TRACKING, SHARING AND TWEAKING

This is part 3 of our 3 part series for How To Grow With Your Friends. If you haven’t read part 1 you can do so here (and part 2 is here).

O.K. so in the previous post we talked about what Dani, Bianca and Jessica did in their first session, (choosing and sharing their goals) and we also talked out the 3 step strategy that they used to pursue their goals (daily learning of the how’s and why’s, focusing on one small step to work on at a time and praying for one’s own and everyone in one’s group’s success). Well, there’s one more thing that I need to share so your Growth Group can be amazingly successful and it’s to do with how Dani’s group and other groups that formed conducted their weekly meetings… Dani called it Tracking, Sharing and Tweaking… Let me tell you about it…

TRACKING

So, Dani, Jessica and Bianca would start their meetings by, one by one sharing their successes and failures of the previous week… 

How could each one remember how they did… which days they missed their reading (or audio learning) or to do the step that they were working on or their prayer for themselves and the for the other members of their group? Well, our ladies didn’t have to commit their successes and failures to memory. They simply tracked their successes at the end of each day.

Here is a photo of Jessica’s tracking for one week. She used a simple iPhone app called “Way of Life”. Here’s the link to down load it – Way of Life – if you’re interested. Bianca simply used a calendar (photo also included below). Dani thus far has not consistently been able to get it together to track so she just retells how she did the previous week the best as she can from memory. 

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‘Green’ means completed for that day and ‘Red’ means not completed for that day.

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(R = Reading  S = the Step being currently focused on  P = Prayer)

Bianca and Jessica both said that very often they pushed themselves to do the tasks that they were tracking even when they didn’t feel like it or when they were really busy. Why? Well because they knew  that they needed to record their day’s achievments and they found a lot of motivation to record a tick ✅ (as opposed to leaving the space blank or making a cross ❌).

SHARING

Sharing is simply the process of sharing with the others in the group how you did during the week with: your readings, the step you are presently working on and how praying for yourself and everyone else in the group is going. The members of the group would share if they hit all 3 goals every day (that’s obviously the ideal) and also if they missed various goals on various days and even if they had let the whole week blow out without anything.

Sharing one’s successes and failures in their Growth Group each week is obviously an incredibly important part of one’s Growth Group sessions. On the one hand, knowing that one would have to share how they did was a HUGE motivation to do one’s best during the week. It made everyone accountable. What’s more, however, was that sharing put everything on the table so each person could be real with what was going well for them and what needed to be TWEAKED…

TWEAKING

So what’s tweaking? Well, let me explain with an example from Jessica. So, on Monday and Tuesday of her weekly tracking (as can be seen in the photo above) Jessica didn’t do her reading about the mitzvah of honouring her father and mother (indicated by the RED), nor did she do the step that she was working on which was calling one of her parents each day and asking them how they were doing and if they needed anything. Why did she miss these 2 days? Well, this was the question that Dani and Bianca asked her when she presented her successes and failures of the week at their Growth Growth meeting and by the way it’s their job to ask this question! The answer… She had gone away to London for 2 days for business and had left her book behind. Also, she didn’t have a way to easily call her Mom or Dad from London as they didn’t have apps like What’s app or Viber on their phones.

After a brief discussion a solution was found for potential future trips. 1) If the book would be forgotten Jessica would ask her husband to take a picture of the next few pages and send them to her. And regarding calling her parents, Jessica simply installed Viber on her parent’s phones.

This is tweaking… learning from the past, seeing what could be modified to avoid similar lapses in the future and implementing them. By the way, the tweaks may not always be the perfect solution straight away. Some tweaks may be great, some may be a step in the right direction but there will need to be more tweaks before the problem they are addressing is fully sorted, some tweaks may be ineffective and some may be bad. It’s a work in progress.

TWEAKING – THERE ARE NO FAILURES WHEN YOU LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES

I’ve been talking about successes and ‘failures’ above, however, it’s very important to know that there are really no failures when one records ‘failures’, works out what the reasons are for what is going wrong and then TWEAKS. They say about Edison the great inventor that he failed over 1,000 times before he perfected the lightbulb. However, he didn’t see any of those failures as ‘failures’ but rather as learning experiences. Each ‘failure’ taught him what didn’t work and helped him take a step closer to the eventual formula that did. How can that be a failure?!

When Bianca didn’t do her daily readings or exercises for 2 full weeks she brought that information to her Growth Group and they helped her analyse it. Why did she do nothing for 2 weeks? Well, after discussing it with the others Bianca realised that she had been feeling overwhelmed with having to stay consistent with her daily goals. She had set herself too much to do each day. She talked with Dani, Jessica and Chana Levin (their cherished group mentor) about different options she could try for moving forwards. The basic gist of the plan was to take on much less per day. As the ancient Aramaic dictum goes “If you try to grab too large an amount all at once, you’ll end up with nothing. If you grab a small amount, you’ll keep what you grabbed.”

OVER TO YOU…

So you have read this far! Wow! You should get a medal! 😀

If this topic of How To Grow With Your Friends interests you don’t just let it be something interesting that you read… Use it! It can upgrade important parts of your life in the most wonderful of ways!

You CAN make a Growth Group with your friends or like minded people that you know! You know, believe it or not there are groups like this all over the world. I’m not just talking in the business world where this has been popular for decades, but also in the Jewish world with regards to friends growing together, helping each other achieve their personal, spiritual goals.

And you know we only live once. This idea might not be something that anyone that you know is doing, but SO WHAT!!! They probably weren’t ever taught and encouraged to utilise this idea when they were growing up. And the bottom line is that regardless of what others do or don’t do, if you would form a Growth Group with one or a few select people you could achieve and see AMAZING ACCOMPLISHMENTS within just 3 months!

So my final call… If you are even just contemplating about maybe forming a group with a few friends, GO ON! You really stand nothing to lose from trying and you stand to gain so, so much!!! You can send this blog post to a friend!… You can copy and paste the text that is below which contains a link to the 1st part of this 3 part series… Also there are buttons for emailing, what’s apping or facebooking this at the bottom of the post. Feel free to send a link to part 1 of this blog series right now to a friend you’d like to discuss doing this with, or to anyone you think would appreciate reading it…

You can copy this link (to the 1st part of the series) and send it to a friend:

Hi

I read this really amazing blog post that I really think you will enjoy reading. You can check it out via the link below and if you’re interested we can speak about it:

Here’s the link: https://thinkingjew.com/2017/02/09/growing-with-your-friends/

For a nice looking PDF copy of all 3 parts of How To Grow With Your Friends, click this: growing-with-your-friends-pdf

This post is dedicated l’ilui hishmat, for the elevation of the soul of Henna bas Avraham