Mental Strength and a Self Development Plan – Part I

With the New Year just around the corner I wanted to leave 2010 with a 2 part series on creating a self development plan for personal success and peak personal performance.

First, I’d like to acknowledge ICA for their help and inspiration with this topic.  Next, I’d like to make a request of you to take sometime alone and seriously contemplate what you want in 2011.

Follow the guidelines in referenced in this post(s) and design your personal self development plan for 2011 so that you can achieve your personal success! 

We have all had experiences of undertaking a detailed course of study or attending a dynamic seminar, yet a year later, we would find it difficult to identify how this “learning” has impacted on our lives at all. In fact, in many workplaces, participation in learning activities such as workshops, seminars and conferences is seen as either a “reward for good behavior”, or remedial education for underperformance; a bit like being kept behind after class for not finishing your homework. Behind these attitudes is widespread dissatisfaction with the capacity of many learning activities to “stick”.

Kirkpatrick’s Model of Evaluation

One of the reasons organizations and individuals are frustrated with the outcomes of traditional learning activities, is that they have trouble measuring their effectiveness, especially when it comes to personal performance and personal success. We have all had the experience of filling in questionnaires or other evaluation instruments at the end of a workshop or other formal learning activity, and while these instruments have their place, they are often not indicators of the long-term effectiveness of learning.

Donald Kirkpatrick developed a model for evaluating the effectiveness of learning activities, which is widely used in the adult education and training fields. Kirkpatrick outlines four points or levels at which learning activities should be evaluated. These are:

1) Reaction – At this point learners outline what it is they expect to learn from a particular activity and then determine the extent to which the learning activity met these expectations. Most post-workshop evaluation forms follow this model of evaluation. This level of evaluation is important because it goes to the heart of the learner’s motivation to learn.

2) Learning – This level of evaluation is specifically concerned with the skills a person develops through the learning activity, including knowledge acquired or attitudes changed.

3) Behavior – This is a very similar principle to “transfer”. It is the ability of the person to apply the newly developed skills to a practical situation. This is the level that is rarely evaluated in formal, traditional learning activities.

4) Results – Individuals undertake any learning activity, including mental strength coaching, in order to achieve change in their lives. The ultimate test of any learning activity is therefore its capacity to achieve results for the client. Kirkpatrick believes that the ability to produce new achievements is the ultimate indicator of learning success.

Developing a Self Development Plan

The most effective tool in learning is a commitment. The act of writing down learning goals forces you to make a commitment. There are many ways that a learning journey can take you. The world is full of new ideas and information waiting to be explored.

However, a busy person in the information age has to be strategic. It would be nice to follow ideas and information in an endless stream and just see where they take us. We need to think carefully about where we want to direct our learning and what we want to get out of any new learning endeavor. A self development plan can help you to think through this.

A self development plan must always be flexible enough to allow for insights, new ideas and opportunities that can’t be planned in advance. When we begin our self development plan, we concentrate on the things that we “know we don’t know”, however along the journey we hit the territory of things that “we didn’t know we don’t know”, and we need to alter our course to take into account these new developments. However, the fact that a plan can change is not a reason for not planning at all. By mapping the new direction of the journey, we have a powerful tool for reflection on the way we learn and develop which we can apply when we take on a new learning challenge.

Taking Action  

With the New Year upon us, I strongly suggest creating a self development plan. Your plan should include information that you have gathered about yourself, any ideas or information that you have generated from your gathering. Then you create a plan and the action steps that you need to achieve your plan. There are many forms that a plan can take; it can include pictures, graphs and colors or it can be dot points and tables.

Many people work well within a structure that includes:

• A description of an end point – a goal;
• Some strategies to reach that end point;
• Some milestones, i.e. small points of achievement along the journey that can be used as indicators of success and opportunities for celebration;
• Timelines to measure the journey; and
• A reflection of your learning – evaluation.

The evaluation section of your plan could be broken into sections according to Kirkpatrick’s model.

Blogging as a Learning Tool for Reflection

Reflecting on our actions is a key stage of learning. The simple act of writing about the things that we have experienced and trying to draw life lessons from them can be incredibly powerful. For this reason, many successful people use journals to assist them with their learning. A blog has a number of features that make it a powerful tool for journaling.

Firstly, a blog is an excellent information manager. It can include links to other sites, graphs and images allowing you to keep an enormous range of ideas, thoughts and images together. An entire flow of information, data and ideas can be held together in the one place.

Secondly, a blog is interactive. Blogs can speak to each other. You can publish your blog publicly on the internet, market your blog web address, so that others can read and learn from your journey and you can learn from others. In addition to this, you can quote from other people’s blogs and they can quote from yours. If you do not wish to share your blog with others, you can keep it unpublished; however, powerful sharing of ideas, networking and dialoguing can occur in your blog.

Finally, as a powerful communication tool, a blog can be used to communicate with friends, mentors and clients to build your business. It is useful to become familiar with and comfortable with the technology for blogging so that you are ready to take your blog to the next level. You can orient yourself to blogging by reading other people’s blogs and by mapping your own learning journey using a blog.

Contemplation

• What is the first step you need to take to create a self development plan?
• What are the benefits of creating a self development plan?
• Are you committed to achieving these developments?

I’ll be discussing more about creating a self development plan in Part II.

My e-book, “Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior” can assist you tremendously in discovering and developing your own self development plan.  If you’d like to explore this further with personal attention,  request your Introductory Consultation.  

Let me know your thoughts about this in the comments below.