Many of us want to learn new processes and tips for setting goals, tracking our progress, and working toward a vision. 12 Steps to Power Your Business and Work Performance is a free online course offering a series of steps to accomplish this objective. While it may appear to be a path to success, the course stumbles and fails to achieve that objective.
Moreover, this course embodies a number of problems in this kind of “content” that’s being churned out online these days.
Summary
The course’s 12 steps open with goal setting. This begins at the long-term “Ultra goal” of 3-5 years, then narrows to one year and finally 3-month goals. The course advises that these should be traditional SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely).
Next, you should assess where you are to understand the gap between your current position and your goals. You can use a SWOT analysis of your business to help.
Third, use your SWOT analysis to set goals at the appropriate level of difficulty for you. If you are more of a beginner, the course argues you should set Realistic goals, which are definitely achievable within your current skillset. More advanced Stretched goals, in contrast, require you to grow and learn new skills; success is far from certain.
Knowing your goals and current state, the fourth step is planning. This is the step that builds the path to get from where you are to your goals. Three types of plans break down the process:
- Action Plans: 3-5 steps in chronological and priority order
- To Do Plans: breakdown of your Action plan into specific tasks
- Contingent Plans: What happens if things go wrong? (aka Plan B)
Next, set milestones along the way to track and celebrate incremental progress toward your larger goals.
Sixth, conduct a personal SWOT analysis to identify your personal strengths and weaknesses. Then determine ways to empower your strengths and/or improve your weaknesses.
Seventh, be sure your plans offer the right amount of challenge. Too few challenges and you get bored. Too many and you get stressed out and overwhelmed.
The eighth step is persistence. Grit. You must have the strength to overcome obstacles and setbacks repeatedly, else risk failure.
Ninth, use Energetic and Psychological tools to cope with stress and crises. Take a deep breath. Slow down. Practice visualizing your success. Celebrate even minor successes as positive reinforcement.
Tenth, recognize that sometimes you must reassess your current status.
- Reassess the Goal – what’s the probability of success? Do you need to make a change?
- Reassess the Plan – is it working? Are you still moving toward your goal?
Step eleven is self control. Use tools from step nine to face fears and keep going. Write your own “winning speech” as if you have already achieved the success you are striving for.
Finally, step twelve is success. It takes a lot of determination, passion, and persistence to get there.
Analysis
The course material is basically 12 lightly researched and heavily regurgitated 300-word blog posts. That is, it restates things other people have said, only as a shallow summary.
At 44 minutes, the course seems to drag on and on, even when played at 1.5x speed.
The curriculum looks like a slam dunk before you watch the videos. In retrospect, however, it is merely a set of popular keywords in the subject area.
For starters, steps 1-6 are essentially the planning process discussed in the strategic business plan course I covered before. Frankly that course is a much better treatment of this subject.
Step five, setting incremental SMART milestones, is questionable “common sense” advice. The instructor suggests that if you have, for example, a goal of $60k monthly revenue in 6 months, then set a goal of $30k monthly revenue in 3 months. This may sound reasonable, but you should not assume a linear growth trajectory!
I will also mention my concern with outcome goals like this being a problem in the first place. You should set activity goals which you can control instead. For example, you cannot control a goal of achieving 10 sales this month, but you CAN control a goal of making 100 sales calls.
The instructor should at least provide an example or two connecting her ultra-marathon experience with the course material. The persistence step, step eight, would have been one place where her experience would be appropriate!
Step nine, the crisis management video, has basically nothing to do with the subject of crisis management. I did like her point about inner dialogue, though. She recommends that you acknowledge negative thoughts, then respond in a positive and self-loving way.
At multiple points, the course suggests that sometimes you have to adjust or reset your goals or your measurement criteria. Really?? Grant Cardone would be highly displeased with this advice. Never reduce your target. Always increase your actions!
Conclusion
Here is the trouble with this course, and many other blogs, books, and online courses like it. They attempt to condense broad subjects based on popular keywords down to bite-sized chunks, stuffed with more relevant keywords. They present the material as “How To” bullet lists, suggesting at least a survey of the material in a given subject.
The problem with this approach is that it is like attempting to illustrate the “Top 10 Beaches in The World” by showing 10 pictures, each of which is a close-up of a grain of sand. Not only can you not see the beach, you cannot see the area around it. The beach and its context are both missing from the description, and the reader/viewer/consumer gains nothing from the content.
I am certain that Ashmoret, the course instructor, works hard. She runs ultra-marathons, which must be incredibly challenging. (I run a mile or two on the treadmill when I go to the gym, so I have no relevant experience to comment.) Unfortunately, her personal work ethic and grit do not shine through, either in the course material, or in her presentation.
Ultimately, this is a shallow treatment of an important subject and I cannot recommend this course.
However, I can recommend that you download my course guide to skim the course overview and my notes.
