Personal Development Plan Redux

 

I harp on goals and plans with my team. Without them, on a project basis, we are toast. Without them, on a personal basis, we might be okay, but perhaps coasting along without an objective. With them, we can suddenly frame success, determine present and desired states, and develop action plans for achieving the stated success criteria.

As a recap of previous rants on this subject, I recommend planning your future, obtaining coaching where needed, and getting a mentor (or three). As a follow-up comment to the mentoring, you don’t have to have a formal mentor relationship. Someone might be successful in what you want to be doing, and just listening to them or perhaps emulating them (no blatant weirdness please) is the mentoring you needed.

Sometimes a mentor can be a formal top-down thing; but in general, a somewhat less rigid arrangement works better. For the last six months or so, I have had a very-less-formal mentor. There has never been anything in writing or verbal that would have established a mentor relationship. But she is.

She has the unique ability to synthesize information into a coherent conclusion and then present verbally off the top of her head. Or so it seems. Maybe she is practicing late at night for those random occasions.

At any rate, just getting to listen to her is a learning experience. She demonstrates skills that I have never mastered. Maybe one day. But there’s more! Sort of like the infomercial – BUT WAIT!

For my edification, for the same price of admission as before, we also get other pearls of wisdom that make you sit back and think. Sometimes that is good, sometimes it is a catalyst that you have been searching for and never realized it. Other times it points out something that maybe you should consider revisiting. The other day, here came this one.

Mindtools dot com. An interesting site to say the least. The specific item that brought me here was informative, instructive, and timely. But in poking around this resource, I found this little slice of goodness that ties in nicely to your needs to plan your future: Personal Development Plan - Mind Tools.

The current problem with this recommendation is that now Mindtools.com would like you to pay for what was once free – but I get it. OTOH, 20 pieces of government coinage is not that big of an investment in your future.

While I am waiting for you to breeze through 27 pages that can predict your future, allow me to observe that we are getting close to the midpoint of year – a perfect time to be looking at a goals and objectives review; work and personal must be in balance and if you follow my mantra, people should have to really know you to tell the difference.

OK, hopefully you have taken a few moments to peruse that planning guide. Furthermore, I hope that you realize that you can use the same techniques with your customer’s projects. Benjamin Franklin, is credited with: “Failing to plan is planning to fail” and that is certainly true in my experience. This tool could be the one thing that creates a tipping point and helps you achieve your goals.

YMMV