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Learn to Love Your Performance Review and Up Your Game

Have a performance reviewing coming up? The first step is to take a plain and simple DEEP BREATH: just RELAX. Performance reviews aren’t bad – they are AWESOME. WHY? They are pure, unadulterated opportunities for you to learn and grow. If you really want to crush your goals and up your career game, you have to change your mindset. Here’s how to love them and see them for the true opportunity they are. Use our tips to get the most out of your performance review:

Take a Breath and Receive the Feedback

Instead of getting nervous, wound up, defensive or even angry, take a breath and really set your mindset to engage and listen to what they’re saying. Receive, breathe in and absorb the feedback. If you understand it as one-on-one coaching and training, you can take the BS emotion out of it and really hear what they want you to do to own your success. Even the positive feedback is something you need to really hear and digest. Continuing to double down on your strengths while implementing the ideas your boss has for you to learn and grow is how you will continuously up your game at work. 

Make It About Them

Once you’ve taken that breath, received the feedback, and removed the emotion from it, it’s time to make it about them. What does that mean? It means you need to serve your audience, the reviewer, and cement your relationship. What does your boss really need and want from you? Why is it important that they get it? When you can understand where THEY ARE coming from, you can really see that the feedback they’re giving you is really to help you grow and become better. We call it WIFThem. What is in it for them?  If you understand that, you create greater trust and connection masterfully. If you can do that, they will want to help you even more along the way. That is what you want – more help and support. Which brings me to my next point…

Believe They’ve Got Your Back

Your boss truly does want you to succeed. They’ve got your back. They’ve invested time and money into training you. They want you to be part of their company. They want you to deliver more output, to be happy, to make their job easier, to help them be seamless. If they are smart, they will take it seriously. Serious grooming and training require serious and real feedback that may be hard to digest. Nonetheless, you’re aligned with them. It’s in your interest and theirs for you to be better. By the way, having someone’s back isn’t about blowing smoke up your ____ and telling you how great you are. It’s about supporting you and helping you realize your potential. Having honest, authentic conversations and being transparent about where you can do better. That’s having your back!  If you can understand how to give and take feedback, your game will be better than the rest. So how to make it better? Use this one simple tip…

Ask Great Questions

Now that you’ve accepted and internalized the feedback, you must go deeper and use curiosity to level up. Learn the single best communication tool: how to ask great questions. This is your opportunity to go deep and create trust by showing you understand, respect and value their feedback. Demonstrate that you hear what they’re saying and that you really want to understand so you can implement. So summarize or repeat what you heard and then double down on asking great questions like: what can I do to help you become more successful? Are there any books I could read? Where could I learn additional skills that might help? Can I help with the team? How do I better serve you, etc?  Speaking of serving….

Deliver and Create Impact

This last step happens after the performance review is done, AND it’s one of the most important steps to loving a performance review. After the performance review, it’s time to start delivering and creating impact based on the feedback. Take what you’ve heard and learned and use that to coach yourself to take things to the next level. If you can implement and execute on what you were told would help, you will create massive value for your boss and you will strengthen their trust in you. You will demonstrate that you’re someone who can not only receive feedback but execute. That is why we love performance reviews. Where else do you get to learn, bond and then deliver exactly what they need?

Need some help to up your career game, change your mindset around your upcoming performance review, or help with communication? Or need a little guidance to really implement the feedback you’ve received? Our one-on-one coaching provides you with the personalized, on-demand support you need to quickly level up in your career and life. Click here to reach out to us about getting started. 

 

7 Strategies to Create a Habit of Learning

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Have you ever noticed that when you run into someone you know at Starbucks and ask them how they’ve been, most people give you one of two standard answers? “Good” or “Busy”. Or my personal favorites, “Good, but busy” or “Busy, but good.” 

Let’s face it: we don’t know how to get un-busy anymore. We have too much going on at home and in the workplace. ESPECIALLY in the workplace!

We know the future of work is changing rapidly and we MUST keep up. So how do we prioritize our own learning and development to ensure it becomes a habit?

 It starts with hacking our existing habits to make learning fit. Choose any one of the seven strategies below and you’ll be surprised about how much learning you can add to your already packed day. 

Morning Routine Hacking

Most successful people have a morning routine, whether that involves going to the gym, praying or meditating, or just enjoying the first cup of coffee. Whether you already have an existing routine or want to start one, try waking up just fifteen minutes earlier.  Use it to read an article or just a few pages from a book related to your industry. Depending on the difficulty, the average person takes between two to six minutes to read a page.

 So while you might only be reading three to twelve pages a day, keep in mind that many non-fiction books are fairly short – only around three hundred pages in length. At that pace, you’ll finish a book every thirty to a hundred days which means you’ll read three to twelve books a year! Not a bad result for devoting just fifteen minutes each morning to your learning!

Makeover Your Commute

For most of us, the morning commute is a pure and simple waste of time. But rather than spending it listening to music, catching up on the news, or having a casual conversation with a friend or co-worker, why not put on a podcast episode instead? There are thousands of hours of podcasts available on all kinds of topics and many podcasts take the form of interviews, which allow you to learn from the success and failures of others. Find a podcast related to your industry and take your education on the road! Some of my favorites podcasts are the GaryVee Audio Experience, the Tony Robbins podcast, School of Greatness by Lewis Howes, the Tim Ferris Show, and the Peter Attia Drive podcast. 

Knowledge by Subscription

What’s the first thing you do when you get to the office? Make a cup of coffee and gossip with your coworkers? Browse social media before the boss comes in? What if you started each work day with a bit of education instead? While most of us don’t want to add any more email to our already overcrowded inboxes, be purposeful about subscribing to email updates from an industry leader or coach whose content you enjoy. If you don’t have a particular person in mind, there are also services like Nuzzel, Feedly, or Flipboard that will send you a curated list of news articles that match a certain keyword or topic. 

Lunch and Learn

Most of look forward to lunch as the time we can take a break and relax. But I’ll bet that you often spend your lunch hour scrolling through Instagram or watching funny Youtube videos. So what if you took that time and redirected it towards your learning? Read an article from an industry leader, watch a how-to video, or put your earbuds in and finish listening to the podcast you started on your morning commute! For lunchtime reading, I recommend Josh Bersin, Ariana Huffington, Brené Brown, Ray Dalio, and Adam Grant. 

Daily Workouts for Your Body and Mind

Whether you hit the gym before or after work, the gym presents yet another opportunity to engage your mind in learning. While you might feel that you can’t workout without a good playlist, try listening to a podcast episode from an energetic speaker instead! And if you really can’t listen to anything, but music when you work out, use that time to review what you’ve learned recently and make a plan to implement the new knowledge as soon as possible.  

Social Media With a Purpose

After a long day at work, most of us can’t wait to wind down with some mindless time spent looking at social media or watching Youtube videos. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t allow yourself a little freedom to indulge in these activities, but what would happen if you spent fifteen or twenty minutes purposefully looking at content that educates or inspires you first? Who knows – those fifteen or twenty minutes could easily become forty minutes or an hour of learning!  I personally enjoy following and consuming content from Gary Vaynerchuk, Tom Bilyeu, Grant Cardone, Tom Ferry, Mel Robbins, and Oprah.

Self-Directed Courses and Certifications

These days there’s no end to the continuing education courses and certifications you can take. While you can attend classes through a local college, for many working people it’s a lot easier to choose a self-directed online learning program without a hard deadline. That way you can work at your own pace and make learning fit your schedule, rather than the other way around. If you don’t know where to start, try looking up courses on Udemy.

 

Whether you spend five minute or five hours on your learning each day, what really matters is whether you actually DO something with the knowledge. Most people go to conferences, sit on webinars, read books, watch videos, and do NOTHING with what they’ve learned. If you can devote a small amount of time each day to learning something new and then actually implement it, you will win! Learners are Earners!