doug smith training

Money is important. High performance leaders must pay attention to money and how it effects their team. When you can, make sure that your team is positively impacting the larger organization's bottom line. That keeps you in the game. And -- there's more. Much more. What is it about your team's work is transformational? How much are you improving the lives of others? Is your team helping to create a better world? We can care about money and still be noble. We can focus on important areas such as service, helpfulness, safety, truth, happiness, heath, quality -- whatever it is that is there for your team to prosper, drive, and deliver on. The bottom line is not the only line worth measuring. It's not even the most important. Define your most important bottom line, and make money subordinate to that. -- doug smith

Have you ever seen someone who is so flexible that it's hard to know where they stand? There have been times when I felt that way myself. It feels free, but then limits because it's so hard to make a decision. How do you choose? What's best? I've since learned that it helps in making decisions to rely on a solid set of values, a strong sense of purpose, and a committed set of goals. Everything else, from projects to past times, falls in line with those three things. When you add your sense of faith to your values (or as one of your values) it becomes much easier to see when it's necessary to be flexible and when it's necessary to remain firm. High performance leaders maintain flexibility without losing focus.  They know when to be flexible and when to be firm. How about you? -- Doug Smith

It's not just about the goals. It's setting the right goals. Goals that energize you. Goals aligned with your mission. Goals that create a better team, life, and world. Set the right goals and the path becomes easier. Instead of a struggle, the journey is an adventure. Instead of ordeal, the magic is revealed. You'll know it's a "right" goal when you can't wait to get started. What goal are you working on right now? -- Doug Smith

What do you dream about? For years I dreamed about starting my own training company. I yearned to set my own hours and choose my own topics. So I set a goal to do that. Are your goals pointing you in the direction of your dreams? If you complete all of the goals on your list today, would your dreams come true? Possibly not. That's OK. But, are they moving you in that direction? What do you dream about? What occupies your mind? Given three wishes, what would they be? You know how to turn a wish into results: make it a goal. Set an action word, result, and deadline. And then get busy. You do want your dreams to come true, right? -- Doug Smith Are you interested in how to achieve your goals? Contact me about scheduling or attending our next How To Achieve Your Goals webinar.

How do you feel about your goals? If they are big, noble, ambitious, and fun you probably feel good about them. If they are small, inconsequential, and discordant with your mission or values, you might not feel so great about them. We get to choose. Our feelings will tell us all about our goals and their importance. When we feel unhappy with our goals, it's not our feelings that are out of whack - it's our goals. Our goals should make us feel good about ourselves. Our goals should tell us that we are working on important things and making a positive difference. Our goals should show us that we are growing. Our goals should bring a smile to our faces. Maybe not all of your goals will set the world aglow or keep you grinning. But, shouldn't some of them? -- Doug Smith

How energized is the team that is working on your biggest goal? No team? What will it take to interest others in your goal? Isn't it worth the time, the effort, the energy to get as many people involved as it will take to achieve your biggest and most noble goal? It starts with focus. Keeping your focus on that wonderful outcome. Identifying your true mission. Aligning your efforts with all of your work. Give people focus, and the energy to drive that focus appears. A brilliant idea is irresistible. Let people know your brilliant ideas. We create energy with our focus.  And energizing your team is a critical part of achieving your goals. -- Doug Smith

Have you noticed how much your performance depends on your focus? Whenever I am clear about my focus, and steady in my attention, my performance improves. It can reach the level of flow, where I'm no longer even aware of time passing or skill execution -- but that only comes after mindfully keeping my focus on the here and now, on what I'm doing. How about you? When you start with your focus, do you achieve better results? Are you goals easier to achieve? Even when our mission is clear, we need to keep our focus on identifying that mission and bringing our actions to the front of achieving our goals in service of that mission. Your performance starts with your focus. Do you want to improve your performance? Improve your focus. What's your focus for today? -- Doug Smith

Does your mission inspire you? Do you move quickly on your goals in order to get closer to fulfilling your mission? A mission must be inspiring or it's not much of a mission. If your mission doesn't give you energy, maybe it's not your mission. It could be someone else's energy (if they're inspired by it) but it's not yours unless it drive you forward. Rewrite it. Review it. Redo it. Your mission is there for a reason: to guide you to success and happiness. Identify your real mission and run with it full speed ahead. Create a better world. Achieve your most noble goals. Walk a life of happiness: grab a mission with energy and live it for all you're worth. -- Doug Smith

If it feels like you have too many goals, you probably do. Focus on your mission. -- Doug Smith

Have you ever had to work with someone who does not share your values? In all honesty, I think we all do that all the time. Our values are important, and we strive to live by them every day, but not everyone shares those values and yet we do need the help of people who have different values. It IS so much easier to work with people who share our values. Shared values build trust. Shared values build understanding. Shared values build collaboration. But sometimes we have to be a role model for those values and hope that our demonstration of our values in action will show their merit. By being a positive example of our values in action, we might just encourage other people to embrace those values. And by showing our willingness to work with people we disagree with we can show how we facilitate, rather than force, our way of living. It's harder to collaborate with people who don't share our values -- but not impossible. Who have you been avoiding because of their value...

Do you check each goal that you take on to make sure it serves your mission? It's a practice that I'm working on, because I've discovered that any goal that does not serve my mission probably detracts from it. Maybe it's not a direct conflict, but any goal that consumes time is using time that could be used on work that is aligned with the mission. How else can we achieve our mission? If it's ambitious, challenging, and important that mission will take considerable effort, growth, and learning. It will take the relentless application of our action plans to achieve those goals that focus on the mission. It's worth rethinking any goal that doesn't serve your mission. Maybe it fits. Maybe it doesn't. What about all those goals that DO focus on your mission? When will you work on those? -- Doug Smith

Do you ever have someone stand between you and your goal? Does it ever sometimes seem that the actions of someone were an intention attempt to thwart your progress? Maybe, like me, you were over thinking the whole thing. People do things that we would not choose or pay for. People surprise us. Our job, as centered high performance leaders is to keep our focus anyway. Centered leaders forgive without giving up the goal. There's no success in revenge or in keeping resentment. Success is in remembering your mission and acting relentlessly on your goals. With that kind of focus, with that kind of passion, even people who at first seemed opposed to your efforts may find themselves eventually strongly attracted to them. And if not, why not forgive them until they do? -- Doug Smith

What is your primary goal as a leader? I consider my primary goal to be "helping people to achieve their goals." The most challenging thing to that is that I don't succeed unless others do. The longer I work, the more I am convinced that is true no matter what your primary goal is. To the extent that we help others, enrich others, empower others -- that's the degree of success we achieve. What if your success depends on your ability to bring success to others? Will it change the way you do business? Will it change the way you look at others? Will it recalibrate success? Sure. We have goals for ourselves. What I'm wondering, though, is how much more do we get when others do well as well? I'm thinking that the answer is: a bunch more. What do you think? -- Doug Smith

Do you know exactly why you do what you do? For the goals that you set, do you make sure that they all align with your purpose? I know it's not always easy and perhaps not always possible, but when we are able to align our goals exclusively with our purpose the energy and effort gets much closer to the kind of flow that gets things done fast. When we aren't sure of how our goals align with our purpose the lines become blurred and it's easy to miss on a goal, easy to get stuck. Find that clarity of purpose. Find that thing that you're working on to make your mission complete. Do what's really important. There is no substitute for clarity of purpose. Almost everything else takes second place. How is your clarity of purpose? Have you identified your mission? -- Doug Smith doug smith training: how to achieve your goals Front Range Leadership: High performance leadership training

Do people talk about your goals? Do they get excited and share your goals with other people? It's a good gage for vitality. If people talk about your goals they are stirring up interest and probably helping. They work on what excites. Design the kind of goals that people want to talk about. Goals that make a difference. Goals that bring about useful change. Goals that make lives better and happier. That's what you're working for, right? -- Doug Smith Front Range Leadership:  High performance leadership training doug smith training:  how to achieve your goals

Do you have too many goals? Sometimes I find myself in that situation - with so many goals that I can't remember them all and certainly can't complete them all in time. My advice on this is: don't do that! Focus on the big goals. Keep your goals aligned with you overall purpose. Sure, it's useful to break the big goals down into smaller pieces but that's not the problem I'm talking about. Too many unrelated goals is where we go wrong. Be careful about being confused by too many little goals. Focus on the goals that are aligned to you mission.  The big stuff matters. The big goals matter. Start with that. What's your biggest goal? -- Doug Smith Front Range Leadership:  High performance leadership training doug smith training:  how to achieve your goals

How do you measure success? Having been a manager, supervisor, and project leader for many years I've had to evaluate team member success in many different ways. We usually focus on performance that is connected some how to customer happiness. Sometimes, that's not as important in our metrics as profitability. It's easy to lost track of why we're doing what we're doing if we don't measure the right things. I learned as a supervisor that if you're not careful about what you measure and how you reward performance that people will achieve the metrics you want even if they have to game the system to do it. They can miss the whole point of the exercise and instead worry about getting the reward. We shouldn't do that to people and we shouldn't let them do that to us. We should use measures that tell us how we are doing about our financial performance, yes of course, AND also how we're doing at meeting our mission. Are we serving our purpose? Are ...

Who knows about your true vision? Not some slogan, tag line, or inherited mission given to you by someone you don't even know, but rather your true vision. What you see as the reason you are here. What you hope, plan, and expect to accomplish in your lifetime. That's a big one, isn't it? Big because it requires thought and effort and big because as we form our vision we may have absolutely no idea how to accomplish it. If it's too easy it's not a vision, it's just an incremental goal. A vision is tough work. Why go at it alone? Why not get the help you'll need to bring that vision about? Why not find out if that vision even makes any sense (the world probably already has enough Don Quioxotes tilting at windmills out there). A vision is only as powerful as those who share it. Build your vision with your allies. Develop your vision with your friends. Create your vision with your mentors. Get the help you need. You'll need it. -- Doug Smith ...

What do you care the most about? Setting goals can be hard work. Working that action plan is filled with pitfalls. What one thing makes it easier? Aligning your goals with your passions. Work on what you enjoy the most. That doesn't mean give up your day job and chase a crazy dream that maybe makes sense and maybe does not. I'm not one of those people who thinks that anything is possible -- when you think about it you'll likely agree that while more is possible than we sometimes consider, certainly not everything is possible. It's better to focus our passions in areas of possibility . When your passion meets your mission the goals become clear. Work on goals that align with your passion. Whatever your passion is (presuming it's legal and ethical) you can apply it to your work and to your goals. See what a difference it makes. I apply my passion for creativity to the training that I do. It makes every task connected with preparing for a workshop fun and...

Are you working on a really big goal? Bigger than career advancement, bigger than obtaining things, bigger than learning a new skill -- are you working on something that will change the world? I know that it's important to achieve little goals because they encourage us, they propel us forward, and they lead us to bigger goals. It's also important to keep in the plan some major life-changing goal. Some noble purpose that will construct your legacy and (more important than that) improve life for the generations who follow us. Does what you're working on have the potential to change the world? If not, what can you add to it that will? What should you be working on? Imagine a book written with you as the central character. What do you want to be known for? What is your mission? What is the theme of your story? And, most importantly, what's your next step? -- Doug Smith If you're interested in taking that next step contact me about attending or scheduling...