Today ...

Are you crushing it...knocking the ball out of the park...and off to a blazing start?

Or...are you repeating the same patterns as last year...barely squeaking by...and in serious need of more, better and faster results?

Regardless of your answer, I'm going to share with you a simple, seven-step strategy for taking your performance to an entirely new level.

I just used it to evaluate my YTD performance and implementing the feedback into my plans for the month of February.

It's called an AFTER ACTION REVIEW (AAR), and it's purpose is to...

1. Celebrate and sustain strengths as you must reinforce the tactics and strategies responsible for winning.

2. Identify and correct deficiencies as it is imperative that you analyze behaviors which are compromising performance.

3. Focus on opportunities to exploit and goals to pursue for the remaining 335 days of the year.

DO IT NOW

To best position yourself, your family and business for the remainder of the year, you NEED to perform an AAR and analyze what took place in the first half of the year, and...YOU NEED TO DO IT NOW!
You NEED to identify every nugget of knowledge your past performance offers and milk it for all it's worth.

Please note the special emphasis on the word NEED, as if you hesitate to do this exercise or simply choose to delete this message, you'll most certainly pay the heavy price associated with neglect, ignorance and immaturity.

Unfortunately the vast majority of people and companies don't learn enough from their mistakes or their accomplishments.

It's like everyone is simply plugging along with their heads down, and it's Ground Hog Day all over again.

But, instead of repeating the same day over and again, both companies and individuals continue to repeat the same undermining attitudes, the same unproductive strategies and keep getting the same under-performing results.

IT"S TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK

You and I both know that no matter how good or bad your results have been these past 30 days - you can always do better—MUCH BETTER!

Yet, the single biggest key to improving both your performance and your results seems to go ignored by almost everybody. If you want to perform at the top of your game you NEED to review, analyze, and learn from what has already happened.

MASTER THESE SEVEN STEPS

There are seven steps in the AAR process, and you must begin implementing the ideas that you are about to generate...IMMEDIATELY.

Step 1 - Identify Your Three Greatest Accomplishments in the year so far.
Even if the first month of the year has been a challenging one for you, odds are...if you look close enough, there's something to be proud of.

Step 2 - Analyze What You Learned from Each Accomplishment?
Now that you have identified your three greatest accomplishments, go back to each one. This time though identify exactly what you learned or were reminded of by each of them.

Step 3 - Identify Your Biggest Disappointments in the year until now.
Practically every company and individual resists analyzing their mistakes. That's a shame because this is where the best learning comes from.

Step 4 - Analyze What You Learned from Each Failure or Disappointment.
No matter how great everything in life is going -we all make mistakes. The trick here is to analyze them, what preceded them, what could you have done differently and determine how can you prevent them from reoccurring in the future.

Step 5 - Identify How You Limited Yourself and How Can You Stop It?
Were there certain actions you took or didn't take that came back to haunt you?
In order to make sure you don't limit yourself again - you need to bring these self-defeating actions and self-limiting beliefs to the surface,confront them, and most importantly determine what you must do differently to make sure you don't make the same mistakes all over again.

Step 6 - Pragmatically Review the Information You Have Gathered?
The goal of this exercise is not simply to know yourself and your business better, but to actually use the information to make certain that you are best positioned for a strong first quarter and year, and that you have an actionable plan that far surpasses anything you have done in the first 30 days of 2015.

HOW DID YOU DO?

• What are the big takeaways from answering each question?
• What do you know about yourself or your business that you didn't realize or weren't thinking about?

Obviously, having this list isn't going to do it all, you still need to take this new knowledge and USE IT!
Fortunately, that's what the last question is centered around.
And here it is...

Step 7 - Determine How to Use This Information to Astonish Yourself in the year that is left

The purpose here is to build into your schedule,your interactions, your management style or whatever else you've surfaced in the previous questions and build yourself a new, better approach.
Okay, now that we've uncovered a lot of useful information, the final step is to incorporate it into a game plan for crushing the first quarter of the year.

My goal is simply to help you achieve yours, and the single best thing I can do for you (now that the first half of the year is in the history books) is to impress upon you the importance and URGENCY of this AAR discipline.

Implementing the seven steps of the AAR before you get into work on Monday will go a long way in helping you making this the best year of your life.

I wish for you a lifetime of abundance, prosperity and ever increasing opportunity.

One where you make sure...

Everything Counts!

Gary Ryan Blair