Success Strategies for the New Year

What was your biggest triumph last year? What was the smartest decision you made? What was your greatest success?

Of all the things that you did , there was certainly one fabulous success (if you’ve not found it yet, look harder!), so now the big question is – how could you use the same strategies that gave you so much success in this area to guarantee your own personal success in the year to come?

Your best year ever

My gift to you for your happiest year ever is to share with you a strategy for successful outcomes that I have seen work with hundreds of clients year after year.  It’s exceptionally simple yet totally unique to you and if you use it, you can guarantee personal success.  It’s called…

PUTTNG THE COOK IN THE KITCHEN

If you ask a great cook how he makes a particular dish, he may very well say, well, I take a pound of this and some of that, put it all together and bake in a hot oven.  You are none the wiser. But if you ask the cook to retrace his steps and stop him at each ingredient along the way, you are very likely to discover his success strategy.

In order to create your own personal success strategy, you’ll need to take yourself back to the moment you decided to do the thing that gave you your greatest success and write down each and every step you took along the way to get there.

1. What happened just before?

Do you remember what led you to decide that you must now take action?  You probably had a thought and perhaps it was something like “enough is enough – I just have to do this” Go back to that thought and write down what that thought was.

2. What was your desired outcome?

After the initial thought, you almost certainly created your desired outcome in your mind. You knew exactly what it was you wanted and this time you were determined to achieve it.  What was that desired outcome?

3. What was your strategy?

In order to achieve your outcome there will always be a strategy. Even though it looks like outcomes and accompanying strategies are different, in essence your own personal strategy is always the same and can be used for all your goals in life.

Here’s an example of a client taking her driving test that she had failed 4 times previously but wanted to pass in order to achieve independence:

• Studying the Highway Code every night for 40 minutes
• Driving with experienced driver four times a week for one hour
• Extra focus on difficult manoeuvres
• Paying more attention
• Changing behaviours (e.g. mirror/signal instead of the other way round)

This same strategy could be used for studying, buying a new home, or creating a sustainable relationship. The basic ingredients for her are:

• Know my Outcome
• Research
• Practise
• Focus on difficult areas
• Paying more attention/listening/understanding
• Changing behaviours that don’t work in that situation

4. How did you do it?

Take some time to write down now every step you took that led to successful achievement of your outcome. Don’t miss anything out, put yourself in your own ‘kitchen’ and retrace your exact steps.

5. SUCCESS!

The last part of this strategy is to ask yourself “which of my values were honoured by successfully achieving my outcome?”  I imagine that virtually all of them were, so just take a moment now to write down which values were honoured by your fabulous success. Now you know that you have truly been successful because you have honoured you!

Taking it forwards

This is the basic strategy for achieving success in everything you do.  If you want to make some comparisons, look at outcomes that have not been successfully achieved and retrace the strategy you used.

Notice where you crashed and what you would now do to create success.  Follow your own personal success strategy in every area of your life and have the most fabulous and successful year!

I’ll bet you can remember several occasions when something went really well every step of the way. You made the right choices and decisions and achieved the result you were looking for.  It may have been passing  your driving test, starting up a new business, creating new relationships or changing your career path.

Whatever it was that gave you the results you wanted, it happened as a result of a great strategy that worked for you.