Brian Walch walks through identifying resources you need for your goals: time, people, books, courses. He also covers anti-resources, the obstacles that block you: naysayers, life changes coming, self-doubt. Document each one and plan how to handle it.
Today I'm talking about the fourth of five elements in your personal development project plan. So it's covered, scope, timeframe and aspirations. And today we're going to talk a little bit about resources. What are the things that are going to help propel you forward and what are the things that are going to hold you back from accomplishing your goals, your dreams and your aspirations. So when you think about resources, you want to first think about how much time you're going to spend on this personal development initiative. Whether it's 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, three hours a week, whatever time you're going to allocate, make sure you identify where will that time come from? Where are you going to take that time from to invest in this new initiative? The next thing is to list out the people that are going to help you. This may include your peers, managers, friends. If you are working with a coach, it will include the coach. Anybody that you think is going to help be important for you to move forward on this initiative. And as you think about them, you'll also want to think about how do you need to communicate with them. And then you also want to make sure to identify are there any dependencies, meaning people that you are dependent on to achieve your objectives. If you can limit these, that's ideal, but if you can't, you want to make sure to identify them. And then the last thing is just any books or other resources, courses, anything like that, that is considered something you need to move forward on this project. The second part of this section is what I call anti resources. So these are the things that are going to hold you back from making progress. The first one you want to think about is the naysayers. You know, we all kind of have people like that that we go and tell them about some big plan we have and they instantly come up with things that are going to go wrong or things we got to think of. They kind of take the wind out of our sails. You want to make sure to identify those and be realistic. Oftentimes these people are people that are very close to us, that we love and it's not that that they're bad intentioned, but by identifying we may want to think about when do we tell them about our plans or what do we share with them. Maybe we don't want to share things too early in the process so that we lose some of our enthusiasm, things like that. So those are the naysayers. The other anti resource you want to think about is any life changes coming up. If you're having another child come into the house or you're having a big life change in the middle of this project. You will want to identify that here in your anti resources. And then last thing, maybe there's others, but the last thing to think about is any doubt, like self doubt or limiting beliefs that you know are going to hinder your progress toward your dreams. Now these anti resources are not reasons for you not to move forward. They're not excuses for why you can't move forward. But in project management we call this a risk register. So we identify risks and we identify mitigation plans. And this is the same thing you're doing. These are potential risks, potential obstacles. But you are going to identify a way that you're going to overcome those obstacles. That's the resources section. Now we've got one more section which is coming tomorrow, so stay tuned for that and I'll see you then.
Episode 116: Guest Brian Walch - The 3 Stages of Career Growth: What Engineers Need and Managers ...
