Driving Personal Change in 2012

New Year Resolutions!!! Just a cliché? Another ritual you go through knowing it won’t matter? Or something you do with full earnestness? (even if you aren’t always able to stick to them)

New Year is one of the few festivals that celebrates the passage of time, and makes us think of the year that presents itself before us. I like to use this opportunity to revisit my commitment to personal growth and set up a framework to ensure I utilize the New Year effectively to drive my goals.

I know people who say why wait for New Year to make resolutions, I can make them any time. Well, sure, you can. But do you? How often in the past year have you sat down to review your personal goals, track where you are and make an action plan? An advantage this occasion gives us is that it provides a predesigned time framework which we can fit our action plan and monthly review into. And we always get a reminder that it’s “that time” of the year again 🙂

As long as you are determined to make and achieve your resolutions, it doesn’t matter when you make them. The three simple steps below are designed to ensure you succeed:

• Step One – Goal Setting:  Whether you will even get close to achieving your resolutions is often clear at this stage itself. Setting the goals right and setting the right goals is the first step towards achieving them.
  • Identify Areas of Focus for the year. Start by identifying your area of focus for improvement for this year. It could be health& fitness, career, relationships, home, charity etc. I know you want to focus on them all but prioritize, identify the top one or two and remember that you can choose again next year. Once the larger category is determined, setting goals will be easier.
  • Quality over Quantity. Make fewer and more clearly defined and important resolutions. Taking on too much will not allow you to focus your energy.
  • Make your Resolutions Personal.  Your goal should be about something you feel passionately for and not something someone else feels you should do.  Your commitment and efforts will only be for the goals you believe in.
  • Try to Sync your Resolutions with your larger Life Goals.  If your life goal is to achieve a defined level of success by a specific stage in your life, work backwards and identify what you need to do NOW, in this year. It could be ensuring you keep yourself updated in your area of expertise, investing in networking, getting additional qualification or any other. Amit’s life goal was to be making a difference in the lives of underprivileged people so one of Amit’s resolutions for the last year was to spend at least 5 weekends per quarter with an NGO which imparted vocational skills to people below the poverty line.  
  • Apply SMART. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic & Time bound goals are not just for the workplace. Any goal should follow the SMART principle. So your resolution cannot be to just lose weight. It would have to be “I will lose 6 kgs this year at a pace of not less than half a kilo per month and not more than a kilo in any month” Quantifying goals helps in tracking achievement.
• Step Two – Action Planning:Now that your goals are in place, it’s essential to put in place an action plan of how you’ll go about achieving them.
  • Break Down your Goals into a Series of small Steps/ Milestones. E.g. If your larger goal is to master a new area, have milestones attached to each step you have to take: such as “read the manual” as a first milestone, “view all webcasts” as a second milestone, maybe “attend training” as third, “start practising” could be fourth and so on till you get the certification or level of proficiency that you desire.
  • Attach action steps and a timeline to each milestone.  Having action steps and a deadline for each milestone is essential. To take the above example further, you might decide to curtail you TV viewing or facebook updating time to ensure you read and make notes from X number of pages each day to achieve the first milestone.
  •  Track Progress continuously and tweak your plan if required. The moment you let go of tracking is when you may start losing momentum
• Step Three – Staying on TrackI know this is the tough one especially given our busy and sometimes unpredictable lives but, believe me, it can be done.
  • Write It Down. Writing down your goals and action plan and putting them up where you can see them ensures recall and helps firm resolve. This will help you draw up a definitive plan, track it effectively and give you the satisfaction of ticking off every step that you complete.
  • Share It. Building a support system has been identified as one of the key factors for people who managed to achieve their goals so tell your family and friends. Start a buddy system where you support your friends on their resolutions and they support you. It’s always hard to give up on something people know about and are encouraging you for.
  • Review & Revise. Set a timeframe for regular review and make sure you do it. Review progress, note what went right and what didn’t, find what you need to do differently, if at all and update the remaining plan.
  • Celebrate Small Wins. When you review, don’t forget to pat yourself on the back for achievements. Celebrating small wins will keep you motivated for the long haul. (Just ensure your celebration is not detrimental to your goal like my friend who’d reward herself with a triple scoop, extra chocolate fudge sundae every time she lost half a kilo!!)
  • Focus on a Positive Vision of the Future. People who focus on the benefits of success have a significantly higher chance of fulfilling their goals than those who focus on the downside of failure. Our mind gets energized by a positive vision whereas it is very difficult to really put your heart into something where the only reason pushing you is the fear of how bad it could be if it didn’t work.

Maybe all of us won’t achieve 100% of our resolutions but even if you managed to do 70% that’s far better than giving up or doing nothing at all. There may be the occasional lapses but treat them as temporary setbacks and focus on getting back on track. Just one day has passed; the whole year beckons us, full of promise. I look forward to hearing about all your success stories of personal change and growth and pray this starts a cycle of rejuvenation for you every year.

For training programs or personal coaching on goal setting, driving change, increasing personal effectiveness contact the author at handashweta@gmail.com

An adaptation of this post has been published in The Financial Express as part of Shweta Handa-Gupta’s guest column

Copyright ©2012 Shweta Handa-Gupta. All rights reserved.

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Coaching & Mentoring for Excellence

“Till you spread your wings, you will have no idea how far you can fly”

 Coaching and Mentoring are being increasingly recognized as important for the overall development of individuals. These terms are often used loosely and interchangeably but are very different from each other. While there are overlaps, each has its own value and it is important to understand which one we need before we embark on a mentoring or coaching relationship.

Mentoring is the download of knowledge, skills, information and perspective on a particular topic or area from a typically more senior/knowledgeable person to another and is useful in the following situations. If you are:

• Seeking to learn from someone else’s existing knowledge or expertise
• Seeking area/topic specific guidance
• Seeking to learn and take guidance from someone successful.

A mentor can be anybody with expertise in an area, a willingness to share their knowledge and help you to achieve your own goals. Your mentor could be someone from your own function whom you would like to emulate and aspire towards or equally it could be a successful person from any other function or even industry who you can learn from and who would like to guide you. When Anil joined an IT services company as management trainee, his one aspiration was fast growth and his role model was a senior alumnus from his B school who had risen to the position of CEO at the age of 30. Anil requested and entered into a mentoring relationship with this senior to understand and emulate the work habits and career management skills that helped this person reach there. It is not necessary that Anil will also become a CEO by 30 but his career progression may be accelerated because he learnt the right things to do at the right time.

Finding the right mentor in your workplace can be an important boost to your career. For organizations, creating a culture that encourages mentoring provides not only more motivated and engaged employees but also an effective knowledge management tool.

Coaching, on the other hand, is a specialist activity and needs additional training and certification.  It is not so easy to define and is often confused with mentoring or counselling. Of all the definitions the one that has appealed to me the most and helped define me as a coach was the description of a coach as a “facilitator of individual performance or facilitator of individual excellence” The focus is on helping the individual increase self awareness and discover and tap their own potential. A basic premise that drives coaching is the belief that every person has immense potential within them and possesses the capability to find and create their own solutions.  It is the coach’s role to facilitate this journey. Coaching is rarely directive and doesn’t give you ready made formulae and solutions.

When identifying a coach, look for someone with the requisite training and more importantly use the first meeting to judge if the coach makes you feel comfortable. The best coaches in the world are people who manage to build that rapport with you and help you delve within yourself to learn in minutes things that would take hours to learn if someone would try to enforce them on you based on their own opinion. Sonali, a highly talented trainer found it very difficult for years to sell her services despite being a confident and articulate speaker with good networking skills. She then sought the help of a coach who simply by asking effective questions, summarizing, paraphrasing, reflecting and listening discovered, along with Sonali, that she had a deep-seated discomfort in asking people for things. She had always prided herself as someone who gives and doesn’t take. This along with a perception of salespersons as pushy and not entirely honest held her back from selling due to a fear she herself wasn’t aware of, that people might categorize her in the same bracket. The coach inspired her to think and change her perceptions. Sonali also realized that if she hadn’t discovered this fact about herself on her own, the chances that she would have believed any of these thoughts existed in her mind were very low.

Effective coaching would ideally leave you with a deeper insight into yourself and your blocks and the ability to identify your destination and create your own path. Coaching is right for anyone who wants to get somewhere and is willing to take some action, and make changes if required, to get where they want to go.

It helps both in relation to your work and life as it can help you identify personally relevant goals, choose the best action steps and stay on track. A coach provides with a safe and confidential place to offload and to get fresh perspectives and unbiased support. People who have used coaching services feel coaching helped them with:

• Increasing self-confidence and self awareness
• Redesigning their lives to become more self-reliant and take greater responsibility towards their goals and commitments
• Increased productivity and personal effectiveness
• Significantly better decision making due to a deeper understanding of their own world view and biases
• Awareness of their own skills, talents and potential
• Understanding their blind spots and reaching the root cause of their problems
• Resolution of specific issues, dilemma for which coaching support was sought

Organizations which invested in employee coaching identified the following benefits in response to a survey:

• Boost in employee involvement, motivation and productivity.
• Improved interpersonal relations and teamwork
• Performance improvement and self-development of employees and leaders
• Effective tool for culture building
• Strengthening of employees’ skills
• Increased retention

Both mentoring and coaching provide organizations with powerful and cost-effective tools for increasing organizational productivity and performance and at the same time helping employees feel valued, encouraged and satisfied.

So next time you feel you can connect with a senior person and learn from him/her, don’t hesitate to establish a mentoring relationship. It can help you grow. Similarly, if something in your personal or professional life is leaving you dissatisfied and you feel something you want is not happening, reach out and find a personal coach who can help you. As was mentioned in an Ivy Business Journal “Coaching is the most potent tool for inducing lasting personal change.” Seeking external help is not common in our culture but the trends are fast changing.

To know more or for coaching or training solutions, contact the author at handashweta@gmail.com

    “He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened”                        ~Lao Tzu

An adaptation of this post has been published in The Financial Express as part of Shweta Handa-Gupta’s guest column

Copyright ©2011 Shweta Handa-Gupta. All rights reserved.

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Multi-Specialists – Winning the Specialist Vs Generalist Debate

Top Reasons Why Being A Multi-Specialist Pays.  

In this world of specialists is the Renaissance Man dead? Is Da Vinci – painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer still relevant in the modern world? Generalists have often claimed him for their own especially in battles with specialists but I do not think Da Vinci was a generalist or even a specialist. He was multi-talented and definitely a multi-specialist.

Specialists have been defined as people who have in-depth knowledge and expertise in one area or discipline. Whereas generalists are those who have basic knowledge in a wide number of disciplines without the depth and expertise of the specialist.  Promoters of specialization still insist that since specialists concentrate on only one discipline they are more knowledgeable and experienced and the generalists claim that they are the masters of integration and will always be the ones leading the pack.

So who wins this battle between generalists and specialists? In my opinion, neither suffices to be successful in today’s scenario.  While specialization is… Read More

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