Artisan Creative is celebrating 20+ years in staffing and recruitment of creative professionals. Over the years, we’ve learned a thing or two that we’d like to share with you. We hope you enjoy the 431st issue of our weekly a.blog.
Hard to believe that this week is already the ½ way point of the year! It seems each year that our days & weeks pick up speed, zooming by faster than ever.
Our connectivity to our devices, to our colleagues around the globe, and to friends and family via social, makes one day blend into another with the passage of time becoming seamless.
With the mid-year here, now’s a good opportunity to revisit the goals we set early on in January and take stock of where we are. Are we on track? Are there goals that have already been accomplished that we can remove from our list? Can we add additional ones for the next 6 months? Are we behind on some? How are we keeping ourselves accountable for staying on track?
If you didn’t make the time to set goals earlier in the year, it’s never too late to start now.
If you are on track with the goals you set in January—congratulations!You are part of a committed group of people who know how to keep on track and stay focused. The rest of us can use some help to stay the course.
Marshall Goldsmith, in his new book Triggers says, “we are superior planners and inferior doers”, and that we start the day with excitement and enthusiasm and yet we get “blindsided by our environment ” and don’t get to do what we had planned. He further suggests three steps to forecast the environment by Anticipating, Avoiding or Adjusting where possible, to stay on track with our plan.
So, if we are continually getting blindsided and not accomplishing some of our goals….. it raises the question of how much do we really want to achieve that goal?
If the goal is getting pushed from month to month to the following year….how important is it? Should we just drop it and focus on a few vital goals that are non-negotiable or do we get back on track, revisit our goals, evaluate them and measure their progress?
Here at Artisan we create vision boards that provide a visual reference for our goals. It was a great exercise and I was inspired by the pictorial vision of what my year could look like. I placed my vision board right in front of my desk—so I would look at it everyday. However, after the first few months of the year, my vision board became part of my office décor. Even though I was looking at it daily, I wasn’t seeing it.
I wasn’t actively revisiting the bold statements and visuals I had intentionally placed on my board and wondered if they still resonated or were driving me towards a better year. Until…I read Dr. Goldsmith’s Triggers book and understood the power of asking active questions to keep me on track and help me focus.
I now start each day by evaluating the action items I had set the day before to help me achieve my bigger goal and ask myself the daily question introduced in the book.
Did I do my best to………..? and then I fill in the blank with my goal.
For example, on my vision board I have several images of the great outdoors (mountains, the beach, trees, etc.) to inspire spending more time in nature. Now I ask myself the active question of “Did I do my best to spend time in nature today?”. Some days that means a hike in the Santa Monica mountains or a walk on the beach, and other days it may mean a simple walk around the local park.
The important facet is I’m trying to do something everyday to move the needle closer to my goal.
What daily actions do you implement to achieve your goals? Please do share!