If you’re an insurance agent or a financial advisor what do you ask your clients to do all day long? Don’t you ask them to make investments to protect and provide the future they want? Yet surprisingly enough you guys are like the doctor who won’t follow his own orders.

In this case, I’m not referring to buying the products you sell yourself, although you should. If you don’t believe in the value of the products your selling enough to make the financial investment yourself you shouldn’t ask a single other person to do so. But there isn’t a simple product you can buy to do what you need to do.

This is probably a busy time of year for you as you wrap up business in this last quarter. But if you don’t assume a leadership role for yourself and do what you need to do the upcoming year may not meet your expectations. Self-leadership demands that you set your on course of action.

Good self-leadership demands you set the right course for action. You can focus on efficiency, you can focus of effectiveness, or you can focus on both. But you have to know what you’re trying to accomplish in specific details to improve either efficiency or effectiveness.

Efficiency is doing things in the right way in the least amount of time using the least amount of resources. You can be very efficient and very unproductive. Because while you can do things really fast you aren’t doing the right things.

Effectiveness is doing the right things. The right things are the things that produce the results you want. You can be inefficient but highly effective and produce results far greater than your competition.

But you have to know the right things to do before you can figure out how to increase your efficiency. And that’s where your self-leadership comes in to play. You have to develop a clear quantifiable plan of action to produce the results you want.

That clear quantifiable plan of action is your strategic action plan. Your strategic action plan helps you to make decisions quickly and use resources wisely. It helps you to increase your business results because it keeps you focused on doing the right things in the right way with the right people at the right time for the right reasons. So, how about scheduling time to develop your strategic action plan before this year wraps up?