A mechanism to enhance performance.
What if you adjusted critical success factors leading to inspired action and achievement of your desired results, faster and with less effort?
This morning I was speaking to a friend in the UK. It was 6:30am in California and 2:30pm in London. Thank goodness for skype, the call didn’t cost a dime!
My friend enjoyed what I had written about Accelerate Success: Use the 5A’s Checklist . However, he reminded me of something that wasn’t quite explicit in that context.
It’s a concept that is simply a natural part of how I approach problem solving. It’s what has made me successful in delivering results in my various corporate and nonprofit roles. Yet, for many people, it’s not as intuitive and often overlooked as a critical element for success. Consequently, the best made business strategies or personal action plans lead to poor execution and poor results. The best way to elaborate on this concept is to share two stories from my own experience.
Doing This Enables a Smoother Drive
Three years after I purchased my new car, it was time to get new tires. So I turned to Costco Wholesale for quality and price. Unfortunately, Costco told me that I needed to go elsewhere to get my tires aligned in order to prevent premature tire wear and increase my gas mileage. On the short 2-mile drive to the service station, I experienced what it was like to have new tires that were not aligned. I was driving along a nicely paved road. Yet, my steering wheel shook as if I were driving across gravel. It was an unnerving and uneasy feeling. And I drove with hands firmly gripped on the steering wheel until I arrived at my destination. Whew!
The Best Way to Start a Jigsaw Puzzle
When I was a youngster, my father brought home a 60-piece jigsaw puzzle for me and my siblings to solve. Ooh…this was going to a challenge from the more elementary puzzles of times past. Nevertheless, we eagerly opened the box and dumped all the pieces on the coffee table. Next we turned each piece so that the image was face up instead of face down.
Can you guess what we did next?
You got it. We propped the box cover so we could see the image of the completed puzzle. Then proceeded to select all the edge pieces to frame the outside of the puzzle. This structural alignment enabled us to improve our puzzle solving performance in less time and with greater ease. Ahh! Success.
So what do both of these examples have to do with your ability to accelerate success?
Alignment.
A wheel alignment involves adjusting the camber, castor and/or toe (internal aspects) in order to improve performance and maintain proper tire wear characteristics of the car (results)
In the puzzle example, a structural alignment involved laying out the puzzle to improve matching of pieces to empty ‘slots’.
And in your personal success, alignment involves adjusting the elements of your physical and mental attention, attitude, environment, belief system, and imagination in a manner that enhances your performance and achievement of results.
Alignment is the key to making the 5 A’s operate in your favor. Aligning the critical internal or mental elements yields inspired action which is effortless. Effortless inspired action applied consistently begets speed to external achievement.
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