The ChooseFI Newsletter

My friend, Brad Barrett runs the largest Financial Independence community in the world where he simplifies personal finance and inspires you to take action to improve your:

• health
• finances
• relationships

More than 58k+ people read The ChooseFI Weekly newsletter for inspiration every Tuesday on their journey to financial independence.

To improve your finances, sign up here!​

Manage To the Test

This is, without a doubt, one of my key secrets in life.

In almost all areas of your life, there are tests of performance.

In my opinion, where there’s a test of performance, there’s a playbook for how to train and prepare.

I agree with Albert, to some extent.

But, there’s another way to look at tests.

When a test serves a certain purpose, use it to your advantage.

Where I’m going to start with this one is the conversation we’ve been having on how to increase your earnings by growing your career and building your team.

The Gallup Poll

Gallup has studied over 2.7 Million workers across 100,000+ Teams to understand what employees need to perform their best.

Their survey is linked to greater colleague engagement, which lowers turnover and increases productivity.

Bottom Line: Engaged colleagues are happy and productive.

When your team is happy and productive, you’re more likely to get promoted.

Here are the 12 questions the Gallup Survey asks:

1. I have a best friend at work
2. At work, my opinions seem to count
3. I know what’s expected of me at work
4. My supervisor seems to care about me as a person
5. My colleagues are committed to doing quality work
6. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job
7. There is someone at work who encourages my development
8. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day
9. This last year, I’ve had opportunities at work to learn and grow
10. In the last six months, someone at work’s talked to me about my progress
11. My Company’s Mission / Purpose makes me feel my job is important
12. In the last seven days, I’ve received recognition or praise for doing good work

When I started in my current role, our engagement scores on this test were low and here’s what it meant for us:

• High turnover
• Overtime and long hours
• A lack of productivity and delivery

Determined to change it, as a management group, we ran a new gameplan:

Manage To the Test

What that looked like was examining every single one of these 12 questions each time we did a survey and asking:

1. Why is our score low
2. How can we improve this
3. What would being the Best look like

We also used the questions to guide our conversations in our 1:2:1s, by asking simple questions like do you have the tools and resources you need to do your job.

We had conversations with leaders to ensure they were giving their team credit and praise for a job well done.

The Test became our playbook.

We trained our managers to the Test.

Over the last 9 years we’ve maintained engagement above 90% and here’s what that’s meant for us:

1. High retention
2. Reduced stress loads
3. Greater work-life balance
4. Higher productivity and work quality

By managing to the test, we created an engaged workforce, which made every single person’s life better.

Built to Move

In this episode of the Podcast, we talked to Kelly and Juliet Starrett about their book Built to Move, which provides ten tests and ten physical practices to make your body work better.

Again, coming out of that conversation, I decided to manage my life to the Test:

1. Modified my diet
2. Increased my walking
3. Started to stretch more
4. Practice my sit-stand skills

The idea of Built to Move is to allow us to live healthily for a long time, which is definitely on my to do list, so I’ve opted to manage to their tests and ensure I increase how I score in each category.

Physical Fitness

A few years ago, I decided to improve my fitness.

The first question I had for myself was, what is good fitness.

Luckily, I found this handy graph from Atomic Athlete and, I saw they had programs to improve your strength and skills in each area.

So, you’re likely not surprised when I say I decided to manage to the test, which is exactly what we did.

For each area of the test, I chose the workout program to let me achieve the desired results for that section.

By the time I was done the program, which wasn’t long, I was in the best shape of my life and I was in my 40s.

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TGG Podcast

This week on the Growth Guide Podcast, we talked to Jody Carrington, author of Feeling Seen: Reconnecting in a Disconnected World.​

In the end and in the beginning, all we want to know is we matter.

Jody shares personal anecdotes and professional insights that will inspire you to:

• prioritize relationships,
• embrace vulnerability, and
• overcome the barriers that hinder genuine connection.

From discussing burnout and mental health in organizations to the power of acknowledgment and the need for emotional language, this episode is a thought-provoking journey.

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A Thought

Once I realized I could manage to the test, it changed my life in so many areas:

1. Figure out what I want
2. Understand how to test for it
3. Use the test to create the roadmap
4. Act daily on the roadmap until I succeed

A Question

Where in your life can you Manage To the Test?

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