9. Massive Action Scorecard

You are listening to The Success Minded Woman with Deidrea Kiesling, episode nine. Today’s is all about how to track your actions and assess your results. This is how you will know if what you’re doing is working. This is how you will know what to change. As Peter Drucker famously said, ‘You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.’ So stay tuned. We’re going to talk all about how to measure it and manage it.

Hi, I’m Deidrea, wife, and mom to three teenagers, coffee snob, and certified life and business coach. If you’re a high-achieving, goal-oriented woman and you know you were meant for more, then you are a success minded woman and you’re in the right place. I’m here to help you make the money and the impact you’ve been dreaming of, to step into your confidence, create habits and systems to support you, ditch that imposter syndrome, and harness the power of your mind. If you’re ready to create a life and business you love, then let’s go. I’m so glad you’re here.

When you’re out there taking massive action, taking action until the result that you want, you need a scorecard. You need a way to track your actions and your results and analyze and assess and then make adjustments to your plan. So if you think about the GPS metaphor that I love, the plan is the route. And the scorecard is where you are on the route, how far you've gone, how much longer it will take to get there. Is it taking longer than you planned? Maybe you're making more stops than you planned. Maybe the weather is slowing you down. Maybe you have to take a big detour.

One time when we were going skiing in Colorado there was an avalanche. We had to drive around it for hours, for 10 hours to get to the ski resort. So you never know what obstacles and detours you might have along the way. But your GPS is updating along the way. You know that, updating, updating, redirecting, rerouting. That’s just how it goes. And you just need to plan for that or course.

That's one of the obstacles that we plan for is knowing that things are going to come up, that things are going to get in our way. But when you are tracking your actions and assessing your results with a scorecard, you know what to do, what to adjust and what's happening. So when you’re going after your goals, it's just like a GPS. You have to update and redirect and reroute as you go. And how you know what to do for that is your scorecard. Your scorecard is how you know where you are on your route to achieving your goal.

It's hard to change or improve what you don't measure and track. And what you measure gets done. Your brain has, people say 60,000 thoughts coming at it each day. And it can only perceive a small amount of information that's coming in. And what you focus on, grows. What you expect, happens. And tracking your results and your actions helps your brain know what to focus on. It’s hard to change or improve what you don't measure and track. So tracking your actions and results is how you stay focused. Tracking your results and keeping score helps you stay focused on your goal.

It helps when you are reaching for a cookie when you’re not hungry and your goal is to lose 10 pounds. It helps when you’re building your real estate business when you know you should make one more sales call and you want to call it a day. It helps when you want to skip a workout that you had planned for the day. A scorecard helps you be accountable to yourself. I know for me and for a lot of us, we are great at accountability for others. We do what we say we will do for our family, for our employer, for our friends, for our volunteer activities.

But when it comes to keeping our word to ourselves, most of us need help in that department and the scorecard is a great tool to be accountable to yourself. It's how you know you’re on track. And this is what all corporate projects have and what most personal and entrepreneurial goals don't have. When I was managing multimillion dollar projects in corporate it would be unheard of to start the project without a scorecard and a recurring weekly meeting scheduled with the key stakeholders to review the scorecard.

And when you treat your goals like a project and you follow your 90 day plan, the scorecard is what pulls it all together, how you know what's working. You have actual data that you can assess and use to adjust your plan. Do more of what's working, do less of what's not working. And this is why it's so important to have a specific measurable goal. And if you want more information on how to set your goal, go back and listen to episode four where I give you all the details of how to do that.

So Grant Cardone who I love, says, “You’ve got to know your numbers, get your numbers right, it’s the only way you'll get somewhere.” And he also said, and this is so true, “Numbers don't lie, people lie. Numbers will help you catch yourself when you're lying to yourself.” We tend to do that, lie to ourself either by exaggerating our failures or minimizing our success, but either way it's lying to ourselves and building a case, creating evidence of why we won’t get our goal. But facts don’t lie, and that is why you need a scorecard.

When you say, “This will never work, this isn't working”, what exactly does that mean? What are you doing exactly? What results are you getting exactly? Be specific. Often when new clients come to me they’ll say, “I keep trying this and it’s just not working.” Okay, what did you try? How many times did you try it? Why do you think it's not working? What could you do differently? I like to call this the math versus the drama. When you’re keeping score and gathering data it becomes more fact based and data driven rather than emotional.

The math are the facts. The drama is all the thoughts and feelings we have about the facts. The math is the boring part. It’s the data, just the facts, ma’am. I planned five workouts and I did three. That’s a fact. I should have done more. I will never reach my goal. This isn’t working. I’ve been trying to lose weight forever. Maybe I should just give up. That is all the drama. The drama is all of our thoughts and feelings about our goals and actions. When you track your actions and your results by keeping a scorecard, you are out of the emotions, you’re out of the drama and you’re into the math, you’re into the facts.

The data doesn’t lie, it just gives you data. It gets us out of the mind drama that nothing is working, how will I ever get this done. You answer that question by looking at the data. You go to the math. And so to get to the math you need the data. Separating out the facts from the drama is key. And this could be exactly what you need to get to your goals. And you need to write it down. And I know I say that all the time, but keeping all of this in your head is wasting your brain power and your brain is highly judgmental and inaccurate.

Your brain has a negative bias and it will always find more of what’s wrong than what's right. That is how our brain kept us safe as humans as we were evolving, but now our brain can be used against us. Your brain is best used as a processor, as a super computer, but when you keep everything in your head and you don't write it down, you’re treating your brain like Tupperware, keeping all your thoughts in a container.

I want you to take that out of your Tupperware brain and put it in your super computer brain, a piece of paper or a digital, whatever works for you, but get it out of your head. Get it separate from you so that you can look at it. You can analyze it and make decisions about it and release some of that cognitive load to free up your brain for creativity and problem solving. I want you to treat your goals like an experiment and you are the scientist and your scorecard is the experiment.

A scientist, Google says, is someone who systematically gathers and uses research and evidence to make hypotheses and test them to gain and share understanding and knowledge. And an even simpler definition is someone who believes that there is a natural explanation for most things. For any problem they see, scientists try to understand the cause so they can come up with a solution. So how does a scientist show up for an experiment? She has a hypothesis, she makes a plan and then she does the experiment and assesses the result.

The scientist doesn't blame the experiment. The scientist doesn't say, “This will never work.” The scientist gets curious and asks questions, reviews the data and makes a judgment. She doesn't judge and blame herself or the experiment. She just learns and grows, takes the information and adjusts. And the scientist changes one thing at a time. So now it’s your turn to be the scientist of your experiment, which is going after your goal. Put on your lab coat, get curious and review the data and ask yourself, what worked, what didn't work and what can I do differently?

No judgment, no blaming, just curiosity and compassion. Those are your best tools.

Okay, so how to create a scorecard. You need to decide what you're going to track and measure. And if you’ve been following along these last few episodes then you have your one goal and you have your 90 day plan. And if you don't, go back and listen to episodes four through seven where I give you all the details on how to set your goal and make a plan. So you will want to identify three to five daily actions and weekly actions, and I want to say less is more, so you can dial into what are the biggest impact actions that you will take to achieve your goal.

You will know what those actions are from your 90 day plan. So each day you track your actions and the result those actions or inactions are creating. Remember your actions are your do goals. The results are your outcome goals. The do goals is what we’re focused on here, what you're doing to get the outcome. So here’s the facts from your daily actions. Did I do it? Yes or no. These are the do goals and this is what you can control. Did I do it? Yes or no. Those are the facts, you either did it or you didn't do it. We’re not into excuses, justifications and blaming, just the facts. It's a yes or it’s a no.

And then you can ask yourself why or why not. This is how you start discovering what’s holding you back, what’s getting in your way. And a lot of the time it will be what you're thinking and feeling, if you have too much to do, if you don't have enough time, if you’re too tired, write it all down. This is all information, and remember you're a scientist so there’s no judgment, we’re all about curiosity. And the measurement, this is the actual result for your do goals and that's just how much, how long.

For weight loss it could be the number on the scale. For business it could be the number of sales calls. For an online entrepreneur it could be the number of posts or emails or follow-ups you did. You want to have an actionable number. Remember, we are getting the math, the facts and out of all the thought drama. So to actually calculate your score and assess your results it's going to be a combination of these two things, what you did or did not do and the result that action or inaction created. And that is how you get to your goal.

So you need an actual calculation, a number. And the one I use and I teach my clients to use is a very simple formula. You count the number of yeses, so that's the number of times you did what you planned. And then you divide that by the total number of actions that you plan, and that will give you your do goals score. So for example, let's say you plan on Monday to make two sales calls, send one email, make one follow-up call and you made only one sales call, so that score is zero. You did send one email so that score is one. And you did make one follow-up call, so that score is one.

So you have three planned actions, two you did, one you didn't do. So that's two divided by three is 67%. Now, notice that I said, when you make two sales calls, you plan two sales calls but you only made one, I want you to give that a zero. I want you to also then say why. So that’s where we’re going to do the evaluations of why you didn't do what you said you would do or you didn't do all of it. So I’m not saying that you're not making progress, but this is where you refine what you’re actually planning. So that's why you need more and more information and review the facts and do your analysis.

Why did you plan for two and you only made one? That’s the assessment part. And, again curiosity not judgment. And the calculation of your score and assessing your results, this is how you learn from failure. This is how you make mistakes and learn and grow and get better from practice and mistakes. So maybe it's going to take you 100 sales calls or 100 networking events or 100 days of showing up on social media or 100 times of going to the gym, whatever it is, whatever it takes to get to your goal.

You will know exactly how many you made when you did it. And after that it might take you 80, then 50, then 30, then 20, you never know, but how you get better is practicing and learning as you go. And the scorecard and the calculations helps with you understanding and assessing your results. I love this quote by Zig Ziglar, ‘You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great’. And the scorecard helps you with that.

And I’ve heard this before so many times and I just love it. And I don't remember where this quote comes from but here it is, ‘In order to be great you first have to be good. In order to be good you first have to be bad. And in order to be bad you have to start and getting started is the hardest part’. Your scorecard will help you get started and keep going especially in the beginning. Remember your brain has a negativity bias and it is going to look for all the reasons why this won't work and your scorecard will help you override that primitive programming and tell yourself you’re doing it and show yourself that you’re doing it.

Your scorecard will help you go from good to great and the score does not have to be 100%. Studies show that when you do 80% of what you need to do for your goal, you will get your goal. So we’re shooting for B minus here, 80%, progress over perfection. And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but you only need a C to graduate from college and you only need a B minus to get your goal, maybe even a C. But the point is that you won’t even know what percentage you’re at unless you have a scorecard and you do your calculation.

So what happens is if you have a less than 80%, that's where you assess and you reevaluate. So you may be trying to do too much in too short of a time. You may need to lower your 90 day goal. You obviously keep your long term goal but you might need to shorten the result that you’re trying to get in 90 days because your facts are showing you that you’re continually telling yourself that you’re going to do more than you actually do. So it's all about assessing the results like a scientist.

So what we’re looking for is continuous improvement, 1% improvement. James Clear in his famous book, Atomic Habits says, ‘If you master continuous improvement and get 1% better at each day for one year you'll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done’. And I heard Jesse Itzler say this and he is the husband of Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx. And can I just say that I love how he is best known as being her husband.

He says that, “If you spend 18 minutes a day practicing something, anything in any discipline, karate, playing the piano, learning a new language, showing up on social media, sending emails. And you do that every day for a year you will be better than 95% of the people in the world at that thing.” I mean you're not going to probably win the Olympics, you’re not going to be at the elite, elite level, but you will be better than 95% of people in the whole world by doing something consistently, practicing something consistently by 18 minutes a day.

And consistency and the compound effect of that comes from action, comes from what you’re doing. And a scorecard is how you keep track of what you’re doing. So 1% level up, what can you do every day or every week just a little bit better, just 1% better? And if you can do a 1% level up every day for a year, do it every day for your 90 days, what’s 1% improvement that I can do tomorrow? And leveling up is how you take your life to the next level, you do it in small incremental steps 1% at a time.

And you know you're doing that and you make a plan for doing that and you tell yourself what you’re going to do by making your plan, following your plan and using your scorecard. Remember, we’re dreaming big, a big vision for our life, but we’re planning small and we’re taking small consistent daily action and tracking your actions and assessing your results and making adjustments as you go. As long as you don’t quit you will get your goal. Your success is inevitable. Look at your data and ask yourself, what’s working, what’s not working, what's in my way, what can I do differently?

Do more of what's working and less of what's not working, ask for help, get support if you need it. Be the scientist of your experiment. Have curiosity, have compassion, look at the facts, look at your data, look at your scorecard and assess the result and make adjustments.

Next week we’re going to talk all about accountability because that may be one of the missing ingredients that you need in your plan and in your going after your goals is accountability, a group, a partner. Someone to be accountable for, someone to encourage you, someone to guide you, someone to help you as you’re learning to be more accountable with yourself. So stay tuned for next week and I’ll talk to you all later. Bye.

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Thanks for joining me this week on The Success Minded Woman podcast. If you like what you heard on the podcast and you want to know more, then head on over to thedreamacademy.com where you can sign up for my weekly success and mindset tips to help you create your dream come true life. Talk to you all next week, bye.