S- Specific
M- Measurable
A- Attainable
R- Realistic
T- Timely
Specific -
A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. To set a specific goal you must answer the six "W" questions:
*Who: Who is involved?
*What: What do I want to accomplish?
*Where: Identify a location.
*When: Establish a time frame.
*Which: Identify requirements and constraints.
*Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.
EXAMPLE: A general goal would be, "Get in shape." But a specific goal would say, "Join a health club and workout 3 days a week."
Measurable -
Establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set. When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued effort required to reach your goal.
To determine if your goal is measurable, ask questions such as......How much? How many? How will I know when it is accomplished?
Attainable -
When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals.
You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them.
Realistic -
To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents substantial progress. A high goal is frequently easier to reach than a low one because a low goal exerts low motivational force. Some of the hardest jobs you ever accomplished actually seem easy simply because they were a labor of love.
Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal.
Timely -
A goal should be grounded within a time frame. With no time frame tied to it there's no sense of urgency. If you want to lose 10 lbs, when do you want to lose it by? "Someday" won't work. But if you anchor it within a timeframe, "by May 1st", then you've set your unconscious mind into motion to begin working on the goal.
T can also stand for Tangible - A goal is tangible when you can experience it with one of the senses, that is, taste, touch, smell, sight or hearing. When your goal is tangible you have a better chance of making it specific and measurable and thus attainable.
duminică, 15 martie 2009
vineri, 6 martie 2009
Self awareness and career orintation
Your Career Direction Journey
The process of uncovering what you are meant to do, that is finding career direction, is a journey. It starts with discovering the essential "you": the person who truly resides behind the facades, defenses, and stresses of everyday life.
Once unmasked, your journey continues with specific career exploration and identification of a career that allows you to make good use of your talents. And it moves on with a focused job or career move, in which you identify the jobs you want and put yourself in the best possible position to get them. In fact, this journey never really ends because work itself is all about change, growth, development, and reinvention.
By taking a talent-based approach to your career search right from the start, you keep yourself heading toward the right career even when the actual direction shifts over time. This approach consists of sequentially answering three questions:
1. Who Am I?
2. What Do I Want to Do?
3. How Do I Get Hired?
1. Discovering Who You Really Are
The first question to answer is "Who am I?"
We'll take two approaches to answering this - firstly asking you to explore your talents, and secondly using psychometric tests to explore your preferences.
Exploring Your Talents
First of all, consider your answers to the following questions:
• When have you been most committed, passionate and enthusiastic?
• When have you been most creative?
• When have you been most sure of yourself and your decisions?
• What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?
• When have other people considered you to be most successful?
• When have you enjoyed your work most?
• What talents were you relying on, and using, in these situations?
• For what would you take a very strong stand?
• What about the world puzzles or disturbs you that you could make an impact on?
• What jobs do you like to do at work when you have a choice?
• What activities are you drawn towards out of work?
• If money were no concern, what would you be doing?
Brainstorm each of these questions, and then use your answers to identify the top three talents that you most use when you're successful. Rank these in order.
Personality Inventories
With personality testing you learn what you have in common with other people. You also discover potential points of friction with people of other personality types. While no personality type is good or bad, it does help you discover what motivates and energizes you. This in turn empowers you to seek those elements in the work you choose to do, and avoid the things that frustrate and demotivate you.
As you explore your personality you come to realize that who you are is really determined by the choices you make. You choose to react one way over another, or to prefer one thing to another. You can take this self-awareness one step further by examining why you make the choices you do. In psychological terms, what is your payoff for making the choices you make?
When you know the "why" it is easier to see how you can become fulfilled through the work you do.
Write a "Who I Am" Statement
Now draw this together into a simple written statement of who you are. This is an important step toward self-discovery and defining your purpose. Use it to answer the following questions:
• What your talents and strengths are;
• The talents you achieve most with;
• The activities you get most satisfaction from; and
• The type of activity the psychometrics you've completed guide you towards.
2. Finding Out What You Want to Do
Now that you know who you are, the next stage is to think about what you want to do.
For your life to be balanced and fulfilled, your career must be aligned with who you are: Otherwise you'll be unhappy with work, and you'll probably underachieve. After all, ill-fitting jobs demand different talents from the ones that you have. If you try to pursue a career path that is at odds with your values, your beliefs, and your way of seeing the world, then you'll struggle constantly and be under a great deal of stress and pressure.
The starting point is to do some brainstorming on the jobs that you think would suit who you are. We'll then confirm this with some different psychometric tests, and then extend this list with some more brainstorming.
You then need to spend some time researching the top careers you've identified.
i. Exploring the Options You Know About
Starting with your "Who I Am" statement, start thinking about all of the jobs you can see that would suit you someone with the talents and interests in that statement (by depersonalizing it in this way, you help to avoid "being too close to the issue.")
Starting here is particularly important if you're already established in a career: It's important to capitalize where you can on the experience and contacts you've already built up, compared with ditching everything and starting completely afresh (while this sounds glamorous and enticing, it puts you in the position of competing equally with other career starters, who may be much younger than you. On the other hand, if you're profoundly unhappy with your company, industry and profession, a radical career change may be the best thing...)
So start by asking yourself if your current role can be adapted to suit you much better; if there are other roles within your existing company that would be worth trying; or whether similar roles in other organizations might be more rewarding.
iv. Pulling This Together.
You'll now have identifies a wide range of possible careers open to you. Now's the time to cut these down and prioritize them. We're not asking you to choose one now, but to cut down to your top 5 or 6 choices (the reason being that when you start researching these careers, some of them may turn out to be quite bad!)
Again, if you're having trouble prioritizing, use paired comparison analysis to rank your choices.
v. Perform Career Research
Armed with a solid understanding of how you can participate in fulfilling work, you now need to research the various options you have to make money doing so. Career research is not something many people relish, but it is necessary in order to eliminate choices that seem to be great fits on the surface but really won't align with your mission and purpose.
Yes, this is quite tedious. But think about the consequences of getting things wrong! Surely it's worth spending time exploring your options, rather than a lifetime kicking yourself for making a bad choice!
Methods for researching careers include:
• Researching the career using sites like Acinet.org, so that you can understand industry trends, job pay levels, qualifications needed, job availability, etc;
• Conducting your own PEST Analysis to confirm your own view of likely career trends;
• Reading industry/career magazines and get a sense of how "happy" the industry is, who the major players in it are, and what the issues and problems within it are. Also, looking at job vacancies to see if the career is in demand;
• Understanding what talents and personalities make people successful in the career, and mapping these back against your own talents and personality;
• Attending professional and trade shows;
• Participating in job fairs;
• Visiting company websites, and keep an eye on how companies are talked about in the press;
• Understanding where organizations are based, and deciding if you're prepared to travel to interviews, and perhaps to move;
• Volunteering; and
• Working part time and/or seasonally in the industry.
By the end of all of this research, you may have rejected several possible careers. Now's the time to narrow down to one! Again, Paired Comparison Analysis may be useful here, however so can Grid Analysis which helps you make comparisons where many variables are involved.
3. Answering "How do I Get Hired?"
In this last phase you answer, "What am I going to do to get hired?"
With your "Who I Am" statement and your research as your compass, now you need to actually map your progress. Many people tend to move from their purpose right into job search mode. This is a mistake because unless you have a plan, it is far too easy to get derailed by a lucrative job offer, an opening that Uncle Vinny has, a job that sounds really glamorous, or a whole host of other distractions.
Develop your plan first and you're more likely to get where you want to go, faster.
• Start by writing down the career you want. What is your long-term vision for yourself in terms of your career?
• Write down the steps you need to take or the things you need to accomplish, in order to get there. What qualifications should you get? What experience should you build? Which organization will give you the best start?
• For each of these steps create a detailed implementation plan.
• These are your short term goals
• Be sure to express as SMART objectives
• Go back and identify contingency plans
• Do a "what if" analysis on your goals "If you don't get accepted to grad school this year, what will you do?"
Now you are free to pursue your dream career with confidence. There are certainly no guarantees but with the right amount of planning and a sufficient dose of reality, the career that you are meant for will materialize.
Key Points
Finding career direction is a process. The more effort you put into the planning stages the better your results. Uncovering your true self and your purpose is heavy, emotional work and you may have to go through this process a few times in the span of your working life. The effort however, is certainly worth it when you end up with a clear sense of the direction your career should be taking.
The process of uncovering what you are meant to do, that is finding career direction, is a journey. It starts with discovering the essential "you": the person who truly resides behind the facades, defenses, and stresses of everyday life.
Once unmasked, your journey continues with specific career exploration and identification of a career that allows you to make good use of your talents. And it moves on with a focused job or career move, in which you identify the jobs you want and put yourself in the best possible position to get them. In fact, this journey never really ends because work itself is all about change, growth, development, and reinvention.
By taking a talent-based approach to your career search right from the start, you keep yourself heading toward the right career even when the actual direction shifts over time. This approach consists of sequentially answering three questions:
1. Who Am I?
2. What Do I Want to Do?
3. How Do I Get Hired?
1. Discovering Who You Really Are
The first question to answer is "Who am I?"
We'll take two approaches to answering this - firstly asking you to explore your talents, and secondly using psychometric tests to explore your preferences.
Exploring Your Talents
First of all, consider your answers to the following questions:
• When have you been most committed, passionate and enthusiastic?
• When have you been most creative?
• When have you been most sure of yourself and your decisions?
• What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?
• When have other people considered you to be most successful?
• When have you enjoyed your work most?
• What talents were you relying on, and using, in these situations?
• For what would you take a very strong stand?
• What about the world puzzles or disturbs you that you could make an impact on?
• What jobs do you like to do at work when you have a choice?
• What activities are you drawn towards out of work?
• If money were no concern, what would you be doing?
Brainstorm each of these questions, and then use your answers to identify the top three talents that you most use when you're successful. Rank these in order.
Personality Inventories
With personality testing you learn what you have in common with other people. You also discover potential points of friction with people of other personality types. While no personality type is good or bad, it does help you discover what motivates and energizes you. This in turn empowers you to seek those elements in the work you choose to do, and avoid the things that frustrate and demotivate you.
As you explore your personality you come to realize that who you are is really determined by the choices you make. You choose to react one way over another, or to prefer one thing to another. You can take this self-awareness one step further by examining why you make the choices you do. In psychological terms, what is your payoff for making the choices you make?
When you know the "why" it is easier to see how you can become fulfilled through the work you do.
Write a "Who I Am" Statement
Now draw this together into a simple written statement of who you are. This is an important step toward self-discovery and defining your purpose. Use it to answer the following questions:
• What your talents and strengths are;
• The talents you achieve most with;
• The activities you get most satisfaction from; and
• The type of activity the psychometrics you've completed guide you towards.
2. Finding Out What You Want to Do
Now that you know who you are, the next stage is to think about what you want to do.
For your life to be balanced and fulfilled, your career must be aligned with who you are: Otherwise you'll be unhappy with work, and you'll probably underachieve. After all, ill-fitting jobs demand different talents from the ones that you have. If you try to pursue a career path that is at odds with your values, your beliefs, and your way of seeing the world, then you'll struggle constantly and be under a great deal of stress and pressure.
The starting point is to do some brainstorming on the jobs that you think would suit who you are. We'll then confirm this with some different psychometric tests, and then extend this list with some more brainstorming.
You then need to spend some time researching the top careers you've identified.
i. Exploring the Options You Know About
Starting with your "Who I Am" statement, start thinking about all of the jobs you can see that would suit you someone with the talents and interests in that statement (by depersonalizing it in this way, you help to avoid "being too close to the issue.")
Starting here is particularly important if you're already established in a career: It's important to capitalize where you can on the experience and contacts you've already built up, compared with ditching everything and starting completely afresh (while this sounds glamorous and enticing, it puts you in the position of competing equally with other career starters, who may be much younger than you. On the other hand, if you're profoundly unhappy with your company, industry and profession, a radical career change may be the best thing...)
So start by asking yourself if your current role can be adapted to suit you much better; if there are other roles within your existing company that would be worth trying; or whether similar roles in other organizations might be more rewarding.
iv. Pulling This Together.
You'll now have identifies a wide range of possible careers open to you. Now's the time to cut these down and prioritize them. We're not asking you to choose one now, but to cut down to your top 5 or 6 choices (the reason being that when you start researching these careers, some of them may turn out to be quite bad!)
Again, if you're having trouble prioritizing, use paired comparison analysis to rank your choices.
v. Perform Career Research
Armed with a solid understanding of how you can participate in fulfilling work, you now need to research the various options you have to make money doing so. Career research is not something many people relish, but it is necessary in order to eliminate choices that seem to be great fits on the surface but really won't align with your mission and purpose.
Yes, this is quite tedious. But think about the consequences of getting things wrong! Surely it's worth spending time exploring your options, rather than a lifetime kicking yourself for making a bad choice!
Methods for researching careers include:
• Researching the career using sites like Acinet.org, so that you can understand industry trends, job pay levels, qualifications needed, job availability, etc;
• Conducting your own PEST Analysis to confirm your own view of likely career trends;
• Reading industry/career magazines and get a sense of how "happy" the industry is, who the major players in it are, and what the issues and problems within it are. Also, looking at job vacancies to see if the career is in demand;
• Understanding what talents and personalities make people successful in the career, and mapping these back against your own talents and personality;
• Attending professional and trade shows;
• Participating in job fairs;
• Visiting company websites, and keep an eye on how companies are talked about in the press;
• Understanding where organizations are based, and deciding if you're prepared to travel to interviews, and perhaps to move;
• Volunteering; and
• Working part time and/or seasonally in the industry.
By the end of all of this research, you may have rejected several possible careers. Now's the time to narrow down to one! Again, Paired Comparison Analysis may be useful here, however so can Grid Analysis which helps you make comparisons where many variables are involved.
3. Answering "How do I Get Hired?"
In this last phase you answer, "What am I going to do to get hired?"
With your "Who I Am" statement and your research as your compass, now you need to actually map your progress. Many people tend to move from their purpose right into job search mode. This is a mistake because unless you have a plan, it is far too easy to get derailed by a lucrative job offer, an opening that Uncle Vinny has, a job that sounds really glamorous, or a whole host of other distractions.
Develop your plan first and you're more likely to get where you want to go, faster.
• Start by writing down the career you want. What is your long-term vision for yourself in terms of your career?
• Write down the steps you need to take or the things you need to accomplish, in order to get there. What qualifications should you get? What experience should you build? Which organization will give you the best start?
• For each of these steps create a detailed implementation plan.
• These are your short term goals
• Be sure to express as SMART objectives
• Go back and identify contingency plans
• Do a "what if" analysis on your goals "If you don't get accepted to grad school this year, what will you do?"
Now you are free to pursue your dream career with confidence. There are certainly no guarantees but with the right amount of planning and a sufficient dose of reality, the career that you are meant for will materialize.
Key Points
Finding career direction is a process. The more effort you put into the planning stages the better your results. Uncovering your true self and your purpose is heavy, emotional work and you may have to go through this process a few times in the span of your working life. The effort however, is certainly worth it when you end up with a clear sense of the direction your career should be taking.
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