Cohort 3 — Week 3 — Identifying my Personal Growth Edge
The assignment for week 3 was « Identify your Personal Growth Edge”. When I first look at the tool provided to do so (the « immunity map for change »), I felt a bit lost. Nevertheless I gave it a try.
My main goal: Finding more balance between working time and idleness. And getting better at focusing on a few key important things, rather than
The main behavior that work against my goal:
• Having far too many areas of interests and wanting to learn it all
• Feeling a lot of frustration not being able to learn as fast as I would like to
• Wanting to read/see/experience everything out there
• Procrastinating until the day before and then working like hell to deliver… and actually -most of the time- delivering quality (self-talk : « why should I change anything then ? ») as if that particular stress was triggering a boost of creativity or unleashing after an unconscious maturation period
• Getting bored if I don’t have much on my plate,
• Not willing to say ‘No’ until I have so many things on my plate that it’s not humanly possible to fully manage them all
• Believing that I may nevertheless manage it by a ultra-controlled state-of-the-art time management system
« Learning is the essence of life »
Big assumption: Life is so short; I won’t be able to live/learn/experience everything that I want to live/learn/experience.
What was most significant about the process for me?
First of all, I was really impressed by the candor and the depth of the sharings of my partner on that assignment. She shared a lot and I was honored by that trust. And both her sharing and her commitment to change really made an impression on me and inspired me.
The most significant parts for me were that:
1. It brought to me a lot more than what I would have expected. Dedicating just a little bit of time to that structured way of introspection (here, with the ‘immunity map’) was more benefitial than I thought it would be.
It put even more focus on the very fact that I’m constantly trying to do (far) too many things at once, too many projects, addressing too many areas of interest.
2. I was surprised to share so many commonalities with the « improvement goal » and the « behaviors that work against one goals » of my teammate for this week.
3. Even though we were both struggling with time, we succeeded to schedule an hour to share and the feedback were really benefitial to me (I hope it was to her too).
There is a question that I constantly asked myself as I observe the world around me and it’s this one: « Why is it this way? –and not another way- ». I found it helped me to question my paradigms and my dogmas more than once.
My teammate gave me another question to ask myself : « Is this really something I wanna do ? And if so why ? ».
I’m going to try that –and possibly even write down the answers I may have for this very question.
Experimenting it and see where this will lead me.
P.S.- On last Friday’s call, I particularly enjoyed the answers given by each of us to the check-in question. Those answers really resonated with me.
The provocative check-in question was: « Remember something that you thought was going to be the scariest thing you’d ever do, and it turned out not to be so scary.”.
One of the reason why this really resonated with me was that I experience that ‘scariest-finally-not-scary’ thing so very often !
And I don’t get what is the cognitive bias which makes me (and apparently many of us as well) feel that fear everytime we have to face a different situation… or even a not-so-different situation. For instance for me, facilitating a session for a new team or for a large audience. Which I have done so many times ! And even though, my brain seems to anticipate each event worse than it is again and again.
Feel the fear and do it anyway…
