It seems like the business world has recently discovered a phrase that my wife and I have already known to be true through our years of parenting a big crew.
You can’t expect what you won’t inspect.
That kid who tells you they’ll clean their room before they play a video game? They might really intend to do it, but you can’t just assume it’s going to happen. Believe me, when you announce that you’re going to inspect their room, you’ll likely hear a lot of drawers opening and closing and closet doors slamming as you make your way down the hall.
Why?
Because there’s power in the inspection. There’s power in taking a good hard look at what has taken place in the aftermath of committing to an action.
Evaluate Your Actions and Accelerate Your Progress
If you have a goal, hopefully you, too, have taken some action – and if you have, then it’s worth taking time to evaluate the result that action got you. After all, we want to make smart, strategic improvements as we move toward our vision to improve our progress.
As you evaluate your results, these 4 questions will come in handy:
1. WHAT DID I DO?
When my family was making the move from Saint Louis to Palm Beach, Florida, the movers helping us were worth every penny. Why? Because I’ve got books everywhere, a stack always going. As more and more boxes were filled with books, and as those
heavy boxes were then hustled down the stairs and out the door, one of the movers remarked to me, “You’ve got so many books! So many!”
If he and I had had the opportunity to sit down over coffee, what I would have shared with him is this:
Success leaves clues.
All those books? That collection is a clue for what I’ve been able to accomplish.
It was an external clue, just like any preparation you’ve been doing to accomplish your goal – listening to podcasts, learning from mentors, joining cohorts. But when you take action and evaluate, you look to your own approaches and results for those clues.
So, you’ve taken an action; now, you now have a result. What did you do to get that result?
As you ask yourself that, I’d like you to leave the idea of if the result is a good or bad one on the back burner for now. At this point, I simply want you to make sure you know the recipe for the current result you’ve experienced. Take some time to write down everything you did to get that result. That becomes the baseline as you move forward for evaluating what to keep in your repertoire and what to let go of.
2. WHAT DID I LEARN?
This is as straightforward as it sounds, and yet, it’s often something people forget to think about. Anytime you undertake an action, and when that action gives you a result, there’s something to learn there. It might be just one or two things, or it might be many. Regardless, you want to pay attention to that learning curve.
Begin by writing down the things you’ve learned that pop out first to you. Perhaps you learned that the action didn’t take as long as you thought. Maybe you learned that it was harder than you expected or simpler than you anticipated. What are the things that you discovered in the process of taking this particular action?
3. WHAT DID I LIKE?
There are going to be things you need to do to achieve your dream that aren’t always fun and that will push you out of your comfort zone. One of the biggest misconceptions I see today in working with clients is that they have been sold a falsehood that everything about their goals should be fun and should feel easy.
Wrong.
But I also don’t buy into the idea that you’re going to have to suffer, suffer, suffer to get to where you want to go. There should be fun along the way. You should like a lot of what you get to do. What’s the point in building toward something you don’t even enjoy?
That’s why I want you to jot down what you liked in the action that you have taken as you evaluate your results. You may find that something you didn’t think you would like doing you actually ended up enjoying. You might also discover that something you thought you would like turned out not to be as exciting or as interesting as you thought. When you take the time to really think about what you liked in the action you took, it will help you home in further on those things you want to spend the bulk of your time doing and those things you might want to delegate. It helps give you a more accurate picture of who you are in general and who you are in relation to your goals.
For example, I know people in the speaking world who thought they would really like the public recognition and fame they thought they would receive. Some of them ultimately discovered that what they really liked was the development of the material, practicing that material, and tweaking it after each presentation. What they thought would drive them farther in their goal actually ended up not being the thing that they liked the most. This didn’t mean they needed to stop driving in their dream for public speaking. It simply meant that they now knew that preparation and research was what they liked best and that that aspect of taking action was an important part of their enjoyment. When you’re clear on what you like in the process of getting results, it helps you gain even greater understanding as you move forward about what actions feel best to you.
4. WHAT WOULD I CHANGE OR DO DIFFERENTLY?
I love pickleball. So much. I started playing in 2020 and never looked back. And if running around on a court chasing a little ball with a paddle under the hot Florida sun is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.
And one of the things I like best about pickleball?
There’s always something to adjust and improve, things as simple as tweaking your paddle a couple of degrees or running laps around the track to give you better endurance on the court.
During each pickleball match I play, my brain is on alert for what I can change in the next volley, in what I can do differently the next time I’m up to serve. It’s part of the fun of the game, celebrating when I score the point, learning when my shot goes over the line.
Think of the actions you’re taking toward your vision as a pickleball match (you are playing pickleball these days, right?). You hit the ball (an action) and you see where it goes (evaluation). You observe how it’s received on the other side of the net (an apt metaphor when your actions are moving you toward your goal) and then you adjust your next swing, based on what you learn from their response.
It’s a real-time, act-evaluate-adjust moment right there.
Every now and then, someone will interpret this question of What would I change or do differently? as a call to be hypercritical of the action they took. Don’t do that to yourself. At the same time, even if you are completely happy with the action and result you experienced, push yourself a bit to define some micro adjustments you can make the next time you act. Too often, we either avoid making any upgrades in our actions because we’re afraid we’ll mess up, or we want to scrap everything and start over completely, ignoring that we’ve usually got some grains of goodness mixed in.
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Keep the lines distinct: Know what you did to get the result, define what you learned in the process, clarify what you liked in what you did, and look for what you want to change or do differently the next go-around.
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