What if you can do the work one does in 12 months in 12 weeks, the limit that people set around themselves and constant distractions lead to a yearly planned schedule (Also called Annualized Thinking) that is not acted upon until November and December, and the same repeats each year until you decide…
“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.” ~ Thomas Edison
Emotional Connection
There are several aspects to a human’s life but many are unable to achieve what we truly desire and the underlying situation is we do not feel an emotional connection to our desires due to the constant chase of comfort and hardwired habits. So, to truly make a connection you will have to sit in a meditative posture and make a crystal clear vision, and by doing it consistently a deep emotion will create every time you think about it.
Why 12 Week Planning?
Businesses, organizations, and individuals focus on 12-month planning which is highly unpredictable and uncertainty possibly leads to a life of procrastination. Setting up 12-week planning eradicates unpredictability, provides more execution-focused planning, and is efficient structured.
12 Week Year Starts:
Implementation is key to progress, it may not guarantee success but it surely puts you on the path towards it. Therefore there must be a passion-driven commitment on your side if you wish to see a drastic change in your life in 2022. The 12-Week Plans should align with your short-term and long-term goals for the most effective results.
Tactics
Once you make the goals you wish to achieve in 12 weeks it starts to already get underwhelming by seeing all these massive goals together, the best solution is to separate all your goals into a certain category for example income goal, health goal, etc and attend to them individually as you become more focused and relaxed.
Weekly Planning
A week plan is an instrument that organizes and focuses your week. Your weekly plan encompasses your strategies and priorities, your long-term and short-term tasks, and your commitments in the context of time. At the start of every new week, spend 15–30 minutes planning your week. Identify the core activities required to fulfill your 12-week vision. In addition, spend first five minutes of each day should be spent reviewing your weekly plan to plan that day’s activities.
ScoreKeeping
At the heart of each competition is scorekeeping. We score ourselves based on our performance and keep measurements of our progress. An effective way to increase odds for success is by measuring our performance and achievement. Not just does it build our self-esteem but also provides an overview of areas that require more attention and work.
Productive Tension
Productive tension is the uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re not doing the things you know you need to do. The most effective way to resolve it is to use productive tension as a catalyst for change and use this fuel to uplift your creativity and life goals.
Intentional Timing
Despite the priceless value of time, many people engage each day on their terms. People thoughtlessly engage in activities that provide momentary satisfaction. That’s where intentional time plays its role of blocking out regular time each week dedicated to your strategically important tasks.
There are three types of blocks:
Strategic Block- It is a three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week and concentrates your intellect and creativity to produce breakthrough results. During this period you accept no distractions and focus on your pivotal commitments.
Buffer Block- Buffer blocks are designed to deal with all of the unplanned and low-value activities. The power of buffer blocks comes from grouping together activities that tend to be unproductive so that you can increase your efficiency in dealing with them. The buffer block can be scheduled according to your requirements but they should not exceed 1–1.5 hours a day.
Breakout Block- An effective breakout block is at least three-hours long and spent on things other than work away from your business that will refresh and reinvigorate your mind.
“If we take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
Accountability
The concept of accountability rests in understanding that each person has freedom of choice. It is this freedom of choice that is the foundation of accountability.
At the end of the day, the only accountability that truly exists is self-accountability. Only an individual is accountable for his actions and efforts. Therefore, being mentally honest and having the courage to rise above all compulsions.
Commitment
A commitment is a conscious choice to act to create the desired result. Commitment is an important and powerful part of every process. There are several benefits of keeping your commitments involving improved relationships, strengthening integrity, and building up self-confidence.
To live the experience of an unbreakable commitment you need:
- Strong desire: To fully commit to something, you need a clear and personally compelling reason.
- The desired result needs to be meaningful enough to get you through the hard times and keep you on track.
- The desired result needs to be meaningful enough to get you through the hard times and keep you on track.
Keystone Actions: The next step is to identify the core activities required to fulfill that desire. There are usually a few core activities that account for the majority of the results and usually, there are two or three keystone activities that are required.
Count The Costs: Commitments require sacrifice. In any effort, there are benefits and costs. Identifying the costs before committing to a vision allows you to consciously choose whether you are willing to pay the price of your commitment.
Act on commitments, not feelings: There will be times when you won’t feel like doing the critical activities, at these moments you must learn to act on your commitments instead of your feelings. Learning to do the things you need to do, regardless of how you feel, is a core discipline for success.
Greatness In The Moment
The belief is that in order to get the most out of my day, you need to be fully scheduled, fully committed, and constantly on the run, which is false. In our efforts to not miss anything, we unwittingly miss everything. Our attention is spread over various subjects and conversations that people tend to miss life and focus less on themselves.
“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
You can’t change the past or act in the future. The current moment — the eternal right now — is all you have. Right now, you can affect what happens to you for the rest of your life.
Performing In The Moment
Greatness is not achieved when the result is reached, but rather long before that when an individual chooses to do the things that he knows he needs to do. When you’re present in the moment, your thinking is clear and focused, decisions come easily, and you move through tasks almost effortlessly. When you are in the moment, you live with grace and ease. When you are totally present at the moment, when you connect with the now, life is more enjoyable.
The difference between greatness and mediocrity on a daily and weekly basis is slim, yet the difference in results down the road is tremendous. For example the difference between greatness and mediocrity for a salesperson is two or three extra appointments a week, five or ten more calls a day, three hours out of a 45-hour workweek spent working on their business.
Intentional Imbalance
One challenge most of us face is balancing our time and energy — between work and family, community service and recreation, exercise and relaxation, personal passions and obligations. Life balance is not about spending equal time in each area instead it is about intentional imbalance.
For your 12 Week goals to succeed, you must identify a few core activities in each area of your life and rate yourself from 1 to 10 for each to determine which area requires your focus and energy. Intentional Imbalance has the power to help you experience the same magnitude of improvement in any area you choose.
Emotional Cycle Of Change
12 Week Year is an execution system that helps you operate at your best each day by creating clarity and focus on what matters most and a sense of urgency to do it now. To apply the 12 Week Year will require change, and change is uncomfortable.
Understanding the process we go through emotionally when faced with change helps not be derailed by it.
The Emotional Cycle of change is a process described by Psychologists Don Kelley and Daryl Connor. Kelley and Connor’s emotional cycle of change (ECOC) includes five stages of emotional experience:
I. Uninformed Optimism: The first stage of change is most often exciting, as we imagine all of the benefits and have not yet experienced any of the costs. Our emotions are driven by our uninformed optimism. Unfortunately, uninformed optimism doesn’t last long.
II. Informed Pessimism: The second stage of change, informed pessimism, is characterized by a shift to a negative emotional state. At this point, the benefits don’t seem as real, important, or immediate, and the costs of the change are apparent. You start to question if the change is really worth the effort and begin to look for reasons to abandon the effort.
III. Valley of Despair: This is when most people give up. All of the pain of change is felt and the benefits seem far away or less important — and there is a fast, easy way to end the discomfort: Going back to the way you used to do things. After all, you rationalize that it wasn’t so bad before. At this stage having a compelling vision is critical to bring back the courage to be willing to give up your comfort zone.
IV. Informed Optimism: At this stage, your likelihood of success is much higher. You are back in the positive emotional area of the cycle. The benefits of your actions are starting to bear fruit and the costs of change are lessened because your new thoughts and actions are becoming more routine. The key at this stage is to not stop!
V. Success and fulfillment: At this final stage of change, the benefits of your new behaviors are fully experienced and the costs of change are virtually gone.
Every time you complete the cycle, you build not only your capacity, but also your confidence. At this point you can move on to the next change that you want to implement with greater assurance of success.
Closed System
The 12 Week Year is a closed system in that it contains everything you need to succeed. The real breakthrough comes when all of them are applied in their entirety. When applied in this way, the 12 Week Year becomes a self-correcting system that creates a breadcrumb trail that allows you to pinpoint any breakdowns and take corrective action on a timely basis. When you install the 12 Week Year as your operating system, it makes subsequent change easier, and when you install the 12 Week Year as your operating system, it leverages your other business systems.
People need stability; we need some things to remain the same. The 12 Week Year as an operating system stays the same. It provides a consistent platform to implement corporate initiatives and change efforts without the chaos that usually accompanies change.
Crafting Your Vision
The first step to creating a breakthrough with the 12 Week Year is to craft a great vision for yourself. The most powerful visions address and align your personal aspirations with your professional dreams. In the end, your professional vision often funds and enables your personal vision.
The best visions are big ones. Nothing great is ever accomplished without first being preceded by a big vision. All of the great accomplishments of mankind from medicine to technology to space travel to the World Wide Web were first envisioned and then created.
Impossible To Possible To Made: When we imagine a future that is significantly bigger than our current reality, we can begin to think that it is impossible for us. The fact that you don’t know how to do it creates the perception that it is impossible, at least for you, and it makes you think of new goals on a sliding scale of impossibility to certainty.
“If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” ~ Henry Ford
Step 1: Reaching your biggest dreams is to shift from impossible thinking to possible thinking. You do this not by asking How? but by asking What if? What would be different for you and people you know. By asking What if? you give yourself permission to entertain the possibility and begin to connect with the benefits.
Step 2: Once you see your vision as possible, then you begin the shift from possible to the next level: probable. You make this shift by asking the question that we avoided earlier: How might I?
Step 3: The final shift needed in your thinking to create an effective vision is to move from probable to given. This shift happens naturally as you begin to implement the planned actions. Given is a powerful state of mind where any question of doubt is gone.
Passion
Passion comes from your personal vision, and passion is the energy source that helps you push through the pain of change and the valley of despair. Your vision provides you with a line of sight, an emotional link to help you overcome the challenges and execute. When the task seems too difficult or unpleasant, you can reconnect with your vision.
There are three-time horizons that you’ll want to focus your vision on: 1. Long-term aspirations. 2. Mid-term goals, about three years into the future 3. 12 Weeks
Long Term Aspirational Vision: In formulating your vision, you must let your mind expand to imagine and even embrace the possibilities that often get pushed aside in our daily lives as being not immediate enough to command our attention, impractical, or too audacious to even consider, let alone pursue.
Take a few minutes right now and think about all of the things that you want to have, do, and be in your life. Write everything you can think of on a sheet of paper; leave nothing off the page.
Now, take the items from your page that you connect with emotionally and construct a vision for your life 5, 10, 15 years into the future. Be bold, be courageous; create a life vision that inspires you and fulfills your purpose.
Three-Year Vision: Based on your long-term vision, what do you want to create over the next three years? Describe in as much detail as possible what a great personal and professional life would look like three years from today.
Thinking Shift
Vision is a thinking exercise, but how you view the concept of vision will impact the degree to which you leverage and benefit from it. Vision, when engaged properly, is the ignition switch and power source of high performance. It is the all-important why behind the things you do.
The shift in thinking from seeing vision as fluff, to seeing it as the mother of all antecedents is a fundamental shift in thinking that will pay huge dividends.
Team Application
Vision is the best starting point for all effective performance-based coaching relationships because vision creates ownership. If your direct reports take ownership of their visions, it will be much easier to help them to own their goals and plan tactics as well.
Review the visions of your team in individual one-on-one sessions. Ask permission to review their professional visions with them. Dig into why the business vision they have is important to them.
It’s important that you establish a team vision for your company, division, or group. The team vision is similar to the individual vision in that it describes the destination at a fixed point in the future. When creating the team vision, you will want to apply many of the same dynamics used in creating your personal visions. Start with the long-term by having everyone brainstorm what a great company or office would look like in the future.
Develop A 12-Week Plan
Planning enables you to allocate your time and resources to your highest-value opportunities, it increases your odds of successfully hitting your goals, it helps you to coordinate your team, and it creates a competitive advantage.
Operating in the 12 Week Year execution cycle creates an increased premium on the value of time. In 12 weeks, each day counts toward reaching your goals. The value of each moment is brought into sharp focus when there are only 12 weeks in your entire year. One of the benefits that come from applying the 12 Week Year is learning to act at the moment because that’s where the future that you will experience is being created.
Writing an effective 12-week plan is key to accomplishing great things in only 12 weeks. The plan defines the actions that you will need to take each week of the 12 to reach your goal.
Getting Started
It’s not enough to have a vision and a plan. If your goals and plan are designed to help you achieve a higher level of performance, then you most likely have specific tactics that are new actions for you.
ARTICLE INSPIRED BY- 12 WEEK YEAR BY DR. BRIAN P. MORAN AND MICHAEL LENNINGTON
