Is your meditation practice actually making a difference to your business?
Does journaling truly affect your relationships?
Are cold showers having an impact on your business? Or are you just getting cold and wet?
You know how difficult it is to quantify personal growth. Whenever you set goals in another area of life you can see the results. More plates on the barbell, zeros on the balance sheet, or books read this month, equals success.
Are you becoming who you’re meant to be though? That is a different question altogether.
“What gets measured gets managed,” wrote Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory. You need a way of quantifying your results. Otherwise you’ll find yourself in a familiar situation: you don’t know if you’re growing or not.
What is really holding you back? What is helping you? Are you becoming who you’re meant to be?
Whilst working with my clients, and figuring out my own shit, I’ve developed a pretty foolproof strategy for quantifying your growth as an individual. Today, I’m going to let you steal the exact system I teach my paying clients.
Why You’ll Never Be Fulfilled (Or Successful) If You Only Pursue Business Growth
You and I are walking two paths at once: the path of attainment, and the path of actualisation. Attainment is what you get from the world. Actualisation is who you’re becoming.
I picture us with one foot on both paths. If you get your business to provide an income you’ve sought for months - that’s one step on the path of attainment. You gain a modicum more presence through an NSDR practice - your right foot catches up with your left as you take a step on the path of actualisation.
Obviously if one foot is bogged down in mud on one path, you can put all the effort into inching the other foot forward, but once you’ve done the splits, you’re just busting your balls for no reason. You’ve got to attend to the path holding you back.
On rare occasions, I’ll find someone whose personal development is in advance of their real world attainment, but in the vast majority of cases, I’ll speak to people whose businesses, relationships, health and in fact happiness, are all pinned back by a lack of progress in the path of actualisation. They’re bouncing against a glass ceiling.
Self-sabotage, an inability to harness their emotions, and a lack of clear thinking dominate their experience.
When I work with someone, the first question to answer is “which path are you behind on? The path of attainment or the path of actualisation?”
That allows you to figure out which of the 3 types of metrics you should track.
Metric 1: Why SMART Goal Setting Is Dumb
Let’s start with the obvious one: are you achieving your goals? I have a comprehensive goal setting process called Nested Goals which allows my clients to find alignment in their goals, discover the motivation to achieve them, and turn them into a simple process to achieve them. I teach it in my Clarity Course.
Products of this process are clear objectives for each day, week, month, quarter and year.
Once you’ve got that, you simply need to measure if you’re hitting those goals or not. Did you make your sales target? Did you manage ten pull ups? Did you go on a date night each month?
If you want to turbo charge this, you’ll want to isolate the process goals and obsess over these. To identify and master your process, The Character Course is great for you.
Store your goals somewhere you see them often. Track them weekly. Keep these front of mind.
Practical Step: What are your most important goals to attain?
Metric 2: What Your Mind & Body Tells You About Your Route To More Freedom
Next up, you want to track how you feel. Notice how I say ‘track’. You want to write this down on a regular basis. This will help you spot trends of your emotional and subjective state. That way, you’ll see if what you’re doing boosts your mood, state, anxiety levels and the rest.
You want to be able to look back at your data and see if it’s improving.
I teach my clients to get a consistent view of their inner world in a couple of different ways. When they sign up, they fill out an onboarding questionnaire. The questionnaire is there to assess their average levels of motivation, discipline, focus, clarity and the like. This not only gives me an idea of what I need to include in their programming, but also allows them to clearly see their growth. Especially when they fill out a similar form 3-6 months later.
On a more frequent basis - daily initially - I get them to fill out a Nervous System Regulation Tracker. This logs their mood, stress and anxiety levels, sleep quality, Heart Rate Variability, and much more besides. I give you this tracker as part of the Calm Course I developed.
This Regulation Tracker has a dual benefit. First it tracks outcomes of the work we do together, and secondly, it gives me clues about what could be holding them back.
Heart Rate Variability - or HRV - is probably the most important metric I track here as it’s the byproduct of so many variables.
Practical Step: put together a daily tracker which shows you your mental-emotional landscape across a time span.
Metric 3: How To Spend More Time Travelling & Adventuring When Growing Your Business
The first two metrics are mega useful, but what ultimately matters, is succeeding on your terms. No amount of standard goal setting, or mood tracking will truly reflect what makes your life worth living to you. That’s why we work hard to devise highly personal Freedom Metrics.
Freedom Metrics are the kind of thing that very few other people would care about. They’re also the type of thing that are generally much harder to quantify. Let me give you an example or two.
If you follow me on social media, you’ll see I adore skiing, climbing, and generally being outdoors. As part of a lifestyle, this is hard to quantify. I mean, am I truly being a ‘mountain man’ or not? But when I dig deep, I see there are metrics that correspond to this goal, namely, how many days I spend adventuring.
One of my most important Freedom Metrics is the number of days I spend adventuring per year. My goal is 45 days per year, and this is part of what makes my life meaningful to me. This year I’ve accumulated many of those in ski mountaineering in Pakistan, and cycling in the Pyrenees with my Dad.
Another example. Part of what makes my life high in quality, is to be intentional, deliberate, effective and intense when I work. This is combined with being totally off, when I’m not working. The best metric I have discovered to track this is simply my total hours worked per week. 25 is my upper limit and goal. This forces me to work incredibly hard and intentionally. It also means that I am more present with my wife, and when they’re born, my child.
My clients have things like: days spent abroad or travelling, hours spent doing something new, hours spent doing sweet FA, and many more.
We even ran a competition in the Adventurepreneur Collective to see who could accumulate the most Adventure Hours in a month.
Practical step: come up with your single most important Freedom Metric.
How TO Quickly Track Your Personal Growth: A Wrap-Up
If you consistently track these data points, you will be able to walk both paths - those of attainment and actualisation simultaneously. You’ll also be able to grow much more rapidly as you’ll always know what is helping and what is hindering you.
When you look at all three of these goals, you can triangulate success for you.
So remember:
If you’re stuck, ask yourself if you’re held back on the path of attainment or actualisation.
Develop easily measurable metrics to see if you’re hitting your goals in the real world
Consistently track your internal state
Define your own Freedom Metrics
If you want to expedite this process & take the step after tracking your growth, The Character & Clarity Courses are perfect for you. When you get both of them, you also get the Calm Course for free in the Bundle
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