The title of this article saying this list is to “Fast Track” isn’t really true. This list is to provide tips and behaviors to follow that will make a significant difference in how you perceive others, in how they perceive you and will help to make you more successful in your career and other related life activities. That was way too long for a title however so I choose the one I did!

So this list is what I believe it takes to make quick progress which I’ve learned from my own experience and by learning from and studying others. I hope it gives some inspiration to be more productive with your own progress and is useful to remind you of the things to focus on and to learn more about if they are unfamiliar to you. My list is not exactly ordered, but I did put the items first that I believe more strongly in, that is not to say they are the most beneficial though.

1. Demonstrate and hold true to your values and beliefs.
   This doesn’t matter where you apply it, it can give you so much in how others perceive you. It allows you to live and work with content in your actions and to earn respect from others who learn and understand your motives. Sticking to your values no matter what shows great integrity and consistency, which can definitely help you make progress in your career and in the trust you build with every relationship.
2. Volunteer and take on new work.
   Givers are great! Volunteer yourself and expect nothing back. Take joy in what you have to offer others. Take advantage of a giving attitude in a workplace, it is generally valued and seen as a leadership skill. It demonstrates an attitude of seeking for new responsibilities and gives you an opportunity to really take on responsibility and prove yourself with your actions. Develop a habit of being quick to volunteer for tasks (but don’t expect to always get it) and be willing to take on work no one else wants.You learn so many new things by volunteering and can experience great joy seeing your contribution and impact you have simply by choosing to give more than you are expected or asked. And those meaningful and heartfelt “Thank You” notes and words of appreciation can really make your day (or week or month).
3. Set and focus on planned goals.
   I’ve written several articles already on goals which you can jump to them here for more details. Goals really are the key to accomplishing whatever you desire and so setting them and focusing on planned goals is a critical step to advanced things in your life and career. If you do nothing else from this list, at least start using goals effectively.
4. Take risks.
   Many people are afraid to take risks in life and they keep themselves in a safe environment wherever possible. Life doesn’t simply come handing things out to people and it takes some initiative and risk to make quick progress. Taking risks of course introduces an element of possible failure and those that understand the benefits of failure can learn from it instead of being afraid of it. Its fine to make mistakes as long as you can learn from them and better yourself because of it.
   Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Albert EinsteinTwo specific ways to take risks are by challenging existing systems and processes you have experience with in order to improve it and to welcome change. Both of these have some element of risk and are often areas that you can improve things and make progress.
5. Communication Mastery
   What I mean by this is just to learn to master communication skills. Communication is such an important skill in so many areas its definitely worth learning more about it and learning to master it. A couple of short tips to improve by communication are:
   • Keep others informed of progress and problems when working together. Don’t try to own and hide anything. Honesty is the best practice.
   • Focus on your listening skills by practicing techniques that use reflective questions, paraphrasing and empathetic understanding.
   • Share / inspire your vision, values and passions to others.
6. Help Everyone
   People develop relationships quickly when you offer help. Helping others lets you share what you have learned with them and it often can enable others to take their own actions afterwards. A generous giving heart and attitude is a great personal attribute and generosity works in a recycling way.
7. Educate/Train constantly
   Continue to improve yourself and become more and more educated in the areas of your strengths so that you can be more effective with them. Learning to be an expert in areas can be done by self study and provides a valuable foundation to demonstrate knowledge and depth in an area of practice which will make you much more likely to succeed in that type of role. There are so many resources available nowadays to continually learn from, its easy for people with a learning attitude to keep learning more. It stimulates the brain and thought processes improving your reasoning, problem solving, communication foundation and your memory, among other things. I can’t stress this one enough.
8. Humility and Modesty
   Career progression often leads to a person having and showing pride in their accomplishments. This is dangerous and can be very negative towards others and easily come across as self admiration. This is why a humble and modest attitude is critical to making fast progress in life and your career. Humility balances you with others and keeps things at a level playing field without any distinction between your progress and that of others. Modesty is acting in a way that you don’t self advertise your accomplishments and that you give more credit to others than you take for yourself.
9. Compassion / Empathy for others
   Having compassion and empathy for others opens many doors of communication and builds trust in relationships. Truly understanding the needs of others and feeling some impact from those needs leads to many of the other areas on this list, but especially better communication and new avenues to help others.
10. Positive / Energetic Attitude.
    A positive attitude and energetic style is a very common leadership skill and it not only motivates others, but also drives a person internally. There is so much to say on this topic I can’t really even touch the surface. Keeping and controlling your mindset is a powerful tool in life and with a positive energy and passion in doing it, leads to great achievement. Consistency here and learning to reinforce your thoughts and displayed energies in a positive way can accelerate many areas of your life. This will continue to feed your desire so that you can easily get through difficult times and put in the focus needed to accomplish what you want, no matter what it takes.
11. Make Connections, Know and Like Everyone
    Relationships and connections to other people are one of best things in life, as well as a tool to make the progress you want. Connections provide you ways to find and give help, to share your stories, passions and feelings and open many doors that can continue to steer you on your path. If you are willing to see people as individuals without judging them you can focus on building meaningful relationships in your life. Give more to relationships than you ever expect in return. A fantastic book I’d recommend on this topic is Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi which I reviewed here.
12. Make the most of your working time
    My last tip to improving your productivity towards life and career progress is to make the most of the time you have. Eliminate the things you really don’t need to do and take the time to find your passions in life and focus your time and efforts on them. At work, make sure you are in fact working. Don’t use work time for anything personal, don’t surf the web for personal interests and minimize your personally discussions to breaks and after hour times. Ensure you are seen as a hard worker by your peers and colleagues and you will definitely make good progress in your career. Remember you don’t need to work more hours, just work those hours better. While this doesn’t provide success just on its own, it certainly helps when you focus on results and what is expected of you. Find ways to be more effective, not just efficient and use your work time for what you are paid to do, work!

This list only provides a starting point on each of the 12 items. I encourage you to look at which ones you currently focus on and how you could add the others into your routine. These are the things I’ve found by my experience and learning to make the most difference and I’m sure there are many others just as important. What additional items would you add to this list?

Posted by Mike King under Business & Life | 8 Comments »

Tracking goals is an ongoing process, not a one time thing. This is the time when you are actively working on your goals and it is generally over some long period of time. During that time, its important that goals are not just forgotten. They need to be looked at on a regular basis. The more you think about your goals, the more you enhance the related beliefs and the more attention you will put to achieving these goals. I have some recommendations here for working towards your goals as well for tracking and monitoring them.

Working On Your Goals

The next important thing to do for working on your goals is pick the absolute simplest thing you can and make it the next thing you can work on. It should be something that you can do immediately (today or tomorrow). It might be as simple as looking up a contact name or finding some article or reference material, but that in itself is progress and a step towards your goal. Come up with a list of these simple things that will lead to progress towards your goal and write as many of them as you can think of. Making a habit of doing simple tasks towards your goal is very important and a great way to ensure that your focus will last without feeling overwhelmed by the work and that you have an impossible goal.

Make sure you keep tasks simple so you don’t get bogged down by any one long task and break them into pieces if you need to so you can always work on some small part. Keep a running list. Update it frequently so you don’t run out of things to work on. As mentioned above, you should focus on your goals on a regular basis and spend that time planning, reviewing and working on the tasks to help towards your achievement.

Some people find it helpful to use a goal buddy that they can share their plan and tasks list and hold them accountable to so that they are responsible to get things down not only for themselves, but also for the other person since they will be expecting it. Try this out to see if it works for you. Sometimes even just telling someone else and reporting to them on how its going is enough to keep you working with extra inspiration. A mentor here is perfect for helping to track and monitor your goals.

This may be daily, weekly or perhaps only monthly. The preference highly depends on each person and on the goals themselves. I recommend weekly, no matter what the goals are, since most people can remember tasks and items from about a week, but not much more.

Progress is Success!

Progress. The one and only thing that really matters for goal achievement. Continuous, steady progress will lead to accomplished goals. You will never get there without progress. This is why the small tasks work so well since you can easily remind yourself when you review your goals of the success and progress you are already having towards your goal if you are taking it on in small pieces.

Taking a simple action everyday or every week is a great way to have success in your whole goal setting process and it will definitely continue to inspire you to keep going strong with it. Keep that list of items going and keep them small enough that every time you review your goals, you have at least one thing to check off as being done.

Is Changing a Goal Cheating?

Next, its important to carefully consider your goal progress and be honest with where you are at. Its even a good idea to change your goals when you are falling behind. Its no use to beat yourself up for falling offtrack or getting behind on things, simply change your goal, reset, and starting making progress again. This is where most people fail who do set goals, they seem unwilling to change their goals, get farther and farther behind and eventually just give up. Don’t do that, just change your goal.

Adjusting a goal might mean changing the timebase of it, changing the goal itself to make it easier for you or even eliminating a goal altogether. Perhaps, just the way you measure a goal needs to be refined so you can tell when you’ve really accomplished it. Maybe your ideas and priorities have changed. After all, people’s minds and circumstances change all the time and therefore, so should their goals. If you’ve changed your beliefs about a goal, adjust it and make it real again. Remove some goals or add new ones. Its perfectly valid to adjust your goals constantly and actually, it will drastically help you to focus on the right goals that really do mean something, because those topics don’t just fade away; irrelevant and temporary ones definitely do. Is it cheating? No way, its part a proper goal setting process.

So, keep reviewing goals regularly, recognize progress towards your goal and feel free to change things to make them more appropriate.

Goal Setting Series

Part 1: Goal Setting – Introduction
Part 2: Goal Setting – Setting and Identifying
Part 3: Goal Setting – Tracking and Monitoring
Part 4: Goal Setting – Completing and Close

Posted by Mike King under Success | 3 Comments »

OK, I wrote recently about not setting any new year’s resolutions and that was really because resolutions are generally missed, forgotten, ignored and never adjusted. They are not written, planned or even thought about that clearly. They are VERY different from goals. So, I’m going to be exploring goals and goal setting, tracking and following goals for the next several articles and I wanted to just introduce a bit about goals and what a difference they can make in one’s life.

Setting and achieving goals is a process, it is not a single event. I think this is the biggest mistake that people make with goals. They set them, leave them and eventually realize when its way to late, that they didn’t achieve them and voila, they no longer believe that goals work. That is simply not true. Goals do work, but to make them work, you also have to work your goals. There is a process that is needed to attend to them, track them, adjust them and even to identify them in the first place. They don’t just happen!

What are Goals Really Good For?

Plain and simply, goals are the one fundamental key to success and achievement. They are the key to accomplishment in every aspect of life. Living without having and utilizing goals means living in the wake of reaction and circumstance. Its living just to live instead of choosing how to live and why to live. Goals allow a person to focus their energy and life for purposes and passions. They help to add value to a person’s life by keeping them on track with what means most to them and they help a person to better understand themselves and what is important to them. Goals are a way to live with meaning and obsession for what brings the most joy and satisfaction to a person. They are something to express passion for, to motivate you and others who see your determinism and they simply bring to your life more of what you want.

Different aspects of Goals

So, the point these articles is that I’m going to reviews goals in a few separate sections. Its a big enough topic its easier to take in pieces and helpful if you are already experienced with goal setting but need some helpful tips in just one area. Goal setting really is important enough (and there are many blogs and series out there to show this) that it can be the sole focus for an entire site or longer series as well. I hope to cover a few specific things I’ve learned from using goals through my life and I want to present it in a short and actionable way so it is easy to help others enhance their experiences with goals as well. So, I’ve broken down a few separate articles into the following sections:

• Setting and Identifying goals
• Tracking and Monitoring goals
• Completing and Closing goals

I believe goals should be focused on achieving life lasting skills, relationships and changed behaviors or habits, not simply temporary or material things. The reason I believe this is because temporary and material things don’t really bring a true lasting satisfaction to anyone, so achieving them doesn’t build on the value of goals nearly as much as goal accomplishment in those other areas. A goal that is remembered and lasts forever will be much higher valued and will re-enforce the value of goal setting in the first place, even more. So, through these goal setting articles, keep focused on behavior impact of your goals, things you want with a lasting impact, not just some new job, toy, or even some dollar figure. What will last for years to come? What will you be most proud of on your death bed? What will help you leave a legacy to others when you pass on? Those are the types of content for great goals and accomplishing them is truly something to be proud of.

Goal Setting Series

Part 1: Goal Setting – Introduction
Part 2: Goal Setting – Setting and Identifying
Part 3: Goal Setting – Tracking and Monitoring
Part 4: Goal Setting – Completing and Close

Posted by Mike King under Success | 7 Comments »

Life is a complex mess of circumstances, interactions and experiences each unique to every single person on this planet. There are countless things that seem to make a difference in people’s lives and how life is perceived. However, there seems to be just a handful of things that make a big difference on a daily basis with our relationships, career and joy in life. That item is part of one’s attitude and specifically, its about complaining in life. Most everyone does more than their share of complaining and it stems from the societal pressure of constantly wanting more, moving up the career chain, wanting to continually improve everything and simply because people are not generally content with what they have. If you take note and make a conscious effort to eliminate complaining in your own life, you will be much happier.

Why So Many Complaints?

Are you focused on constantly wishing things were different, and complaining about them instead of being focused on seeing and recognizing the things that are positive and going well for you? What about with others, do you complain to them more than thank, appreciate or praise them? Perfectionists and critical thinking people often deliver a lot of complaints and don’t see the good things happening around them every day.

People constantly complain about their jobs, there money or lack thereof, traffic and the weather. The news, its just a long series of more things to complain about and rarely anything to be excited about or thankful for. Life is unfortunately, quite a bombardment of media and people who are complaining about nearly everything!

You can change that for yourself by replacing any complaining with more positive thoughts and comments. Look for the good around you, talk about the positive things about your job, start conversations when the weather and traffic are good, see the things you value on a day to day basis and share that with others, instead of the usual set of complaints.

Change Your Focus

Its easy to change your attitude and start thinking and focusing on the positive things in your life if you look for this every day. Its takes some effort, but just a few changes everyday can make a big impact in your life and make you feel happier. Thinking positive and avoiding the complaints are your choice to make. That choice allows you to be in control of how you feel simply by choosing what you will focus on. You can make yourself happier if you choose to and by practicing consciously over and over to see the good things and to value them instead of complaining, you will train your mind to do the same subconsciously. This will eventually change your natural attitude and you won’t even have to work on this anymore, it will just happen. And you will be happier.

Posted by Mike King under Relationships | No Comments »