by Elyse | Jun 27 | Mindset
“Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.”
-Jim Rohn
Commitment to growing yourself is non-negotiable to becoming a successful and confident leader. Working on yourself can increase your confidence, skills, emotional intelligence, and empathy and make you a better leader. It can also increase your capacity to enjoy the successes that you accomplish and feel better.
Creating a personal development plan is essential so that you are clear about where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there.
How to Create a Personal Development Plan
In this post, we will walk through the steps to take and the questions to answer so that you can create a personal development plan customized to you.
Awareness
The first step in creating a personal development plan is to become aware of where you are now.
Getting to where you are going becomes much easier when you know where you are starting from.
Bringing awareness to where you are now can be a tremendous first step in improving areas of focus in your life.
It can help illuminate problems you didn’t know were there and explain why you do what you do.
To do this step, answer these questions:
- What are you thinking?
- What are the top 3 feelings you experience each day?
- What are your current struggles and challenges right now?
These questions will help you understand your current thinking and feeling habits. It will also be helpful to identify where you have pain points and what you want to change.
Resources:
The End Destination
Where do you want to go?
What do you want to achieve by creating a personal development plan?
This step is crucial because it gives direction, intention, and focus.
It also helps you prioritize and constrain your options and what you want to work on now.
Knowing where you want to go is important because you want to see the destination you are working towards.
Think carefully about what you want to achieve.
Most people aspire to specific goals because of how they imagine reaching them will make them feel.
But those feelings are available to you now. Once you learn to conjure those feelings up, you can experience the emotions at the end of your destination.
Questions to ask yourself about where you want to go:
- Where do you want to go? (What is your end destination?)
- How do you imagine you will feel once you get there?
- Why do you want to reach this particular goal?
- What is someone who has already achieved this goal thinking?
By answering these questions, you will have a clear destination and a start of a roadmap to how to create this goal in your life.
Plan to Get There
The next phase in creating your personal development plan is to plan how you will go from where you are now to where you want to go.
- Make a list of all the ways that you think you can accomplish moving from where you are to where you want to go
- Decide what ways you are going to commit to in your plan
- Write down each thing that may come up that may stop or hinder you on your way to reaching your goal
- Come up with solutions for each thing that may hinder you
- Put your plan into action
- Review and evaluate each week how your plan is going
- Adjust and refine your plan as necessary
These steps to create a personal development plan will help you focus on achieving the results you want to make.
A Final Note
You can use this process of creating a personal development plan each time you have a new goal or area of focus that you want to work on. It can be applied to learning new skills, habits, or a way of being. By creating a personal development plan, you ensure that you know where you are and where you are going and have thought through a plan about how to get there.
by Elyse | Jun 16 | Leadership, Mindset
Cultivating a growth mindset is a beneficial strategy for anyone looking to improve their career. Adopting a growth mindset can drive success and empowerment in your career.
A Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is the idea that your mind is malleable and adaptable. It is the idea that you can stretch your mind, learn new things, and continually improve.
With a growth mindset, you would seek feedback, be resilient to failures, and not feel discouraged by others having success.
This is the opposite of a fixed mindset, defined as your mind is set in a particular state and unable to change it.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
- 75 Journal Prompt Questions for Career-Driven Women (blog post)
- Is Leadership a Skill? (blog post)
Embracing Learning
Someone with a growth mindset is always learning and interested in continuous self-improvement.
This is an excellent skill for someone who wants to improve their career because someone with a growth mindset will seek out new opportunities, be open to learning new skills, and broaden their knowledge base.
You won’t feel hindered by an obstacle if you have a growth mindset.
If you don’t have a skillset, you will feel open and capable of learning it.
If you receive feedback, you will be open to learning from it instead of feeling stuck forever.
You will feel capable of learning leadership skills such as decision-making, communication, planning, confidence, emotional intelligence, and discipline.
Navigating Setbacks
Setbacks and failures are inevitable, especially when you are doing something new.
But with a growth mindset, you will use setbacks and failures to learn from instead of using them to stop you on your journey to your goal.
The setbacks and failures you experience can be some of the most valuable lessons you learn. If you had a fixed mindset, these setbacks would seem permanent and insurmountable.
With a growth mindset, you can analyze your failures, find a lesson to be learned from them and course-correct for the future so that it doesn’t happen again.
Creating a Supportive Environment
While having a growth mindset is something that you can adopt individually, it is also something that will benefit those who are around you as well because it creates a supportive environment.
Leaders with a growth mindset also encourage their team to have this mindset. This empowers their team to seek new opportunities, take risks, share ideas, and learn new skills.
A growth mindset on a team fosters collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement, which leads to collective success.
A Final Note
Adopting a growth mindset can be a powerful tool when stepping into a leadership position. It can help you embrace learning opportunities, navigate setbacks skillfully and create a supportive environment for your team. This is how you can lead with resilience and empower yourself to unlock your full leadership potential.
by Elyse | May 26 | Mindset
Overwhelm can be stressful and anxiety-inducing. It can make you feel stuck, don’t know what to do, and have no way forward. Overwhelm is an emotion–that means your thinking always causes it. Here are 13 causes of overwhelm.
1. Black-and-white thinking.
Also known as all-or-nothing thinking. This is when you think that if you don’t have time to do absolutely everything, you don’t have time to even do one thing.
Black-and-white thinking can keep you limited in your thinking. You will think you have limited options when making a decision and limited opportunities.
2. “Should.”
The idea that you “should” do something that keep you stuck in patterns of fear, guilt and obligation. “Should” can have you making decisions and commitments that you don’t really want to make.
It can also have you adding more to your plate or to-do list for no other reason than because you think you “should”. Not because you want to, you enjoy it or it will have you moving closer to your goals.
Resources:
3. Perfectionism.
Perfectionist thinking can have you stuck in overwhelm. If there is a fear of not wanting to fail or not wanting to feel shame, there is probably some perfectionist thinking.
Perfectionist thinking will have you not making progress on tasks until you know more information or feel more confident in your abilities.
It can also show up as procrastination. If you knew that you would have done a better job with more time, you can blame your “less-than-ideal” job on not giving yourself enough time.
4. People-pleasing.
People-pleasing is saying yes to everyone and everything else before you say yes to yourself. It is a way for you to try to control other people’s feelings, judgements and thoughts about you.
Instead of prioritizing yourself, your approval and your goals, people-pleasing has you prioritizing what other people want from you.
5. Indulging in drama, not facts.
When you separate out the facts from the stories you are telling yourself, it becomes a lot easier to solve a problem.
If you are stuck in a story that you are telling yourself, it is easy to get swept up into the emotion instead of making decisions and a plan to move forward.
Indulgent feelings that don’t move you forward are doubt, worry, self-pity, etc.
6. Indecision.
Not making decisions will keep you stuck and in so much overwhelm. Indecision will keep you spinning and looping in your head instead of making any progress forward.
You will feel less overwhelmed when you make a decision and move forward. Making a decision and moving forward will also give you more data than any analysis you can do in your head.
7. Undisciplined thinking.
When you have undisciplined thinking, it is very easy to indulge in unhelpful thoughts and unhelpful emotions. This habit can be hard to break out of if you don’t properly manage your mind.
Disciplined and deliberate thinking is how you keep yourself highly productive, focused and disciplined.
Resources:
8. Allowing I don’t know.
When you ask your brain a question and you allow yourself to answer with “I don’t know” you keep yourself stuck.
When you require your brain to make a decision in the moment, you create the ability to make a decision.
9. Lacking constraint.
Constraint is when you constrain your options.
An example of this is a vegetarian. A vegetarian has constrained their food choices to anything that doesn’t include meat. When they go out to dinner and are looking over a menu, a vegetarian doesn’t spend any time contemplating or thinking about the different meat options a restaurant offers. They just don’t eat meat.
Constraining can simplify your life, help you make quicker decisions and save you time and mental energy that would be better spent solving bigger problems.
10. Confusion.
Being confused is an easy way to stay in overwhelm and remain stuck where you are. Confusion is an indulgent emotion that feels useful but does not help you. You will learn more by just making a decision and moving forward than if you stay stuck in confusion.
If you are really confused and genuinely don’t know how to do something, than add “research how to do xyz” to your calendar to get you out of confusion.
11. Not staying committed to decisions.
Often, when someone is habituated to overwhelm thinking, they have a hard time staying committed to the decisions they make.
They make a decision to work on a task and then as soon as they start, they think that they should be doing a different task instead. This back and forth takes mental energy, contributes to decision fatigue and extends how long it takes them to get their task done.
12. Decision fatigue.
It takes a lot of brain power to make a decision and the more decisions you make, the more tired your brain gets. Then, it runs into decision fatigue and has a harder time making decisions and making good decisions. This can prolong the feeling of overwhelm.
When you make decisions ahead of time, constrain and commit, you can greatly reduce how overwhelmed you feel.
13. Scarcity thinking.
Scarcity thinking is a thinking pattern that is rooted in the thought that there isn’t enough. It presents when you feel overwhelm because overwhelm is typically an emotion caused by thinking there isn’t enough time or resources to get everything done.
A Final Note
The feeling of overwhelm is caused by the way that you are thinking but there are a lot of different thinking patterns that could be contributing to it. By learning the causes of overwhelm, you can see which cause is most likely to be happening for you and then can learn to change that pattern so you feel less overwhelmed.
by Elyse | May 19 | Mindset
Learning how to manage your mind can become an invaluable tool to feel better, stress less, accomplish your goals, and create new results in your life.
Your mind is full of thoughts every day, and you have tens of thousands of thoughts every day. Some will be helpful to you, and some will not.
You can direct your brain to think thoughts that serve you instead of just accepting each thought that comes to your brain. The way to do this is to manage your mind.
Facts and Thoughts You Have
There are facts in the world, and then there are stories you tell yourself about the facts.
Those stories are thoughts.
Thoughts create your feelings.
When you take a fact, ten people can have ten wildly different thoughts about the same fact.
This is how you know that a fact is neutral.
Since your thoughts create your feelings, your thoughts are vital to creating an enjoyable life. How you feel dictates your experience of life, and since your thoughts are your perception of life, you want to make sure that you choose helpful thoughts.
Thoughts also cause stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and other negative feelings.
Resources:
Your feelings are not caused by the things going on around you. They are caused by the thoughts that you think.
This is important because how you feel impacts your actions and, therefore, the results you create.
What actions do you take if you think I don’t have enough time to do this, and it makes you feel overwhelmed?
Do you sit down, organize, plan, and get to work? NO.
You probably spin in your head about how much you must do, complain, feel bad, and continue feeling overwhelmed without getting any momentum or moving forward.
The result that you create is that you don’t have enough time to complete all your tasks.
But it is not because of the number of tasks you have. It is because of your thinking.
This is awareness and is the first step to managing your mind.
How to Manage Your Mind
Managing your mind is becoming aware of what you are thinking, separating facts from the stories you tell yourself, seeing the impact of those thoughts in your life, questioning and understanding your thoughts, and then creating and believing new thoughts to produce new and different results.
1. Become aware of your thinking. Write down all the thoughts going through your head in a stream-of-consciousness style. Even bringing awareness to your thoughts can help you create different results and feel better.
2. Go back through and identify what is a fact and what is a thought. Most of what you write is probably thoughts with minimal fact.
3. Pick one thought and determine its impact on your life.
Think the thought and then ask yourself how that thought makes you feel.
Now ask yourself, what actions do you take when you feel that way?
Then ask yourself what result those actions create for you in your life?
4. Now question the thought you picked out.
Why do you think your brain offered you this thought?
How is this thought serving you?
Do you want to keep this thought or do you want to let it go?
5. Now, think of a result that you want to create in your life.
What actions would you need to take to create that result?
What feeling would you need to be feeling to fuel you to take those actions?
What story would you need to tell yourself to get yourself into that feeling?
This is the thought that you need to start practicing and believing to create the new result in your life.
A Final Note
This is the process of managing your mind. It is being aware of what is going on in your mind, seeing how those thoughts impact your life, evaluating your thoughts, and then creating and practicing new thoughts to get you different results.
Managing your mind is how you solve your problems. It is how you stop feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or worried. It is how you change your feelings to create new results instead of repeating what you have already made.
by Elyse | May 12 | Mindset
Burnout vs. Overwhelm. In this article, we will go over the difference between burnout and overwhelm.
While many people use the terms burnout and overwhelm interchangeably, they are different.
Identifying if you are feeling burnt out or overwhelmed will help you figure out the root cause of why you are feeling the way you are and also help you know how to solve it.
I like to think of burnout and overwhelm as feelings on opposite poles of a spectrum.
What is burnout?
Burnout is a prolonged period of physical or emotional exhaustion. One article I read described burnout as being victimized for an extended period without appreciation or reward, and I often think about that description.
Burnout happens when you are working and producing a lot but not taking care of yourself or managing your mind.
In burnout, you are doing a lot but you are not taking care of your physical, mental, or emotional health. Being in burnout puts your well-being in jeopardy.
Burnout goes hand-in-hand with exhaustion.
What is overwhelm?
Overwhelm is a feeling that happens when you feel like you have too much not and not enough time to do everything. You feel overwhelmed when you feel like you are drowning in too much to do but you struggle to do any of it.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
When you are in burnout, you are producing. When you are overwhelmed, you are not producing as much as you need to or as much as you know you are capable of.
It can also happen when you don’t have a priority because everything is a priority.
If everything is important, then nothing is.
Typically, overwhelm is also present with indecision, confusion, and feeling stuck.
Causes of burnout and overwhelm
The two leading causes of burnout and overwhelm are not managing your mind and not planning effectively.
When you manage your mind, you:
- empower yourself to think supportive thoughts
- fuel yourself with useful or positive emotion
- make strong decisions
- can say no to others so that you can say yes to yourself
- have boundaries
- honor commitments you have made for self
- practice real self-care
- manage your stress
When you plan effectively, you:
- plan time for yourself to relax, rest, and play
- plan time to take care of yourself
- know ahead of time if you need to change a deadline or your workload
- know precisely what you are producing and when
- say yes to yourself and your dreams
How to Know If You Are Experiencing Burnout or Overwhelm
Ask yourself these questions to know if you are experiencing burnout or overwhelm.
Are you getting enough done?
If yes, you are more likely to be experiencing burnout. If not, it is more likely that you are experiencing overwhelm,
Have you created a plan that you follow to get your work done?
If yes, then you are probably burned out. If not, then you are probably overwhelmed.
Burnout and Overwhelm
It is essential to know if you are experiencing burnout or overwhelm because they require different solutions for you to feel better.
Once you have identified if you are experiencing overwhelm or if you are experiencing burnout, you can start taking steps to feel better.
