I was surprised I haven’t been doing this

This post is NOT about identifying your most important activities and taking care of them first.

Even though that’s essential counsel that I’ve been advocating for years. And very difficult in practice for PR pros pulled in different directions by email alerts, social media notifications, and bosses’ demands.

No, this post is about something that I recently realized I haven’t been doing. Pretty surprised at myself.

You see, I’ve been so focused on being efficient and effective going forward, I’ve neglected the importance of looking back. I’ve written about starting every morning by hand-writing my one or two most important goals for the day. But I’ve shared nothing about reflecting on lessons learned.

Let me fix that:

For every five to ten instances you take time to look ahead and set goals about your future, take one moment to record key lessons and principles you’ve learned.

I hit on this when I realized that next week is the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Inner Circle. Shout out to those first nine members who signed up in the beginning!

Since then, I’ve been intensely focused on providing up-to-the-minute training for my members. Making sure that I stay ahead of the trends and can show them exactly what’s working now to get the results they need.

But hitting this milestone prompted me to reflect on how much has changed since we started back in 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession. And then to realize what has stayed the same.

Pondering these lessons learned, and then comparing them with input from our most veteran members, has been exhilarating. Learning from the past is deeply more powerful than anticipating the next shiny new thing.

I’m going to share these lessons learned with you next week – for free.

Join me for the Top 10 PR Lessons of the Last 10 Years You Can Apply in the Next 10 Days.