Negosentro | Achieve Your Highest Goals without the Overwhelm Using the 4DX Method | So, you have an audacious goal you’re ready to tackle. Maybe you’re looking to start a new business in a new industry. Or perhaps you’re midway through your career and are ready to get serious about how you plan to prepare for retirement. Whatever the goal is, approaching it with a system that can keep you focused every step of the way is the key to finding success. One system, called the 4DX method, is designed to help you do just that.
What is the 4DX Method?
The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a goal setting system that hinges on four critical components of execution: focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability. When put into practice, it effectively provides you with more clarity, sustainability, and momentum as you work towards your goals. While the disciplines are simple, they require great commitment and as the word implies, discipline. Having the right execution system can significantly impact your journey and potential for success, and the 4DX method helps you get there.
Wildly Important Goals
The 4DX method hinges on what it calls your Wildly Important Goals. You might have a list of a hundred goals you’d like to accomplish, and while it’s great to be ambitious, having too many goals is often what stops people from actually achieving them. When you have too many goals at one time, you end up being stretched beyond your capacity, leaving you depleted. To utilize the 4DX method properly, you will need to hone in on only the one or two goals that are paramount to your success, and leave the rest for later.
Discipline 1: Focus
It sounds obvious in theory that in order to achieve a goal, you need to focus on it. But in the context of real life, this becomes easier said than done as other tasks and action items come up along the way and compete for your attention.
The key is deciding what goal is the most important to your success, and prioritizing it above all others. It will require you to say no to other goals that might seem important, and maybe they are—but if they aren’t tied to your Wildly Important Goal, they must be side-stepped. Learning to say no takes effort, but without an extremely narrow focus on your Wildly Important Goal, it will be difficult to make any headway in achieving it.
Discipline 2: Leverage
An important component in accomplishing anything in life is the ability to be flexible. Many people map out their path to reaching a goal in a way that ends up being too rigid, and when inevitable roadblocks arise it throws them completely off track. Being able to adapt to the ebbs and flows of the path will increase your resilience and allow you to more efficiently react to the unexpected when it arises. Part of that adaptability involves how you measure your success as you work towards your goal.
Many make the mistake of measuring their progress based on past performance (lag measures) rather than future successes (lead measures.) A lag measure is a statistic that measures a goal, while a lead measure is predictive and can be influenced.
For example, a business owner might be measuring his success based on the number of sales he made last month. While it makes sense in theory, his measure of success is rooted in the past. The 4DX method uses predictive measures instead—the required activities that drive desired outcomes. So, to use a lead measure, the business owner might instead track the number of promotional offers run last month. Notice that this lead measure can both predict and influence the number of sales made last month, while the lag measure is just a record of what’s happened. Lead measures are proactive and push you closer to your goal.
Discipline 3: Engagement
Establishing a clear and compelling measure of where you are and where you need to go keeps you motivated and fully engaged in the path to your goals. The 4DX method calls this your scoreboard. A compelling scoreboard should be easy to read and understand at a quick glance. With just a look, you should be able to see exactly where you stand and whether or not you’re on track towards your goals. This allows you to stay fully engaged and aware of your progress each step of the way.
Discipline 4: Accountability
The first 3 disciplines of the 4DX method are rooted in providing the focus, clarity and engagement needed to successfully reach your goals. The 4th discipline hinges on a final critical component to push you towards the finish line: accountability. Accountability involves regularly assessing what you’ve accomplished and where you’re falling short, so that you can proactively track your performance and course-correct when necessary. Without accountability, you might not realize if you’ve fallen off track.
Going after large goals can seem overwhelming, but going in with a plan can help you reach them in the most sustainable and efficient way possible. To learn more about the 4DX Method, this visual created by CreditRepair explains each discipline of execution and offers examples of how you can implement it in your own life according to your specific goals. Keep dreaming big!
Please include attribution to CreditRepair.com with this graphic.
