Setting yourself up to win

Spring has sprung! The garden is waking up and I have just been out in the sunshine feeding the plant pots with booster plant food to set them up for their new growing season.

The underlying principles that govern nature tell us to focus on what we can control and that means creating the right conditions for the plants to help themselves. These same principles also apply in our lives and working environments as well.

This could be creating the right conditions for the learning to stick or creating the right environment to work productively or creating the right impression to get that job or … you get the idea.

When I am setting goals or coaching others – the way I frame this is with the question:

‘What do you need to do to set yourself up to win?’.

This is about how you prepare the ground so that you help yourself or others succeed.

Often, we are so keen to leap into the task we don’t stop to think through what is in our control and what the recipe for those right conditions are. This is true when we are leading ourselves or collaborating with others. From my experience the time spent preparing the ground is usually a sound investment but often overlooked in the mad rush to get on with it.

The other two question I always ask to prepare the ground are:

‘Who do I need to be to make this succeed?’ and

‘Who do I need to help me succeed on this?

‘Who’ always comes before ‘what, where and how etc.’ because who you choose to be and who else is involved, changes how you respond to the other questions. In that, what you and the others involved bring to the garden are the booster plant foods to prepare the ground for success.

Brendon Burchard suggests in his studies on successful people that they are very intentional in working out who they need to be and what they need to bring of themselves to each meeting or piece of work. He has this as part of his daily journalling practice. I think this thought process is quiet profound because we have a choice in how we show up in every moment of every day. Often we are so distracted by our busyness that we are not intentional with the ‘who’ at all!

How can you be a little more intentional in how you prepare the ground and how you show up – to set yourself up to win?