The 5 Ways You Can Become Your Very Best In Whatever You Do!
8 min readThe 5 Ways You Can Become Your Very Best In Whatever You Do!
The Focus From An Athletics and Business Perspective
The art of doing your very best, I will go through five things that people can do today, that can help you become your very best. One of the biggest mistakes that people make in athletics and business. My main two main focuses are athletics and business, because I’ve being a football coach for almost 16 years, and that for 16 years now, and I’ve operated my business for almost as long. I’ve ridden the highs and lows of that, and as an athlete myself, playing Division one football ,at the University of Connecticut, and riding the highs and lows of being a starter, to be in to being out for a year, to having to come back to being your starter, and grinding to have that success again.
I think I’ve learned a ton about, what it takes to be your very best, and it’s something that’s a daily struggle for every single human being on earth. If you want to successful in what you do then it will always be a challenge. In this article, I want to give you some things that can help you in the process of trying to be your very best.
- Understanding Your Actionable Goals
Number one: Understanding, understanding what your actionable goals are, and what do I mean by that? is you have things that you want to accomplish either on a daily, or yearly basis, or monthly basis, and you have to have actions for those things, in order to accomplish them.
So, for example if your goal in business is to generate 500,000 dollars in sales in the next six months. Okay, you have to have actual items that are going to take care of each of those things, so let’s start with some things that could be actionable in order to do that. A great example would be creating a Facebook Ads campaign targeting the New York City marketplace in finance. Okay, or financial planning something along those lines, you target that, and then you have the opportunity then to run those ads and generate leads, so that’s a step towards being your best and making that an actual goal.
Another specific actionable goal, might be to hire five salesmen on a commission level, giving them 20 percent commission for every sale that they get, and trying to generate for them a hundred leads a week, that they can follow up on. That’s an actionable goal that you could provide for people that work for you in order to generate an opportunity for you to get those sales, so actionable goals it’s not enough to just have $500,000 in the next six months in sales, you have to have actionable goals behind it, so that’s the first and most important thing.
- Have A Process That Is Measurable
The second thing that’s real important, and critical to being your very best, is to have a process, a process that you go through every single day, in order to take steps towards your actionable goals, so what is your process, how do you come up with ideas, how do you brainstorm, how do you figure out ways to do things? If you’re an athlete, and your goal is to be first team All-County defensive back, and you’re gonna do that by training five times a week, for an hour a day, a half hour on strength, half hour on speed, and then two times per week catching balls every single a week, those are actual goals then the process is how you go about doing that.
When you go out and catch balls,you’re gonna catch 50 balls each time, you’re going to have your eyes on the ball as it comes all the way in, you’re gonna extend your arms, you’re gonna pull the ball all the way in, secure the football, turn up field and run. Okay, there’s your process, you have your actionable goals, you have your process, and you have to have that every single day, in order to gain steps towards your actual goal. So, that’s number two; having a process. So, number one, is having actionable goals, number two is having a process to reach those actionable goals.
- Have Long Term Vision
Number three; is to have a long-term vision is, what is it that you dream about at the highest level in accomplishing? Not just goals, but what do you dream about being? when you have that vision, that vision has to be drawn out, or written out, whether you’re a visual person, or textual person, somebody who or — even if you’re someone that’s an audio person, you have to have a way that you can remind yourself of your vision every single day, every single day you have to remind yourself of your vision.
A vision is; Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, NASA’s vision and John F Kennedy’s vision was to put a man on the moon, that was the vision, they had a lot of actionable goals along the way, a lot of processes that were in place, but the vision was to put a man on the moon. Okay, and you have to make sure you have the vision, and once that vision did get accomplished, no one can forget Neil Armstrong taking the very first steps, and landing on the moon. So, number three is having a vision.
- Holding Yourself Accountable
Number four; accountability, you must be accountable to all those things, your vision your actionable goals, and your processes. How are you judging yourself, and how are you holding yourself accountable, or having someone else that is holding you accountable? You must be held accountable, for all of the things that you have is actionable goals, your processes and your vision. Holding ourselves accountable requires a self-reporting process, tracking. Okay, a self-reporting process and tracking of what is getting done, this can simply be a checklist. Okay, and I see all the time people say, you shouldn’t have a to-do list, it disappoints you, lets you down.
There’s a difference between having a checklist, and a to-do list, and you make it simple, you have that accountable thing, that you have to have for you each week, and you limit it to somewhere between three and ten items, that each week you’re accountable for, and you can put that on a monthly basis as well, or yearly basis. If you’re doing a yearly basis, that goes along with your vision, and your actionable goals, and you might have three items, a weekly basis somewhere between three and ten items, that you can hold yourself accountable, that you can say yes I did, or I didn’t. And I listened to when people say, I’ll get rid of your to-do lists, however you do it, you need to have a checklist. You can do it in Evernote, which is a program that you could use on your computer, you could use it with paper, and post it on your wall, and you have to be accountable to yourself, in order to have the actual ability to be able to reach the next step.
- Create A Self Imposed Reward System
Number five, and this is the — maybe the most important thing; you must create a reward system for yourself, how are you rewarding yourself? For each process along the way, how are you reward yourself for accountability, in football, as a football coach, we have a very defined reward system. Okay, a team winning or losing a game is a very definitive reward system, at the end of the year, you can see your record and have a pretty good idea how you did. Okay, if you accomplished all those things that you wanted to as a team. as an individual, okay as a coach, you could have all those items that you have, and maybe wins and losses wasn’t your only measurable things.
So, you might have to have a reward system based off of participation. You might have a reward system based off of what percentage of guys got in the weight room this year versus last year. You must have a reward system that measures and rewards you for what you accomplish. An example of another reward system that measures you, could be how many points your team scored in the season. An Individual may create a reward based on how many touchdowns you scored, but a better reward system would be, how many touchdown you scored, and then how many times you then rewarded the lineman who blocked for you, or the quarterback who threw you the ball but the most important thing is to create a reward system.
So, once you have that as your reward a win, or a loss, or a touchdown, then you create on top of that reward system, what I call supplemental rewards. If you accomplished your rewards, and your goals in a game, or in a week, or in a month. You might take yourself out to dinner something small, or if you’re in a relationship, you might reward your spouse by taking them on a vacation or to dinner, small rewards that reinforce the fact that you’re doing the right thing from a process standpoint, from accountability standpoint, from a vision standpoint, you must make sure that you take care of those things. Creating a reward system is the feedback that you need in order to keep doing each one of those other four areas. So, number one is actionable goals; number two, having a process, number three, having a vision. Creating a vision is number three; number four, accountability, and reporting, and number five, having a reward system, that you can track, to make sure you are reinforced, with proper feedback positive and negative, in order to be able to accomplish everything and to be your very best.
Being your very best, if you follow those five steps, you will create the opportunity to being your very best. Being your very best, does it mean that you are matching, or competing with anybody other than yourself? By learning to compete with yourself, you will then be able to compete with others effectively. You will learn to help others effectively, you will be able to figure out things that are most important to you, and to be your very best means the best that you possibly can do. It does not mean beating yourself up, by comparing yourself to others, but being your very best, being your best competitor, in order to accomplish all the things, you want to accom
by David Schuman @nucfootball on twitter and @daveschuman on instagram
you can contact him at dschuman36@gmail.com
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