Action Audit Wrap Up – The 60-Day Challenge

Here in our 5th and final piece of our Action Audit series we’ll put together the insights you may have gained from you Self Audit process with those that you might have discovered through your interactions with friends and family through your Action Audit 360 surveys.

 Hopefully you have already started applying the CAR process to those Action Gap areas that you previously discovered in your Self Audit examinations. Again, in the CAR acronym, C stands for Commitment, where you pause when an idea for future plans or actions come up and make a point to decide there and then if you are willing to fully commit to it or not. For those things that you do decide to commit to, when the time comes you then have to take the Action required to meet the commitment. And finally, for every Commitment you complete with Action, you want to make a point to intentionally and consciously Recognize this fact with a short moment of appreciation and applause for yourself.

 No matter how small they may seem, these moments of Recognition are critically important components for solidifying your deeper integrity and further bolstering your awareness and identity as somebody who says what they mean and means what they say. Every success in your efforts to integrate the CAR process into your normal flow of life should result in increased self-confidence which leads to and supports others increasing their confidence in you as well.

 Now it is time to review your Action Audit 360 surveys, specifically looking with an eye for 2 things. The first thing is see what each person listed as the most relevant for them and their experience of you. Working with this item as relates to that individual person will be a big part of your 60-day challenge, so it is important to have a clear understanding of how they see you coming up short in their experience of you.

 The second thing to look for in those surveys is to see if there is a theme or themes present underneath and/or across the specifics of all the individual responses. Examples of common themes in play include timeliness, overcommitting or last minute cancellations, and lack of follow through on often stated life goals like fitness, diet, or even travel aspirations.

 From here you should be able to make some connections between your Self Audit findings and those coming from your Action Audit 360’s, and the more, the better! In a perfect world, your Action Audit 360’s revealed no surprises and all mentioned the same 1 or 2 things that you have already been working on in your Self Audit CAR process efforts. However, it’s more likely that while there is some overlap, your Action Audit 360 surveys also revealed some bigger issues in play whose existence might have come as a bit of a shock or surprise.

 Armed with your Self-Audit results and both the individual and thematic items from your Action Audit 360 surveys, you now have the basic information in front of you to officially begin your 60-Day Challenge of closing some more Action Gaps.

 Step 1: Get more clarity on exactly what Action Gaps you want to close when it comes to your social circles. As mentioned above, I’d recommend focusing on items that were highlighted by relevant individuals as well as any larger thematic ones.

 Step 2: Write out the specifics of these Action Gaps, and then also write out how you might apply the CAR process to closing them and potential opportunities to do so. The more specific and detailed you are here, the better for your future chances of success!

 Step 3: Here’s another scary part. Have a short conversation with each of the relevant Action Audit 360 survey respondent where you briefly recap what came up in the survey and then tell them about your 60-Day Challenge of trying to close those Action Gaps. Finally, I recommend actually inviting them into the challenge as a way to further build that relationship and get real time feedback on your efforts. Here’s an example of what that might look like:

 “Hey Mike, thanks for making time for this chat, I appreciate it. I wanted to share the results of my Action Audit 360 survey that you helped me with a few weeks back. It turns out that you and several other people all pointed to my lack of timeliness as a place where I had an Action Gap. So, first of all, thank you again for being honest with me there. But secondly, and more importantly, I’m undertaking a 60-Day Challenge where I am going to put more effort and attention into watching myself when it comes to my timeliness. This may look like me being clearer about when I can be somewhere, including if I don’t think I can make it at the preferred time. And on my end, I will be much more intentional about honoring the time commitments I do make. My goal is to be where I said I would be at the time I agreed to be there. That would be refreshing, right?

 This being said, I’d like to invite you into my 60-Day Challenge by simply asking you to pay a little more attention to my timeliness for the next 2 months to see if how I do. I’d like to receive a little push if I’m not doing well, and perhaps hear a little acknowledgement if I am doing well. Building up my own integrity is important to me, and I’m grateful for your continued support in those efforts.”

 Of course, that’s just a hypothetical example, but it covers the basics of appreciation for honesty, communication of results, aspiration for improvement, and request for open-mindedness on their part to go along with the attention and effort on yours. These ingredients should come together to create stronger relationships in the end, especially to the degree that you can show up with more integrity and fewer Action Gaps going forwards.

 Finally, the key moving forward is to intentionally apply your CAR process each and every time anything remotely near the area of your identified Action Gaps comes up. Sticking with the above “Mike” example, say Mike and few others mention a post-work Happy Hour meet up at the pub down the street, starting at 5:30. Upon hearing this, pause first and simply check in with yourself to see if you want to Commit to going instead of just expressing vague commitment. Assuming you want to go, now ask yourself if 5:30 is workable. If so, say “Yeah man, I’ll see you at 5:30.” If not, say something like, “Yeah man, but I’ll be closer to 6. I need to button up this report before I leave today.

 Next, follow up with appropriate Actions that get you there at the time you agreed upon. Again, as a reminder, this is much more about your integrity, and much less about their opinion of you. Take the necessary actions that strengthen your integrity and their observations of such will automatically increase your standing with them.

 When you get there at 5:30, or 6, or whenever, make a brief point to touch base with Mike and say something short and sweet, like, “Alright, I made it!” with a smile to let him know that meeting your expressed commitment connects to your previous conversation around your 60-Day Challenge. The subtler here, the better. But the point here is to not only have your own Recognition of making this improvement, but to have it be a shared Recognition as well.

 Over the course of your 60-Day Challenge you should have plenty of opportunities to engage or even create chances to give your friends and family members new experiences of you showing up better and in more alignment with your spoken commitments. Making a point to connect with them before and during the 60-Day Challenge can be a helpful catalyst for creating a new shared reality between you that is an upgrade and overwrite of the previous one.

 This new shared reality now features you as more reliable, more dependable, and in fact, more admirable for having taken on your Action Gap challenges in a direct and focused manner. While these results speak for themselves, you might be surprised to see how much they inspire others to speak positively to and about you as a result as well.