Keeping your plan to reality

Keeping your plan to reality

Pilots’ have a mantra: ‘Brief the plan, fly the brief.’ The brief is the mission; the mission is the brief. Pilots want to feel that their mission has run like a well-scripted, well-rehearsed play: with great timing from every actor, stagehand, and musician; no missed lines; quick recovery from any left-field glitches; each participant having an irresistible energy for getting the job done and done well. If at the end of a mission a pilot can say ‘It went according to plan’, it’s a happy day. It’s also a rare one, for plans rarely survive contact with reality. The reasons are infinite, but logically, it’s because: the plan was not so good in the first place; someone didn’t know the plan; someone hasn’t followed the plan; or reality has dramatically changed.  Follow a high performance framework like Flex to plan–brief–execute–debrief and you’ll address the first three of these risks in turn. But what about the inevitability of change. How do we keep our plan wedded to reality?

Gaps between the plan and its execution

Regardless of where you operate – the boardroom, the showroom, the storeroom, or the war room –  plans have to be adapted because the reality of a situation changes. If you know how reality will change, you’re smarter and perhaps more divine than most and your plan will reflect that. (In fact, many changes you will have foreseen, and included in the contingencies of your flexible plan.) But if you’re human, Flex may help.

Flex accepts that as reality changes, the plan changes. Is that a bad thing? If a sinkhole opens up in the road in front of you, do you drive on regardless?

Let’s go back to the philosophy behind Flex. It’s aiming for flawless execution, not flawless planning. You don’t have to obsess about the plan being perfect, because it’s the execution that matters. However fast or good your planning, a plan is accurate only for the minute it’s made. It will keep changing until captured in the moment of time that is the brief, and then it will continue to change.

So, how do we keep our plan to reality? Every plan should include team check-in points, an execution rhythm of regular X-Gap reviews to analyze the gap between the plan and its execution. Each X-Gap (short for ‘execution gaps’) is a decision point for the mission: continue, adjust, or abort? Green light, yellow, or red? If reality changes between X-Gaps, your plan will change too.

 

Why have X-Gap meetings?

Keeping on top of what’s happening is the driving reason for our X-Gap meetings, but not the only one. People forget things. (There, we said it. It’s out there.) People don’t always do what they plan to do. (Truth is hard.) People are more likely to do things when they’ve committed to do so to someone else. People don’t like facing people when they haven’t met that commitment.

People are more likely to do things when they’ve committed to do so to someone else. People don’t like facing people when they haven’t met that commitment

Accountability

You get the picture. There is simply no better way—without going off on vigilante fantasies—to hold people to their part of the plan. As well as keeping things on track, X-Gap meetings hold people accountable. The plan is who does what and when, and nobody can hide if something’s not done. Whether it’s an honest oversight or a shirked responsibility, the plan will have to change. You’ll be able to head off small problems before they snowball and become big ones. You’ll also know there’s an internal threat that might have to be managed in future plans. Working through those issues builds teamwork and mutual respect.

Build Culture

X-Gap meetings also underscore the leader’s intent and desire for the mission. Just as the brief is the moment for a leader to stamp a personality on the mission, an X-Gap is the time to reset that personality. Every emphasis a leader makes and the mood they create in an X-Gap helps build the team’s culture. The leader is restating their responsibility for the plan and its delivery.

 

Adjust Courses of Action

I found plenty of opportunities to reset the plan and take responsibility for it on the journey with my company Mode to build a seventeen-story hotel using innovative modular construction. The idea and plan seemed sound—as sound as something that’s never been done before could be—but it turned out to have a few gaps. Prime among them was the building material.

The concept originated in Papua New Guinea, to control building costs in a place with devastating material and labour cost inflation. Mode used steel boxes, fabricated offshore or in a PNG factory, which could be placed like LEGO blocks to build up the structure. The problem came in transferring the technology to Australia, a country where the building codes and fire standards were based on concrete construction. Yet the architect, structural engineers, and fabricators at a regular X-Gap could quickly set a plan to find a solution.

The ultimate decision? Mode elected to abandon years of research and engaged an Australian builder of smaller prefabricated buildings, and together they designed and built their hotel. It was a tough decision, leaving behind all that technology and investment capital on the shelf, however we still achieved our mission objective: owning and building a great hotel for less cost than traditional building techniques.

Fighter pilot missions are briefed and flown on the same day. That’s their execution rhythm, and they stick to that rhythm for as long as their strategy demands. Business missions take longer. If they’re longer than a week, don’t wait for reality to change to call an X-Gap meeting. Make it a regular event and create your execution rhythm.

 

Christian “Boo” Boucousis is an author, entrepreneur, ex RAAF fighter pilot and the CEO of Afterburner Australia – high performance corporate training, team building and motivational keynote speakers. Email Christian directly boo at afterburner.com.au

 

The post Keeping your plan to reality appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/strategy-execution-process-x-gap/

Plan for Perfection, Prepare for the Worst

How to Engage Millennials in the Workplace with Direction and Autonomy

Balancing direction and autonomy: the high performance way to engage your team and increase accountability 

Engagement is one of the most overused words in the modern business lexicon. It isn’t the answer to everything, but it remains powerful. For people to perform at anywhere near their best, they need to be ‘engaged’. This is particularly true of millennials, the generation born from 1980 to 2000, who will comprise 50 percent of the global workforce by 2020.

Millennials, the generation born from 1980 to 2000, who will comprise 50 percent of the global workforce by 2020

To engage millennials, and in our view anyone else, you need to be both direct and empowering.  And a good place to start is the planning process. Let me explain how.

 

There is no waffle in a solid plan. The whole point of it is for each individual to know exactly what they need to achieve by when, for every task in the plan. The mission objective must be clear, measurable and achievable and the enabling courses of action must be direct, personal, and concise.

So How Does any of that Empower Anyone?

In the 1980s, several studies showed that people worked harder, were more satisfied, and trusted their employers more if their management supported their autonomy: respecting perspectives, giving choices, and encouraging self-initiation rather than specifying how they should do things. For the millennial generation, support for autonomy is even more important. Millennials will be more energized and productive if they have greater autonomy over where, when, and how they work.

Millennials will be more energized and productive if they have greater autonomy over where, when, and how they work

There is a balance to be reached between the directness of a plan, and the need for team members to have control of their own missions. That balance is found in the team’s situational awareness. The more awareness the team has of the context for the mission, the state of the industry, its players and history, the less direction they will need.

 

 

Create the Best Plans for Engagement

The best plans are created by the teams who are responsible for executing them. In being part of their team, in taking part in their planning, people are signing up to the team’s plan. They are making commitments to their team, and for high performance teams that follow a disciplined execution framework, those commitments will hold.

In The Upside of Turbulence, MIT Professor Donald Sull suggests that ‘The best promises share five characteristics: they are public, active, voluntary, explicit, and they include a clear rationale for why they matter.’ Each of these characteristics should be shared by the commitments made in high performance planning. When a team works together to set its mission plan for a worthwhile, aligned objective, the team members have no problem buying in to the plan or being responsible to take on the needed tasks. If anything, the team needs to watch for people who overload themselves with tasks. But, as we know, there are ways to manage that risk.

Features of a High Performance Plan

A high performance plan does not go into the detail of how its tasks are to be done, nor state the obvious, nor restate standards. Just like the strategy it is pursuing, the mission is defined only by its intended effect: the what. Similarly, each task in the mission plan is defined only by its intended effect: what by when by who; clear, measurable, achievable. How that result occurs is up to the team (for the mission) or the individual (for the task).

Tina the Millennial & Breathing Steps

So if your plan calls for Tina to have a car outside 1135 North Street at 11 p.m., it’s Tina’s task to get it there. You don’t want to get into the route taken, the speed driven, the need to obey traffic laws, the need for fuel. You don’t want to worry about the way Tina drives. Your team will have standard operating procedures (SOPs). It’s obvious the car needs fuel in the tank and air in the tires. These are ‘breathing’ steps: steps so obvious it’s like telling people to remember to breathe. Beyond that, leave it to Tina to drive the car her way, using whatever techniques and preferences she likes—and that are consistent with the SOPs. If you go into too much detail, if you labor the obvious, it’s an insult to people.

They’re on the team to do these things—let them work it out, or ask for support.

As Charles Duhigg said in The Power of Habit: ‘Giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have a genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.’ Or, as General Patton put it: ‘Don’t tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and let them surprise you with the results.’

Christian “Boo” Boucousis is an author, entrepreneur, ex RAAF fighter pilot and the CEO of Afterburner Australia, high performance corporate training and team building. Email Christian directly boo at afterburner.com.au

The post How to Engage Millennials in the Workplace with Direction and Autonomy appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/engage-millennials-workforce/

Working with FLEXibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business

Working with FLEXibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business

 

Whatever business we’re in, we face more disruptive technologies, more regulations, and more competition. No one person can keep on top of all that. People are by nature anxious, curious, easily distracted and more often than not overconfident. Given the speed of change and the complexity of our environment, there are more ideas, possibilities, initiatives, and challenges coming at us all the time.

Some people are better than others at keeping focus. So now more than ever we need to open up our thinking to a broader awareness. But we need to do so in a simple, disciplined way, so that the focus is on the substance and not the process. 

Flexibility (or “Flex” for short) is the key. “Flex” is a label for a high performance way of thinking and a framework for action. Its DNA stems from the disciplines and mindsets of special military teams: U.S. Navy SEALs, Australian SAS, U.S. Army Rangers and, of course, jet fighter pilots in army, navy, marine, and air force squadrons. These teams are geared to act as tight, effective units in hostile, complex, and dynamic environments. All of these teams would recognize and use the principles of Flex, though they may have their own terms for them. Any fighter pilot on the planet would recognize these principles, and be able to work together using them. It’s how fighter pilots think and act.

 

The very same principles can be applied to business. Let me explain.

What just happened? What are we aiming for? How can we get there? Can we do it better? If any of these questions are on your mind, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s take stock of your situation.

Say you know what you’re trying to achieve, but things aren’t quite going to plan. There may be any number of reasons for that, but mostly it’s because of one of these: there are fundamental (repairable) issues within the organisation, the plan wasn’t so good (assuming there was one), people didn’t know their plan well enough, or they didn’t execute it as planned.

If you met with your team and talked about it honestly, you’d be able to work out what fell short: the plan, the communication, or the execution. It can’t really be anything else. You can point the finger at something else, but was that something you could have foreseen? And, if so, could you have dealt with it as part of your plan?

 

 

That conversation—‘What just happened? or How are we doing?’—is where we usually start

It’s a review of an action, or a check-in on your progress. Someone, somewhere wants to have that conversation. We can’t call it a debrief because, as we’ll see, a debrief assumes there are a few things in place to begin with. But having that conversation will help make sure that next time you do something, you’ll plan it better, brief it better, and execute it better.

Getting things done these days is rarely easy. Sure we have more opportunities, but with them come greater expectations, responsibilities, and risks. We have more people to keep happy—all those ‘stakeholders’—with more demands. We face more uncertainty, because the changes we face are more frequent, and bring with them things we’ve never encountered before. We need to build for the future, at the same time as delivering today. So it’s harder to do the things that really matter to us, personally and professionally, and do them well.

Let’s imagine you’re a medical products unit or an investment team that’s been operating for a decade, and you’re pretty good at it. You’re a good team, a few quirks and quirky personalities, but you know each other and how to work together. You’ve made a decent return and your bosses and investors have stuck by you. You have a good pipeline of opportunities, you know how to assess them, you know how to execute transactions to protect your interests, and you know how to manage assets and people for the long term. It’s what you do.

 

So you just need to keep doing it, right?

Maybe. Maybe you’ve just lost your best researcher or lead-maker. Maybe tax policies have changed, or you need a greater gross return to generate the same income. Or your investors are now tempted by better returns elsewhere, and want higher returns from your own unit. Maybe someone else has turned up in your neck of the woods, snapping up the last three opportunities you had your eyes on. Your world has changed in some way, just enough for you to have to perform better—or it’s a little more urgent than that.

Flex will help you. The Flex framework for action is deliberately simple. But as you work with it, you’ll find it sharpens your team’s awareness, its bias to action, and its accountabilities. Each part of the Flex process instills a belief that the mission is on track, that each person has a clear and critical role, and that they will fulfill it.

 

 

We use the term Flex because it is true to what it is: a way of working with the flexibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business, and still deliver what you need to. It helps us quickly assess our situation, make a decision, get things done, and keep doing them better. Do you have the flexibility to keep you ahead of your game, at that high performance level?

______________________________________________________________________

Christian “Boo” Boucousis works with individuals, teams and organizations to achieve their business objectives through the use of a high performance framework.

He is a former Air Force Fighter Pilot and the founder of one of the world’s largest humanitarian support companies. He is currently the CEO of Afterburner Australia and Mode Modular Developments, who recently developed Australia’s tallest prefabricated modular hotel – Peppers King Square in the Perth CBD.

Boo is a leadership and high performance expert and the co-author of “On Time, On Target: How Teams and Companies Can Cut Through Complexity and Get Things Done….The Fighter Pilot Way”.

The post Working with FLEXibility to handle the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of modern business appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/working-with-flex-modern-business/

1 + 1 = 3: How to create the highest performing teams

I’ve been involved in developing high performing teams and leaders as a performance coach for a little over three years now. I’d been building the same teams and leaders as a fighter pilot and entrepreneur for more than two decades before. And now, I have the unique opportunity to observe teams across extremely diverse functions and frankly, it’s been fascinating.

By understanding conceptually why teams are important, we can prioritise the simple methods that achieve alignment of the individuals within the team. If you’re worried you’ll lose the acknowledgement we crave as individuals, then don’t. Whilst there’s no “I” in team, there is in “winning team”! Individual empowerment comes about as a function of being part of a high performing team.

So how do we become a high functioning team?

Through the creation of alignment around simple objectives – the key differentiator between good and great companies. Wasn’t it Jim Collins himself who stated “Visionary companies are 1% vision and 99% alignment”? Through a commitment to effective team work you’ll achieve a productivity multiple that delivers impressive results.

What I find most interesting is each organisation fundamentally believes that they are different. In some respects, it’s true – one organisation may be a charity, the other a public service, another may be an elite sporting team or a corporate entity. Very different products and services. However from a human performance perspective, you may be surprised to learn that these organisations are by and large the same. How so?

There is a trend in organisations to focus on the individual, they call it “talent” or investment in individual development. Astonishing amounts of money are spent on recruiting, on-boarding and training individuals into an organisation. Depending on where you look, studies show that recruiting can be anywhere from 5%-30% of an employee’s salary. Then there is training and integration into the organisation, which takes on average 32 hours.

Losing employees and re-hiring, if occurring in a two year cycle, can cost up to 30% of an average employee salary for entry level positons, and 200% + for C-suite levels. With the constant hunt for “new talent” and the next big thing we run the risk of neglecting the most important part of any business – our existing and dedicated team.

I am a firm believer that good teams managed by effective leaders provides an exponentially better outcome than you just going it alone.

By effectively managing a team we harness the diversity of human beings, something we are unable to achieve in a single individual. According to David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom the essential traits of effective team are:

1. Creating dependability through trust in the team to get things done, when they need to be done. Trust is driven through accountability by each team member to deliver on their objectives.
2. An understanding of how each team member will contribute to the overall “big picture” or the organisation’s long term vision. Each team member knows what they have to do to achieve the objectives.
3. Communicating clearly to ensure everyone is ‘on the same page’ and understands their roles in delivering the organisation’s objectives. Encouraging open and honest communication in the form of debriefing to build respect and trust amongst the team.
4. Once alignment and trust is established we can move from subjective chatter to an objective assessment of performance. This in turn creates constructive conflict and this type of conflict or critique should be encouraged!

One of the most common human traits I have observed is the unwillingness of team members to admit their mistakes or that their assumptions were incorrect. This stifles growth and erodes trust, and is a response to either poorly planned objectives or weak leadership.

5. Appreciation of each other. Individuals appreciate recognition for a job well done and the team appreciates the efforts of the individual. Sharing the appreciation and achieving small tasks regularly is a huge motivation driver and it’s why these companies are so successful.

So how do you create this super team?

Here are a few tips to help you on your way.

1. First and foremost, there must be a commitment to the process of becoming a great team, whether you’re a team leader or a team member.
2. Work together to create a simple plan that sets three simple objectives for the year, quarter and week ahead, that are aligned to your organisation’s strategy.
3. Each team member must develop and commit to three enabling objectives, aligned to the whole team’s plan, to create accountability to deliver on these objectives within 90 days.
4. Meet once a week as a team, for no more than an hour, to allow each team member to review their progress against their objectives.
5. Participate in a team building exercise every six months. This is a great way for the team to work together on a new task with new subject matter. This helps keep the relationships invigorated and provides an opportunity to develop and observe the natural strengths and weaknesses of the team (without the security blanket or bias of our own organisation’s structure). This is really valuable for all team members to reflect on how best they can contribute to the team and who to go to when they need help.
6. Share leadership roles amongst the group. The team leader has the casting vote on all matters, however allow a different team member to lead the weekly “how are we tracking” meeting. It helps develop their confidence and allows the team leader to observe the team and reflect on the “bigger picture”.

Learning to develop and maintain effective teams is one of the most powerful tools an organisation can develop.

We meet the deep rooted social needs of individuals seeking a sense of community through our teams supportive peer group. We then align this empowered team to the long term vision of our organisation, creating a disproportionate effect in our business, manifesting our “1 + 1 = 3” equation.

The post 1 + 1 = 3: How to create the highest performing teams appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburner.com.au/1-1-3-how-to-create-the-highest-performing-teams/

Defence Connect Podcast with Afterburner

Unique Team Building Events – The Fighter Pilot Way

Afterburner has been delivering Team Building programs in Australia and Asia for over twelve years. Our pilots and clients have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to bring their two worlds together, if only for a day or two! One of the key reasons for the success of our team building programs (and our unique point of difference) is the genuine motivation and interest our coaches – all fighter pilots – have for sharing the lessons they’ve learned after having millions of dollars invested in them by the Government.

 

Why a 98% Success Rate Beats a 13% Success Rate

 

Fighter pilots execute their missions successfully over 98% of the time, which in their world is business as usual. It isn’t something they take particular attention on, it’s the benchmark and it’s consistently achieved. In business, the consensus on organisations successfully executing their strategy is anywhere between 13-30%. That’s quite a difference. We’ve realized over time that there are a few key reasons for this differential in performance and they may not be the reasons you think.

 

Turning Average Joes into Elite Performers

 

For starters, the majority of fighter pilots are incredibly average and the individuals coming though the recruitment process aren’t exactly ‘super stars’ in any particular field. So it’s safe to say that trainee fighter pilots aren’t elite athletes, academic geniuses or groundbreaking theorists. However something very special happens once these ‘average Joes’ walk through the door to pilot training.

(Img Source: http://www.defencejobs.gov.au)

A very sophisticated and proven system switches into gear and transforms these men and women into some of the world’s most highly effective practitioners on earth. This system is what we call the Flex Methodology – a simple, repeatable and effective tool that delivers some extremely useful outcomes including:

 

1. Situational Awareness: The ability to source the right information at the right time to empower an individual to make a decision that results in an effective action being taken.

• Alignment: By aligning small teams around a common purpose and clear objectives we create a solid mechanism to create situational awareness and share it quickly amongst the team.
• Debriefing: By looking back at our performance and quickly stepping through a very simple and structured review process we create and adapt our future objectives based on the real world, moving away from our dependence on forecasts and planning using assumptions rather than facts.
• Focus: Through the application of Flex we’re able to gain awareness of when we’re suffering from task saturation (stress) and quickly follow a simple method to find our focus and return to an even keel.

 

Avoiding Task Saturation

It sounds simple right? Well it is. However the reality is, organisations struggle to ‘let go’ of complicated process and the false belief that focusing on many tasks with a few key people equals success. The reverse is actually true. By following a simple process, focused on achievement of no more than three objectives results in 98% achievement of those objectives, rather than 30% of the many tasks that swamp us every day in today’s workplace.

 

The Two Day Team Building Program

 

Through participation in a two day dynamic team building program, we are able to educate an organisation on how and why simplicity works, based on real world examples of success in the fighter pilot world and business. We are able to break through functional silos by participating in a fun and energizing team planning exercise where teams are able to ‘experience’ the world of fighter pilots and in particular time sensitive mission planning.

 

 

We are able to apply the lessons learned to an organisation’s REAL WORLD challenges and take these lessons into the future. Our second day is an immersive planning workshop where an organisation and their teams will leave with:

 

1. 3 strategic objectives;
2. 3 supporting objectives for each leader; and
3. 3 enabling objectives for each member of the team, for a 90 day period, to be applied within the business to drive real and effective change.

 

Team building can be fun, dynamic, energizing and most importantly relevant to an organisation’s day-to-day operation.  At Afterburner we think that’s common sense or what we call a “no-brainer”. Why would you conduct a team building exercise without extracting as much value for your organisation and in turn the clients and customers you serve? We don’t think of it as team building anymore. For us it’s all about team growth and transformation!

 

Contact us to discuss a team building experience you’ll never forget: Learn More

 

The post Unique Team Building Events – The Fighter Pilot Way appeared first on Afterburner Australia.

source https://www.afterburneraustralia.com.au/unusual-team-building-event-corporate/

Why you won’t achieve your New Year’s Resolution and how you CAN!

If you didn’t achieve your New Year’s resolution in 2016 don’t feel too bad, 92% of everyone else who made a resolution also failed to achieve it! If you’re in your 20’s statistically you have a 49% better chance of achieving your New Year’s resolution than people in my age bracket, 40+ where it’s as low as 14%. Maybe it’s because we’re old, wise and happy enough already!

So why do we fail to make hay while the New Year’s sun is shining? It’s simple really. It’s because as humans we love to make things more complicated than they need to be and that means we set ourselves up to be disappointed. How do we know we’re doing that? Because in between making things complicated for ourselves, we have ‘moments of clarity’, when everything just seems to make sense and falls into place and the weight of the world temporarily lifts off our shoulders.

So, if we know we have clarity SOMETIMES, how do we get it MORE? By keeping things simple, so simple you’ll find yourself saying “that’s ridiculous, how could I possibly get anything done when it’s that simple”. Let’s explore simplicity a little more.

KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid.

Firstly, what is it in life that gets you excited? What do you like working on, investing time and energy into that makes you feel good when you accomplish it? Even when it’s hard. Whatever that “thing” is, that’s your purpose. Write it down! Now set three goals that CLEARLY line up with doing what you love and what you’re passionate about. I can hear you now! “Here we go, more goal setting, yawn, heard it all before”. Hang in there…

The biggest mistake we make with our goals is they’re too big! Human beings are an overconfident bunch, that’s how we survive at the top of the food chain, so your default is to set a target that’s WAY TOO AMBITIOUS. We either set an unrealistically short time frame or if we have some experience with goal setting, a realistic one, that’s too far away in the future, so we inevitably lose interest on the way. To ensure we achieve our single most important goal we actually have to set THREE goals. No more, no less.

1. Goal 1 (The Big One) – What do you want to achieve in the next 12 months?
2. Goal 2 (C’mon, just keep going) – What do you want to achieve in next 3 months?
3. Goal 3 (How do I get there?)– What do you want to achieve at the end of the week?

Now don’t get disappointed if you don’t achieve your weekly goals, as really, they’re more like GUIDES and help us to adjust what it is we do each week to keep us progressing towards our big twelve-month goal!

The three-month goal is the little step along the way where we pat ourselves on the back as we leap each small incremental step towards THE BIG ONE. These are the goals that keep us motivated, not too big, not too far in the future, just right.

These “on the way” goals also help us to understand whether our big goal is realistic and whether we should maybe adjust it a little. Just a little, no more than 3 more months, or you’ll never get there..

Find a wingman and communicate your goals

We are our own worst cheer squad. Find a friend or peer support group that has an affiliation with your purpose and ask the simple question “Hey, how about we work together to achieve this, I know I could really use the help”. Here’s a life hack, odds are they need the help too! Second life hack, for those who’s NYR is “Find someone to have a relationship with” this is an awesome meaningful icebreaker!

Your “wingy” is there to help you check that your goals are still realistic and to step in and help you when you’re finding the going is getting tough

There are no short cuts, how to grind out the days.

Sorry folks, there are no short cuts. Achieving your life’s purpose is hard work. Good, fulfilling and meaningful hard work. We also know life is hectic and there is no way our carefully laid plans and newly found wingman are going to synchronise perfectly with the real world. So, we need to make sure we are realistic and that we adjust our activities week to week. We get sick, we have work and family demands and the gazillion distractions that come with a digital age. However, no matter what you do, even if it’s FIVE MINUTES, do a little something that aligns to “The Big One”.

You will FAIL along the way to achieving this big goal. It’s GUARANTEED!! That’s a GOOD thing and you’ll need to learn to enjoy riding the failure train. “Enjoy failing?” I can imagine you saying right now, so let me clarify.  Every time you fail, you learn a lesson and it’s these lessons you will learn to love. Here’s another life hack, they’ll also make you a more interesting person to be around!

To capture these lessons and to stop repeating the same mistakes again and again, you need to Deebs. What’s Deebs? Shh, I am going to share with you a little fighter pilot secret that was developed over 60 years ago and it’s so good it’s still used today. For me personally and outside of wearing a uniform it also allowed me to learn about happiness, financial independence and life in general. Big Stuff. It’s called “Debriefing”. If that’s a little too CIA for you, we used to call it a Deba or my favourite, Deebs. It’s the best way to learn from failure and ensure success.

Make time to Deebs

At the end of the week ask yourself three simple questions, something I call the three R’s.

1. RESULT – What did I want to do this week and what did I actually do?
2. REASON – Why did I achieve/not achieve what I wanted to?
3. RESPONSE -What will I do next week to improve/sustain or rest

RESULT – this one is pretty easy. What did you set out to do vs what you achieved? Really the result isn’t important. It’s the gap between our goal and where we are today that is, I call it “the performance gap” and the size of this gap shapes the next conversation we have with ourselves

REASON – Ask yourself, very honestly why is there this gap in performance, is it big or small, or bigger or smaller than last week? If the result is GOOD, keep doing what you’re doing. If it’s not what you were hoping for then ask yourself why. Notice I wrote “ask yourself why” rather than “Find an excuse and blame someone else”. The reason we don’t achieve our goals rests with the way we approach them, not how something external to you affects them. They’re YOUR goals, so if there’s something in the way, adjust the plan and move around the obstacle. For every excuse, there is a corresponding action, even If you’re tired and couldn’t be bothered, rest, rebuild your energy and go again!

If you’re stumped at Question number 2 then ask your wingman or this thing called the internet! If you’re still struggling try googling “Who is an expert at (Insert what you’re struggling with)”, get their phone number and give them a ring! Simples..

Question number 3 is the fun part, where we can play around with our plan and set all the exciting tasks for the week ahead that will ultimately assist us to achieve our goals, and in time, our dreams.

For all those hours in between enjoy life and do your simple daily activities that align ultimately with your sense of purpose, The Big One and finally that New Year’s Resolution!!!

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