Otis Woodard

A Workable Strategy for Personal Development

Personal Development / by / Leave a Comment

Personal development — if it is to be effective — requires a strategy. A process. A way to get from here to there.

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” — W. Edwards Deming

In this article, my purpose is threefold. I will show you:

  1. What a workable strategy looks like.
  2. That a workable strategy includes peer support.
  3. Why you need a strategy.

Let’s do this…

Backdrop

I think in terms of structures and frameworks. That’s just how my mind works.

When I was young, I loved building things. I built a 14-foot sailboat in my mid-teens. I found a set of plans and bought them. That was my framework, my strategy, my process. In my mind, I saw three things. First, a stack of materials: lumber, fiberglass, fastenings, rope, pulleys, cleats, sails, cable, sails, etc. Second, these plans in my hand. Third, I saw me sailing that boat with friends and family. And so it was. I used that framework and I made it happen. I sailed with friends and family.

I spent years fumbling around in my personal development efforts. Lots of enthusiasm, little tangible results. Why? I lacked a framework. I had no workable plan.

I went to coaching school to learn a framework. That didn’t work out so well. The frameworks I was taught were either too obscure or too formulaic.

I guess I needed to write my own set of “plans” — to develop that framework — myself. It has taken me years. I’ve learned from the teachings, concepts, and frameworks of other people. I’ve aggregated what I’ve learned from others with what I’ve created myself. I’ve pulled it together into a coherent and complete system.

It’s not perfect. But it is workable. I hope it helps you take your personal development to the next level.

A Workable Strategy

1. Get Clear on What Personal Development Is (And Isn’t)

What: Gain a workable understanding of what personal development is. This includes seeing more clearly the human condition, the fundamental problem and the fundamental desire we all have in common, the journey from here to there, the significant price we must pay, and the benefits-beyond-measure of paying that price.

Why: The following two quotes say it all.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Lewis Carroll

Chance favors the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur

Resources:

Outcome: Primed for the journey!

2. Widen Your Aperture

What: See yourself more clearly. You, like me, have a problem. You don’t see yourself straightforwardly. Personality style assessments can help you expand your perception of yourself and can help you see what you do see more straightforwardly.

Why: Personal development hinges on having a clear, powerful change goal. A clear, powerful change goal hinges on seeing ourselves more straightforwardly than we have in the past.

Resources: I use and recommend the DISC + Values assessment, and the Enneagram assessment.

Outcome: A deeper, broader, more objective view of yourself… both your shortcomings and your strengths.

3. Identify Your Change Goal 

What: Clearly define what behavior you want to change as a result of your personal development efforts. Sounds simple, but everyone I’ve ever worked with struggles here. It also helps to get clear on what result(s) you want to see occur as a result of that behavior change.

Why: Without a clear change goal, your personal development efforts will tend to sprawl, be fragmented, and dissipate.

When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost — and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.” T.S. Eliot

Resources: I don’t have a great resource for you. I need to document my approach. But the Outcome below says it all. Fill in the blanks.

Outcome: A written, crystal-clear change goal.

  • “I am committed to getting better at ___________…
  • … in order to achieve this result: _______________.
  • This is incredibly important to me because _______________.

4. Amplify and Anchor Your Change Goal

What: Amplify and anchor your change goal by doing three things:

  1. Make your change goal crystal-clear — by listing specific, new behaviors and the situations in which you will be doing them.
  2. Do a gut check for motivation: On a 5 point scale of importance, this change will need to be a 4 or a 5. Otherwise, you won’t change.
  3. Validate your change goal with others: Do others see this as being important for you as you do? If not, you might be self-deceived. 

Why: These three steps make your change goal more real and easier to achieve. You want this.

Resources: None that I know of. In future articles here I will share how I guide clients through the above three steps.

Outcome: A powerful, compelling change goal that’s ready for action and inspiring to work towards!

5. See the System Driving Your Counterproductive Behavior

What: Learn why you haven’t been able to stop doing the behaviors that work against your change goal. The reason you haven’t achieved that change goal is because you do counterproductive behaviors that work against that change goal. Intellectually, you know you shouldn’t do those behaviors. But you can’t stop. And you can’t stop because there is a system driving that behavior.

Why: Sustainably changing a seemingly intractable behavior requires you to change the system that drives that behavior. Simply put, most people won’t change because they can’t change. You can’t change what you can’t observe.

Resources: Chapter 6, An Everyone Culture, by Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey.

Outcome: A workable understanding of the fears and assumptions driving the behavior that holds you back.

6. Rewrite the System

What: To rewrite the system, you must see it. To see it, you provoke it. To provoke it, you deny the behaviors it drives. In other words, you continually “don’t do” behaviors that are comfortable and natural for you to do. Which means you will be consistently leaving your comfort zone. You will be triggering the fear or anxiety you typically avoid to find out if that fear or anxiety guides you well. You will be testing the mental assumptions you make. Systematically doing this irons the distortions out of the underlying system, using your courage, your intention, and the power of your awareness. Your “code” becomes less “buggy.” You become more capable.

Why: This is the only way to change deep-seated, counterproductive behavior sustainably. You must modify the underlying system. This is not easy. It is not fast. It is sometimes messy. And it is also liberating.

Resources: Immunity to Change by Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey. Also, look for more posts here on this topic.

Outcome: Self-knowledge. The power to change. You, flourishing. (Words here are inadequate.)

7. Create a Workable Weekly Strategy to Do This

What: Make personal development part of the work you already do. Included it in the rituals you already have.

Why: You probably are not sitting on an excess of available time. So, make this a part of what you already do. This is where I see so many well-intentioned people come off the rails. They have in their mind this will take more time. It really doesn’t… if you stitch it in to what you already do. This takes intention, not time.

Resources: None that I’m aware of. More opportunities to write about here, right?

Outcome: Spending a little time thinking through this makes your personal development workable and therefore doable.

8. Tap the Power of Peer Support

What: Establish a relationship of radical candor and psychological safety with someone who will challenge you and support you.

Why: Because you cannot do this alone. Period. You can’t see into your own blind spots, and you believe the stories you tell yourself. Someone who both sees through your B.S. and cares enough about you not to support you in it is essential. Further, that underlying system fights back. You will screw up. And you need someone who will pick you up, dust you off, and point you back onto the horse that threw you.

You have to do it yourself, but you cannot do it alone.” — Anonymous

Resources: This will likely be the next course I develop — how to set up these peer support relationships. In the meantime, you might want to check out two books I have on my reading list, next in the queue:

Outcome: A personal development training partner and a relationship unlike probably any other you’ve had.

9. Expand Your Capacity to Change

What: Increase your skill at working with emotions — yours and others’. And broaden and deepen compassion and self-compassion.

Why: Skill with emotions, compassion, and self-compassion make personal development easier.

  • Skill with emotions: Changing that underlying system means you will encounter emotions, so you might as well get good at them. Also, your worst behaviors arise typically arise when you are “triggered” or “hijacked”. In short, it is hard to change when the mind is drunk on emotion.
  • Self-Compassion: This stuff is hard. and when you see yourself more clearly, shame and guilt can arise. Self-compassion is the antidote.
  • Compassion: You need it for three big reasons:
    1. Most of your suffering arises from thinking other people should be acting differently than they are. Compassion helps.
    2. As you do your work, you will realize you need to become better at working with the emotions of others. Compassion helps.
    3. Further, you will need to do a much better job making the people around you feel safe. Compassion helps.

It’s magic, I tell you.

Resources: All you need to get started is in my article right here. 

Outcome: A mind that is less encumbered by emotions + the capacity to keep your heart open when you need it most.

Why You Need a Strategy

By this point, I probably don’t need to convince you that you need a strategy. Having a good, workable strategy pretty much always a good thing, right?

Yet, I think you can only truly appreciate the strategy when you have a glimpse of what the strategy is aimed at. This strategy is aimed at providing a means to do something very profound. Something a lot of people wish they could do, but don’t even know how to start.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, here is a picture worth at least 2-3x that. I’m going to leave you with this picture, this diagram, and I’m going to leave you hanging. Until next week. Because next week I’ll tell you a real life story that happened last week.

Next week, this diagram and the real-life story I will tell you is going to bring this diagram and therefore the above strategy to life. Then, I think you can really understand the power of the strategy, what it is aimed at, and how it is applied to empower people just like you to truly change. (By the way, you can download a PDF of this diagram here.)

Wrapping It Up… Almost

I’ve just given you a framework born of decades of experience — in under 2,100 words. At some point, all aspects of it will be covered in articles here on this blog and via courses Sara and I offer. I hope from the bottom of my heart that this might save you a lot of time, frustration, missteps, and fumbling around in the dark. I hope it enables you to get started or re-started, today.

I have never seen a comprehensive framework like this. It is what I was looking for and never found. It is comprehensive. It is born of experience. It is founded in research. It works in real life.

It is my life’s work to bring this framework out fully to all people, everywhere, who are trying to find a way. And not only make it available to the hundreds of people I’m blessed to work with today so closely and so directly.

I hope you will join me next week… because we need to talk. Thanks for your time, attention, support, and comments. I appreciate you more than you can know.