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90-day Cycle of Success
by Denis Waitley
The sports world, to a
great extent, operates on a seasonal basis in which the
majority of league games are played during a 90-day cycle,
not including post-season playoffs.
I’ve found a 90-day cycle of success to be a wonderful unit
of time. It’s a time period that is long enough to plan
for, begin, work hard at, and accomplish certain objectives.
At the same time, it isn’t a year from now or forever. It is
a short enough time to generate a sense of urgency. One of
the problems with focusing on monthly goals is the gap in a
month caused by events and holidays.
Tax time in April. Vacations in June, July or August.
Christmas and other religious holidays, the World Series,
the playoffs and the Super Bowl. These gaps present a
problem in any given month. To sum up the concept of the
90-day season of success: It is a long enough period of
time to accomplish something significant, yet it is a short
enough time that there is urgency to act now.
Your 90-day season of success will build your motivation
because, often, yearly or five-year goals are so distant
that it’s easy to get discouraged and give up on them in
frustration. When your goals are proximate and positively
pressing, you’re more likely to muster the motivation
necessary to achieve them. Before you begin your next 90-day
success season, take an evening to go through the following
exercises. To do this, I recommend you download the text
from this newsletter, and block out some time for yourself
when you’re alone and can think without being interrupted.
Exercise 1: Review your life-forming goals, and
update your personal mission statement for your life or
career.
Exercise 2: Take 15 minutes and write down your most
important priorities personally and professionally for the
next 90 days. Get your calendar and planner out, and start
sequencing your action steps. Write down a list of to-dos,
phone calls, e-mails and appointments you need to make.
Exercise 3: Now review your list from Exercise 2, and
spend another 15 minutes adding things to that list that you
want to do for your own personal entertainment or
enlightenment.
Exercise 4: Take five minutes and record three things
that tend to slip through the cracks in your professional
life. Then do the same exercise for your personal life.
These are things that you always mean to accomplish, but
somehow never get around to doing.
Exercise 5: Create your “Seasonal Success Focus.” Review
the specific goals and images of achievement you want to
accomplish during the next 90 days in order to further your
life’s mission. As you write these goals on paper or in your
electronic diary, put a short statement as to the major
benefit of accomplishing these goals.
Once you have done this review, determine what the present
reality is—where are you right now in relation to the
accomplishment of these goals.
This week, start thinking about your goals as “quarterly
quotas.”
-- Denis Waitley |