5 Steps To Achieve Personal Success
The most successful leaders are those that move from intention to action. They see who they want to become as a leader and they take the steps necessary to achieve their vision. At Building Champions, we believe that great leaders know they’ve never truly arrived and are humble enough to admit there is always room to grow and improve. In this article, we’ll take a look at five steps you can take to achieve personal success while increasing your impact on those you love, lead, and serve.
Find Your “Why”
Everyone has a “why.” It’s the thing that drives you to do your very best every day and motivates you to stay dedicated to your personal development and professional growth. Successful people use their “why” as a reminder that all their hard work will be worth the reward when they reach their goals.
Finding your “why” is the first step to achieving success in your personal and professional life. A leader with a powerful reason to guide their organization brings purpose to every communication and shows their team that the long-term goals are worthwhile. Their purpose gives them enthusiasm and courage that they pass on to their team to uplift the entire organization.
If you feel like you need to relight the flame that once kept you excited about your job, then it might be time to reassess your “why.” There are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine what motivates you most:
What is my purpose in life?
Why do I want to be a leader?
What is it about my work that makes me excited to get out of bed each morning?
What impact do I believe I can have on those I love, lead, and serve through my leadership?
You’re likely to see how your organization’s mission and goals align with your personal purpose and what matters most to you. Or you might see that the relationships in your workplace are meaningful and give you a sense of purpose and belonging. Or maybe it’s even as simple as providing a better life for your family through the work you do.
Whatever your “why,” let it guide both your professional and personal decisions. Because when your work aligns with your most important values, you’ll feel empowered to help grow your organization and lead your team to success.
Identify Your Goals
Once you know what drives you, you can figure out where you want that energy to take you. The next step in achieving your goals is to create a roadmap complete with milestones and actionable steps that will push you over the finish line.
First and foremost, you should have a personal goal that guides your daily decisions and strategic plans. This helps you to align what fulfills you as a person with what will make you better as a leader. It allows you to continue growing and developing your skills so you can confidently lead your team and invest in their growth as well.
As you set goals, you might see that your personal ones fit with organizational ones. For example, if your goal is to become a better negotiator, it might mean making more strategic deals for your company that foster growth and wise partnerships.
Many leaders want to develop themselves in ways that lend well to their organization. That’s a great idea, but it’s important to remember that it’s also about you. Focus on developing skills that will make you an all-around better leader and not just a better executive.
A few examples of things to work on include:
Communication skills
Coaching skills
Priority management
Decision making
Emotional intelligence
As you develop your personal well-being and skill set, you’ll become a better leader capable of instilling the same capabilities in your team.
Achieve Your Goals
Use our Focused Plan to set goals, commit to high-payoff activities, and identify improvement projects to help you be successful in business and life.
Prioritize
It’s not uncommon to create more than one goal you’d like to accomplish in the next year or longer. In fact, having more than one goal is a great way to make sure you always strive for growth. But as your list of aspirations grows, you reach the next step in the planning process: prioritization.
As a leader, you’re probably accustomed to putting the needs of your organization before your personal life. In this instance, however, you should be your top priority. Remember, you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others.
Pick a single goal to be your top priority. This could be an ambitious goal or an easy one, depending on how you prefer to approach your list. This goal will be your main focus moving forward. It doesn’t mean you have to spend all of your time working to achieve it, just that the tasks of decisions of daily life should move you closer to that finish line.
Choose paths and take initiatives that will help you work on the skills you need to achieve your top priority, both in your personal and professional life. You might need to be more mindful of your habits to identify times in the day you could improve. Or maybe you could restructure your schedule to allow yourself more time to put a certain skill into action. The more you make a conscious effort to focus on how you can improve, the faster you’ll reach your goals.
When you consider how to plan for success, prioritizing is a key step. It helps you organize your thoughts, paves the way for a game plan and lays the foundation to achieve increasingly challenging goals. As you develop one skill, it will give you insight into the next. The more you grow, the better you can lead your team and organization in the long-run.
Manage Your Time
Leading in an organization means spending plenty of time in your office, sometimes even after everyone else has gone home for the day. Although some periods of business will require extra hours, don’t let your job consume your life. Create time for yourself to do things you enjoy and that nourish your sense of purpose, such as:
Spending time with friends and family
Exercising
Working on a hobby
Having alone time to relax
Giving yourself time to rest and recharge, by whatever means works best for you, means you’ll be sharper and more prepared to tackle problems at work the next day.
There are a few different ways you can manage your time more effectively when you have a demanding role in your organization. The first is to use time blocking on your calendar. Break it down into chunks so that each section of your day is focused on a single type of task. For example, you might spend two hours each morning in meetings, then three hours doing strategic work, followed by an hour for lunch and two hours in the afternoon to check in with your team and catch up on communications.
This is a helpful tool if you find you manage time better with a visual of your day. It helps you create an action plan to tackle the most important tasks of your week while still blocking out time to rest your mind or step away from stress.
Leadership Coaching
You don’t have to journey alone. We believe everyone should have a guide to help become the best version of themself for the people they love, lead, and serve.
Ask for Help
The first time you create a plan to reach your goals it might seem like a lengthy process. And it is, but for good reason. With each new year, you’ll see the progress you’ve made and be able to continue developing your skills and fostering personal growth.
You don’t have to navigate this process alone, though. In fact, asking for help is one of the best ways to make sure you stick to your plan and achieve your goals. It creates accountability and provides you with support along the way.
At Building Champions, we’d be happy to guide you through the steps to reach your goals. We offer coaching that can help you improve your self-leadership, team effectiveness, and the impact of your organization on your clients. All of our coaches have real-world experience in leadership and can help you solve complex problems, make better decisions, and create a plan to move your organization forward by bettering yourself.
If you’re ready to start planning for success both for yourself and your business, then reach out to us today. We’d love to help you achieve your goals.
