Career Development Part 1

The entire performance based culture is tough, its not like a normal company where you can be guaranteed to go up a bit just by 'being'. If you don't raise the bar for yourself everytime, you'll never get promotions and you'll never get raises.
Its good and bad at the same time. Improving yourself is always something to be happy about, but lifting that bar will get harder each time.

I know personally I have a few issues that I have to work out. The first and most important one is to use my coach better. I've got this great resource thats sitting there and I've never used it beyond the basics. I've been classified as a DPH person for coaching purposes after I tried out a assessment form. That is directed, programmatic and holistic. Before you think this makes no sense and sounds like psychobabble, let me clear it up. A directed coach will teach you thinks by telling you how things are done, what you can do to improve yourself, give you feedback externally. By programmatic, it means you should meet regularly in order to discuss how you are going and how to improve yourself. Finally holistic means that I'm not interested on learning about just day to day skills from my coach, but more about the overall career development. So I'm going to have to have to raise this next time and get it organized. Its my responsibility after all.

Also at work I'm a 'yes' person and it means I'll say yes to something that I cannot promise without working like a dog, which of course leads me wanting to cause mayhem and chaos. So really I need to learn to say no. I can say no plenty of times at home, but at work, I'll do it if someone says to do something.

I was shown a nice diagram which I'll remember pretty well. It was three concentric circles. The center most one is your comfort zone, the middle ring is FEAR and the outer ring is growth. I'm one of those people who have a comfort zone and a thick ring of fear around it. But I'm slowly getting better at breaking through the fear barrier of late to get something done. But its hard, but thats what personal development is about right?