The holiday season can be a welcoming time to reflect, relax, and rest as we enter a new year.
But from the perspective of company productivity, these last few weeks can often feel like “wasted time,” with project deadlines inching toward the end of the year or pushed to Q1.
EOD means the End of December, right?
While we’re completely here for the holiday cheer, we also like to use this time of the year to lean into mastery.
First, let’s break down the difference between growth and mastery.
With growth, you’re pushing yourself toward a hard goal, like learning new software that’ll help you be more efficient in your day-to-day work or taking the stairs instead of the elevator to reach your daily step count goal.
For example, let’s say your New Year’s resolution is to get your running journey back on track. To get back into the habit, you may just be focused on completing the mile in 10 minutes, not particularly caring about form as long as it gets done.
- You + your goal = growth.
When you’re in mastery mode, you’re taking the time to hone in on your skills.
It’s the mindset needed to improve business results. So, instead of sending that project over saying, “This is good enough,” you start asking yourself, “How can this be even better?”
That’s because you’re engaging in mastery mindset characteristics like persistence, effort, and embracing challenges.
Let’s go back to the running example. After a few weeks, you’ve reached your goal of running a mile in 10 minutes. (High-fives all around!)
Now, you’re probably thinking about how you can increase your speed to lower your mile time to 8 minutes. This is where you tap into your mastery mindset to think about how optimizing your foot placement and posture will help you drop seconds off your running time.
That’s the power of expanding your mindset.
- Your skills + focus on improvement = mastery.
It requires keeping a watchful eye on the areas where you can improve and making the smallest change to improve where you are to where you want to be. (Not to be confused with perfectionism, which can be part of a fixed mindset.)
If you’re struggling to see where you can turn “failures” into your superpower, try a failure journal this new year.
Here’s how it works: Whenever you make a mistake at work (and who are we kidding, we all do, like every day), write it down in a notebook.
Set a reminder or create a calendar event for 30 days and 6 months after writing down your initial mistake to reflect. Analyze what you’ve learned from this mistake and use it to inform future decisions.
For example, let’s say due to competing deadlines and an increased workload, you dropped the ball on an important project deadline. This turns the head of your organization’s CEO, who then sends you an email reprimanding you for the missed deadline mistake.
Jot down your mistake in a notebook (or Word document) and plan to revisit it 30 days later then again 6 months later.
By documenting your mistakes, you’ll start to ask yourself how they happened to prevent them from happening in the future. You might realize that a lack of communication with your team led to feelings of task overwhelm, and as a result, made a project deadline past due.
So the next time you see tasks piling up, you might reach out to a superior or colleague and address the need for support beforehand, minimizing the risk of missing deadlines and helping the project get across the finish line through a team effort.
That’s how you can rise from failure and use it to power future growth.
Email us at contact@buildingppl.com to learn how you and your team can lean into mastery now and throughout the year.
