Things High Achievers Do To Supercharge Their Performance And Help Others In The Process

Sometimes a simple change can take your performance – and your life – to a whole new level.

The only way to overcome a problem is to do something differently. But there’s no reason to wait until you’re forced to make a bad situation better.
There’s a better approach.

Why not be proactive and turn an average situation into an awesome situation?
All you have to do is pick a way to do things differently.

1. Help a person who needs help

Don’t wait to be asked. Pick someone who is struggling and offer to help.
But don’t just say, “Is there some way I can help you?” Be specific: Offer to help with a specific task, or to take over a task for a few days, or to work side-by-side.

A general offer is easy to brush aside. A specific offer not only shows you want to help; it also shows you care.

2. Help a person who doesn’t seem to need help

Think about it: Compared with others, the best-performing people don’t need help. So they rarely get help. And as a result, they’re often lonely, at least in a professional sense.

So offer to help with a specific task. Not only will you build a nice interpersonal bridge, but some of their better skills or qualities might rub off on you as well.

3. Help anyone

Few things feel better than helping someone in need. Take a quick look around; people less fortunate than you are everywhere.

For example, I conducted an interview skills seminar for prison inmates (after all, who needs to know how to deal with tough interview questions more than a convicted felon?). It took only an hour of my time and was extremely rewarding.

Most of the inmates were touchingly grateful that someone – anyone – cared enough to want to help them. I got way more out of the experience than they did.

4. Don’t try to change who you are. Be a better version of who you already are.

I would like to ride a motorcycle like this guy. Or climb like this guy. Or run a company like her. Or change the world like him.
But I won’t.

And for the most part, I’m OK with that, because I can always be a better me. I can ride faster or climb better than I do now, and I can make a bigger difference in the lives of my family and friends.

Think about the people you admire and pick a few of their qualities to emulate, not their accomplishments, because you can’t be them.
But the cool thing is, they can’t be you.

5. Let other people be who they really are

Your customers, vendors, suppliers,they aren’t going to change. Don’t expect them to.
Pick one source of frustration and decide what you will do differently, including, possibly, walking away.

When you stop focusing on negatives, you may start to notice the positive qualities you missed. Rarely are people as bad as you make them out to be – and if they are, it’s up to you to make whatever changes are necessary.
They won’t.

6. Change the way you measure tasks

Over time, we all develop our own ways to measure our performance. Maybe you focus on time to complete, or quality, or end result. Each is effective, but sticking with one or two could cause you to miss opportunities to improve.

Say you focus on meeting standards; what if you switched it up and focused on time to complete?
Measuring your performance in different ways forces you to look at what you regularly do from a new perspective.

7. Change the goals you strive for

If you develop accounting software, it’s fun to benchmark against, say, the success of QuickBooks. Setting an incredible goal is fine – if you don’t aim high, you won’t reach high – but failing to hit a lofty goal can also kill your motivation.

So choose a different benchmark. Look for companies or people with similar assets, backgrounds, etc, and try to beat their results. Then, after you do, choose another, higher target.
Aim for the heights but always include a few interim goals along the way. The journey will be a lot more fun.

8. Do the opposite of what you normally do

Think of this one as the George Costanza approach.
If you haven’t reached a goal, then what you’re currently doing isn’t working.
Instead of tweaking your approach, take an entirely different tack.

Pick one goal you’re struggling to achieve and try a completely different approach. If you’re hoping to finish a marathon and endless long runs aren’t paying off, try interval training instead. Sometimes small adjustments eventually pay off, but occasionally you just need to blow things up and start over.

9. Eliminate one goal

We all have goals. Often, we have too many goals; it’s impossible to do 10 things incredibly well.
Take a look at your goals and pick at least one that you’ll set aside, at least for now. (Don’t feel bad about it.

You weren’t reaching your goals anyway, so what’s the harm in dropping a few?)
Then put the time you were spending on that goal into your highest priority. You can’t have it all, but you can have a lot – especially when you narrow your focus to one or two key goals.

10. Rework your workday

Get up earlier. Get up later. Take care of e-mails an hour after you start work. Eat at your desk.

Pick one thing you do on a regular basis, preferably something you do for no better reason than that is the way you always do it (which makes it comfortable), and do that one thing in a different way or at a different time.

Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. Sometimes familiarity breeds complacency, and complacency is a progress and improvement killer.

11. Adopt someone else’s habit

Successful people are often successful because of the habits they create and maintain.
Take a close look at the people who are successful in your field: What do they do on a regular basis? Then adopt one of their habits and make it your own.
Never reinvent a wheel when a perfect wheel already exists.

12. Teach another person something you want to do better

When I teach, I learn more than the people I’m trying to teach. (Hopefully that says more about the process of teaching than it does about my teaching abilities.)

When you mentor another person, you accomplish more than just helping someone else.
You learn a few things about yourself – and hopefully find new inspiration and motivation in the process.

Jeff Haden is an author of more than 50 non-fiction books and ghostwriter for innovators and business leaders. To engage with him, e-mail us at editor@leaderonomics.com.

Reposted with permission on Leaderonomics.com

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