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You’re only as good as your last performance

By Jim Connolly | May 18, 2020

only as good as last performance, good last performance

Photo: Shutterstock.

I want to share maybe the most powerful mindset in business with you. Because when you understand it, it boosts your productivity, increases your confidence and supercharges your results.

It’s simply this: “You’re only as good as your last performance”.

Here’s how it works.

Why this mindset is so powerful

By learning from your last performance, your road ahead is always filled with potential. Always filled = never-ending. And never-ending potential is just another way of saying endless potential.

It gets even better!

Because you’re always free to bury an unsuccessful last performance, under a better performance, you can destroy the fear of failure from holding you back.

Here’s an example of how I embrace this mindset.

When I publish a blog post and find it didn’t resonate with my readers, (it bombed) I don’t just leave it there.

I understand that “you’re only as good as your last performance”. So I learn from my last performance, make improvements and replace it with something better.

I check things like the subject, the message, the conclusion, the clarity, and the relevance etc.

My NEW last performance is then an improvement. The previous performance is history. And knowing that if I get it wrong, I can always perform better next time, I’m free to work without fear. That’s huge. Because it’s exactly that kind of fear that holds people back from doing their best work.

In short: This mindset gives you the freedom to produce marketing (or do pretty-much anything), without the fear of failure crushing you.

When you embrace the idea, that each performance is an opportunity to improve, and that a bad performance can be buried under a great one, you’re free to blow the lid off your potential.

You’re only as good as your last performance in business

Here are a few real-world examples, of the way embracing this mindset helps business owners.

  • If your last public speaking opportunity didn’t go as well as you’d hoped, learn from it and make your next performance better. Because that’s the talk, which people will remember.
  • If your last newsletter or article didn’t generate the results you needed, learn from it and bury it under your next, newly-improved performance. Because that’s the one your readers will remember.
  • If your last marketing exercise failed to get the results you needed, learn from it. Make the required improvements. Then bask in the success of your newly-improved marketing performance.

As you can see, the idea can be applied extremely widely. This gives it the flexibility to help you in many of the most challenging areas of your business.

Embracing this mindset frees you to give the world a massively better (and always improving) version of you and your work. Oh, and just watch what it does to your results.

Given that you’re only as good as your last performance, here’s a suggestion. List some of your past performances, which you’d love to improve, then replace them with better ones. That’s a great place to start.

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Hi! I'm Jim Connolly and I help small business owners to increase sales, boost their profits and build amazing businesses. Read more here.

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