It’s been a busy break here at the end of the year.  Enjoying my Christmas and New Year’s holidays and getting ready for 2014!

I started my break taking Michael Hyatt’s course on 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever  This gives you some good guidance on how to look at last year, how to set your goals and how to push through when you feel like giving up.  Pretty good series.  I also read the ebook Goals by Eric Fisher and Jim Woods.  Another good read on the idea of setting and achieving your goals.  Of course, Brian Tracy, Darren Hardy and Jim Rohn are still my main sources of information on goal setting so I went back and re-read some of their books on the subject.

I set my goals based on the “Wheel of Life” concept from Zig Ziglar.  I use the same 7 areas of life that he has in the link:  Spiritual, Health, Family, Social, Career, Financial and Personal Growth.

One of the things that I am trying to obtain is being more “intentional” in my life.  What I’ve observed so far in life is that you can pick one of two paths.  You can go along and drift with the tide or you can intentionally decide what you want and go after it.  When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to be a musician. So I skipped the normal college route and went out on tour with a band.  When we got back, I took some classes at the junior college without a specific goal.  One thing led to another until my brother-in-law asked me if I’d be interesting in working for his Dad at Cobbledick-Kibbe Glass company in San Jose.  I never really decided what I wanted, things just happened.

Contrast that with my sister, who left high school and got a job because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.  After 6 months of drifting, she woke up one day and decided that she was going to be a doctor.  She had no money for college or medical school and no idea how she was going to do it, but she just made up her mind, worked really hard and now she is a doctor.

The funny thing is, I can tell you so many stories about people who set specific goals in their life, worked really hard to achieve them, and succeeded.  I can’t tell you any stories about people who set goals, worked really hard and failed.  Even if you don’t hit the goal, you still end up somewhere amazing.

As I looked back on this last year, my year was filled with things that I wanted to achieve.  There were still other things (like my trip to London to investigate an interesting solar technology from the University of Oxford) that were out of the blue, but for the most part, I was intentional about what I wanted the year to look like and I was able to achieve most of my goals.  This idea of creating a written document of what you want to work on and then setting out to do it is quite powerful and I’m extremely happy with the progress I’m making.  I’ve learned more and grown more in the last year than in any previous year of my life.

As I look back on 2013, I can really see the impact of being “intentional” about my life.  I’ve set some pretty stretch goals for myself in the coming year and I’m excited to see if  I can achieve them!  Happy New Year!

As most of you know, the glazing industry isn’t exactly flooded with women.  I was listening to a podcast the other day and they sited a study from MIT regarding team performance.

The study was performed to understand what made a high performing team.  The initial thought was that the IQ of the individual team members would result in higher performance.  This did not play out.

Professors Woolley and Malone, along with Christopher Chabris, Sandy Pentland, and Nada Hashmi, gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.

So, the finding was that a higher percentage of women on the team was the best way to predict team performance.

The other factors in the study were the team’s ability to gauge each other’s mood and the way that the team communicated. More dialog and less arguing would also contribute to team effectiveness.

Creating a more diversified workforce should be everyone’s goal.  This study definitely lends credence to the fact that more women on your team and in your company can improve the company’s performance.

Hope everyone has a very merry Christmas!

A couple of years ago, I took a class at Stanford with some of the guys at work.  The class was called:  Excellence is no Accident: Mental Skills Training for Work, Sports and Life.  There was a group of about 7 of us and the professor asked us to pick a goal that we could accomplish over the course of the class.

The interesting thing was that we were all struggling with what to pick.  The fun part about taking a night course at Stanford is having dinner in downtown Palo Alto before the class (ok, and maybe a glass of wine too).  So we were sitting at dinner and we were all struggling over what our goal should be.  It struck me that all the people I was with are very accomplished professionals.  Many of them are project managers who have run multi-million dollar projects for years.  They know exactly how to execute and achieve an outcome.  But sometimes the hardest thing to do isn’t getting what you want, but deciding what you want.

So, I picked a goal.  I set a goal to be able to do a set of 20 pull-ups.  Just something simple that I could work on.  Now, I suck at pull-ups.  I always have.  I had a hard time doing 2 or 3 in a row.  So, it wasn’t an easy goal, but it was something.

So here is what I learned.  The most important thing, is just get moving.  When you set out on the journey, you won’t be granted some amazing vision of exactly what you want to achieve in life.  You aren’t going to have some divine inspiration that tells you exactly what you are meant to be or meant to do.  I kept waiting for that and it never came.  But when I started moving, just doing my pull-ups every morning and making small gains, I began to realize that getting started is the hardest part.  Once you are moving and growing, more opportunities become available.  It’s like that thing they tell you in driver’s ed in high school.  If you slam on the brakes and your tires aren’t moving, you can’t steer the car.  It’s like that in life.  If your wheels aren’t moving, you won’t be able to change directions.

Getting moving is like a flashlight when you are walking down a dark road.  It won’t show you the whole road, but you see far enough ahead to be able to make course corrections.

So, I started making some small daily changes in my life to get me moving.  I started walking every day to begin getting healthier.  I started listening to Podcasts and Audio Books on my walks to begin improving my mind and get new ideas.  I began writing and blogging to get my ideas out and help clarify my thinking.  I began setting some smaller goals to begin having some wins and change my mindset.  All of these things have helped me to really start seeing what my bigger purpose wants to be.  Just the start of doing a few little things consistently over time has really changed my outlook and helped me understand better what I want to do with my life and what legacy I want to leave on this earth.

So, while I have only been able to hit 10-15 pull-ups so far, I know I will get to 20 some day.  But it taught me a lesson about not waiting to know exactly what I want before I begin.  Inspiration is not the power to get you moving, inspiration is the product of the journey.