Despite having tried absolutely everything off the shelf, you can’t lose weight? Does it turn you frustrated when you see things moving from bad to worse? And that is the result of what you call your best efforts? Well, consider a major overhaul. Hold your fragile self and move slowly away from that deep abyss of depression, because the next few paragraphs have enough potent material to melt your waistline into that perfect ‘just in tape’ condition!
Mistakes can happen anywhere, and health plans are no exceptions. If eliminating mistakes completely may be impossible, eliminating our stubbornness to remain on them surely is. I would be drawing attention to some of the most common mistakes that is rampant in health plan management at present. The idea is to give you an accurate indicator so that you can gauge your own plan to see whether it checks against certain errors. Doing so might give you some clue as to why the inches won’t shrink and why the pounds would forever stay with you.
Mistake Number 1:
To think that the health plan and diets would conjure results within days. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. So no amount of workouts, special diets, or cardio would work unless they stand the test of time. It is after all the test of time that outstands the worthy from the crowd! So climb up the ladder of social fitness, slowly! It takes a long time to pile up fat, as all the many obese people would certify, though feeling nostalgic about it. So it would take a lot of committed discipline to shift the trend towards reversal.
Mistake Number 2:
Adopt a brand new straight-out-of-magazine diet hoping that the results for you wouldn’t be that different than for that model on its cover page. Marketing gimmicks are far from being sufficient for your body’s nutritional needs. The models who endorse its use have a lot more of business connections in the industry, with their bodies virtually converted into a thriving business enterprise. If you don’t have that many connections or money, and you don’t expect to get them in any time soon either, then it would be better for you to stick with the commitment. I can bet one day your dream will come true!
Mistake Number 3:
Being too lenient to your regimen in an attempt to gain some morale boost, which includes underestimating calorie intake, both in terms of portion size, and the amount of calorie per serving; calculating more calories at the gym than that you have actually burnt; skipping exercise so that you may not enter into the over-training phase, or since you trained hard yesterday; or just give yourself a party, planning to double the workout hours to cover for it up.
You can only avoid such serious misgivings by keeping a careful written track of your entire calorie intake as well as your exercise and calorie use. That fades away a lot many leniencies as you get the accurate picture at hand.
Mistake Number 4:
You exercised, sweat, lost weight, and as soon as you started making progress, started to fade off; starting to buy slim line clothes, you start spending workout hours switching TV channels and running around from kitchen and let the same very thing which you are trying to control get control over the entire plan!
Exercising for better health is not just a six-month slimming program. You have to commit to it for your life to change your entire lifestyle. That means even more when you are slim, because that’s the prime time that you were working for all these months!
Once the onset of permanent change occurs, rewards will start to fly in. Fitness doesn’t play second fiddle to anyone; you have to commit to it into a life long marriage. Or else, the extra inches keep hitting back!
Mistake Number 5:
Lie to yourself, you just look fine. The weight, though a little offshoot, is well within the normal range. Well, that’s the distinctive attitude of habitual obese. The bad ones in the photo album have just been taken from a very close angle, and those designer suits at the boutique aren’t really for normal people; one has to be a model slim with some surgical back up to fit in that. And the medical advisor is just over-reacting to my normal variation of cholesterol.
Self-praise amounts to nothing really. Try to come up with reasons to overcome your procrastinations, and stick to your plan. Once it starts moving, your mind will go with the flow!
Who’s to Blame For Hiring Mistakes?
What’s a hiring mistake?
If you have low standards a hiring mistake is someone who gets terminated or quits during the first 3-6 months. If you have high standards it’s someone who isn’t an achiever. An achiever – typically a B+ or better person – is someone who delivers high-quality results on a consistent basis, deals effectively with all types of people, can take on bigger projects, and gets promoted into bigger roles. To me, not hiring an achiever for most roles is a mistake. For rank-and-file positions, not hiring someone who performs as well as those already in the top-third is also a mistake. Not making these hiring mistakes is sure to improve your company’s overall talent levels.
When viewed from the above perspective, there are some common hiring mistakes that can be virtually eliminated with some talent-focused leadership from HR and the executive team. Here’s my short list of mistakes and some solutions. Since I’m biased, you’ll note a Performance-based Hiring theme to these solutions. Whether you choose to go that route, or not, is less important than doing something that focuses on eliminating the backend mistakes, not just spending all of your resources on finding more candidates.
The Short List of Common Hiring Mistakes and Possible Solutions
If you have more than two or three of these problems, the root cause is systemic, probably the lack of an end-to-end hiring process. In this case, implementing Performance-based Hiring can have an enormous impact on improving your company’s ability to consistently hire top people across the board. Following are the steps involved. Most are common sense. As you review the list you’ll discover that none of the ideas are profound or hard to implement. What’s hard to do is getting every manager and recruiter to do them every time.
While this list of mistakes is not complete, nor the solutions proposed the only ones available, the idea of focusing on eliminating mistakes can have a profound impact on overall hiring results. The problem with most companies is segmenting the mistakes, rather than working on them at the system level. This is the underlying benefit of Performance-based Hiring. It started out as a means to eliminate hiring mistakes, and in the process it ended up as system to hire top talent. In my book, Hire With Your Head, I describe how to do this, step-by-step, with specific case studies. This should be enough to get you started, but email me if you’d like to learn more.
