Ongoing Improvement

If you have been reading my postings, it may have become apparent to you that in order to become motivated and stay motivated, you need a system, a plan. Haphazard attempts at getting ourselves motivated are not going to work. There are just too many things going on in our lives that distract us and turn us away from our path to expect motivation just to happen. Only by having a system will you be able to keep yourself motivated.

However, the focused activity does not stop after you have created your plan, you need to establish a way to make sure not only that the plan continues to work, but also allows you to improve the plan, as you gain experience and wisdom about yourself. The way we guarantee this ongoing improvement is through evaluation. All highly functioning businesses establish a process for ongoing improvement, through self evaluation.

We’ll talk in future blog postings about how to do an evaluation. Today we will talk about when to do an evaluation, the timing of your evaluations.

There are two ways to time your evaluation; you should use both ways. The first is on a regularly scheduled basis. Every week, two weeks, or month, your choice, you need to sit down and figure out how you are doing. Are you moving forward on your goals? If you find out you aren’t, you will now know you need to figure out why. If your evaluation shows that you are bumping into one particular ongoing problem, this knowledge will allow you to take steps to stop that from happening.

The second way to time your evaluations is on an “as-needed” basis. Evaluations are needed when something good happens, and when something bad happens. When something good happens, we need an evaluation to find out why the good thing happened, so we can make it happen again. We don’t want to lose the benefit of that lesson. We also need to take time to bask in the good feelings that will arise when it happens, and also to see if there are benefits from the good thing that maybe we don’t see at first blush.

When something bad happens, we also need to find out why, so we can avoid it happening in the future. We also may need to take some time to heal over any pain that results when things don’t go according to plan.

As intentional man, we don’t let things happen, we make things happen. A proper evaluation is one way we do that.