Dancing Elephants – The Blog

One of the smartest people I’ve met in business has one commandment that he swears by: Measurement eliminates argument.

His philosophy is that numbers don’t lie and that you’ll always know what works and what doesn’t if you measure properly. I’ve taken this message to heart and it has served me very, very well.

In fact, each week I spend a few minutes on my Monday Morning Metrics*, a collection of 7 key measurements in my business that tell me whether I’m on or off target for my goals.

The most powerful part of this time is looking at the graphs of the measurements. At a glance, I can tell in which direction my business is headed. I can spot trends and get a sense of when I have surges or troughs on my success path.

These graphs give me a dashboard for my business and in an instant let me know whether to keep doing what I’m doing or change.

Graphs work because the decision-making side of your brain is picture-focused rather than numbers-focused. When you look at a spreadsheet of numbers, your brain struggles to make sense of it. However, when you see a picture, or graph, of those numbers you immediately understand what the significance is. This is the reason that “infographics” have become so popular as a way of telling a story about data.

What graphs do you look at regularly? Are there ones that you should add to your weekly regimen?

* This is part of The One Page Strategic Planning process.

One of my favorite things in life is participating in SEAL Team PT. It not only gets me in incredible physical shape but I learn leadership and teamwork skills as well as lessons that translate directly to business.

One of those lessons came just the other night.

SEAL Team workouts are broken down into evolutions, or small exercises. Last Thursday, one of our evolutions consisted of getting into teams of ten members, racing to the nets at the tennis courts and then passing each member over the net without touching it.

Our instructor turned us loose and we performed our task. At the end, we all high-fived and were quite proud of ourselves. He then asked us to repeat the process but do it faster. We did and all of us were confident that we’d gone as quickly as we could.

After the second round, the instructor told us that the fastest team had completed the evolution in 1:02 and the slowest team in 1:50. He then challenged us to do it even faster on the third round.

This time the fastest team completed the evolution in just :40 and the slowest in 1:30. That is 30% and 18% improvement respectively!

What I learned from this short exercise is:
Practice improves performance – it sounds sort of simple, but how often do you really practice beforehand vs. just going out and doing something new? Do you practice sales presentations, cold calls, networking, etc?
Short-term goals improve performance – as soon as the team knew what times to beat, we crushed them. Do you have goals for each meeting, day, week for you and your team?

I’ll be sharing other tips and ideas from SEAL Team as the year progresses. You can learn a lot from a man who was a Navy SEAL, crushed his spine five years ago, is now running a super-successful business and did 600 pushups on Monday of this week.

It is no secret that change is difficult.

In fact, that is the number one reason that goals don’t get accomplished. Achieving a goal requires change. It requires you to do something differently than you did before.

Change requires you to act in a new way, to go against all the automation in your brain and use conscious thoughts. And your brain hates that.

You see, conscious thought eats up enormous amounts of energy while automated thought requires very little power to run. So, your brain would much rather kick you into autopilot mode, repeat what you’ve always done and call it a day. That way it can use the energy you get from food to run other parts of your body like muscles and lungs and digestion or store it up for later usage.

If you want to make changes in your actions, you have to tap into the conscious part of your brain in a way that uses very little brain power. This tricks the brain into change.

The simplest way to do that is to make your “new” actions very, very small changes.

The easiest strategy I’ve ever found for this is to use what I call “Divide and Conquer”. Here is how it works.

Write down all the actions you can think of that you’ll need to accomplish to achieve your goal.

Now, look at the list. If any action on the list will take more than 30 minutes to accomplish, divide it into two parts.

Review the list again and divide any actions into two parts if they will take more than 30 minutes to accomplish. Lather, rinse, repeat.

By creating a list of 30-minute micro tasks you’ll trick your brain into changing without freaking out about using too much energy.

If you are using The One Page Strategic Plan, this is exactly the strategy you use on the weekly planning template to turn your quarterly initiatives into doable tasks and hit your annual goals.

Last week was a great reminder about choosing the company you keep.

As I posted a few weeks ago, one of my goals for this year is to lose 29 pounds. Part of making that happen is making very wise food choices and controlling my portions. For example, I can eat pizza, just not four slices.

When I am at home, cooking for myself, eating well is easy. I only buy healthy food at the grocery store so there are never any temptations to eat junk at home.

The challenge comes when I eat out.

Twice last week I had the opportunity to eat out with work colleagues – once with my friend Brian and once with my friend Susan. The difference in my eating habits was dramatically different.

With Brian, I ate almost twice the amount of food that I did  with Susan and I ate heavy pasta instead of light fish.

Why? Because I let my decisions be influenced by what my dining mate chose. Brian doesn’t care about his weight so he chose a pasta restaurant and ordered a huge plate of noodles. Susan is always concerned about health and fitness and she chose an asian restaurant where light fare is standard.

In looking back at the last few weeks of eating out experiences, I realized that I almost always overeat when I go out with men and rarely when I dine with women.

The company you keep influences the decisions you make. If you hang out with people who share your goals and values, you’re much more likely to stay on track for success.

Who do you hang out with? Are your friends as ambitious as you are? Do your colleagues want success as much as you?

I’m not suggesting that you get rid of old friends, but rather that you modify how you interact with them. I’m not going to stop eating out with my male friends but I’m going to do my best to include female friends in the mix when I do.

What are you going to change about the company you keep in 2012?

2012 is kicking off in a big way at Dancing Elephants. We have our new logo (revealed soon), are hard at work on our new website and are on track for our goals so far this year.

One of the things you’ll be seeing from us this year is a lot more community building. Among other things, that means sharing  some of our goals with you and asking if you’d like to do the same with us.

For starters, we are going to double our sales this year over 2011. That’s a tall order as 2011 was a record year at Dancing Elephants but we know, if we deliver consistent value to our clients, we can do it. We are on track through the first 10 days and focused on getting ahead of the curve by mid-February.

I’m also sharing one of my personal goals – to lose 29 lbs and get back to my favorite weight of 125lbs. How’s that for sharing? So far, I’m participating in the SEAL Team PT 90-Day Challenge and tracking each day’s food via LoseIt. I’m down 2 lbs in the first week and excited about the progress.

What are some of your goals for 2012? Will you share them with me in the comments below? The more we can build a community of support and feedback, the better off we will all be.

Here’s to 100% goal achievement in 2012 for us all!

Laura

It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. Yet, that is exactly what happens quite often at this time of year.

Most of us start the year with so many great ideas and ideals. We crave change and achievement and forward progress.

Sadly, by the first of February many of our desires have gone by the wayside and we are back to our old habits.

If you are serious about getting different results this year, you’re going to have to change.

Change doesn’t start with your actions. It starts with your thoughts and beliefs.

A SEAL Team PT friend of mine posted this on her Facebook wall today,

“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullsh** story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it!”

This comes from a woman who, in the last two years, has lost over 120lbs and is now running the NYC half marathon.

What stories do you tell yourself? Are they stories of success or are they excuses you use to maintain the status quo?

What are stories are you telling yourself for 2012? I’d love to hear them!

A new year brings with it much promise. It is a clean slate, a chance to start over, to begin anew.

It is a time that many overwhelmed people look forward to as it offers the hope of change and renewal.

Sadly, few people actually realize their dreams of the fresh start and, instead, fall back into the habits of the past year. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you’re serious about a clean slate this year, here are a three quick tips for making 2012 the new beginning you want:

Declare email bankruptcy – most people have scores of unanswered emails in their inbox, giving them the feeling of never catching up. Start 2012 with a clean inbox. Set your deleted items folder to keep deleted mail for 60 days, then delete everything in your inbox. Yep, the whole thing. The important ones will come back, trust me. Every Friday before you leave, clean out your inbox. All of it. You can check out followup.cc as a cool tool for keeping things clean. Also, give SaneBox a go to manage the flood of incoming mail.

Clear your desktop – is your desktop of full of clutter? Is your computer desktop equally chaotic? Grab a cardboard box, dump your real desktop’s contents into it and store it someplace out of the way for 60 days. If you need something, you know where it is. For your computer desktop, just create a folder in your documents called “Desktop 2011” and file everything there.

Make sand – if you’re going to change your circumstances, you’ll have to change you behavior. And that can be hard, especially if you’re looking to make long-lasting changes. The key to change is to break your changes into tiny little pieces. Create actions and tasks that take no longer than one hour to accomplish and watch how easy it is to work those into your schedule. If your changes are boulders think about breaking them down into grains of sand. With a grain of sand, even an oyster can make a pearl.

If you have time this week, before the New Year kicks off, give these tips a try. You’ll find that creating a clean slate and then laying out a list of tiny tasks to get you started will make all the difference in your 2012 results.