Building Your Growth Plan: Step 4
David Freund, Chief Leadership Officer
Over the past three weeks, we’ve worked through building your growth plan with Step 1 (defining what you want in life), Step 2 (looking in the mirror and facing reality), and Step 3 (finding resources to support your growth plan). This week I’d like to talk about gathering all of your information and laying out an easy to follow plan. Let’s get started!
Start with laying out all of the information you gathered in Steps 1, 2, and 3. In this final step, you’re going to align resources with your desired growth areas. Let’s use my growth plan as an example. My values ended up looking like this:
- Faith
- Marriage
- Family
- Personal Growth
- Career
- Community
For this example, we will look at Personal Growth.
Personal Growth is what positions us for Career Growth, and this is why I have prioritized it ahead of my career. I took the time to reflect on my Personal Growth with the reflection questions we discussed in Step 2.
- What is going well?
- What is not going well?
- What is missing in this area?
- What am I unsure about in this area?
Based on these answers, I chose resources that expand what is going well, improve what isn’t going well, add to skills or knowledge that I’m missing, or clarify things I am unsure about. Here are the resources that I chose to use based on my personal preferences:
- Books – I will use books in written and audio format. My goal is one book per month.
- Podcasts – I will listen to leadership and productivity focused podcasts. My goal is at least two per week.
- Events – I will attend IMC (which is an annual John Maxwell Team event). I will also host Live2Lead each fall. This gives me two learning events with a leadership focus.
- Social Media – I will follow seven different organizations or people on Instagram that offers me short daily quotes for inspiration.
Make sure that you choose resources that you can use on a regular basis and when possible, let the resources determine the frequency. The social media accounts that I subscribe to provide me daily updates. The podcats that I listen to are typically released once or twice a week. My Audible subscription reminds me monthly that I have another credit for a new book on the 14th of each month. The John Maxwell events run each year. These resources allow me to plan daily, weekly, monthly, and annually for my personal growth activities.
The last part of Step 4 is to develop a system for tracking your progress and learnings. If you are a person who journals, this can be as simple as a question each day regarding what you learned in the last 24 hours. For me, my daily reflection questions cover this process. Whatever tool you use, make sure it is easy to use on a daily basis because consistency is the key to real growth.
Join Marisa and me on Episode 117 of The Next Page podcast as we take a more detailed look at my growth plan and discuss how you can develop a plan that works for you.
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