Take Action to Develop as a Leader – Eric’s Story
I’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog during my college internship at ILI. In this post, we will take the next step in the innovative leadership development process: taking action. This post will discuss how to start effectively and mitigate any potential barriers.
Start Effectively
First, you must believe you can accomplish your short-term milestones. If you’ve been closely following the previous posts and participating in the exercises, and you’re serious about chasing your life goals, then you are more than capable of accomplishing these short-term milestones. You may seem intimidated and overwhelmed, but that’s what you want. If you’re not exiting your comfort zone, you’re not growing.
Secondly, this process will not only take you out of your comfort zone but will require some consistent commitment. If you must, do not start out too extreme. Take it slow in the beginning, familiarize yourself with the routine, and gradually push yourself to greater limits.
Overcoming Barriers
Most importantly, you’ll need to allow yourself some flexibility in your plan because you will likely face obstacles that may require you to modify your routine temporarily. Below is a worksheet to help you overcome your barriers. Feel free to refer to my answers to see how to answer each space. The goal I’m referring to is how I want to increase my productivity with work.
| Barrier Action Planning Worksheet | ||||
| Category | Barrier | Impact of Barrier | How to Remove or Work Around | Support I Need to Remove or Work Around This Barrier |
| In my thinking | I over-analyze small details, which take me on tangents about unrelated things. | It distracts me, removing my focus from the actual task, and I think about something completely irrelevant. | Maintain perspective on the overall goal of certain tasks to better understand the functions behind the smaller details, requiring less thought later on. | Personal support to hold me accountable each day. |
| In my behavior | I try to multi-task way too much. | This impedes my productivity. | Focus on one task at a time, do it right the first time, and practice “essentialism.” | Personal support, casually reminding each other about essentialism. |
| In our beliefs | We depend on third parties to do their part of a task too often. | This slows us down because we wait for them to finish. | Rely less on external sources’ work and consider doing their part by ourselves. | Professional partnership support to find out what we can do without a third party. |
| In how we do things | We multi-task as a group. | It impedes productivity. | We are reminding each other to focus fully on the tasks at hand. | Remember that I must also focus and ask others to do the same. |
Real World Application: Create a Barrier Log
Review your responses for the Barrier Action Planning Worksheet and create a spreadsheet document. Label the first column “Barrier”. Move one column to the right, and label the next five columns, from left to right, “Attempt #1”, “Attempt #2”, and so on. In the column labeled “Attempt #1”, write how you plan to overcome the corresponding barrier, perhaps using the response you put for the Barrier Action Planning Worksheet. If you fail on the first attempt, write a new or refined way to overcome that barrier, plus what you did wrong in the previous attempt in the Attempt #2 section, and continue this process until you eventually overcome the barrier. On the attempt where you finally succeed, highlight that box in green. As new barriers rise, add them to the log; however, after you complete a barrier, it is critical that you keep it on the log and do not delete it.
This barrier log will be useful because you can track what did and did not work to overcome a barrier. You will likely come across barriers similar to previous ones, so knowing what worked (and what didn’t) in advance makes the barrier easy to overcome. As time passes, and you begin to see a long list of old barriers with green boxes, signifying success, your confidence in overcoming barriers will increase. It may be grueling to add more attempts because you keep failing but understand that only true failure is failure to try.
Feel free to include barriers outside the leadership development process, such as academic, social, and even health barriers. Save this document in a cloud storage service for both safety and convenience. Update it regularly. Also, if one of your mentors from the Build Your Team section is an “equal” or someone in the same situation as you, have that person make a barrier log and share logs with each other online or during meetings.
In the next post, we will answer reflection questions to strengthen our understanding of how we’ll take action.
Photo Credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua