How to develop a career action plan
November 4, 2007 at 3:43 pm | In Business, Life | Leave a CommentTags: career, coaching, plan
Articles in earlier editions of the coach outlined how to develop a one page business action plan. This month the focus is on the development of your career action plan. However, the process can also be easily adapted to other areas of your life.
The first and most important step is to make a decision. The decision is whether or not you need a career action plan. Many may not require any action in their career at this stage of their life. For some there are more important areas in their life to which they want to devote their time. The challenge is to make a conscious decision and either accept the current job or put into place actions to achieve your goal job.
Like a business, the foundation of a strong action plan for a career is a vision, mission and identification of values. This article will not go into detail about the development of this foundation (see the inspiration coaching blog for articles that contain more detailed information) but in summary the following is suggested
ü Vision: Choose a time in the future and document in detail what you will be doing from a career point of view. I suggest somewhere 3 to 5 years in the future. What you should identify includes:
o where you are located,
o what you are doing,
o how you travel to your work place,
o how many hours a day you spend there,
o what sort of colleagues you have,
o what clothes you wear,
ü Mission: Identify what you want to achieve in your working life. As a tool to help you complete this, think of what ideally you would like to tell people when they ask you “What do you do?”
ü Values: Identify what is important to you in your working life. Make them behavioural statements and not just one word statements. For example if you value “excellence” (I suggest choosing the 5 or 6 most important values for you, please contact me if you would like a tool to assist with this) document a statement that will show how you will behave to show how you value excellence. For example it could be “I will value excellence by continuing to develop my knowledge in _______________ (your area of expertise).
The next steps involve identifying actions to help achieve your mission. The first of these steps is to document the key areas that need to be nurtured to achieve your career mission. For example these could be relationships, customers, my knowledge, my growth. As an example I will look at “customers” and the steps to follow to identify actions. The steps are strategy, targets and actions.
ü Strategy: In simple terms a strategy is a method to win. Be it war, sport, business or your own personal career having a strategy increases the likelihood of success. In regards to customers, “exceed customer expectations” is a statement not a strategy. However, “I will exceed my customer expectations by knowing their needs before they do” is a potentially very powerful strategy.
ü Targets: The targets that support this strategy could be:
o 80% Retention / renewal rate
o New product or service provided every six months
ü Actions: Actions that would help achieve this target are:
o Attend two industry conferences annually
o Call each customer once per month
o Subscribe to two industry magazines and research industry trends
Repeat this process for your other key areas and you will complete your career action plan.
Celebration: Life’s Little Secret
November 4, 2007 at 3:42 pm | In Life | Leave a CommentTags: , celebrate, gratitude
Many of my family and friends would not believe me but I do find it hard to celebrate. It is true that I give subtle reminders that my birthday is coming up (not too many shopping days left now) and I do enjoy the birthday dinners and being looked after on father’s day. However, I struggle to celebrate anything personally for the other 363 days of the year or 99.5% of my life. Does it really matter whether we celebrate or not? Will it have any real impact on our life? My suggestion to you is that it can.
Why is there resistance to celebrating? There are many philosophical, cultural and personal reasons why we resist the practice of celebrating. These include: Celebrating is
ü Self centred
ü Resting on your laurels
ü Wasting time better spent on “important stuff”
ü Being the centre of attention (for others this is an attraction of celebrating)
I will define “celebrate” as “giving yourself permission to stop for a moment and enjoy what you have already accomplished or discovered”. There are therefore two steps to the process. The first is
1. Giving your self permission to stop for a moment
This is not as easy as it sounds. Today we are given lots of opportunities to keep busy. We have amazing communication and entertainment technology. So it is easy not to stop for a moment because there is so much happening. We can always being doing something productive so the perception could be we are wasting time if we “stop for a moment”. The second step is
2. Enjoy what you have already accomplished or discovered.
Rather than just let the days and the related wins and discoveries pass by, take a moment to recognise what has been accomplished and learnt and celebrate it.
This definition of celebration opens up possibilities. By this definition a celebration does not have to be a party or a big meal. In fact it can be done privately. Some examples of celebration are:
ü A massage
ü A meal
ü A day off or half day off your “normal” life
ü At work, start meetings by recognising what went well or what was discovered since the last meeting before getting into the other agenda items
ü Writing your thoughts, accomplishments, discoveries in a journal.
All these actions involve giving yourself permission to stop for a moment and enjoying what has been accomplished or discovered. Note that this is not restricted to celebrating the wins and successes. Discoveries can also be celebrated and these may occur when we have taken risks but not succeeded. Another positive way of viewing celebrations is to see them as the opportunity to thank (or celebrate with) the people who supported you.
You may be saying that this sounds okay but what is celebrating really achieving? Celebrating provides us the structure to take the moment to stop and to recognise the good things that have happened. A related concept is that we have two opportunities to be happy and they are to either have everything that we want or to be grateful with what we have. Putting those two concepts together means that celebration provides a mechanism to recognise the good things in our life which can lead to a happier life by increasing our gratitude about what we have. It may take a long time (if ever) that we get everything that we want. This is not suggesting that we should just sit back and be grateful for all the good things and forgot about all the goals and dreams that we want to achieve and realise with the rest of our life. It is suggesting that celebrations will help us enjoy the journey to these goals and dreams by taking the time to recognise the small wins and discoveries along the way.
So go ahead celebrate hard!
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