Seminar #1: Strengthen Individual Excellence

This seminar is part of The Seminars on Excellence — a comprehensive approach to strengthening excellence throughout an organization.

Excellence is doing the best you can at whatever you’re doing while simultaneously learning how to do it better the next time.

Individual Excellence requires clarifying your purpose, understanding your Self, and applying your Self toward the fulfillment of your purpose to the best of your ability while learning how to do it better the next time.

Offerings

Dan Coughlin teaches how to strengthen individual excellence in the following ways:

  • Half-Day Workshop
  • Full-Day Seminar
  • Two-Day Retreat
  • Webinar

Content

Clarify your purpose (why do you do what you do for a living?)

Clarify your meaningful measurable objectives

Identify the reasons why your work (paid and unpaid) really matters to other people and to you

Understand your Self so you know what you have to apply to fulfill your purpose:

  • Your intersection of greatness

(intersect your character strengths, talents, passions, and values with the needs of other people)

  • Your sources of self-confidence (review past successes, preview future successes)
  • Your journey to becoming you (key influencers, key formative experiences)
  • Your idea processor (extrovert or introvert)
  • Your primary performance focus (your performance or other people’s performance)
  • Your way of experiencing people and situations (see what is actually happening by looking at evidence or intuitively see the potential of what could happen)
  • Your way of analyzing people and situations (rationally or emotionally)
  • Your use of time (schedule every minute or search for what you feel you should do next)
  • Your temperament (what you are inclined to do in most situations)
  • Your decision-making approach (what you need to make a decision)
  • Your expectations (what others expect of you and what you expect of you)
  • Your personas (the roles you perform)
  • Your interpersonal style (your volume, tone, attitude, and energy level)
  • Your fatal flaw (what within you could end a relationship permanently)
  • Your bliss (the one thing you must do to truly be youself)

See the value of paired opposites (know when to use your way of doing things, and when it’s wise to use the opposite approach)

Realize the fallacy of multi-tasking

Challenge yourself for the sake of challenging yourself

Find really good mentors

Focus and sacrifice:

  • The 1-3-6 Process for Focusing Your Activities
  • The Four Aces Approach
  • Get serious about parameters
  • Decide how tong to work each week

Shift from negative emotions to positive emotions

  • Change the event you are thinking about (understand the downside of imagination)
  • Identify and avoid an irrational belief
  • Improve your self-talk
  • Reinterpret how you look at an event
  • Write a handwritten letter of gratitude

Personal reflection and discernment

  • What happened, why did it happen, what did you learn, and what will you do with what you learned?
  • The Continually Raising Your Performance Bar Process

Awareness, Choice, Responsibility

  • AADA (awareness, acceptance, decision, action)

Use the ability to forgive

Stop and start over

Write down new ideas as they come to you (have one new idea in motion at all times)

Read and exercise regularly

The worst four-letter word: d-e-b-t

The power of accumulated intentional effort

Actually do what you encourage others to do

Take real vacations consistently

What to do when you make a monumental mistake

If you take money out of the equation, how do you measure success?

What’s your critical one-hour activity you need to do every day?

Build an ecosystem of valuable relationships

The value of silent mentors

Think a little bigger and a little broader

Imag-in-e: mentally live in the image of what you want

Deal effectively with a change thrust on you

Gain opportunities to make a significant difference

Maintain personal dignity

Integrity is not always automatic (know when to slow down and think rationally)

  • You’re very tired
  • You’re talking about a topic you know very little about
  • You are drinking
  • You are intensely emotional
  • You’re making off-the-cuff comments
  • You’re feeling rushed

The do’s and don’ts of following your bliss

Cross the bridge from intention to action

Choose your role, then choose greatness

Don’t compare yourself to others, learn from them

Schedule thinking time and non-thinking time

Perform with precision

Have fun

Don’t let anyone talk you out of achieving your dreams

Avoid arrogance

You are represented by the values of the people you associate with