Day 15 of 31 days to Creating Your Inspiring Personal Plan for 2012
In Step 4, you were to get input about your strengths from people who knew you well. Now, it is time to put that input to powerful use. Before showing you how, I want to share some background.
For far too many years of my life, my corporate planning work and personal planning focused as much on “curing” weaknesses as it did on making better use of strengths. Over the last decade, I have come to believe that corporate winners and individual winners place much more focus on leveraging their strengths. In other words, the put more focus on how to better use their strengths.
I hope that you have built into your Vision statement the philosophy of leveraging your strengths (using whatever words resonate best with YOU). If you have not done so, I encourage you to reconsider doing so as described in the second half of the instructions for Step 12.
If you agree that making better use of your strengths could accelerate your success, then the relevant question becomes “how can you better use your strengths to accelerate your success?” “How” at the 40,000 ft level represents a strategy.
For this step, add at least five potential strategies to the list of potential strategies you started in the previous step (Step 14). As you hopefully did yesterday, set aside judgment as to whether you can actually do what you dream up for this step. Remember that:
One definition of insanity is expecting changed results without changed behaviors.
For you to have a significantly better year in 2012 than you had in 2011, some things will have to change.
Let me give you an example of the development of strategies using strength analysis. One of my mentees is making a career change from being a successful technical writer to being a coach. Writing is one of her strengths. One of the things she could do to accelerate her success as a coach would be to better leverage her writing skills. So a possible strategy that she would list is “leverage my writing strengths to get more visibility for my coaching practice.” Note she is not yet down to the tactical level issues of whether she will launch a blog, write an ebook, or whatever. Those are tactics which will change month-to-month as she has success. But, the strategy is one that she could use throughout 2012, and even beyond.
So look at your list of strengths and start writing down ways you can better leverage your strengths. Add at least five ways to the list that you started yesterday with your Gap Analysis (Step 14).
With the completion of tomorrow’s task, you will be half way through development of a plan that will accelerate your success in 2012. Congratulations! Stay the course. Finish strong.
When you have completed Step 15, you can access Step 16 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.
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+.
