FLOW

In Success Principle 1: Taking 100% Responsibility For Your Life, I identified two actions to start doing:

1. Paying attention to what I’m doing, not doing and trying new behaviors, approaches and strategies with things
2. Requesting more feedback – specifically from five people.

How have I fared?  Well, ironically, requesting feedback is a future topic in the book so I think that will come up again, but that’s okay because I was most successful at action #2.  I vowed to reach out to five different people, I did, here’s what happened.

I asked five people whose opinion I value, the following questions:

1. Is what I’m doing working?
2. Could I be doing better?
3. Is there something more that I should be doing that I’m not?
4. Is there something that I am doing that I should stop doing?
5. How do you see me limiting myself?

Person 1: Was enthusiastic about my request and suggested we get coffee to discuss the five questions I asked.  Our meeting is first thing in the morning, so more feedback to come there
Person 2: Pretty straight forward answers to the questions I asked.  What I am doing is working, there’s nothing I could be doing better. Keep doing what I’m doing, don’t stop anything and I’m not limiting myself.  They included other candid comments about future growth opportunities which was affirming.
Person 3: Said they would think about it and requested I provide similar feedback to them.  I don’t think that will go anywhere.
Person 4: No response
Person 5: Yes I’m doing a great job.  We all have room for improvement, although no specifics were given.  Something I can do is to continue to share in learning opportunities and promote growth amongst peers and support team.  I shouldn’t stop doing anything.  Am I limiting myself?  This is the most interesting (and motivating answer) – chase your dreams, you only get one shot – you have the skills and abilities to make it anywhere.  That makes you feel good.

The nice thing about this process was I got a few attaboy’s.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but I realize that true improvement will come from addressing areas that I’m limiting myself.  Finding the people who are willing to candidly discuss those things with you is extremely difficult, but if you do find them, hang on to them.

I need to focus more on paying attention to my behaviors and trying new strategies or approaches.  Any suggestions?  How can you approach things differently?  Do you have a limiting behavior?  Find out: Ask your friends, family, colleagues, boss, peers, clients the five questions above to see if there is something you are doing that’s limiting your growth.