Remember Spring Break as a kid? Maybe you traveled somewhere fun, or maybe you visited family, or maybe you stayed home and played.
It didn’t matter.
After a winter that seemed to never stop, and school everyday, you were ready for that break . . . ready for something to revive and refresh you . . . something to change your perspective and help you get through to the end of the school year.
Now you are an adult, and your time horizon is a bit longer. You aren’t just trying to get to the end of the school year, but you may still feel those some late winter blahs. Even as adults we need a break at the start of spring.
The rest of this article is going to offer you five pairs of questions that can use to create a spring break for yourself without ever leaving your home or office. Even if you’ve taken a spring break trip or vacation recently, read on.
The Questions
What makes work most fun? / How can I do more of that today and everyday?
What would WOW my Customers today? / How do I know?
What risk have I taken lately? / What did I learn from that experience?
What was my childhood dream? / What does it tell me about myself now?
What is one thing I could do to refresh my perspective? / When will I do it?
How to Use Them
Reading the questions is a nice start, but that alone won’t create your mental break (or breakthrough). The questions are useful, but it is your answers that will help you reframe, re-focus, refresh, rejuvenate, and recuperate – just like spring breaks used to do. In other words, the most important thing to do with these questions is to think about your answers to them.
Here are some steps that will help you use these questions to create new perspectives and ideas.
1. Read the questions again. Make a note (mentally or on paper) the pair or pairs that seem to jump out at you the most.
2. Spend 10-15 minutes today reflecting on the pair of questions you noted.
3. Jot down your thoughts and ideas on a piece of paper, in your planner, or your journal.
4. Read your answers tomorrow morning and reflect on the fresh perspective, energy and excitement you feel.
5. Repeat these steps for any or all of the other question pairs.
Do this for all five question pairs and you have created a five day mental vacation!
If this sounds like it will take some time, you are right. But when you consider the results you will gain, and that it is a lot cheaper than booking a flight to a spring break destination, you’ll realize the time is well worth it.
Remember that better questions help us produce better answers. And that better answers, when put into action can change our lives.
Invest these few minutes in thinking and you’ll reap the benefits of a fresh perspective and gain new outlook on the spring and early summer. Your answers will help you be more productive and enjoy your days more.
Many people go on vacation to relax and rejuvenate themselves. They spend hours in planning and preparation. Most people spend an hour or more to plan their weekend activities. Investing one hour over the next several days with these questions and the process I’ve outlined will give you a greater return than those other time investments and will make a difference in your life and results.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label professional development. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label professional development. Tampilkan semua postingan
Senin, 02 Agustus 2010
Jumat, 16 Juli 2010
Continuing Professional Development
According to the dictionary, “Continuing professional development is the means by which members of professional associations maintain, improve and broaden their knowledge and skills and develop the personal qualities required in their professional lives.” Continuing professional development ensures that professionals keep developing their knowledge and skills, as well as improve their competence.
One can undertake a continuing professional development program through the following modes: home-based learning with the use of audio, video or multi-media resources and other distance-learning material; action-based learning or studying problem solution methods through workplace experience; supervised research; and conferences, seminars, workshops or other technical and professional events and meetings.
Continuing professional development accentuates a person’s education, development and effective professional performance. In the US, professional organizations are also making continuing education mandatory, either as a requirement of membership renewal or licensing retention. Government organizations, professional bodies, employment organizations, individual employees and professional development providers are increasingly stressing continuing professional development programs. A continuing professional development program requires systematic, ongoing, and self-directed learning that would ensure continued competence and an indisputable professional responsibility.
These programs offer courses that can provide the flexibility of a part-time study together with world-class postgraduate education and professional development. A professional can develop his skills through a variety of workshops, seminars, short courses, certificates, diplomas and master’s degrees as well as online courses across a wide range of disciplines. You can also study for short non-accredited specialist courses, which gives a person opportunity to be abreast with the latest changes in his profession.
Continuing professional development is important for the development of one’s career and can be used by organizations and individuals to investigate how learning can be best applied to support organizational objectives and sustain a competitive advantage.
One can undertake a continuing professional development program through the following modes: home-based learning with the use of audio, video or multi-media resources and other distance-learning material; action-based learning or studying problem solution methods through workplace experience; supervised research; and conferences, seminars, workshops or other technical and professional events and meetings.
Continuing professional development accentuates a person’s education, development and effective professional performance. In the US, professional organizations are also making continuing education mandatory, either as a requirement of membership renewal or licensing retention. Government organizations, professional bodies, employment organizations, individual employees and professional development providers are increasingly stressing continuing professional development programs. A continuing professional development program requires systematic, ongoing, and self-directed learning that would ensure continued competence and an indisputable professional responsibility.
These programs offer courses that can provide the flexibility of a part-time study together with world-class postgraduate education and professional development. A professional can develop his skills through a variety of workshops, seminars, short courses, certificates, diplomas and master’s degrees as well as online courses across a wide range of disciplines. You can also study for short non-accredited specialist courses, which gives a person opportunity to be abreast with the latest changes in his profession.
Continuing professional development is important for the development of one’s career and can be used by organizations and individuals to investigate how learning can be best applied to support organizational objectives and sustain a competitive advantage.
Minggu, 11 April 2010
Are you effective or ineffective in your life?
Copyright 2006 Robin Harris, DesignerLife
Multi-tasking and saying “yes” to too many things can dilute your effectiveness. People who are generalists, by design, can manage the broad sweeping details of several related or unrelated projects. But those who are more inclined to be specialists are naturally designed to go deep not wide.
The generalist will go stir crazy trying to play the role of the specialist and the specialist will lose access to their own competencies and strengths when trying to play the role of the generalist.
We live in a society that tends to make rules and create models for preferred behavioral traits without understanding how they correspond to innate abilities. Everyone is not meant to multi-task and everyone is not meant to specialize. Get it wrong and you have someone who can fall into the spectrum ranging from slightly frustrated and discontent all the way to grossly incompetent and angry.
To cultivate a career that has any hope of yielding its full potential, it needs to build on natural talents, abilities, and gifts (TAG). Talent and ability are the minimum requirements, gifts that find their way into our work life is a bonus. When all three are properly placed in a suitable role and environment, that is where people will rise to the tops of their fields, have the greatest impact, and contribute the most. Not only will their career shine but it makes a perfect segue for a totally satisfying life.
Work that undervalues or under-utilizes our natural abilities dilutes the over all quality of life. It leads to that elusive feeling that something is missing no matter how grand everything else appears to be. It doesn’t matter if you command a 7-figure income; money cannot replace the human desire for purposeful and satisfying work.
It is fair to say that most businesses are still operating under an old assumption that talent and abilities are the same as learned skills and knowledge. When it comes to the subject of gifts, this rarely finds it’s way into a professional development program. Talents only shine when they are built on a foundation of natural ability or unnatural determination. Abilities are not learned they are innate and raw qualities they make it possible to excel in certain tasks and environments while making it difficult to excel in others.
If you are waiting for a corporate career development path that leverages your TAG, you will likely be disappointed unless you are on the executive development path. Many corporations are much more intentional when it comes to identifying and cultivating a match for executive talent than for the rank-and-file. Well, talented executives without a highly talented and committed team aren’t very effective, now are they? Still, it is up to the individual to take ownership of these personal treasures and find ways to integrate them into well-suited careers and work environments.
As the path of evolution closes off once viable options, we approach a daunting crossroad. We have to decide if we are going to be pruned from the vine, wither slowly, or thrive by making new and wiser choices that will force us out of our comfort zone. If we cannot cross over into the new emerging paradigm of work and we are still in our working years, the consequences will separate us from the life of comfort we have grown accustomed to. Companies and whole industries will continue to disappear from the economic playing field and many will attempt to survive change by downsizing and leveraging a global workforce. This strategy may be wise but often leaves the root cause of the problem unresolved and so the problem continues to sprout new symptoms that downsizing and global workforces cannot relieve. Meanwhile, the individual player stands hoping someone will rescue them and just like a deer frozen in the headlights, this reaction to personal threat of survival is often problematic. What are you preparing yourself to do to mitigate such risks? Do you have a financial cushion? Have you invested in keeping yourself marketable even in changing economies? Do you have multiple streams of income? Or is waiting for the storm to pass and hoping it will your only plan of action?
Your natural talents, abilities, and gifts are God-given and they extend beyond industries, local, national, global economies, and emerging technologies that make workers in certain fields obsolete. They are timeless and it is by becoming a good steward of your TAG that you will be guided to take the action that will allow you to begin to play a bigger game with far better outcomes. Winning on the economic playing field is important but winning at a soul-level is all-inclusive because that means you get the privileged experiences that money can and cannot buy.
Multi-tasking and saying “yes” to too many things can dilute your effectiveness. People who are generalists, by design, can manage the broad sweeping details of several related or unrelated projects. But those who are more inclined to be specialists are naturally designed to go deep not wide.
The generalist will go stir crazy trying to play the role of the specialist and the specialist will lose access to their own competencies and strengths when trying to play the role of the generalist.
We live in a society that tends to make rules and create models for preferred behavioral traits without understanding how they correspond to innate abilities. Everyone is not meant to multi-task and everyone is not meant to specialize. Get it wrong and you have someone who can fall into the spectrum ranging from slightly frustrated and discontent all the way to grossly incompetent and angry.
To cultivate a career that has any hope of yielding its full potential, it needs to build on natural talents, abilities, and gifts (TAG). Talent and ability are the minimum requirements, gifts that find their way into our work life is a bonus. When all three are properly placed in a suitable role and environment, that is where people will rise to the tops of their fields, have the greatest impact, and contribute the most. Not only will their career shine but it makes a perfect segue for a totally satisfying life.
Work that undervalues or under-utilizes our natural abilities dilutes the over all quality of life. It leads to that elusive feeling that something is missing no matter how grand everything else appears to be. It doesn’t matter if you command a 7-figure income; money cannot replace the human desire for purposeful and satisfying work.
It is fair to say that most businesses are still operating under an old assumption that talent and abilities are the same as learned skills and knowledge. When it comes to the subject of gifts, this rarely finds it’s way into a professional development program. Talents only shine when they are built on a foundation of natural ability or unnatural determination. Abilities are not learned they are innate and raw qualities they make it possible to excel in certain tasks and environments while making it difficult to excel in others.
If you are waiting for a corporate career development path that leverages your TAG, you will likely be disappointed unless you are on the executive development path. Many corporations are much more intentional when it comes to identifying and cultivating a match for executive talent than for the rank-and-file. Well, talented executives without a highly talented and committed team aren’t very effective, now are they? Still, it is up to the individual to take ownership of these personal treasures and find ways to integrate them into well-suited careers and work environments.
As the path of evolution closes off once viable options, we approach a daunting crossroad. We have to decide if we are going to be pruned from the vine, wither slowly, or thrive by making new and wiser choices that will force us out of our comfort zone. If we cannot cross over into the new emerging paradigm of work and we are still in our working years, the consequences will separate us from the life of comfort we have grown accustomed to. Companies and whole industries will continue to disappear from the economic playing field and many will attempt to survive change by downsizing and leveraging a global workforce. This strategy may be wise but often leaves the root cause of the problem unresolved and so the problem continues to sprout new symptoms that downsizing and global workforces cannot relieve. Meanwhile, the individual player stands hoping someone will rescue them and just like a deer frozen in the headlights, this reaction to personal threat of survival is often problematic. What are you preparing yourself to do to mitigate such risks? Do you have a financial cushion? Have you invested in keeping yourself marketable even in changing economies? Do you have multiple streams of income? Or is waiting for the storm to pass and hoping it will your only plan of action?
Your natural talents, abilities, and gifts are God-given and they extend beyond industries, local, national, global economies, and emerging technologies that make workers in certain fields obsolete. They are timeless and it is by becoming a good steward of your TAG that you will be guided to take the action that will allow you to begin to play a bigger game with far better outcomes. Winning on the economic playing field is important but winning at a soul-level is all-inclusive because that means you get the privileged experiences that money can and cannot buy.
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