Managing Oneself

Managing Oneself

KEY POINTS:

Intro:

• If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession.

• It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and keep yourself engaged and productive.

• Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself:

o Strengths and weaknesses

o How you learn

o How you work with others

o What your values are

o Where you can make the greatest contribution

What are my strengths?

• We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.

• Feedback analysis: make a decision, write down expected outcome, and compare with actual results.

• Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.

• Work on improving strengths, not on improving weaknesses.

• Discover where your intellectual arrogance is disabling ignorance and overcome it.

• Remedy bad habits.

• Make plans and follow through on them.

• It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve first-rate performance to excellence.

How do I perform?

• Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees failure.

• How do I learn?

o Listening

o Reading

o Writing

o Taking notes

o Hands on

o Hearing themselves talk

• Do you act on this knowledge?

• Do I work well with others, or alone?

• What roll do I play in the relationship?

o Leader

o Subordinate

o Team member

o Coach

o Mentor

• Do I produce results as a decision maker or an advisor?

• Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?

• Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?

What are my Values?

• What kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?

• To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one’s own condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.

• The values don’t need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist.

• There is...