The 12 Week Year Field Guide

Get More Done In 12 Weeks Than Others Do In 12 Months

Brian P. Moran, Michael Lennington

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119475248
• eBook ISBN: 9781119475378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Update your thinking and avoid complacency with the 12 week year

Are you ready to change your life? Thishands-on template for implementing advice from the game-changing book The 12 Week Year is a study guide that makes it easy for anyone to apply the 12 week year to their own lives. Instead of getting bogged down in annualized thinking that produces pitfalls and saps productivity, follow along with this guide to redefine your "year" to be just 12 weeks long. By doing so, you'll avoid complacency, begin to focus on what matters most, create better clarity, and develop a sense of urgency so that "now" is always the right time to act.

Applicable to business growth, career goals, and life in general, the 12 week plan will help you improve in any—or every—area. By closing the "knowing-doing gap, " you'll discover how to execute on what you already know and greatly expand the boundaries of your capabilities. Learn to:

• Create your personal and business visions with step-by-step tips
• Develop your own 12 week plan by applying what you know to what you do
• Put over 10 years of field-tested content, exercises, and templates to work for you
• Build a 12 week commitment and apply the system to your own life and business

Take back your life, improve your thinking, and advance your business or career by implementing real-world, hands-on methods in The 12 Week Year Study Guide.

CHAPTER 1
Becoming a Visionary

The 12 Week Year journey begins with the first of the five disciplines—Vision.

Your compelling vision provides the focus, direction, and energy needed for you to achieve extraordinary results. The best visions stretch you—they require your best work. Your “same-old, same-old” just won’t do if you strive to become great at anything.

You will have to stretch yourself and when you stretch, you encounter resistance. Your old habits, thoughts, and systems will all push back at you.

Most change fails because the price required is too high. The ultimate price of change? Your comfort. That’s why your vision is so important. It is your emotional and intellectual “why.” It is the reason why you are willing to pay the price of change. If you have a vision that you are unwilling to abandon in the face of discomfort, you will become what you are capable of becoming.

The first step in creating your powerful vision is to imagine where you find yourself in 5, 10, 15, or even more years into the future. When you do this, something amazing happens. Neurons deep within your prefrontal cortex begin to fire. These neurons are the same ones that fire when you act on your vision. In a very real sense, when you imagine your future, you are training your brain to act on it as well.

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SUCCESS TIP

Create a big vision. The larger your vision, the greater your results will be—big thinking always precedes big achievements. A big vision will call on you to deliver your very best. A big vision will give you permission to become more of what you are capable of.

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On pages 79–81 of The 12 Week Year, we show how your thinking can often get in the way as you work on creating a big vision for yourself. If you have your copy of the book handy, take a look at these pages and learn what kinds of questions drive a big vision, and what kinds of questions get in the way. Then as you work through this chapter of the field guide, be aware of your thinking so that your vision is big enough to tap into what you are capable of in life.

In Exercise #1, which follows, you will do some initial vision work. While it may sound simple enough, vision work can require a fair amount of effort. In formulating your vision, let your mind stretch to imagine, and even embrace, the possibilities before you. These possibilities may be ones that you push aside in your daily life as being not immediate enough to command your attention, impractical, or even too audacious to even consider! There are no right or wrong answers in vision work. Please get comfortable, remove distractions, and let’s get started.

EXERCISE #1: HAVE—DO—BE

This first exercise is designed to “prime the pump” and to get you thinking about the possibilities for your life. Make it fun. Dream about the things that truly excite you.

Vision is the first place where you either expand, or limit, your results in life. Your goal is to create a stretch vision that is emotionally compelling for you, one that incorporates and strikes a balance between both your personal and professional aspirations.

As we begin, remember that you will have to push back against your limiting thinking. You may consider some big and challenging elements to your vision that will cause you to bump into what you believe are your current limits. You may even feel some fear or anxiety as you contemplate what it will take to reach your vision. Don’t give in to that fear. It arises from your current thinking.

Anxiety creeps in when you begin to think that you don’t know how to do something that is needed to reach your vision. That not knowing can make you feel uncomfortable. That discomfort can turn into anxiety and can ultimately even keep you from trying. Let go of your “How will I do this?” thoughts for a while! The question of “how” gets tackled in Chapter 2 of this field guide—the 12 Week Year Planning section.

For now, just focus on the question “What if?” What if you could accomplish your big vision? What would be different for you? For your family, friends, co-workers, team, community, family, place of worship, and so on.

To get started on your vision journey, you will work through an exercise called “Have—Do—Be.” It will take about 20 minutes to complete, and it is a lot of fun!

Below is a table to capture your work. Start with the first column: “Have.” Brainstorm all the things yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Overview of the 12 Week YearTM
• Chapter 1. Becoming a Visionary
• Chapter 2. Establishing Your Goals and Building Your Plan
• Chapter 3. Making and Keeping 12 Week Commitments
• Chapter 4. Installing Process Control
• Chapter 5. Scorekeeping
• Chapter 6. Using Your Time Intentionally
• Chapter 7. 12 Week Year Review and Planning
• Chapter 8. Confront the Truth (Optional Section)
• Chapter 9. 12 Week Year Game Plan
• Conclusion
• About the Authors
• End User License Agreement