All too often, as business leaders and professionals, we take keeping score all too seriously. It has to be all numbers all the time. For some reason we feel like we must be doing it wrong if we take a different approach.
Here’s the thing; when something feels uncomfortable to us we just won’t do it.
For example, I have a coaching client who has no internal motivation for making money. It’s not her thing. To her, it’s a necessary evil. So if she wakes up and thinks about needing to work in order to make money, she finds little ways to avoid working. However, her real motivation happens to be learning new things. By reframing how she keeps score of her work from how much money she made that day to how many new things she got to learn, she has become more productive and more successful.
Personally, I have a block when it comes to working with numbers. That little terrorist voice inside me says, “Corinne, you’re not good at numbers. You may as well avoid them all together.” Yet I am great at connecting and teaching – so if I approach numbers differently, I actually enjoy the work.
When it comes to keeping score, numbers and money matter. They also only represent one piece of the pie. I know that your dream isn’t exclusively about making money. There is more to business than the bottom line; there is an impact we want to create in the world. So our means of measurement has to include these things – and it has to be fun so we actually enjoy measuring our success.
If you want to have fun with keeping score, you have to make it fun for yourself. This has to be personal. Yes, I am encouraging you to be selfish here. Once you understand your motivations you can keep score in a way that excites you. Instead of measuring your output in terms of dollars you can measure it in terms of new things you have learned that day; the impact you had on making the world a better place; the amount meaningful connections you have made with others; or the accomplishments you checked off that moved you closer to your dream. Once you understand your strengths and motivators, it’s easy to find a way to make keeping score fun.
I love putting up sticky notes whenever I accomplish a task or a goal. At the end of the week I have a huge wall full and I can visually see the impact I have had – and during middle of the week slumps, I have something to look at that energizes me.
Another tool I use, and clients have really connected, with has been the idea of an accomplishments list. We are all too familiar with the overwhelming to-do list. And many of us need to have a to-do list. We also need another list. An accomplishments list. Get yourself a notebook that you use exclusively to write down your accomplishments at the end of each day – before making a to-do list for the following day. This will give you a place to keep track of what you have done right. I suggest making a note about how you felt that day and what you most enjoyed about the day. That will make a huge difference when looking backward because you will have a personal record of your motivations, strengths, and successes.
How about you? Do you have any tools you use to make keeping score fun? How do you incorporate your strengths into your process for keeping score? Please share your thoughts. Your method may be just the tool someone else has been desperately seeking in order to achieve success.