All Your Yesterdays
30.06.2022
Read time: 5 minutes
Hey 👋 - Alina here.
Happy Thursday to 307 thriving professionals!
Welcome to 6 new curious minds!
Grateful you chose to grow with our community!
Hear this: Do you treat your life as your own project?
When you look at a project, you would see scope, duration, schedule, milestones, budget, risks, agreements, resources, deliverables and their quality. And you would call all these elements: project objectives.
You will also have criteria of how to account for progress or completion, and processes for active management of your resources in the context of your project's objectives.
Active management means active monitoring, measuring and controlling. It means you take specific steps and make specific decisions that will keep you moving towards your objectives, while remaining in your budget.
Oddly enough, irrespective of how professional we are as managers, we forget this knowledge once at home. And when it comes to our own personal development and growth, we become quasi amnesic about the knowledge we have at hand.
One can argue that a parallel can hardly be done, since life is a continuous process reminding more of a production line than an one-of-a-kind initiative as any project is. Yes, I can see your point there.
However, I challenge you to see your personal development as your annual project. You are the Project Manager, you are the Sponsor, you are the Planner, you are QA, you are your main Resource; your family, friends, partners, affiliations, including yourself are the Stakeholders. And of course, you are the Client and your main Beneficiary.
The good project management practice will tell you immediately you find yourself in a typical case of a conflict of interests. At job you would know to make these roles very distinct, and put enough decisional firewalls in-between so that they work together to the LONGER term objectives of the Client, of the Beneficiary and of your organisation, as opposed to YOUR short term confort.
In life, you do not have the pressure of a Code of Ethics, nor procedures to comply with at home towards your own professional development. Unless, of cpurse, you realise that your development would benefit significantly if such would be in place. When no such structure is in place, you start feeling the noise the mentioned conflict - of too many hats, of what is more confortable and easy, of long term vs short term - brings to you.
Moreover, the way you managed your professional development the past 6 months, is an indicator for the thinking, feeling and action habits you cultivated, nurtured, and applied indiscriminatory in respect of your professional and personal growth.
So, what do you see today happening in your personal development project:
- Do you have a happy Project Manager?
- Do you have a happy Sponsor?
- Are your stakeholders happy and content?
- Is your Client happy?
- Do you set milestones? How do you treat your milestones?
- How did you treat your main resource in the last 6 months? Have you been too permisive? Have you been too demanding? Have you been to critical?
- Did you (PM) meet since beginning of the year, with the Sponsor and the Client, to review how your personal development and growth project evolved?
- How did you keep accountable?
- What are 5 things you managed to do well?
- What would you change for the rest of the year?
Mid-year is a good moment to stop and reflect.
After all, you are used with doing it for the organisation you work for. As a manager, chances you prepare or are part of the team engaged in preparing the quarter or mid-year reports to your organisation shareholders and stakeholders. You know exactly how it is done.
- Why not apply it for your own life?
- Who are you in your own life if you come second to the organisation for which you work?
The truth is, the way you chose to spend your days in the last 6 months gives you good clues why you are where you are today.
Exactly 26 weeks have passed since my letter New Year Resolutions, where I gave you a tool to assess your past year and learn to plan the year ahead.
If you filled-in last year, keep what you wrote back in December at hand. Take again the assessment looking back of what was representative in the last 6 months, and planning ahead for the next 6.
Mid year is an important milestone.
At this milestone, do you have the practice of checking on the status of your own goals?
If you do, congratulations! It is a wonderful example of integrating knowledge across all aspects of your life. You use this knowledge actively and create opportunities for you to check-in with the meaning of your goals (which should not be only work related), reassess their relevance in your current situation and plan for your next steps towards the end of the year, while making sure of what you really want to pursue and what resources will have to invest in it till the end of the year.
If not, it is your perfect time to see that doing the same things as in the past 6 months will not move you in the direction you wish for. That goal will remain a dream. And you will just feel powerless again when at the end of 2022 you see you moved very little, if at all.
It is uncomfortable to become too comfortable in a place: at the beginning it feels so good, but after a while it burns you back. Most probably it is uncomfortable to hear me reminding you about all this. And perhaps I am not even the first one indicating you that you can better use your project management knowledge, skills and experience to manage your own life objectives, including those career and life balance related.
It is uncomfortable, too, to start a new assignment or enter a new project or entertain a dream in a practical manner with real steps. But along the way, once started, you increase your chances to become curious, explore, open up, expand your understanding and do things that will help you remove the noise in your head, get clarity. And soon you will have something to be proud of.
What discomfort sounds more appealing to you? It is uncomfortable anyhow, why not choose then the one propelling you ahead?
My mid-year gift to you is the following:
The first 10 people who reply this email with the message LET’S TALK MY PLAN and attach their YEAR IN REVIEW filled-in (look at the tool included in Newsletter TTM #1) by July 7th, will receive during July a 2 hour, free, 1-on-1 coaching session for strenghtening even better their personal development plan and removing the blocks they see in the way or adjusting the plan for such removal.
July is usually a hot month! Heat up your inner engine and plan well for your incoming days till the end of the year!
By the end of 2022, you want to make the most use of all your future yesterdays. Remember the best time to act is TODAY. Yesterdays is history.
Hope you found this newsletter interesting.
💥🎉 That’s pretty much all for today 💥🎉
SUMMARY
- As a manager, you have theoretical and practical knowledge of how to manage a project
- Do you bring and apply this knowledge at home?
- Do you use it for yearly managing your personal development and growth project
- Beware you might be in a conflict of interest
- This conflic of interest is your main source of noise
- To remove it efficiently, you need in place life routines to check-in with your goals
- Mid-term milestone is the best time of the year when you can assess where you are versus where you wished to be and take the right decisions
- The best time to act is TODAY. All the days will remain just YESTERDAYS if you do not use them wiselewhile they are still TODAYS.
- Reply, send me your YEAR IN REVIEW assessment, and let's plan your 2 hour free 1-on-1 growth coaching session
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Thanks for choosing to be part of my world. See you again next week!
Cheers,
Alina,
Your mindset trainer
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