Breaking the rut!

When I started my career in technical support ten years back, it was certainly a rewarding experience. Each day I had a new challenge awaiting me and being able to resolve an issue was certainly satisfying. However, I knew one day my time will come that I need to move away from the technical support role. Simply because I needed to keep growing and taking on more challenges. Now, ten plus years after, that reality has caught up.

My ambitions are still the same. However, the main challenge I had was the unclear path ahead of me. To reach this ambition, I needed to effectively map my five-to-ten-year future to reach my goal. Establishing this was particularly difficult and tricky and despite trying many approaches myself, I still found myself lost.

Have you ever been in a similar position?

Upon discussing with few colleagues in the industry, it was clear that this is a common phenomenon and certainly a pain point most of us in this stage of our career would face. The unknown of how to bridge the gap between where we are now with what we need to do to reach our final goal.

It is at this moment in time that I reached out to Niroshan Madampitige for some guidance on how I could map my future. After some mentoring sessions with Niroshan, I was able to understand how I can set the foundations for the next five to ten years to reach my end goal.

And yes, I’ve summarized my journey down for you!

It starts with the mind

First and foremost; Mindset!

Stephen Curry, the American professional basketball player who is arguably the greatest shooter in NBA history once said “Success is not an accident, success is actually a choice” A choice that you need to make in your mind and keep at it.

Before you embark on anything, having the correct mindset is key. And in my case, having a growth mindset is imperative to keep learning new subject matter and also most importantly, learning from my own mistakes.

The mindset that I want to achieve something in life and consciously putting all my efforts into achieving it was the beginning of the journey.

Vision

Like any organization, it is imperative to nail down the vision. Although I had a goal where I wanted to be in five to ten years, it was clear that I needed a better vision; the why factor and I needed to cement it down for me to proceed on the next set of steps to build my future path. After many hours of self-thought and contemplation, I could pin down my vision, what matters to me most, my core values, what I enjoy doing most, my top brand attributes and my motivated skills. These were points that I never knew I needed, but once I had them, it clarified my thinking and made sure I could focus on what I needed to do.

For this article, let’s assume my vision is to become a successful corporate leader.

Goal setting

Ever heard of OKRs? By definition, it is objective and key results, and it is a collaborative goal-setting tool that not only defines the goal but also the key results expected from these goals, thus giving me focus on what I need to achieve. OKRs helped me to stretch my goals and helped me plan on how I would reach them in a time-boxed manner and provided me with a lot of clarity on what my goals are, the key results and how they eventually tie up to my vision.

Setting OKRs in a time-boxed manner starting from one year and breaking them down to three months, one month, one week and eventually, daily, resonates with the human mind by breaking down larger goals into smaller chunks which allow optimum focus on what needs to be achieved.

For me to reach my vision, an important aspect was to read many books. Ideally, my one-year OKR was to read four subject matter books. That then broke down to a three-month OKR to read one subject matter book and thereon trickled down to reading 10 pages of the selected book daily.

Understanding the value proposition

The clarity generated by setting my clear vision and timeboxed goals then led me to understand my value propositions, i.e., how my strengths, skills, and accomplishments can cater to a role in an organization, how I can relieve any pain the organization has and how I can create any gain for an organization. Knowing my vision, core values etc. helped me generate my value proposition. Thus, the value proposition allowed me to improve my focus and understand what I can do for an organization as an individual.

Action

A plan without action is not a plan. It’s a speech. — T Boone Pickens

Now that I knew where I needed to head, it was time for me to put everything I’ve planned into action. No plan is worthwhile if they do not execute it. This is an area I struggled with trying to juggle many hats in my life. But I needed to keep strengthening my mindset and break bad habit patterns such as procrastination. At this point, I also gradually started understanding an execution framework, which is the PDCA cycle.

The PDCA model is simply to Plan, Do, Check and Act, so you plan your execution, act on it, check the results and make any adjustments and then adapt the change and execute. This framework made sure I was constantly adapting to the changing environments and thus achieving the plans that I have set to meet my goals effectively.

Even though I had an execution framework in place, I needed more clarity on a day-to-day basis on how I would achieve the plans I have set to meet my goals. This is where I was introduced to the personal Kanban board! It is exactly like the agile Kanban board, but the only difference being, it is for yourself.

The personal Kanban board categorized the swimlanes based on the duration of such as one year, six months, three months, one month, one week and today which neatly broke down the number of pages I needed to read over the defined period. This visualization helped me focus on reading daily, which eventually tied up to how I achieve my OKR. However, life does throw many curve balls at you and this is when I kept adjusting my OKRs and the execution framework so that I adapt to changes.

Long story short

The mixture of these different frameworks and tools introduced by Niroshan helped me build out my own robust yet flexible framework to help me achieve my goals. Starting with the correct mindset is imperative. Without the correct mindset, there is no moving forward. The vision statement helped me focus on what matters to me the most, and the value proposition helped me understand the values I can bring to an organization. The OKRs helped me define my goals for a period and the key results I need to meet from these goals related to my vision and my value proposition. The PDCA cycle helped me understand the necessity of constantly acting and adapting my plans related to my goals, and the personal Kanban board helped me visualize what I need to do daily.