3 tips for employing your personal radar

Peak performers have a sixth sense in the areas where they perform brilliantly. They seem to know ‘what will happen before it happens’. Al Siebert, author of The Survivor Personality, called this gift ‘personal radar’. Let’s explore where you might use your radar and repertoire to deliver great results.

1) You can clarify where you have good radar.

What are the situations in which you have good radar? Where do you quickly see patterns? Where do you quickly see the desired picture of perfection? Different people have different kinds of radar. Great footballers, for example, seem to have more time and space than other players. Demonstrating superb positional sense, they seem several moves ahead of the opposition. Great retailers have an intuitive ‘feeling’ for their business. They can predict what will be happening in the market in the future. Ellen MacArthur, the round-the-world yachtswoman, reads the waves to anticipate future sailing conditions. Processing the information, she then works-out the strategy for reaching her destination.

So what happens when people use their personal radar? Entering the situation in which they excel, they feel alive and alert. Employing their antennae, they rapidly gather information about three things. a) They see patterns and, extrapolating the patterns, they envisage potential scenarios. b) They see the desired picture of perfection. c) They see how to pursue the best strategy for achieving the picture of perfection. You will have good radar in some situations, but not in others. For example, you may work well with certain clients, but not with others. (Be aware of where you have bad radar and develop a strategy for dealing with those situations.) Try completing the following sentence.

The specific situation in which I have good radar is:

*

2) You can clarify what you have in your repertoire.

Radar provides lots of information - but it is only the starting point. People must dig into their repertoire to reach their goals. There are normally three components in your repertoire. a) Strengths - the natural talents you have been given. b) Strategies - the life-experience, knowledge, models and wisdom you have gathered. c) Skills - the skills, tools and techniques you have developed. Radar is given: but the greatest area of growth lies in expanding your repertoire. Try completing the following sentence.

The strengths, strategies and skills I have in
my repertoire that I can use in this situation are:

*

*

*

3) You can use your radar and repertoire to deliver great results.

Faced by a challenging situation, peak performers reach into their repertoire to use the right technique to achieve the desired goal. “Every client is different, but I do follow a certain model,” said one counsellor. “Meeting a troubled person, I make them feel welcome and quickly look for behavioural patterns. I then imagine what I want them to be feeling, thinking and saying when they leave the session. Moving on, I try many different strategies to make contact and clarify their goals. Drawing on my experience - yet also staying fully in the present - I then use different tools to help them to succeed.” How do you do this in your own way? Try completing the following sentence.

The things I can do to use my radar and
repertoire to deliver results in this situation are:


*

*

*

Consider how you can keep putting yourself into situations where you have good radar. You will then increase your chances of doing outstanding work.