Personal development for professional success

1. Personal development for professional success Personal development is about enabling people to fulfill their potential, to expand their talents and to progress at work and through life with meaning and satisfaction.

2. Personal development for professional successcont. Ultimately, people have to develop themselves; others can set the scene, give encouragement, provide support, propose methods and means, set up mechanisms, give advice, impart knowledge, provide contacts ... but the learner is at the heart of the development process.

3. Personal development for professional successcont. You need to develop qualities and skills which reflect the likely future world in which you will live out your life or have your career; in a fast-changing world, you need to develop yourself for tomorrow's demands rather than just today's.

4. Personal development for professional successcont. American management writer Rosabeth Moss Kanter has argued recently that future work demands will require seven particular qualities:

5. Personal development for professional successcont. 1. The ability to operate without relying on a hierarchy: managers will have to rely on their personal capacities to achieve results rather than depending on the authority of their position.

6. Personal development for professional successcont. 2. The ability to compete in a way that enhances rather than undercuts co­operation: treating competition as a trigger to stimulate rather than being grimly determined to win the fight.

7. Personal development for professional successcont. 3. A high standard of ethics: collaborations, joint ventures and so on depend on a high level of trust. 4. Humility: there will always be new things to learn.

8. Personal development for professional successcont. 5. Having a process focus: how things are done is just as important as what is done; making things happen is as important as deciding what should happen.

9. Personal development for professional successcont. 6. Multifaceted and ambidextrous abilities: to work across functions and business units to find synergies that multiply value, to form alliances when opportune but cut ties when necessary, and to swim effectively in the mainstream and the 'newstreams'.

10. Personal development for professional successcont. 7. The ability to gain satisfaction from results, valuing the contribution rather than demanding status rewards.

11. Personal development for professional successcont. • Maureen Guirdham suggested that the conditions of the twenty-first century will require you to develop a set of enterprise skills, which will improve your ability to work effectively, both independently and in organizations, to take responsibility for your own work and working life, and gain satisfaction from them, and to take initiative in managing your work and working life.

12. Personal development for professional successcont. Enterprise skills are transferable, and consist of the following:

13. Personal development for professional successcont. 1. Self-management: taking responsibility for your own life, getting to know yourself, becoming aware of your motives, feelings, values and abilities, and your strong and weak points, setting personal goals, and developing your ability to cope with difficult situations and stress.

14. Personal development for professional successcont. 2. Learning: an active process driven forward by the learner; a continuous process, going on throughout life; a multifaceted process, drawing on cognitive, behaviourist and experiential learning theories.

15. Personal development for professional successcont. 3. Obtaining and using good-quality information: working out what you need to know, accessing sources, analysing and interpreting information, presenting it in a user-friendly way, and recording, storing and retrieving it.

16. Personal development for professional successcont. 4. Decision-making and planning: using a process that ensures you reflect your true values and preferences, consider all your alternatives, use information fully, and evaluate your options systematically; ways of planning to implement decisions effectively.

17. Personal development for professional successcont. 5. Recognising, creating and evaluating opportunities: making the most of opportunities is a key factor in getting what you want from life and work; environment scanning, networking and methods of boosting creativity all increase the number of opportunities open to you and the chances that you will recognise them; ways of assessing opportunities in terms of riskiness and value are then needed to ensure they are worth while.

18. Personal development for professional successcont. 6. Performing: you can make the most of your opportunities only if you satisfy others by what you provide; it is necessary to make your work user-friendly, maintain high standards, and work for continuous improvement.

19. Personal development for professional successcont. 7. Changing: adapting to change introduced from outside, helping others to adapt, and yourself spotting the need or the opportunity for change and knowing how to bring it about.

20. Personal development for professional successcont. 8. Interpersonal skills: these enable you to work effectively with and through other people.

21. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images

22. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images • The Greeks had the words for it: gnothi s'eauton, know yourself; • they regarded it as the key to leading a good life.

23. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images • In order to relate well to others, we need to know certain important facts about ourselves because our behaviour towards others affects their behaviour towards us; • and if we seem to be having problems with how others behave to us, it may be that we are inadvertently provoking them.

24. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images • When seeking self-knowledge, it is a good idea to use a range of techniques, which in combination reveal more than one alone. • Some possibilities are as follows:

25. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images 1. Event analysis. Take a number of major and minor events in your recent past, describe them in writing as precisely as possible, together with your responses, reactions and behaviour.

26. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images Then re-examine them, looking for an understanding of what values were influencing you, what goals you were aiming at, what abilities you used, and your feelings, thoughts and attitudes. Repeat this exercise on a number of occasions, comparing your analyses for consistencies and contradictions until you build up a picture of yourself.

27. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images 2. Getting feedback. Write out a list of adjectives and other ways of describing yourself. Get an honest friend to complete the same description. Compare the two and discuss the differences with your friend. If your picture of yourself and your friend's are very different, consider whether it points to self-deception on your part.

28. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images 3. Interpersonal skills audit and difficult situations analysis. To develop your interpersonal skills, you need to know what your starting point is.

29. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images One way is a listing of strengths and weaknesses which concentrates on social skills generally and work-relevant ones in particular; another is working out which kinds of encounter or social situation at work create most awkwardness, embarrassment or lack of self-confidence for you.

30. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images 4. Biographical SWOT analysis. List your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, then look for ways to build on your strengths, correct your weaknesses, exploit your opportunities and counter your threats.

31. Personal development for professional successcont. Self-knowledge and self-images • Many people suffer from low self-esteem, which undermines their social skills, as well as making them miserable. • The problem is not easy to solve, but there are positive steps you can take.

32. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • As, for many people, working life and life generally have become more complex and more stressful, coping is an aspect of personal development that has gained increased attention.

33. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • Coping is recognised to be intimately connected to our self-images and self-esteem. • People's expectations about their abilities to perform particular tasks largely determine the extent to which they persevere with those tasks and how successful they are with them.

34. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • People develop 'efficacy expectations' — highly specific beliefs about their abilities to perform certain tasks in certain situations. • They do this by synthesising information from a variety of sources, including the following:

35. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 1. Previous experience with the activity and setting. 2. Observations of other people's behaviour in similar situations. 3. Verbal information. 4. Interpretation of their own state of psychological arousal (for instance, interpreting increased heartbeat as fear).

36. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • People's beliefs about their own ability to do things have three important dimensions:

37. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 1. Magnitude: how taxing are the tasks they believe they can handle? 2. Generality: does their sense of mastery extend well beyond the particular task? 3. Strength: a weak sense of mastery is easily extinguishable by discontinuing experience; a strong one leads to continued striving to cope in spite of disconfirming experiences.

38. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • The best way to gain self-confidence in your ability to carry out a task is to start by doing it under close guidance, then do it without help, then do other related tasks using your own adaptation of the taught method.

39. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • What can you do to help yourself cope, especially with stress?

40. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • The following techniques are based on recognising that you are trying to modify internalisedbehaviour patterns which have been established for many years, so your expectations should not be too high, and you should be pleased with small increments of progress:

41. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 1. Listen to other people — stop trying to finish their sentences or hasten their speech rhythms. 2. Drill to reduce the pressure you feel to keep talking. Does it matter if you let this bit of the discussion go and do not contribute?

42. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 3. Change obsessional and driven behaviour. Punish yourself: for example, by making yourself turn right and go round the block if you jump the lights. Reward yourself: for example, by going to see a good film when you resist working late.

43. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 4. Assess the cause of your behaviour from time to time. Is it a need to feel important? Is it designed to avoid some activity or person? Is it essential to achieving some personal or organisational goal? Will this matter be important five years from now? Must you do this right now, or do you have time to think about the best way to accomplish your goal?

44. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 5. Undertake a slow-paced, but absorbing activity — bowls, cricket, complex needlework, gardening, cooking. Some of these also provide exercise. 6. Learn to say 'No'. Do not overload yourself.

45. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 7. Be aware of activities that increase your own stress levels. These may be unexpected. For example, you may think that because writing reports, articles or long memos is a quiet activity, it is a low-stress one; but counsellors have found that stress is particularly likely to arise during this activity — perhaps because of the pressure to perform well in a durable medium. You should interrupt your own stress activities frequently with bouts of other, relaxing activities.

46. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 8. Reduce your hostility to others: for example, by giving warm thanks to people who have done something for you. They are likely to reciprocate, leading to a more supportive climate in your relationships.

47. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • Gender issues in coping Women's coping abilities are often seen as related to whether or not they have a strong sense of autonomy. There are two kinds of autonomy — emotional and instrumental.

48. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • Emotional autonomy means being able to define oneself rather than be defined by others. • Instrumental autonomy is the ability to act upon the world, carry on activities, cope with problems and take action to meet one's needs.

49. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress • Lady’s ways of coping with stress suggest: 1. Being in touch with her anxiety and searching for the cause. 2. Deliberately thinking of people in the situation. 3. Talking about her anxieties. 4. Trying to take a long-term perspective of success and failure.

50. Personal development for professional successcont. Coping with difficult situations and with stress 5. Trying to ensure people get to know her as a person so they can't stereotype her, 6. Making notes, learning from experience “what I would do in the same situation again”. 7. Allowing 'gestation' time during problem-solving, i.e. trying to let her subconscious work things out.