The Weiman Consulting Letter, January 2008

Wynnewood, PA

Web Site Of The Month: Flight Delay Information
New Seminar! The 3 Keys to Mastering Your Future
Here’s Looking at You, Kid (Part 2)
Quotation of the Month
Updates From Weiman Consulting

Web Site Of The Month: Flight Delay Information

If you travel at all for business, you know how frustrating it can be to get accurate flight information regarding your departing flights. The Federal Aviation Administration has a website you can check to learn where delays are at airports across the country. To check it out yourself, visit: http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp

New Seminar! The 3 Keys to Mastering Your Future

If you want to learn the keys to getting to the next level, and to reap the benefits of a higher level of professional and personal achievement, satisfaction, and balance, please join me and my colleague, David Frees, for our breakthrough program, The 3 Keys to Mastering Your Future, April 10 and 11, 2008 at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The 3 Keys to Mastering Your Future is for business owners and people in leadership positions who have decision-making authority in their organizations. It’s for leaders like you, who want to learn how to build on the techniques and strategies that have helped you so far, but are not enough to help you get to the next level of your career.

With expert guidance, you will:

• Explore and correctly identify the key factors that have been critical in your past success and how to apply these systems, strategies and processes in a new and more efficient way
• Learn how to create and maintain the right state of mind for achieving even more success as well as the strategies, tactics and new technologies for greater leverage in your business and personal life 
• Discover the secrets for naturally and automatically overcoming mindsets and emotional states that interfere with your achievement of even greater success
• Identify prior failure experiences and learn how to recognize and avoid the psychological barriers that they created within you
• Learn the psychology, science, and secrets of effective goal setting so that you can use them to your advantage and to truly redesign your future
• See and use the actual tools that highly effective people use to manage goals, persuade others and implement change

There is so much more that you will gain! To learn more, I invite you to visit the website we created to describe the benefits of this seminar: http://www.breakthroughinvegas.com

It’s going to be an OUTSTANDING event, and I hope you can join us.

There are benefits to registering early, to please click here now to learn more about the program or to reserve your space: http://www.breakthroughinvegas.com

Here’s Looking at You, Kid (Part 2)

Last month’s issue contained an exercise for assessing your results in 2007. It was so popular that I’m reprinting it below for any of you who missed it. A lot of you wrote to me and said the exercise was a powerful one for you.

In that issue, I promised that this month, we would talk about how to take the learnings from that exercise forward as you look at what you wish to accomplish in 2008.

Here is what I suggested you do last month:

Clear off your desk. Put everything away. Turn off your cell phone. Turn off automatic e-mail checking if you currently have it turned on. If you created your own development plan for 2007, take that out and skim through it. But you won’t necessarily need it to do this self-review.

Write the following 7 questions down at the top of a sheet of paper, or copy them to a document, and answer them in order.

1. What was my most significant achievement this year?
   (In writing your response, include why it happened, who was involved, and why this was your most significant accomplishment. Did it support a major value? Achieve a top goal? What made it stand out?)
2. What was my most significant disappointment this year?
   (Why did it happen, what was your role, who else was involved?)
3. What values did I live most prominently this year?
   (What core values do you think you successfully promoted through your own behavior?)
4. What values do I prize, but didn’t live up to?
   (Were there any values that you wanted to promote more through your behavior, but didn’t?)
5. Whose lives, through my behavior, did I improve this year and how did I improve them?
6. Were there any people who were hurt by my behavior this past year?
   (How and why?)
7. What one activity did I do regularly this year that had the greatest leverage on helping achieve growth?
   (Think in terms of your impact and influence throughout the organization, throughout your team, or your interactions with key internal/external stakeholders.)

When you’re done, you should have a thorough assessment of the past year. If you did the exercise correctly, you scanned your memory for many activities, events, meetings, conversations and more that make up the fabric of executive life.

As well, you should have a sense of the value you provided to others and your entire organization, as well as some clues as to where you need to focus your attention in the year ahead.

In other words, you really looked at yourself. And captured in writing what you saw.

With that review in mind, here’s what to do next:

Take out another sheet of paper, or start a new file in your favorite word processing program. Title it “Values, Goals and Action Steps for 2008.”

First, reflect on the values you wrote about in your 2007 review, and state them at the top of your 2008 goals. Our behavior is values-driven, so writing your values at the top of your list helps ensure that your goals for 2008 are consonant with your most prized values.

In my own goals outline, I list financial goals first. I like getting to the bottom line, and putting it in writing. You may do this already, or it may be part of the professional goals or contract with your employer. No matter what it is, include that somewhere in your list of goals. (If you have a moral or other reason for not including a financial goal, just skip this step.)

Next, and for each future goal, list the action steps you will take to achieve that goal. Don’t worry about time lines or schedules right now. You will go back when you’re done the list and create rough deadlines for these. For now, though, just write the action steps up that will help you achieve your stated goals. (I write no more than 5 actions steps per goal.)

Although many people advise that goals should be “SMART,” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Limited or some variation on those keywords) I invite you to create goals that will get you fired up, even if they aren’t seemingly attainable or relevant right now. I like organizing goals by area of my business. For me, that means that Client Goals, Service Goals, Marketing Goals, etc. My list is no more than 5 major goals, by the way. Beyond that, and they aren’t “major.”

There are a number of professional service providers who read this newsletter (e.g., lawyers, accountants) and you should definitely make service goals for the coming year. Even if it’s not a measurable goal, like “Provide outstanding service to my clients at every contact,” writing it down, and including action steps to help achieve that are extremely important.

The idea behind creating your own outline of values, goals and action steps is that you set yourself up at the start of the year for success. You have an opportunity to write out the year on your own terms, according to your own script and using your own ideal ways of viewing the future.

Many clients tell me that the process of outlining the future in ideal terms is an extremely powerful exercise. It will guide your behavior in ways that you may not, at times, even be aware of.

If I can offer a tip that will supercharge your plan for 2008, it is the “meta tip” of taking action as soon as possible on your plans. Small “wins” in the beginning of an action plan are essential for seeing, psychologically, that each step you take is an important one toward achieving your overall goals.

I wish you phenomenal success in 2008! If you want to share your goals and action steps with me privately, send me a note at david@davidweiman.com.

Quotation of the Month

“You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”
— Dale Carnegie 

Updates From Weiman Consulting

• I’ll be teaching a two-day class for advanced psychology doctoral students at Widener University entitled Starting and Building a Private Practice. This class was filled before half the eligible students even had a chance to register for it, and it will be offered again next spring. If you are a professional who wants individual help in growing your professional practice, give me a call at (610) 642-3040 to talk.  I’ve helped psychologists, social workers, accountants, attorneys, and others build their businesses.
• As mentioned in the first news item, David Frees and I will be presenting an awesome developmental seminar entitled The 3 Keys to Mastering Your Future on April 10 and 11, 2008 in Las Vegas. Click here to learn more: http://www.breakthroughinvegas.com