Did I Try To Do My Best Today?
Source/Author: Mike Murphy, Headmaster
September 11, 2015
At our Back to School Night meetings, I shared a suggestion from Marshall Goldsmith’s book, “Triggers.” Goldsmith has served as a professional coach and consultant for hundreds of CEOs and leaders from around the world. He has learned from both research and experience that people who strive to change personal behavior in an effort to improve, make better progress when they regularly evaluate their effort.
His experience and research show that people are more engaged when they have decided to evaluate their daily effort toward a goal. Groups of people who were asked, “Did you reach your goal?” were less engaged and made less progress than people who were asked, “Did you do your best to reach your goal today?”
Goldsmith works with people who do not receive rewards for effort. They are rewarded for achievement. Yet he has observed that achievement improved when his clients examined their progress by evaluating the daily effort toward goals for self improvement.
Why should a child, teacher or parent/guardian wait until the end of the first marking period to see if a student’s effort is resulting in learning and successful achievement? We cannot imagine a coach seeing an athlete put in a half-hearted effort in practice and actually think that the results in a game will be much better.
The day-to-day effort we and our children invest in academics and co-curriculars is a good indicator of the results we will see. In some cases the results we want to see may take longer than one may wish. If the ability is there, hard work will result in progress.
Goldsmith has six questions he uses to help his clients make improvements. I like them. At the same time I think we all can write our own goals within the context of the, “Did I do my best today to______” model.
At Back to School Night I followed Goldsmith’s lead and had us look at:
Our best effort
Our progress toward goals
Our engagement
Our relationship and
Our happiness
One could add any goal to the end of the question, “Did I do my best today to ______”
I encourage you to read Goldsmith’s book. You may find one of his techniques compelling. My hope is that we will be united in our efforts to build a strong school community and will ask ourselves every day whether we did our best to be constructive, build relationships, engage and be happy. If we can say “Yes” more times than not, then I believe we will build a stronger school community and model positive behavior for our children.
Cheers!
Mike
