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To best predict year-end performance, look at how you start Q3.
We’ve come to the end of Q2, and now is a great time to reflect back on the last six months and look at what’s happened through those elements of your life that you’d like to either change, fine-tune and tweak, or totally replicate even more to ensure that you hit your end-year objectives.
The first six months of this year have had situations that all of us have faced that no one could have predicted. But nevertheless, you’ve got year-end objectives in sight, and what’s happened over these first two quarters isn’t a reason or excuse to jettison those goals, those objectives, and settle for something less. Now is a great time to reflect back on the key components of your life, especially over this long weekend, and then decide what you need to really hone in on, especially getting the third quarter out of the gate.
When I was competing, my main race was a 200-meter backstroke swim, and that was four laps in the pool. The first lap goes by so quickly, and the second lap you’re starting to prepare for the third lap, because it’s the third lap where it gets tough. It’s the third lap that takes absolute concentration to set up the last lap, coming home. It’s very similar to what we’re facing in business, especially given the circumstances we’re in. We honed in on every little piece of my swimming stroke. We videoed under the water. We had a video above me when I was swimming, and we looked at all those little points that were potentially slowing me down.
I’m in the middle of reading a great book: Total Competition. It’s about Formula One racing, and Laura Hutchison, the Program Manager for Northwestern Mutual, recommended this book to me, and I’m loving it — seeing the detail that Formula One teams go into, the amount of money they spend just to knock off a couple of hundredths of a second, just to have that car performing optimally and have the driver performing optimally as well. Nothing is spared to make sure that everything is set up well, so they earn the right to expect a great performance.
So, consider your family and relationships. What do those relationships look like? What do they look like with your spouse, or partner, or children? How’s your health doing? What do you need to be doing to ensure that you remain healthy? What about your spiritual situation? Are you getting time to rest and recover, to meditate on those aspects of things and people outside of yourself that really have you focused on what matters most? And then finally, your business set up. How has that been going? So,
- Analyze these four components of your life: your relationship side, your physical side, spiritual side and your business side. Don’t expect any of those components to work independently of the others. They’re all linked.
- Look at those four components and decide: What do you want to replicate more of? What do you just need to tweak and fine-tune to get on track? And what do you need to totally jettison that is unhelpful?
- Have a great break on July 4th! Start next week off strongly, out of the gate. Come Monday, roll back into the office, roll back into your work environment (it might not be your normal office, but your work environment) knowing exactly what those steps are that you want to take in each of these four key areas.
Related: You Can Learn Amazing Things About People, If You Just Ask the Right Questions