“If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down”.

Mary Pickford

An After Action Review (AAR) is a structured reflection process that allows you to review progress towards your key long term goal (s).  In terms of action research an After Action Review is the reflection part of the Plan-Act-Reflect (PAR) cycle (below).

I can explain action research as a type of research by doing. You do something (act on a problem or take actions in the direction of your goal), you systematically learn from what happens and then feed that learning into new plans. You cannot leave out the Reflect or AAR part of the PAR cycle. Otherwise you are caught up in a flurry of activity which might be leading you nowhere. Regular reflection is absolutely key to ensuring that we are learning and growing and on the right track to achieving our goals. Reflection is also key to determining even if these are the right goals to be pursuing at all!

New year goals

As I write this we are only a few short weeks away from January 2020 and many of us will be setting goals for the year. However goal setting is not just about setting goals at the beginning of the year and then forgetting about them for the rest of the year.  That is the route to goal setting failure.  We need to keep reminding ourselves of our goals and checking in with our performance against the goal.  This is where our After Action Review (AAR) comes in! You need to keep your goals in front of you.  You need to keep refreshing and renewing them on a consistent basis.  You also need to check in on a regular basis and review how you are progressing towards your goals. Unfortunately many people seem to set goals and forget about them because they don’t have a system or strategy for reflection such as the AAR to keep goals fresh and also constantly review them based on how they are doing (feedback on goal progress). I will be dealing with AARs and other interesting aspects of goal setting in much more detail in my forthcoming new course ‘Goal Setting 101: How to Set and Achieve Goals‘ .

Progress update on my new course

In a previous post I wrote that I would be launching my new course ‘Goal Setting 101: How to Set and Achieve Goals‘ by the end of September 2019. Well I have not finished the course as yet. There are two reasons:

1. An unexpected work opportunity arose and I am now much busier than planned and my time is taken up with the new work.
2. The course is taking much longer than I expected to complete.

Let’s look at the above two reasons for the delay in launching the course. The first reason is acceptable because we have to be flexible and be able to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. This opportunity was too good for me to say no to and I decided to jump at it. One of the dangers of goal setting is tunnel vision where we are so focused on a goal that we don’t see other opportunities or are so inflexible that we cannot take advantage of them. The second reason is related to my old nemesis the planning fallacy which I have written about many times. This is where we become over-optimistic about the effort and time needed to complete a goal. In other words there was far more work than I anticipated and the goal is much harder than planned. However I am enjoying working on the course and I do think it will be really good and worth all the effort.

My Input goal

Given my time constraints as a result of my new work commitments I have developed an input goal for my work on ‘Goal Setting 101: How to Set and Achieve Goals‘. An input goal is where you only focus on the inputs and in this case my input of time. My input goal is to work on developing the course in the early mornings and also at weekends. To spend 1 hour a day Monday to Friday and 2 hours each on Saturday and Sunday. That means that I will work on the course for 9 hours per week. That is my only goal right now. However I do aim to complete the course in time for the New Year when people start planning the year ahead. Therefore I may put more time into it in the coming weeks to make sure it is finished for the new year. I plan to make the course FREE for all readers of this blog for an initial trial period. The course will include more details on topics mentioned in this article such as how to conduct and After Action Review, the planning fallacy and types of goals such as input goals etc.

Please sign up to the Life is a Lab newsletter and I will notify you when the course is launched including a link so that you can access the new course for FREE.

Best wishes,

Tom