PERSonal Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential Personalize, Evaluate, Responsibility, Sidetracking (1 of 4)
April 21, 2022
Personal Leadership is about you becoming the best version of yourself. It's pushing aside the belief that prioritizing your needs is selfish and accepting that focusing on your emotional well-being is responsible and necessary.
Personal Leadership includes holding yourself to the same standard that you would hold organizational leaders; it's putting yourself in the position of communicating expectations, promoting accountability, and championing your success.
This month kicks off the four-part series, Personal Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential. We'll discuss eighteen concepts that together become your personalized framework for advancing your Personal Leadership. This month focuses on: Personalize, Evaluate, Responsibility, and Sidetracking.
As we kick off this series, there are a few things to know. Each concept includes questions that you can answer on the corresponding downloadable pages. Together they will become your framework for unlocking your potential and advancing your Personal Leadership.
P is for Personalize: set realistic goals for yourself
Personalize your goals to reflect who you are, what you believe, and want to achieve. Be discerning throughout this process and make sure you can realistically allocate the time and energy needed to succeed.
Personalizing your goals takes them from generic and vague to specific and concise. Give yourself time to think about this critical step and treat it like one leg of a marathon and not a sprint.
Coaching: When I began working with Joe, he was concerned about his decreased professional motivation; he wanted a plan to navigate his career after not being promoted to a highly desired role. He previously thought of himself as a skilled and driven professional but was now lacking confidence in his professional abilities and career trajectory. By answering the questions below during his initial coaching sessions, Joe personalized his goals to address his specific needs.
As you personalize your goals, ask yourself the following questions:
What goals am I considering?
What is my motivation for each of these goals?
How will I benefit from achieving them?
What steps must I take to achieve them?
What is my timeframe, and is it realistic?
E is for Evaluate: evaluate the impact of your goals
Evaluate whether or not the expected outcomes of your goals are worth the time and effort you will need to expend. Consider how your relationships will be impacted and decide which will remain, be delegated to others, or put on hold until later.
Evaluate your motivation, and don’t commit to goals simply because you know they are achievable. Instead, choose goals that will provide you with desired experiences that lead to desired outcomes.
Coaching: Take Morgan, a senior leader at an accounting firm, for example. When I began working with her, she was burned out, exhausted, and feeling more stress than she could manage. She worked long hours as a team lead of five direct reports, made dinner for her family every night, volunteered at her kids’ school, and was training for a marathon. After evaluating her goals, Morgan realized that they were unrealistic and negatively impacted her overall well-being.
Evaluate your goals by asking yourself the following questions:
What are my expected outcomes of each goal?
What is motivating me to achieve these goals?
How will I manage my time while working on these goals?
How will my already existing commitments be impacted?
How will my relationships be impacted?
R is for Responsibility: set goals responsibly
Responsibility means choosing goals that reflect your core values, personal obligations, and desired outcomes.
Set yourself up for success and focus on goals you can responsibly allocate time and energy to meet. Challenge yourself, yes, but not if it's at the expense of your well-being, obligations, and happiness. You may want to focus on several goals at once; however, you can (and sometimes should) defer some until later.
Coaching: When Shea engaged in coaching, she was about to become a partner at the firm where she worked for seven years. Her goal quickly shifted to planning her resignation after concerns about partners possibly engaging in unethical and illegal activity. Despite never confirming these suspicions, Shea was unwilling to affiliate herself with any organization she suspects is engaging in activities misaligned with her core values. This conviction overrode any concerns about quitting without a job lined up. Because she had money saved and confidence in her ability to find another job quickly, Shea was confident that her decision was a responsible one to be making.
Ask yourself the following questions to determine if you have set responsible goals for yourself:
Are my goals aligned with my core values, personal obligations, and desired outcomes?
What responsibilities must I continue meeting, regardless of my goals?
Do I have the capacity to take on new goals at this time?
If now is not the right time to commit to these goals, when will it be?
S is for Sidetracking: anticipate distractions and delays
Sidetracking is what happens when your focus shifts away from your goals. Whether big or small, positive or negative, intentional or unintentional, these distractions take you away from what you are working to achieve.
Be realistic and plan for sidetracking. Anticipate detours and know that there are no steadfast rules about how you should respond to them. Sometimes temporarily or permanently changing course is necessary, yet other times, it's more advantageous to remain focused on your goal.
Sidetracking can be a planned distraction, like going on vacation, searching for a new job, attending a party, or starting a fitness program. It may also be unexpected, like getting sick, being laid off from work, or having to reorganize how you live through a pandemic.
Coaching: When the COCVID-19 pandemic forced us into a shutdown, Roger, a small business owner, and my client for about a year had been shifting his focus from working in the business to on this business. He quickly pivoted to survival mode and was able to stay afloat and keep his staff employed, as he had done with his previous company when the 2008 market crashed. Roger was proud of how he managed this unexpected sidetracking and is once again focused on his 2020 goals, despite them now being his 2022 goals.
Prepare yourself for sidetracking by asking yourself the following questions:
How have I previously been sidetracked?
How might I be sidetracked while focusing on my goals?
What are examples of sidetracking that would benefit me?
What can I do to reduce my chances of being unexpectedly sidetracked?
How will I know if I should avoid or embrace unexpected sidetracking?
Next month we will focus on the following Personal Leadership. We’ll be discussing the following concepts: Organize, Necessity, Action, and Lesson.
Download your Personal Leadership Template HERE.
