Self Management Project MGT 494

1. Self Management Project MGT 494 Lecture-9

2. Recap • Two Experiential Learning Tools • Role Playing • Being Myself • THE PYRAMID OF CONTROL

3. Role Playing • When working with self-management skills and interpersonal relationships, role playing simulates experiences that allow people to try out behaviors to see how they and other people feel about them. • The experience has value only if the individuals examine the activity immediately after the role play. • They have to talk about their experiences, process them by talking about and analyzing their reactions or their responses, and generalize as to how to act in future, similar situations.

4. Example • One can create a situation that could happen anywhere at any time. One can also give people roles to play, but not when they are practicing the skill. • As the individual practice, they are themselves, not a character in a play, and decide how to respond to the situation. • They then try to duplicate or mimic what the positive model did or said. This is not playing at a role; rather, it's learning how to apply a skill to a real situation.

5. Being Myself • In this form of skill practice, you don't tell the person practicing the skill how to behave. • You don't even demonstrate or model desired behaviors. Rather, you create a situation and ask the person to decide how to respond and to act accordingly. • You give other people roles to play, but not the person practicing. • You want him to be himself at all times.

6. Self-discovery learning • Self-discovery learning comes into play most dramatically in Being Myself. • Here a person is placed in a situation to which she responds as she ordinarily would. • The discussion then explores the person's reactions and self-management skills. As in all such activities, interpretation, feedback, and analysis then follows the experiential learning. • The group then explores how everyone reacts to what the person practicing said or did.

7. Today’s Lecture • Self-Management Competencies and the Eight Steps to the Top • Step 1: Sort out your values. • Step 2: Organize your values into life dimensions. • Step 3: Write a vision statement.

8. Step 1: Sort out your values • A vision for life is constructed from the values that are important to us. That's why we begin with exercises that help identify those values. Self-management begins by deciding which activities and returns or payoffs give our lives value.

9. Example “Being loved" is a personal value, whereas "having managerial authority" is a business value, and "having a successful career" combines both personal and business values. Identifying those values creates a life vision that each individual sets for himself or herself that not only consists of the values he or she holds most dear but that also describes the whole person he or she wants to be. The vision then forms the broad outline and the motivation for becoming that person.

10. Organize Your Values into Life Dimensions (Step 2) • People experience a great deal of confusion and frustration in their lives in part because experience is a great deal like a picture puzzle without a completed picture for guidance. They have difficulty sorting out the pieces into the proper patterns (e.g., background images and foreground images).

11. Exercise • Categorized your most important personal and work-related values into several or all of the seven dimensions of a life • Be able to explain the relationships between the dimensions of their lives and how they interact (if at all) with one another • Some event currents flow parallel to one another (e.g., a volunteer activity and your job). • Some event currents interact (work and family relationships). • Some event currents are dependent on something else (e.g., your ability to possess the material things you want may depend on the income you earn).

12. Seven dimensions of a life Each path or dimension is an aspect of anyone's life, most commonly referred to as the seven listed alphabetically 1. Career (the work you want to do and where you want to do it) 2. Community (your roles and the degree of influence you want) 3. Family (which refers to both your family or origin and your acquired family or families) 4. Financial (income from all possible sources and how you spend your income) 5. Material goods (things you want for yourself and/or your family) 6. Personal values (morality, spirituality, health, etc.) 7. Social relations (friends, acquaintances, neighbors, etc.)

13. Description • You can and should add categories to the list. Often people add specific job related aspects of their lives, such as the department they manage. • Sometimes, however, you will find that what you add is actually a subset of one of the categories already listed, which you can break out as a separate dimension if you wish to concentrate on it or emphasize it.

14. Examples • A "spiritual" dimension is a subset of personal values that you can break out if you feel it's an extremely important part of your life. • You can divide career into current job, career aspirations, and other aspects of your work life. • You can separate finances into wages or salary, income from investments, and expenses of various kinds. • You can also isolate material goods into home, vehicles, and so on. It is important that you recognize the connections among the different dimensions of your life regardless of how you separate them for the purpose of planning.

15. Write a Vision Statement (Step 3) • In self-management course, the participants must complete a vision statement for themselves that encompasses all seven (or more) dimensions of their lives. • They can use any number of tools for writing a vision statement. • The sample Vision Statement illustrates a formal approach that describes several dimensions as distinct from one another. • Some people call this formal, linear method of writing vision statements too confining and prefer to think more globally and to write statements in a form of free association; for those people, a popular method called Eulogy: Writing a Vision Statement for Your Life gives them the freedom they need (as long as they cover all seven dimensions)

16. Eulogy • Your eulogy points out what dimensions in your life you think are most important to you at this time. • It also describes the ways in which you want to fulfill the values you consider important in each of those dimensions. • Pin it up on a wall in front of you to refer to whenever you can. After all, it's your eulogy. • Nevertheless, don't be afraid to make changes in it over time. • What's important to you now may not be as important to you five years from now. • Remember, in the words of Yogi Berra, the famous baseball catcher and coach, ''It ain't over 'til it's over."

17. Summary • Self-Management Competencies and the Eight Steps to the Top • Step 1: Sort out your values. • Step 2: Organize your values into life dimensions. • Step 3: Write a vision statement.

18. Next Lecture • Step 3: Write a vision statement • Sample Vision Statement • Prioritize Your Life Dimensions (Step 4)