If you made just a 1% change to the way you operated each day – you would make an improvement to your life by 7% in just 1 week, a 28% change in 4 weeks and yes a 365% change in a year.
1% – it doesn’t sound like a lot and it isn’t, but its cumulative effect can be incredible.
Let’s look at the things you can measure easily:
What is 1% of your income? Can you save 1% of your income each time you get paid?
How much do you read? Can you read 1% more? What does reading 1% more mean to your vocabulary, to your knowledge? How can what you have read impact on your working life by 1%. Truth is, it will have a much bigger effect than 1% but for now that is all we are asking for.
Where else can you make a 1% difference?
How many networking events do you go to? Can you go to 1% more? Of those networking events – how many people do you normally interact with? Can you interact with another 1%?
Can you improve your speech by 1% – what difference do you think that 1% improvement would make to the people you speak to? How can you give more value in 1%? Well that depends on how much value you already give to the people you meet and interact with – but is there a book you can share, or an article they can use to improve their businesses by 1% or more?
During your lunch break, can you eat 1% better? Or 1% less if you are trying to lose weight? Can you walk 1% further or 1% faster?
How many phone calls do you normally make? Can you make 1% more each day? How much difference will those extra few calls make to your bottom line? As we have alluded to, a lot of these are cumulative, you will get back multiplied what you give out
How many staff members do you have? Can you improve their lives by 1%? Think about things like a word of thanks or a word of praise where it is warranted. You may think that it would be OK to do that for a small organisation, but it can work just as well for a large one. You may have heard of Doug Conant, he took on the role of CEO of Campbell Soup at a time when the organisation was not doing particularly well. But how he changed the culture was interesting. Yes there was a lot of restructure and re-organisation, but one major thing he did was to clip a pedometer to his belt, changed his shoes for his trainers and he walked throughout the office or the production plants depending on wherever he was based that day. Two reasons – the first was to reach 10,000 steps for his health. But the second reason was even more important. He made a personal effort to speak to the people who worked in the organisation, and he paid attention. His employees could see him, and they could interact with him. But he didn’t stop at that single initiative of improving his workers lives by 1%. One of the other big initiatives he undertook was to handwrite 20 notes per day to the staff celebrating specific successes and contributions they had made. He had 20,000 people working for him during his time as CEO. 20 handwritten notes per day is not 1% of course, but the results of the 30,000 notes he wrote during his tenure were incredible. The more he walked, the more people he interacted with, and he saw his notes everywhere. What had been a poor working environment quickly turned into an environment that people enjoyed working in – and neither of his big initiatives was a 1% improvement; it was much less than that per day – but the result was still incredible. Imagine what would have happened if he had managed to reach 1%.
There are many other areas where you can me a massive change to your working life by making a 1% change to the way you do things.
One lady we know had thousands of pieces of paper littering her office and felt she couldn’t tackle them in one go. Not only did she not have the time to work through in one go, she felt the task itself was too daunting. So we came to an agreement – every time she went into the office she looked at and actioned 10 items from the piles. There are no piles anymore. Everything has been dealt with – again in less than 1% increments, but the change to her working life was liberating.
Where can you make a 1% difference starting today?
Are you daunted by what you have to do? We can Map the Way forward for you.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter – Yabber Natter it covers Lifestyle Changes, Business Support and Personal Concierge stories and topics
Click the the connect link at http://nesolutions.com.au/ to go to the form.