Three Heads are Betterthan One

As we are looking at achieving success this month I thought I’d share some professional development I’ve started that fits nicely in with this theme.

Last year I was talking with two friends and it became clear that we all felt our websites could be improved and that we could be using social media to greater effect.

Between the three of us we have five businesses and another potential one pending, so we are kept pretty busy! However, none of us ever MADE time to look at these things and were probably missing a trick.

We decided to put a time in our diaries to meet as there was much more we could be doing, if only we allocated some time.

In our first meeting we thought broadly about our professional development objectives. As we had similar objectives we set ourselves some related tasks. Some were very specific such as to get X more Twitter followers and others more open such as to research a topic. Around a month later we met up again and we had all achieved our objectives.

As I spend my time motivating and supporting people to achieve successful outcomes, it was interesting for me to consider why three driven individuals had been motivated to achiev the outcomes this time and previously we had not prioritised them.

From my perspective:

• With two other like-minded people to run ideas past it all suddenly didn’t seem such a chore. It actually was better than that – it started to feel more exciting and achievable.
• Saying out loud to two other people that I would do something meant I had to maintain the motivation to do it. Previously I had told myself I would when I had the time and invariably I never made time.
• By sharing the tasks we learnt three times as much in the same space of time. We had all done what we had said we would do, if anything we had been motivated to do more, and so after we had fed back our ideas and findings we were on a bit of a roll.
• I have never been one of those people who find it lonely being self employed but I really relished the opportunity to talk through opportunities and feed into the businesses of the others.

I now have a healthy, growing Twitter and LinkedIn presence and my regular visitors will note my site has finally had a bit of a make-over. Now I’ve started I want to develop some ideas further and I feel way more motivated to do so.

If you are looking ahead at what you would like to happen and achieve in 2012 I would definitely recommend creating a similar set up. No one achieves anything alone and so a space to share your ideas and commit to taking steps forward can really help you stay motivated.