but what your strengths really are. Today!
Over the next couple of days, I will be sharing some very low cost resources that I recommend as ways to learn more about your strengths. But, you don’t have to spend a dime to get a decent assessment of your strengths. Not a dime!
Step 4 is for you to get feedback, as to your strengths, from a handful of people who know you well and whose opinion you would respect. Getting this feedback may take a couple of days, but you can set the process in motion in just a couple of minutes today.
Identify a half dozen people who know you really well. This could be a close friend, a peer, a mentor (or even a mentee), a partner, or a coach. The nature of the relationship is less important than the requirement that the person know you well and that you will respect their opinion.
Ask each of the people you select to identify the six attributes that they respect and appreciate most about you.
Do not ask them to also give you a list of weaknesses. Just ask them to give you feedback on your strengths. Explain that you are crafting your 2012 plan and that you want to make sure that you leverage your strengths in 2012. For their context, you may want to refer them to this description of the 2012 plan process you are doing.
To make this step even easier for you, here is a draft of an email you can use fin asking for this feedback.
Hope this finds you well.
In addition to the usual holiday to-do’s, I am involved in a very important project for which I would be most grateful for some quick help from you. I am working diligently to create a solid personal plan for 2012. I am using a wonderful, free online process summarized here.
As part of that process, I have been asked to get feedback as to my personal strengths from a small group of people who know me well and whose opinion I highly respect.
I would be most grateful if you could list six strengths that you most admire about me. Not looking for any more than six strengths, nor looking for feedback on my foibles (which we both know that I have). Not looking for any explanations, just a list of what you see as my most important strengths.
Your feedback as to my top strengths will enable me to build a plan for 2012 that leverages my strengths. I am convinced by doing so, I can have an even better year next year.
Thanking you in advance for your prompt assistance.
Feel free to tweak to get something closer to words you would use.
Get started asking for your feedback. This feedback will not be needed for about a week. Get your requests out so that you do not get held up waiting for an answer when we get to that step in the planning process.
Now, here is the bonus! Not only is this feedback important to the development of your 2012 plan, but it will also feel wonderful to hear this feedback from people you respect so much. You may even here things that some fans of yours just had never gotten around to saying previously. Knowing that only high performers invest the time to plan for next year, I am confident that you will soon be hearing just how deep is your collection of strengths. That will give you a definite lift!
When you have completed Step 4, you can access Step 5 here. If you want an anouncement every time a new step is posted, you can sign-up – to the right – to receive new steps by either RSS feed or email. PS. (If you miss a day, for whatever reason, just climb back on. You can catch up quickly. Don’t beat yourself up, just climb back up.)
Please note: If you have arrived at this step first, it is not too late for you to join other high performers who are collaborating to follow the bite size steps that are unveiled here every day. Get started here.
This blog post was written by Dave Carpenter. Dave is a prolific author, inspiring speaker, and well-known consultant to professional service firms. Besides writing regularly for this blog, Dave’s writing can be seen in leading business and personal development publications. Dave is also the leader of the Accelerate Success mentoring program where he mentors high performers in a unique program designed to do great things for the favorite charity of each participant. If you are (1) a high performer who believes you still have untapped potential, and (2) passionate about a favorite charity, you may want to learn more about this powerful program. You can also follow Dave on Twitter, on Facebook, and/or on Google+.
