How to run an effective mid-year review
The halfway point of the year is an inflection point in our professional success. It represents a fantastic opportunity to review our wins and misses through the first two quarters and reflect on whether we’re on track to reach our goals, within reach of them or if we may need to hit reset on our expectations. With that in mind we wanted to offer a few tips on how to run an effective mid-year review for yourself or your team. You may want to review this! We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! Tips to effectively run a mid-year review 1. Prep Review your original goals and compile any of the data you need to determine if you’re on track for those goals. It’s also important to carve out the time to review and reflect. We recommend at least 4 hours for the process. 2. Evaluate When you review your goals and what you have accomplished ask yourself some questions: Where have we seen the most success? Where have we struggled? Where are areas for improvement? 3. Reflect During the reflection phase you want to check to see what if anything has changed in the marketplace since you set your goals. Have any external or macro changes occurred that require you to update the premise of your assumptions. Are there any personal or personnel changes that have impacted the goals you set in place at the beginning of the year. Be honest with yourself and your team. 4. Revisit Are your goals still relevant and achievable? Does it make sense to adjust or adapt our goals to reflect changes in our business model or to align with challenges that didn’t previously exist? These are the questions you’ll want to ask to explore if your goals should be changed. 5. Decide Your goals are either something you’ll stick with, or they are not. Do not be afraid to pivot on your goals. While we, without much information, lean towards staying consistent with your goals, life and business are dynamic and so there are times that are goals must be as well! 6. If necessary, set new goals and strategize If you decide you need to set new goals, be as hyper realistic as possible in setting them. You’re making changes for a reason, after all. Address for some optimism bias and plan for how shifting your goals can impact the short-term as well as the remainder of the year. 7. Commit Don’t allow emotion to get in the way of achieving your new goals. Adjusting goals is not a failure, it’s a measured response to changes in your business that need to be implemented. By following the process before you can come to an informed decision and should have the confidence to proceed towards your new goals with gusto. Go get them! Mid-year reviews are powerful exercises that challenge the status quo and allow you to realign yourself with the true north of your business. Reflection and honesty are key to empowering a great mid-year review. By carving out an appropriate amount of time and addressing shifting market conditions and team conditions in a timely manner you’re setting yourself and your business up for a much stronger second half of the year. What’s your mid-year review process? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
How to Crush Your New Year’s Goals!
Most of us want to have a better year next year than we did this year. Even if we had the greatest year ever, it’s natural to desire more and aim higher. To help all of you out there looking to crush your new year’s goals, we have 3 very easy to follow tips in the blog below. Check it out! 6 Methods To Make Sure Your Business Doesn’t Fail Before crushing your New Year’s goals, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you and you can access it right here. Don’t Set Resolutions Resolutions are broad, grand gestures, that fail for almost everyone. Goals are specific actions you can recommit on every single day. Resolutions do not work and there is a boat load of evidence to prove it. Goals, when put in place are shown to be highly effective. This year, don’t bother setting a resolution, set yourself goals. Get Started Today The very best goals shouldn’t wait. Put them in place and get started on them today. If you’re reading this on publication, that means you’ll have a full week of 2022 to get a head start on your 2023 goals. Ever been in a race with someone that got a head start? It’s a whole lot easier for the person with the head start to win. You can be that person by getting moving on your goals right now. Small Goals Win Ever heard of the BHAG? Big, hairy, audacious goals? Love the idea, in theory. But in practice, it’s the small goals that win every time. Win a minute you can win an hour. Win an hour and you can win the day. Win the day, the week falls into place. So on and so forth. Small goals are easily attainable, provide excitement, energy and traction and our brains are designed to want something now. Feed your brain what it wants, and it’ll be a lot easier to achieve those great things you have in mind. How do you crush your goals? Let us know at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
How to Execute a Plan and Why it’s so Hard to do!
Big goals for 2023, am I right?! Most people don’t set small goals. After all, small goals don’t exactly feel like they will be life altering and exciting. Small goals certainly don’t equate to feeling like you won the lottery. When we develop big goals, the next step is to put a plan in place. Unfortunately, most people are terrible at executing on their plans and implementing them. In this blog we’ll share with you some tips on the best way to execute on a plan and why it’s so hard to do. 6 Methods To Make Sure Your Business Doesn’t Fail Before making any more plans, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you and you can access it right here. Why is it so hard to execute on a plan Consistency and default behaviors are why we struggle here. Most of us fail to be consistent and this is a top reason why we can’t execute on our plans. Life happens and our consistency goes out the door. What’s really happening here is we are reverting to our default behaviors. Our brains don’t ever forget our defaults. They stay in the back of our minds, lurking and waiting like some creeper. When we get off track it’s natural for our brains to trigger our default modes and behaviors. Just like that, our plan can get off track. Since this is totally natural and impossible to eliminate, it’s very difficult to execute on a plan. Plan Execution, Tip 1 Review the actions that will help you achieve your plan. The only way to manage to our brains defaults is to be aware of when we start to go back to our old modalities and behaviors. The best way to keep up our defense is to review and stay hyper aware of what we need to do to execute on our plan. This means, constant and, yes, consistent review of our days to make sure we are staying on track. A compass works a lot better if we use it every day instead of every few weeks or months! Plan Execution, Tip 2 Embrace the boring. Yes, you read that right. A lot of the time, plan execution requires us to focus on basic and repetitive tasks. While most of us don’t thrive on repeating the same things over and over again with excellence, time and again history has proven that those of us that work the basics the best are the most likely to execute on achieving our larger plans and goals. Are you a rockstar at executing on plans? Let us know at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Managing to Results and Betrayal
You’ll hear coaches and sales leader say all the time to separate yourself from the results. In other words; it’s a numbers game, it’s not about you, don’t take it personally, you’re not being rejected only your offer is, remove yourself, distance yourself, etc and etc so on and so on. The personal saying I’ve used for many years is to ‘divorce’ yourself from the results. Truth bomb time. You cannot separate yourself from results, not completely, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to. Instead, you should manage to your results. Betrayal is the same. It’s something you can’t avoid. Sooner or later, you will take something personally and it will feel like a betrayal. If you’re not careful, betrayal can really sink your ship fast, and it’s why it’s so important to learn how to manage your results and betrayal. Before going any further, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together an absolutely FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our gift to you absolutely free and you can access it right here. Betrayal was front and center in our podcast, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. In our most recent episode featuring Michael Buzinski betrayal came up and it was personal. Michael ended up shutting the doors of a multi-million-dollar company after experiencing epic level betrayal. Instead of letting it sink his ship, or more aptly, crash his plane, Buzz used it as inspiration to build a business more aligned with his values and his employees. Today he enjoys a thriving marketing business and is President and CMO of Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. To hear more about how Buzz managed his emotions and the impact of betrayal you can listen in to our podcast here and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and give us a 5* review if you enjoy the episode! Why is it so important to manage our results and betrayal? Because we can’t ever separate ourselves from them. We can’t be emotionless when results aren’t what we want them to be. Every rejection is, to an extent, personal. It’s not like someone else is being rejected after all. This is your experience, and it is real. The old advice about divorcing yourself from the results? It’s not that it’s bad advice, we should be figuring out ways to handle negative results, it’s that it’s impossible. It is impossible to fully separate ourselves from negative results. If that is what you’re trying to do, it won’t get you to where you want to be. We need to manage our reaction to results. This is different than removing ourselves from the results. Think of results as data that we need to get better. Every failure, every rejection is an opportunity to learn and tweak what we are doing to achieve more success. As we love to say, it’s all just an experiment and failure is simply a result that we didn’t want or expect. By shifting our perspective here, we can start to manage to rejection. Rejection is something that we’ll still deal with, but we are going to start using tools that will make rejection more helpful. Your emotions will come into play here. Most people, when they experience poor results or rejection will deal with anxiety, imposter syndrome, fear, anger, frustration, and a whole lot of emotions we paint as ‘bad.’ Let’s get this straight. Emotions are neither bad nor good, they just are. We need to be able to acknowledge our emotions, allow ourselves to feel our emotions and then accept our emotions. In this way we can manage to our results and not try to remove ourselves from them. Again, removing ourselves from our results and emotions, that’s impossible. Managing to them is not! Back to betrayal. It will happen. We will feel betrayed. This is a result that nobody will ask for, but we will all experience. Betrayal and our response to it will determine whether we can step forward into our businesses or shrink away. If you experience betrayal, be like Buzz. Step up and out and use it as an inspiration to build something even greater and stronger. You’ll thank yourself later for it! If you’re struggling with your results, we can help. Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external regional sales manager. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Stop Seeking Comfort
We need to stop seeking comfort and get uncomfortable, now! After finishing up the Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter I took some time to reflect on his message. The book focuses on discomfort and the benefits of being in discomfort. It’s interesting to me that we often couch discomfort as a way to be more comfortable. It seems as if even saying the word ‘discomfort’ is too much for the average person to cope with. Instead, we need to say ‘stretch’ our comfort zone or ‘move outside’ of our comfort zone. It’s not embracing discomfort so much as increasing where we are comfortable. Michael shines a burning bright light on the topic of discomfort, like the full sun in the arctic on the snow (if you read it, you’ll appreciate the analogy). Michael doesn’t just talk about discomfort, Michael inspires with a fantastic mix of science, experience, empirical evidence, and tremendous studies. Michael shares his conversations with everyone from leading geneticists to Buddhist monks and wilderness hunters. One of my favorite takeaways from the book was the idea of the Misogi Challenge. Misogi is a Japanese Shinto practice of ritual of cleansing the body. The ritual is much more than this as is the challenge. The challenge dictates that we need to seek out discomfort. We need to attempt radically hard things. With a 50% chance of success or less. That by experiencing this challenge we completely alter how we perceive time, the world around us, how we respond and react to our everyday problems in life and how we reset our understanding of our own capabilities. This isn’t meant to be an Instagram posted story or a normal competitive event. It’s supposed to be something completely outside of our daily lives and training. Something like say, carrying a boulder under water for a certain distance….chances are you haven’t trained for that. This is a deeply personal and intimate challenge. It’s, by design, for you, not the rest of the world. Yet it can and will change how you interact with the rest of the world. Michael urges us to take at least 1 Misogi per year. Personally, I love the idea of doing something that is so outside the bounds of normal in your life, it will forever serve as a bookmark for you and as a standout in the chapters of your life. If that’s what it means to stop seeking comfort, I’m all about it! For some other ideas on how to find discomfort in your life and the benefits around it, keep an eye on our podcast. Our most recent guest, Daniel Blue, talked about how he used the discomfort in his early life to fuel his business and create the future he wanted for himself and his family. You can check out our podcast here! If you’re looking to change your course and really step it up, we’ve got you covered too. You can always reach out to us for help with 2 on 1 coaching. You can get a better feel for our process, Mastery With Science here. If you’re interested in coaching and are afraid you can’t afford our services, think again! We offer a scholarship for deserving individuals and that may be you! You can take a look at our scholarship and apply here!
The Anti-Resolution
There’s a lot of topics the Doc and I consider that falls into the space between the black and white, where there is no one right way to do something. In the case of resolutions, we have a rare instance where both of us agree, they just don’t work. We’ll write that again. Resolutions don’t work. The science backs us up. Only 19% of people will successfully achieve a resolution. Within the first month, 64% of people will fail. By the end of 6 weeks or 42 days, 80% will have failed. Why don’t resolutions work? Lot of reasons, the most common being: They are unrealistic We don’t have the tools to succeed in place We fail to track It’s why we believe in the anti-resolution. The anti-resolution is a belief that we need to have a strong vision, clear goals, and a commitment to disrupt the patterns in our lives and make small changes to our behaviors every day. The anti-resolution is not a one-day choice to make an extreme change to our lifestyle. The anti-resolution is a daily commitment and a journey that occurs every day throughout the year. To solve for this, we place our belief in the anti-resolution. The anti-resolution is built on the basis of our values. We value small incremental changes to modify behavior. We value small disruptions to our daily lives. We value repeating good behaviors and rewarding them regularly, in new and unique ways. We value the journey and the daily acknowledgement of growth, success AND failure. If you’re looking to make dramatic changes in your life and are sick and tired of your resolutions failing, here’s our best guidance for you! 1. Review your behaviors and what you want to change about yourself. Understand what it is you want to change and WHY it’s important for you to make that change. Make it a daily goal. 2. Commit to yourself to work towards making that change. Commit to hardening your resolve and facing the challenge on good days and bad. Commit to failing and still working towards that change. 3. Share that goal with your support system. Don’t have a support system? That’s ok, join us in the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab and we or someone we know will step up and be there for you to help support you and keep you on track, on the good days and the bad! 4. Disrupt the behavior you want to change. Eliminating our autopilot and breaking our patterns is an essential step in the process. Small disruptions work best for a long journey. It’s a marathon not a sprint. 5. Expect to fail and embrace it. Failure is part of the journey. If you didn’t fail, you probably didn’t change either. Accepting our failure and waking up the next morning to go back to disrupting the old patterns and building our new patterns will always be a part of the process. Remember, a .01 degree change every day will lead to a nearly 38 degree change over the course of the year. To hear more about goal setting for the New Year you can check out our most recent podcast here! You can also check out our vault of other blogs here. If one of your goals for 2022 is to be better with your time you may want to consider taking a look at our stand-along Time Mastery With Science course that helps you get back hours of time per day and maximize how productive you are this year. For more information on this course, check it out here.
Reflect 2021
Reflection is important and It’s the time of year when we naturally pause to reflect. For our blog today we took a look back at the last 12 months’ worth of weekly blogs to pick some of our favorites, in no specific order! We can attribute many of these to podcast guests. Where possible we’ve included the names and businesses of the professionals that directly influenced our blogs! We also included the links to the individual blog articles and our podcast if you’d like to listen to these conversations. Masters of Improv – the balance of being deliberate and thinking on your feet Influenced by Jonathan Garber of Flying Chimp Media “Most of us, when we build out presentations and practice our messaging, do so in a ‘sterile’ environment. Sterile, meaning, an environment very much set up for us to succeed. We’ll likely practice in a quiet spot. We’ll practice what we’re going to say and how we’re going to say it. We’ll practice (if we’re smart) enough to be able to work out what cadence we’d like to use, what words we’ll emphasize and the points that are most important to make. Overall, our practice will be structured in a bubble. Funny enough, reality doesn’t operate in a bubble and it’s rarely as structured as we’d like. Reality is dirty, not sterile. It’s loud. It’s uncertain. How we’ll start, who is sitting down, who is listening, who is distracted, where we will stand, will we have our resources, will the technology work….dirty, dirty, dirty. There’s a number of variables that will come into play.” Read here: Masters of Improv Listen here: What does Ross Geller, Black Panther and Jonathan Garber Have in Common? ~ Episode 51 The Influence of Mindset Influenced by Suzanne Taylor of Taylord Consulting “…the power of thought is so strong that even something you carry expertise in can be cast into doubt with the smallest of questions. Have you ever been asked a question about something you at any other time would be 100% positive about? Something you knew so certainly that you’d bet your life on it? Then all of a sudden, that certainty is questioned and now you’re doubting your own knowledge that you would have bet your life on at another time. This happens to people all of the time. It’s perfectly natural and it’s also perfectly indicative of how strongly our thoughts influence who we are. Are we an expert, or are we a fraud? Do we know this for certain, or do we doubt our own expertise?” Read here: The Influence of Mindset Listen here: We‘re Positive that You‘ll Connect with our Convo w/ Suzanne Taylor-King Ready Set Action “Action should never be taken without regard to direction. To say that another way – we believe in thoughtful, intentional, deliberate action. You won’t always choose the best action, but we’d rather have you going 100 mph in any direction vs 0 mph in no direction. Movement requires inertia and inertia requires energy. It takes much less energy to shift direction than it does to get moving.” Read here: Ready, Set, Action Listen here: Ready, Set, ACTION! ~ Episode 31 Setting Goals – Insight from Genesis Games Influenced by Genesis Games of Healing Connections “Big goals, big hairy goals, big hairy audacious goals. Smart goals. Specific goals. Specific and measurable goals. Specific and measurable goals that are actionable. OH MY GOSH. Cut it out. It’s too much. Break all of this down into an end vision and small simple steps that will get you there. Keep your eyes on the individual steps and work backwards from your vision and you’ll achieve your goals. It’s that simple. Not smart, not bhag, not the longest mouthful of words and acronyms possible.” Read here: Setting Goals – Insight from Genesis Games Listen here: G’s to a Great relationship: Goodness, Goals and Genesis Games ~ Episode 22 What Keeps You Up At Night Influenced by Barbara Flynn of People First “We can never be risk free in any aspect of our lives and certainly not in our businesses. Good leaders and entrepreneurs will make risk – adjusted decisions. They’ll try to figure out what level of comfort they have for risk as well as their ability to manage to that risk. Risk always comes down not just to tolerance levels, but also to capacity. Can I afford to take the risk, even if I’m comfortable with it. A risk that could put your business out of business for example, you may be comfortable with taking, but your business does not likely have the capacity to take that level of risk!” Read here: What Keeps You Up At Night Listen here: Risky Business? Not with Barbara Flynn ~ Episode 34