Finish Strong: The Art of Positioning for a Strong Finish

Well, it seems like we were just celebrating the New Year and excited about all the hopes and dreams that we held for 2022. Here we stand at the end of another cycle. In all honesty, this has been one of the greatest years of my life. I have experienced so much growth and maturity personally and professionally. Also, I have seen my relationships grow and expand. Furthermore, I have flourished in my business more than at any other time in my life. To top it all off, I released my eleventh book a week ago and it is doing well and early numbers are strong. I hope you can look back at the last twelve months and feel proud of what you have accomplished. As I embark upon my finish-the-year-strong campaign, I wanted to share a few insights with you to empower you to position yourself for a strong finish. I hope these insights will help you end this year with a bang and start 2023 empowered with a blueprint for uncommon success.

1. You need to have a heart-to-heart with yourself. While everyone is getting into the holiday spirit, I do not want to be a scrooge but I do want to share something serious with you for a moment. Every single year I take some time to sit and assess and evaluate my results. Some people do not like this idea because they do not like facing hard truths about their productivity and performance. If you cannot be honest with yourself, you will never honor the seed of your potential. So I want to challenge you to have a hard conversation with yourself. Are you proud of your results? Did you fall short of your goals? Did you abandon your vision? Your willingness, to be honest, will empower you to course-correct and experience radical change in your life in 2023 and beyond. Dishonesty will always produce a disempowered life. Anything you are unwilling to confront you will never be empowered to conquer. More importantly, anything that you are unwilling to address will always be a barrier to your advancement. Your honesty will empower you to raise your standards and make new strides.
2. You need to take the time to assess your goals and evaluate your performance. It is not enough for you to simply have an honest conversation with yourself. After you have been honest with yourself, you need to take the time to assess your life and evaluate your performance. Assessment is necessary because it reveals whether or not you are living aligned with your goals and your vision. Assessment also provides a powerful measuring tool for how we spend our time and what activities we are prioritizing on a consistent basis. Evaluation takes it a step further and weighs your outcomes against the objectives that you set for yourself this year. This is something that not a lot of people like to do. Honestly, most people know that they have not been focused on their goals and they are not happy with the progress that they have made. Therefore, most people believe that being out of sight and out of mind is the best way to live. On the other hand, I believe that denial is one of the greatest enemies to your growth and development. Assessment forces us to take responsibility for our results or the lack thereof. Assessment and evaluation measure what we are doing with the gift of time and whether or not we are honoring our potential.
3. You need to spend some time identifying what is not working in your life. As someone that has trained, developed, and consulted leaders around the world, most people want to stop after they audit their lives and they realize that they are not making progress and producing the results that they desire to see. On the contrary, from years of personal experience, I know that it is vitally important that you take time to identify what is not working in your life. What I know to be true is that you will repeat patterns until you recognize what is broken in your life. In other words, it is impossible to hit the reset button on your life until you take time to hit the rewind button and figure out what has you stuck. You cannot get unstuck until you unlearn the patterns and behaviors that are contributing to your failure. Therefore, use your assessment and evaluation to determine the flaws in your success system. A system cannot be improved until a process is studied. Study your processes and formulate a strategy that will position you for better results in your life. When you create a strategy, you will stop repeating patterns and start relearning so you can improve your performance.
4. You need to spend some time reflecting on what you learned this year. If you have followed my work for any length of time, then you know that every December I always put out an article about my top lessons for the year. If you are looking for that article, stay tuned because I will be putting it out in a few weeks. Why is it so important to take time to reflect on what you have learned this year? A year without lessons is a year without growth and development. In other words, any cycle in which you have not expanded and evolved is a wasted cycle. Every year of your life you should be learning, growing, and evolving into the greatest expression of who you were created to be. What lessons have you learned this year? How have you grown as a person? Is your life better than it was a year ago? Every year presents us with opportunities to learn, grow, and gain new wisdom and experiences that empower us to become the next best version of ourselves. As we end this cycle, may you reflect and reposition so that you can realize your dreams!