Pacific Crest Professional Development Resources

Picking Growth Opportunities for the Week that have the following characteristics:

• Challenges that exceed your current capabilities (You’re in over your head)
• Activity that doesn’t return as much value or pleasure in your life that you want it to
• Time spent that is gnawing at you that there is something you are missing or obtuse about and that there is untapped value
• Developmental area that is critical part of your growth plan and you are doing activity aligned with this effort
• New ventures or adventures – first time experiences
• Meeting new people, organizations, or situations

If you can sift through the 168 hours in the week and optimize the selection to pick the best opportunities, you could achieve as much as 10× the growth by this selection process. When you reflect at the end of the week, one thing to reflect on is which moments were your best growth experiences, did they align with the hours you picked and were there hours you didn’t pick and what can you do to improve how you choose the 20 hours to focus on. Keep improving your selection process.

Once you pick your 20 hours, for each hour pick an appropriate focus area and within it, a specific aspect with an action plan for implementing the proposed growth.

There are expectations with different people, organizations, teams, family, spouses, and even us, every single day. Which of these expectations should we honor and let drive our decisions about our quality of life (QoL)? We also know that increasing expectations is a critical way to increase QoL and stimulate growth. Which of these expectations are assumed from the perspective of your ought self, real self, or ideal self? If you want the QoL you have identified in your growth plan—make sure these expectations align with QoL. I have learned that the best expectations are those that supersede the expectations of everyone but aligned with your self-growth journey towards your ideal self. From this alignment, you can then raise these expectations to increase your ideal zone of development, challenge yourself to improve, and produce quality that exceeds previous quality in less time. Since quality is defined by you, you must set your own criteria and performance criteria, which sets your own expectations that align with QoL improvement.

Productivity is a necessary condition for self-growth. Self-growth is about taking your optimal performance status and making new breakthroughs in capabilities. If currently there is low productivity, then the response most people have will be to crank up your game. Simple techniques are 1) determine the amount of professional and personal commitment for your own future state (is it 60 hours, 70 hours, 80 hours etc. of the 168 hours in a week); 2) Schedule these hours to maximize outcomes in this direction; 3) make sure each hour is as productive as it can be; and 4) assess productivity weekly to identify when and how your time is very productive and what you can do to increase those hours that were least productive.

Assume that almost every person desires to be helpful to others. In fact, if you explore your most powerful relationships, you will see how many of them shifted from an acquaintance to a friendship when one of either party asked for help. People get a lot of return from helping others, and if they don’t want to help because they don’t believe they can help or the timing is not good, they will let you know. Be direct, e.g., “I am wondering if you would be willing to help me?” If you know you will be willing to help others in the future as payback, then you will find that asking is investing in yourself so you can help more people in the future. To differentiate, taking advantage of others is asking someone to do something that you could do for yourself. This is not asking for help but taking advantage of their time and energy.

After processing negative experiences and learning from them, it is important to edit these experiences out of our memories...to let them be footprints in the sand that quickly disappear. On the other hand, positive experiences should be firmly imprinted memories like celebrities cementing their handprints next to their Hollywood stars. We are the editors of our life film and authors of our life story. Growth stimulated by past negative experiences are first mined for value but after completed, they retain no residual value but are a consistent drain on our well-being, thus should be wipe from existence. The powerful positive story of who we are becomes the energy that drives our self-growth journey towards our ideal self using the past memories of our positive experiences as its strong foundation. In other words, filter out negatives and reinforce positive memories.

Finding time for self-growth is perceived as the number one barrier for so many people. We treat the scheduling of self-growth as these big bricks weekly but in fact they really are just many small pebbles or even grains of sand to sift and embed self-growth planning, execution, and reflection during natural lulls in one’s week. Updating your growth intentions during a 5-minute break reconnects you to your growth intent, taking 5 minutes to integrate an action plan, or finding 5 minutes within a few hours after the growth experience for reflection means that you don’t have to do this by scheduling blocks of time for growth.

We must become sensitive to the pressure cooker of life and our own contribution to this pressure. If we can be our own release value that keeps the productive pressure, but lets go of the non-productive pressure, our QoL will improve. This is accomplished by taking a time out purposefully and timely, knowing that when you reengage, you will gain that productivity that justifies the timeout. The other contribution to non-productive pressure build up is to not add self-judgment because it will become very destructive.

Assumption: Making better use of every hour in a week will increase QoL if the choice of each hour is effective and aligns with annual life and growth plans.

Base foundation: Segment life into 6 buckets for 168 hours time:

Attacking a new performance area requires research and preparation. The best way to elevate performance in an area is to understand that performance area. The best tool to use is a performance description. The methodology for developing a performance description is a great tool.

It's incredibly easy to develop an extensive to-do list. The key is to divide this list into a need to do list and a want to do list. Once you have a want to do list, this is the list that guides your prioritization. Looking over your need to do list, once prioritized, you take each item and ask yourself “Why do I want to do this item?” If you can’t justify from your ideal self that you want to take ownership of this item, then ask who wants me to do this item (the perspective of the "ought self"). Then determine if the ought self has the right idea and maybe it's something that will also benefit you. If not, it might be time to strip this item from your to do list!