Starting a Small Home Business

The Secrets to Breakthrough Results – Consistently Achieving Breakthroughs When Reality Intrudes

January 21st, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized — Small Home Business Author

These days when I interact with corporate and individual clients, I find that the vast majority of people are truly struggling with how they can make steady and significant progress on their breakthrough goals when their current reality is creating chaos all around them. Theoretical or conceptual understanding is often far from practical application and implementation when dealing with the real world. We must find ways to what Stephen R. Covey calls the “gap between stimulus and response” to consistently make progress on our goals when our current reality intrudes.

Find a partner or coach to work with you on the following process for 30 to 90 days and you will see significant progress, if not an actual breakthrough, toward your personal breakthrough goals. For organizations, it typically will takes 6 to 18 months to see significant progress on the organizational breakthrough goal due to the dynamics and complexities involved with the numbers and relationships of people involved.

Creating Breakthroughs in life and organizations is a science and an art. It requires great skill and an investment of time, energy, and focus to achieve. As with all valuable talents and strengths, there is a learning curve and you will likely need teachers, mentors, and coaches to master the following process. However, you can take the following steps immediately to begin the journey of mastering breakthrough progress in any current reality state.

The Secrets to Breakthroughs

1. Define your long-term goals.

Long-term goals are the magnets of life and they set the stage for finding clues in moving forward. Once you set a long-term goal, you now have framed things. These boundaries give you a starting point for investigating how “success leaves clues.” You can study past success similar to what you seek and/or you can find mentors and role models who have achieved similar goals to help you define the path. This research and discovery process is crucial for defining the next critical step in achieving breakthrough progress.

2. Identify the critical few ideal disciplines that are needed for achieving each goal.

I suggest and use the term “ideal” because I want people to know that I am not advocating perfection or idealism. Reality rarely allows for perfection or idealism and real progress at the same time. However, we should have lofty aspirations that have been framed by “success clues” from past success stories and present mentors or role models. Aspirations and intentions set direction and trajectory!

One final comment in identifying disciplines, there may be many to choose from but we should select the top critical few disciplines that make about 80% of the difference in achieving success on your goals. Your personal disciplines should also align with your talents and strengths.

3. Set two absolute, non-negotiables for yourself each day.

I recommend that people set out each day with a non-negotiable intention for implementing their disciplines. Sometimes this takes the form of a scheduled hour in the first half of the day to implement disciplines. Other times it is simply an affirmation and intention to give their best possible focus and attention to their disciplines and to make them the highest priority, whenever possible.

The second non-negotiable is where champions are made. Current reality can often beat us up and get us off course regarding our best affirmations and intentions. Champions have built-in opportunities to go the extra mile and make sure they don’t get too far off course. We all have heard the stories about great sports champions or the past and present like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, John Elway, Brett Favre, Payton Manning, Tom Brady, and many others giving that extra 10%, 20% or more to achieve the pinnacle of success. Well, Champions in business and life build in mechanisms to give the extra 10%, 20% or more as well.

Thus, I recommend that people set a non-negotiable appointment with themselves for the second half of the day to push back on current reality. During this one hour appointment, I recommend that individuals review and evaluate their critical few ideal disciplines and create line of sight to their breakthrough goals. Finally, I recommend that they define some specific action that they can take in the next 45 to 60 minutes to accelerate and energize breakthrough progress. This may be as simple as implementing one or a few of the disciplines. Or, it might be taking action on some new leveraged opportunity. Regardless, the person is investing an extra 10% to 20% time, energy, and focus on creating the breakthrough progress every day.

4. Rinse and repeat step 3 each day.

I mean that literally. Shower off the challenges of the day, celebrate your investment of the extra 10% to 20%, and feel good about the opportunity you will have to apply this process again tomorrow.

Summary

Too often these days I interaction with people who are just too overwhelmed by their current reality and uncertain about the future. When it really comes down to it, we all are really not certain about the future. However, the future belongs to those who can confidently act to co-create the future when there is chaos around them. The four steps provided in this article provide you a process for confidently acting to creating breakthrough progress.

The Champion’s Coach, Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D., has spent much of the last twenty years learning, applying and teaching the components, strategies, and tactics of champions.

To receive a FREE copy of 36 Powerful Leadership Questions that Champions use to fuel their BREAKTHROUGHS, visit http://www.ChampionQuestions.com Also, visit http://www.LearningToBeAChampion.com to learn more about how Jon is significantly increasing the number of champions in this world.