2006 is here! I hope that it will be a year in which you will find meaning, purpose and fulfilment in your work and I’d like to part of your journey. Featuring in this month’s newsletter:

• Achieving Success in 2006
  
• Work/Family Balance – John’s Story
  
• Professional Development – More than Skills and Techniques
  
• What’s Happening Around?

I want to share in your professional development this year beginning with this newsletter. Making a commitment to our professional development is an important, almost essential, way of developing and maintaining passion and enthusiasm for what we do. Having some notional idea of where we want to go, roaming around our heads, is not good enough. We need to actually do some reflecting on where we want to go professionally in 2006, and develop a plan for how to get there. When we have done that we are in a position to approach our manager or supervisor and see what support or opportunities our organisation or company can offer us in making it all happen.

This newsletter wants to initiate the process of reflection for you. I also want the help of my readers to develop some professional development “programs”. I want your ideas, thoughts and even the stories of your struggle to get the type of professional development you want. Knowing how busy you all are, I’ve even offered an incentive of a chance in a draw of a $40 gift voucher to all who respond.

I value your feed-back and comments so keep them flowing!

Maree Harris

ACHIEVING SUCCESS IN 2006

A new year brings with it expectations, hopes and dreams. It also hopefully brings renewed commitment to keep in focus what is truly important to us. But we also need it to bring the energy, enthusiasm and passion to make those expectations, hopes and dreams reality.

So the beginning of a new year is a time when setting “goals” is often the topic of conversation. So here are a few tips.

1. Make sure the goals you set are YOUR goals, not someone else’s. If you find yourself saying: “I should…I ought to…I have to…I must…” , then it is likely that the goal is not yours. Ask yourself: “Who said, I should, must, ought to, have to?”. Whose expectations am I trying to meet? Saying “I want to……in 2006” is more likely to be what you want to achieve.
   
2. Your goals need to meet the needs of the whole YOU – the professional YOU, the family and friend YOU and the individual YOU.
   
3. Don’t set too many goals, or ones that are too demanding or unrealistic, because that sets you up for failure rather than success. Reflect on what is most important for you and what will make the biggest difference in your life, both personally and professionally. Break the big goals down into small steps that make them achievable before the end of the year.
   
4. Think about the “being” and the “doing” part of the goal. Sometimes “being” a certain way stops us achieving the “doing” part. Sometimes too much focus on the “doing” and nothing much on the “being” finds satisfaction avoiding us. Maybe I need to change the way I act or behave to achieve what is really important to me. Sometimes we have to seem to lose to actually win!
   
5. Draw up a 3, 4 or 6 month plan for yourself. As well as keeping it on your computer, keep a hard copy on your desk.
   
   

   Goal	Process	Timeline	Achieved
   Write down your Goals.	What you are going to do to achieve it? Make them achievable steps.	Commit to a time whereby you will aim to achieve each goal or step.	Tick when achieved or stick in a gold star!

   
   Review your plan every week. Is it taking you where you want to go? Make it a “living plan”. Don’t set it in concrete. Change it, add to it, but be honest about why you are changing it. Change it to do or be something more, not to cop out and do and be something less!
   
6. Reward yourself when you achieve a goal. Celebrate the achievement, giving it importance because that motivates and empowers you to take on your other goals with the same passion and enthusiasm. In fact, make one of your goals that you will focus on your achievements, not on your failures or inadequacies. Get yourself the type of note-book that looks as if it will do justice to your achievements – maybe it will be leather or have a funky design or a “painting” by a famous artist on the cover. Everyday write down in it what you achieved that day and what you can be grateful for that day. Consistently doing this will change your life, especially when you read back over it on the “bad” days. Don’t ignore the failures and inadequacies. Reflect on them but proactively move on. Make every lemon into lemonade, and add a dash of vodka!
   
7. Reflect on what has stopped you achieving your goals in the past. Is it time, the inability to be consistent, the way you handle your emotions, your lack of assertiveness in following through, or what? When you’ve discovered that, make it one of your goals to change that in 2006. That will need a number of steps!

WORK/FAMILY BALANCE – JOHN’S STORY

John had also always worked long hours as CEO of his organisation. In fact he had very little to do with his two boys except for the fortnight family holiday they went on each year. They were now 13 and 15 years old. His wife constantly told him what he was missing out on, and that he would regret it in time. He always promised to do something about it, but never did, until his 15 year old was suspended from school for using drugs and being aggressive. That's when John came to see me.

Talking through his situation, the pressures of work and family on him, and what he wanted for both, we came up with a way that John could actually pick his two boys up from school twice a week and spend three hours with them supporting them in their after-school sport. He did this without any negative affects on his work. Quite the opposite the impact was very positive. What began with me as a very desperate contact for John ended as very exciting for him.

There are many different solutions to every situation. This was what worked for John. He could have decided to continue seeing me, to remain focussed and committed to this new direction he had given his life and to maintaining the work/family balance that he was valuing so much. But, he didn’t need to. Being able to have an objective outsider help him focus what was important to him and work through how he could make it happen, he was very well able to do it himself.

Two months later John did return to see me, but not for himself. Rather, he was so affected by what had happened for him, without his work suffering which he had feared, that he wanted to talk through what he might be able to do in his workplace to create better work/family balance for all his staff.

So, if you experience being trapped in a situation at work and cannot see a way out, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one, just that you cannot see it. This is where my expertise lies – in helping people to see more clearly ways to focus and enhance their lives, and then empowering them to take the action they need to free themselves to be all they want to be. This process, whether it be by coaching, mentoring or professional supervision, is as much professional and career development as is gaining a qualification or going to another conference.

All the work we do at People Empowered is confidential. This story has been produced with permission, and names and minor details have been changed to protect the identity of the manager and the organisations.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT – MORE THAN SKILLS AND TECHNIQUES

Whether we are the CEO of a big company, a supervisor on the floor of a manufacturing company, a doctor, teacher or lawyer, a human resource manager, a sales assistant or a receptionist, we all need to be able to effectively communicate with employees, customers and clients to produce positive and desired outcomes while maintaining engagement, in what are often challenging circumstances.

“I think I need to do a counselling course”, one of these people said to me recently. Yet when we look at counselling courses, they are mostly designed for people who want to make a career out of counselling. They are often specialised in their scope –marriage and relationships, drugs and alcohol, family, gambling, adolescents and so on. They are heavily laden with theory that is not particularly relevant to the type of interaction that the people above have with their employees, clients and customers on a daily basis. While people in organisations and companies would be experiencing all these things, it is often inappropriate for them to be dealt with “in-house” because they pose a potential conflict in terms of roles, and often demand a level of expertise that “in-house” professionals do not have. They need to be referred out. That sensitive process that leads to their identification as a problem, and to getting an employee to seek help in addressing it, however, does belong “in-house”. Many people do not have the skills required to do this in a way that produces the desired outcomes because this level of skill development was not part of their original professional training.

What is needed is a much broader process of professional development and training that develops the capabilities of managers and employees to address the inter- and intra-personal interactions within their companies and organisations today.

• How do I communicate with a stressed employee, on the verge of going off on stress leave, who sees me as a cause of his stress?
  
• How do I, as a teacher, maintain my integrity and professionalism, when faced with aggressive and bullying parents?
  
• Or what do I do about the complexity of concerns my young adult students bring to me, because they don’t trust counsellors, which I am not qualified, or have time, to deal with?
  
• What about the receptionist – seen by some to be at the bottom of the organisational ladder – yet, being the first point of contact for people with the organisation, who carries its reputation in the way she/he handles distressed, demanding or angry clients and customers?
  
• As a middle manager, how do I get my employees behind an unpopular new company process, about which I have doubts myself?
  
• And then there is the CEO about to launch considerable change within the company. How does she/he communicate this to his/her employees to gain their support and engagement – and what sort of communication process needs to be continued to maintain it?

In an article in HR Monthly in December 2005/January 2006 issue, Glenn Martin calls for a new model of professional development that prepares professionals for the ever increasing complexity of issues they face in their work. What he calls the “straight line” learning – that technical information we have to know to do our job well – is relatively easy to communicate. It is what he calls the “curves” – those less well-defined processes that engage problem posing and problem setting – that pose the most challenging areas for professional development today. My PhD was about the same issue. I made a distinction between “training” which I saw to be about the “straight lines” and “professional development” which I saw as being about the “curves”.

If we are going to be able to develop the abilities of people to handle the “curves”, and we must, then not only do we have to give attention to determining what the “curves” are in our particular professional area, but also to what we need to do about navigating them. Most importantly, is the “how” of it all, because we can’t develop people’s capabilities in this area by bringing in experts to tell them how it is done, by lecturing them from a podium or by developing an on-line distance education program. What is needed is hands-on professional development that requires a much more dynamic and interactive process. It also requires learning spaces that are different to the traditional ones used for professional development.

I am developing some professional development “programs” for various professional groupings around these issues. While I have many ideas myself, I would like the help of my readers.

EMAIL ME AND TELL ME WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE IN A COURSE THAT ADDRESSES THE “CURVES” IN YOUR PROFESSIONAL AREA. WHAT ARE THE COMPLEXITIES OF THE INTER- AND INTRA-PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS YOU HAVE PERSONALLY EXPERIENCED? WHAT IS IT THAT YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING IN YOUR WORK AND FOR WHICH THERE SEEMS TO BE NO ANSWERS, OR NO ONE TO WHOM YOU CAN EVEN ASK YOUR QUESTIONS?

Everyone who responds before 28th February, 2006 will go into a draw for a $40.00 gift voucher of your choice. All responses will confidentially remain with me.

WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND?

DO YOU WANT TO SET UP A WEB-SITE, OR FIND OUT ABOUT EMAIL MARKETING AND PROMOTION OF YOUR ORGANISATION OR COMPANY?

Melissa Norfolk Web Design in Greensborough, Victoria, is the place to go. They are responsible for my web-site and email newsletter. They are a great company to work with and don’t worry if you don’t live in Melbourne, because they can work with you from wherever you are. They also hold training courses in a wide range of areas and in language that is non-technological and easy to understand. Get on their mailing list, find out about what they can offer you, by phoning them on 03 9432 4423 or by email at enquiries@melissanorfolk.net.au.

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT SPEED NETWORKING?

It’s a new speedy way of making contacts and building your networks. If you want to find out more, Ayda Sabri and Amanda Woollard’s company Speed Networking is the place to go. Tuesday, 28th February, 2006, they are holding a speed networking event at the Park View Hotel in St. Kilda. For more information, go to their web-site – www.speednetworking.com.au.

OASES – GRADUATE SCHOOL, COMMUNITY LEARNING AND RESEARCH CENTRE – a joint initiative of the Augustine Centre and the Borderlands Co-operative in Hawthorn, Victoria.

OASES – organic, aesthetic, social, ecological, spiritual – is the creation of a group of passionate people committed to developing new and innovative approaches to education and change. Its Graduate Program in Integrative and Transformative Studies commences in 2006 with accreditation pending. For further information and details of its current programs, go to the web-site: www.oases.org.au or phone 03 9819 3502.

Copyright © People Empowered-Maree Harris 2006
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