Perform at Our Personal Best

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence. — Confucius

Do we perform at our personal best everyday? Are we keeping track of our personal best in the areas that matter most to us? Are we familiar with the concept of setting a personal best? These are great questions to ask of ourselves and great food for thought. To perform at our best we need to keep track of our performance so we can celebrate our success and learn from our challenges.

Part of accomplishing our goals is tracking our progress against those goals. As important as it is to create our goals so that we have direction for our activities, it is equally important that we keep track of our progress toward those goals. When we created goals we made sure that they were going to lead us in the right direction and we probably used a technique such as SMART goals to identify them.

If you are not familiar with the SMART goals process, here is a quick overview:

Specific – Exactly what we want to achieve
Measurable – Set a metric that can be tracked
Actionable – Stated to take action like run 3 miles in less than 30 minutes
Realistic – A stretch but not something impossible
Time-bound – Identify a time that it will be accomplished by

Using the SMART technique we will create goals that we can actually use and ensure that we are making progress in our intended direction.

A key part of the SMART goal is making it measurable. With this we are able to understand our starting point and how we are progressing toward accomplishing this goal. Since it is measurable we can track our progress and use that progress as a motivational tool to encourage our performance. We can see if we are succeeding and celebrate our success or challenge ourselves if we are behind in our progress. With this we are able to see how we are progressing and adjust our approach as necessary.

A great technique for measuring our progress is to create a spreadsheet or create a grid on paper that identifies the starting point for our goal and then provides space to update our current status. Using the running example, if my overall goal is to run 3 miles in less than 30 minutes, then I might setup a calendar and write the number of minutes it took me to run the 3 miles each day. I could convert that to a chart if I am analytical in nature and see my progress or I could give myself a star every time I achieved my goal.

Another great technique and a quick way to see how we are doing is to identify our personal best in our tracking log. Our personal best is the best time or highest level of achievement that we have had so far on our journey to our goal. We could circle or highlight it in our log but also just put it on a sticky note or on our desktop as a reminder of our accomplishment to-date. By doing this it gives us a great target for our next attempt.

Our progress will not always be linear meaning that todays performance may not be better than our last attempt. We may be trying some new technique or approach or just not be able to deliver a better performance than our last time every time. It does however give us a target that is just a little better than last time and something obtainable with just a little better performance. Beating our target keeps us motivated and provides the sense of accomplishment that we need to push ourselves into ever better performance.

Here are some practical tips for achieving our personal best:

1) Make goals SMART – Utilizing the SMART technique for setting goals will provide realistic and meaningful goals that we can measure.

2) Set stretch goals – When setting goals, make sure that they are stretch goals. Keep the goals reasonable, but outside of our current reach so that we have accomplished something when we have achieved the goal.

3) Track our progress – Set up a system of tracking our performance so that we can see our progress and know how we are progressing.

4) Measure against our personal best – Use our personal best as a target for our next performance.

In the end we are all running our own personal race against our personal goals. It is our race to win or lose and our race alone. Nobody else can run this race for us and if we come up short we ultimately cheat ourselves. Let’s use the personal best technique to help us reach our goals.

Thank you again for taking some time to be part of our community. Please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments below. I look forward to our conversation.

Thanks,

Skip Gilbert