Winning Attitude – What does it take to achieve your goals?

Winning Attitude, or perhaps success mindset, or goal achievement behaviours – call it what you will. It’s virtually invaluable.

Whilst success, in its various guises, is something that the majority of us strive for – we don’t always make it. Naturally, it’s glib to try and assign a binary pass/fail to all forms of success – breaking down the involved complexities is what makes crediting a root cause of success all but impossible. Especially as what we need is more than a lack of failure to consider such success!

Which leads to the question “What differentiates the successful from the EXCEPTIONALLY successful?”. This is what the team of business psychologists at Zircon BeTalent sought to understand when conducting the research for this sensational development tool.

… the required ratio of Behaviours, Expertise, Strengths, Aspirations, Social and Emotional Intelligence, and as such being considered talent, does not necessarily result in individual success over and above the norm.

BeTalent

Defining Success

BeTalent interviewed a smorgasbord of success – a collective who’s who of achievement, consisting of:

• 17 Sport and Media Personalities
  Olympians, Paralympians, TV Personalities, and Performers
• 15 CEOs who were Founder Entrepreneurs
  High Street Brands, Conglomerates, and Foundations
• 10 CEOs and Presidents
  International business icons, educators, and leaders

They then collated, analysed and assessed the qualitative data from these individuals, to find the ingredients of success. Whilst the vast over-simplification I’m giving here is vague on the research and creation phase, the short version is that they identified a range of key attributes on which the interviewees identified – either low/medium/high. When combined, this creates a profile of success for each of them.

The Ten Winning Attributes

• Burning Ambition
• Dogged Determination
• Realistic Optimism
• Unwavering Belief
• Intrinsic Generosity
• Mutual Respect
• Maximising Opportunities
• Disruptive Thought
• Constant Curiosity
• Single Minded Focus

The Range of Each Attribute

At no point are these attributes positive or negative – no one will score high or low across the board because that’s simply not how personalities work. Beyond that, these attributes present both strengths and weaknesses: areas where the attribute can build toward success but also areas where that same attribute can be a risk factor. For example, let’s look at the bi-dimensional definition for the attribute Burning Ambition:

The Recipe to Success

So, as we’ve established – there’s a wide range of information that will be gleaned from this process, when we’ve done the work:

How We’ll Use This Tool

The Winning Attitude assessment is available as a questionnaire and card sort exercise (though the card sort is best for in-person work in my experience. We’ll use the cards for the session but not alone).

It begins with an email for you to complete the questionnaire. You’ll review a number of questions to help identify your Winning Attitude – most are straight forward. It’s important you take time from you day and decompress a little first as your answers should be in line with your resting state and not reactionary to the bad haircut you got half an hour ago.

Why do this?

This tool is most valuable when you have an area of success you’re aiming to reach. How vague this is, depends on how you work, of course. Each of the success cases in the study has their own makeup of winning attributes which led them to that success. You have your own makeup of attributes, too.

When you know the way in which you’re predisposed to strive for success, you can adjust your plan. Especially when you can see how the combination you’re working with interact. Align it with distance running as a hypothetical – knowing your likelihood to ease off speed at the wrong time, to forget to breathe evenly at certain points, or to let your diet slip whenever stressed means you can foresee and adapt. That’s what we want to do with your success – adjust your actions to work with your mindset and behaviours.

Why NOT do this?

To start – psychometrics can be powerful and effective ways to get a deeper look into ourselves. However, they’re not something to do without reason or on a whim. They won’t give you miracle results but can give you insight which you can combine with work/growth to reach progress towards your goals and in order to reach future successes.

More specifically, this tool isn’t one to use when you’re looking to establish your future or goals. There are many exercises and tools we can use to do this, but this tool could cloud matters.

What happens after I’ve answered the questions?

The system at BeTalent will evaluate your responses and generate a report for you. I’ll prep them ready for our next coaching session – which will be a feedback session for your results.

In this session, we’ll go through the report bit by bit, evaluating how the results relate to you, observing any functions involved and perhaps some areas where you don’t relate.

From there we’ll establish how to add the findings into whatever goals you’re working towards. We’ll also use these results in future sessions and in combination with any other assessments you take.

What’s the cost?

The fees involved depend on the coaching programme you’re currently working on. Generally, it’d be £50-£80 for the assessment, plus the cost of your coaching session which we’ll use for your feedback session.

What did Ky learn from his results?

This one was key for me, as I mentioned before, and is a favourite tool of mine because of that. As you may already know, I am aiming towards a long path of further investigation and then research into using coaching as a tool to help those from socioeconomically low backgrounds to achieve success.

What I learnt, was that my combination of Winning Attributes can be GREAT for certain tasks. However, for longer-term and bigger projects my Winning Attributes just aren’t situated ideally. There’s a longer conversation around it all (which I’ll happy to have if you’d like to learn more about this tool) but in the short term, it told that in order to achieve this goal I will need support. Since then, I’ve arranged a coach to assist me in this goal (separate from my go-to coach, and separate from my coaching supervision coach).

Understanding this information is invaluable to striving towards and achieving success.