Your Personal Productivity Platform - 3. Practices

This is the third in a series of posts about your personal productivity platform and its elements.

My teacher, colleague and friend Bob Dunham has observed that “We are what we practice and we are always practicing something.” He follows with the query, “So, what do you choose to practice?” Simple, pointed, provocative.

The pen is in our hands. We get to be the author of this and many other things in our lives. Our authorship is enabled by our awareness; that is our access to making informed choices. Our authorship extends to seemingly simple things and more complicated stuff. Other things equal, it seems worth our efforts to be actively engaged in choosing and designing the things that matter most to us. The choice point is clear: drift or design. The questions are, will we design and if so, will we practice?

Practice, and practices, are what enable us to accelerate our learning, becoming more efficient at what we do. Effectiveness seems to emerge from mindful practice. Our recurrent actions enable our brain’s neurons to fire together, wire together and form thicker, stronger neural pathways.[1] Such efficiency allows our brains to more easily predict the future and budget our body’s resources.

For me, there are several domains where becoming a reflective practitioner[2] pays dividends: health and vitality, career, finances, learning, family and friends, not to be overly exhaustive about it. For every domain where I choose to engage, I can play a game of my making, modified from the original wheel of life[3] exercise. Here are the steps.

1.      Assess your current level of satisfaction in that domain on a 1-10 scale.

2.      Identify your desired level of satisfaction on that same scale at a future point in time, six or twelve months hence, for example.

3.      Identify one to three projects to take on that will move you forward and close your satisfaction gap.

4.      Across your projects, identify the new practices you will need to develop that will enable your learning, growth and success.

Simple, but not (necessarily) easy.

This can be especially useful at times of transition, whether due to external or internal circumstances. As author, you can decide and declare what is the trigger. I’ve written about a former client of mine, executive director of a service organization for veterans, who used her wheel of life structure to design and make progress on her seven most important areas. As a result, she was able to get fit, make time for her family, hire and reassign staff, strengthen a working relationship with her board and expand successful grant writing efforts. Along the way, she generated several new practices that enabled engagement. learning and progress, for example: making clear requests, clarifying the type of decision making that would be used, scheduling time for family and friends, and building in ‘me’ time for exercise and reflection.

Two nights ago, I had my sister Joni over for dinner to belatedly celebrate her birthday. She is recently retired from the work world and questioning what her future might look like. I offered her the wheel of life exercise as a way to make her inquiry more manageable. She was enthusiastic about this way to structure a seemingly incoherent realm into workable, logical domains. I can’t wait to hear how she is progressing on setting up her structure and creating her ‘games’ to play. I imagine that she will identify several practices to develop which will add wind beneath her wings.

In my world of work, marketing and sales has always been a challenge. I’ve been blessed with sufficient client referrals to make a living but I believe that’s not a sustainable approach. So I’ve taken several steps to elevate my game, including creating additional content to makes my value and point of view visible.

Creating new content requires making time to think, create and write. For these weekly blogs, for example, I now have a practice of writing a draft on Sunday so I can post Tuesday morning on LinkedIn. With a group of fellow bloggers (we call ourselves Amplifiers) who also post, we intend to raise our visibility on that social medium. That means that I also have a practice of putting aside two hours Tuesday mornings to be responsive to others’ posts, liking and commenting on their pieces. I am learning a lot while actively engaging with them in thought partnership. As I continue to practice, my writing takes less effort and my style, voice and perspective become more evident. Color me very excited.

In your life, where are you actively designing aspects of it? Where have you decided to put practices in place as a way to get better and get traction? Where have you adjusted your practices to better fit your intentions? What are you learning along the way? Willing to share? I’d love to hear about it.

[1] See Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, 7½ Lessons About the Brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

[2] A term coined by the professor and social scientist, Donald Schön, in his book, The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Though it refers to the special knowledge that professionals have and use while in action, I am using it to describe the knowledge each of us can develop about ourselves that elevates our ability to function and navigate well in our world.

[3] As described here, I have slightly modified this exercise from the one discussed in the Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House and Phil Sandahl book, Co-Active Coaching. Palo Alto, CA: Davis-Black Publishing, 1998, The intentions remains the same: develop perspective, make informed choices, lead a balanced life.

#selfleadership #designyourlife #practices