Personal development: Deciding on your goals strategy March 22, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization, Leaders in Personal Development.Tags: achieving goals, goal setting, goal visualization, personal development, personal growth, personal improvement, Stephen Covey, time management
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In strategizing our personal growth programs, planning and achieving our goals is clearly an important priority. It’s also a procedure that should be tailored to our individual personality characteristics.
The establishment and execution of our self-improvement goals is not usually a procedure in which one formula or strategy fits all situations, or more importantly, all personalities.
By definition, the concept of personal development is just that – personal; it’s individual. If we fight against the basic nature of our individual ingrained approaches to life, and try to institute an approach or method that is not complimentary, failure in achieving our overall objectives will be a strong possibility.
As Stephen Covey comments in his book First Things First, “Self-awareness prompts us to start where we are – no illusions, no excuses, and helps us to set realistic goals…the ability to set goals that are both realistic and challenging goes a long way to empowering us to create peace and positive growth in our lives.”
If you look at goal planning and execution as a decision process, we are faced with the contradiction between the two maxims:
(1) Look before you leap
(2) He who hesitates is lost
If you are a person who usually carefully plans all of your activities, then (1) would be your inclination.
If you like to do a minimum of planning and “get right into things” then your approach is (2).
The trick is in recognizing those occasions when you may need to adapt your approach and either do more planning, or less planning.
If you base your approach for your goals strategy on someone else’s opinion or personal approach, such as an author writing on “How to achieve Your Goals,” and do not adapt the strategy to your own personality and circumstances, frustration and possible abandonment of your goal(s) could be the result.
Personal time management consultant Alan Lakein recognizes this when discussing how to apply his ideas, such as suggestions on developing a goals strategy, in his book How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.
In advising readers, he says, “Pick and choose among the ideas. Recognize that different techniques work for different people, and that there are times when good advice for one person is useless for another. Select the ideas that will benefit you the most, and use them to help you lead a more enjoyable and satisfying life.”
Personal growth paradox: Doing last things first March 20, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Get Organized, Personal Growth Books.Tags: achieving goals, focussing, getting organized, personal development, personal growth, self-improvement, Stephen Covey, time management
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The more we study personal development and growth, in our efforts to improve ourselves, the more often we will encounter the advice to “put first things first.”
Stephen R. Covey, in fact, as the lead author, wrote a 370-page book on this topic, First Things First*. Co-authors are A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill.
The implication is that most of us are often tempted to do last things first.
“Last things” being those activities that are not important. In his time management matrix Covey presents a quadrant which is now familiar to many: (1) Important and urgent (crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects)
(2) Urgent, but not important (some phone calls, some reports, some meetings)
(3) Important but not urgent (planning, relationship-building, empowerment)
(4) Not important, not urgent ((trivia, busywork ‘escape’ activities, irrelevant mail, excessive TV)
In a chapter entitled, The Urgency Addiction, Covey goes into considerable detail about how to overcome the mistake of attributing the quality of urgency to things that are actually not important; how to distinguish between the demands of the four quadrants; and how to manage our time between the four elements of the quadrant.
The book contains this insight: “Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behaviour that temporarily fills the void of unmet needs. And, instead of meeting these needs, the tools and approaches of time management often feed the addiction. They keep us focused on daily prioritization of the urgent.”
With time pressures being so pronounced for everyone these days, we could all benefit from revisiting the ideas and solutions proposed in this book.
* First Things First, A Fireside Book, published by Simon & Schuster
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