I’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. Congratulations! We have arrived at the final step in innovative leadership development. In this post, we will cover the second set of reflection questions to strengthen your understanding of embedding innovation systematically into your lifestyle. My answers are in italics for you to use as a reference to further understand the questions.
Congratulations! This has been the final post for college students in the innovative leadership development series! Remember, innovative leadership and personal development are lifestyles. Once you have developed one skill/behavior to an ideal capacity, you must continue to focus on more areas to develop to strengthen your arsenal of skills as a person. Feel free to revisit my posts or purchase the Innovative Leadership Workbook for College Students. Good luck!
Photo credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. Congratulations! We have arrived at the final step in innovative leadership development. In this post, we will cover reflection questions part 1 to strengthen your understanding of embedding innovation systematically into your lifestyle. My answers are in italics for you to use as a reference to further understand the questions.
There will only be one more post for college students in the innovative leadership development series! In the next post, we will review the second half of the reflection questions.
Photo credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. Congratulations! We have arrived at the final step in innovative leadership development. In this post, we will begin creating a Personal Transformation Log. With this, we will know how to track our actual behaviors toward our goals, measure progress, and compare them to expected behaviors and progress. As always, my responses are in italics, which you can use to strengthen your understanding of the question. The next part of this post will give you real-world application suggestions.
Real World Application: Expect the Unexpected & Fail Fast
While it’s important to focus on what’s in front of you in the present, it’s also important to consider the future. As you progress on your current goals and you’re in a good rhythm, take a few moments occasionally to consider what goals you could set. Consider upcoming events, such as job hunting or graduate school programs. What kind of skills and behaviors would you like to develop by then? Another important thing is to take unpredictable events into account.
One thing guaranteed is that some completely unexpected and uncontrollable events will happen in your life, which could greatly impact your short- and long-term goals. Due to this, it may be worth considering strengthening your resilience and problem-solving skills/behaviors when setting goals in the future.
Remember, failure is natural, and no one is perfect. View mistakes and failure as an opportunity to learn. After all, the only true failure is failure to try. Remember to think like a scientist and use experiments or constant trial-and-error. We like to use the term “fail fast”, meaning the faster you figure out what does not work, the faster you can determine what does.
In the next post, we will answer reflection questions to systematically strengthen your understanding of embedding innovation.
Photo credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. In this post I will answer the second set of reflection questions involved with prepared to take action. As always, feel free to refer to my personal answers in italics to get a better sense of what we’re asking. I am answering these reflection questions to clarify my thoughts about my plan to overcome barriers and leverage enablers from my prior post.
This marks the end of the Take Action part of the innovative leadership development process. In the next post, we will learn how to embed innovation systematically and maintain the mindset of an innovative leader throughout your life.
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. In this post we will answer reflection questions so that we are thoroughly prepared to take action. As always, feel free to refer to my personal answers in italics to get a better sense of what we’re asking. I am answering these reflection questions to clarify my thoughts about my plan to overcome barriers and leverage enablers from my prior post.
This post contained the first half of the reflection questions for taking action. In the next post I will complete the reflection questions.
If you are interested in receiving Eric’s ongoing blog series or our other articles by email, please sign up in the box on the right labeled Get Email Updates From Us.
photo credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua
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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
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. In my last post, we analyzed in-depth our short-term goals to help reach our next career milestones and discovered effective time management techniques. Now, we will fine-tune our short-term goals by answering specific reflection questions. In accordance with the nature of innovative leadership, we not only consider how our personal development goals impact ourselves, but we also consider how they impact our organizations.
We have reached the end of the Plan Your Journey step. This is the third of the six processes of developing innovative leadership – you’re halfway there! As you can see in the graphic below, the next topic is Build Your Team & Communicate, in which we will create a group of mentors and partners to help us before we go all-out in the Take Action step.
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I’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog during my college internship at ILI. In the last post, we discussed identifying a skill/behavior that you would like to improve to help you reach your next career milestone, with the understanding that our long-term life goals comprise a series of short-term goals. In this post, you’ll identify the skill/behavior you’d like to improve upon and then create a plan outlining how the current state of that skill, future goal, daily routine/actions, deadline for completion, and a way to measure progress.
Your goal should be S.M.A.R.T.
We recommend that your goal be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (S.M.A.R.T.).
Specific: clearly defined. When goals are specific or clearly defined, it is easier to know when they are reached. Specify the goal by clarifying what is expected, why it is important, who is involved, and where it will happen.
For example, I want to increase my focus/productivity by 200%, independently, each month during internship/work hours because I can get twice as much work done and be better prepared for when I enter the workforce upon graduation.
Measurable: establish criteria for measuring the progress of each goal. This shows what and how much change we are expecting.
Focus/productivity will be measured in how many tasks I accomplish during work hours each day. Let’s say I complete two big tasks each day; I will eventually focus on limiting distractions/overthinking to complete four big tasks each day.
Attainable: identify the most important goals to you, and you begin to find ways to make them come true. You develop attitudes, abilities, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin to see opportunities you otherwise may not see as you realize the importance of such goals. “Attainable”, in this case, refers to how reasonable the goal is overall, regardless of your ability to do it.
Doubling daily productivity or reducing time to accomplish each task in one month is attainable for many people in my situation. Many interns can do that as they develop knowledge and skills.
Realistic: to be realistic, the goal has to be something you are personally willing and able to work toward. You are the one who determines when it is completed, so make sure it is something you can realistically accomplish. “Realistic”, in this case, differs from “attainable” because it specifies whether you can accomplish the goal. There may be something unique about you, making you better/worse at accomplishing a task than most people in your situation. If it is too easy, increase the difficulty or tighten the deadline. If too hard, decrease difficulty or push back the deadline, but only after you’ve tried it for a bit – don’t give up too easily!
Doubling daily productivity is realistic because I am increasing my knowledge and skill of my work at a higher rate than I could have ever anticipated.
Timely: goals that lack time frames also lack urgency. When setting the time frame, set an actual number or defined time, like “one month” or “one school year”. Don’t just say “soon”, “ASAP”, or “eventually”. Would you rather your professors tell you, “You have an exam soon!” or “You have your exam one week from today”?
“One month from today”is a defined time.
Ensure your goal is written down in a way that meets the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. Next, we will use the Development Planning Worksheet. This chart should be simple enough to make in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet. Follow my lead:
I highly recommend using a digital calendar with cloud capabilities and managing time well. This link will help you manage your time during the academic semester: http://howtostudyincollege.com/time/. While the link specifies making time for studying, it is still a great time management strategy and will help you find time for your goals.
Now you have a great sense of your short-term goals and your strategy to reach them, plus some potentially life-altering time management advice! In the next post, you will be provided reflection questions regarding the entire journey planning process. After that, you should have a very firm understanding of how to plan your journey as an innovative leader and outstanding college student.
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. I recently completed a series of assessments and the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. As usual, I like to finish each topic with some reflection questions. The “What do I believe” quadrant represents intentions, and “What do I do” represents actual behaviors. The “what do we believe” section refers to what our student organization, community, or major/department believes. The “How do we do this” section refers to the systems or processes of that organization, community, group, etc. In my answers, I am using the context of a competitive student organization, in which I am an emerging leader among students, and there are hired professionals at top management.
Next week, we will cover the third step in becoming successful as a college student and leader – planning your journey. Do as many of the assessments as you can so you have a full understanding of yourself, your strengths, and your situation while planning your journey.
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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my summer internship at ILI, a leadership and management consulting firm. I am entering my final fall semester at The Ohio State University, majoring in Strategic Communication. I like marketing and plan to attend business school in a few years. I’m also on the varsity fencing team at Ohio State.
This summer, I am starting a blog that helps students find their life purposes, plus a step-by-step guide on bringing this vision into reality. I am giving you information from a workbook written by a combination of college faculty and leadership development and executive coaching experts who make business executives very successful. This book will be published late in 2014. In this post, you will find your values. Throughout this blog, I will provide my answers to the exercises as an example. This is part three of the four-part Vision topic. My answers are in italics.
In this post, I’ll show you how to set a realistic career direction based on your vision. We discussed creating your vision and identifying your values in the last two posts. In the next post, I will answer some great reflection questions. It turns out reflection is a key part of this process.
Putting Vision into Action
Now that your vision is outlined, it’s important to put it into action. Consider your values and vision, as well as your skills. In this exercise, you will find ways to incorporate your passions into how you make a living. Also, think of ideas or topics that you find extremely interesting and are somehow involved in almost everything you do – school, work, social activities, entertainment media, etc.
Step 1: Identify your foundation.
What are you most passionate about?
Values: love, excellence, meaningful work
Respect
Order or being organized
Creativity
Doing things the right way and not cutting corners
Doing the right thing in general
Success/winning
I would be lying to myself if I didn’t put “food” on this list
Deep thinking
What are your economic needs, and what can you do to meet them?
Overall financial stability: enough to not be worried in case of some family emergency, such as one of my family members needing surgery.
I want to create sufficient funding for the NPO.
Somewhere between a modest upper-middle class lifestyle and the guy from ‘The Wolf of Wallstreet.’
Business strategy
Marketing/sales
Project management
Public speaking
What can you be great at?
Marketing/sales
Business strategy
Project management
Friend
Philanthropy/non-profit work
Teamwork
Public speaking
Step 2: Review and Identify Overlap.
Creativity and deep thinking are involved in all of the professional skills that I can be great at (my creativity led me to try marketing and strategy initially)
Excellence and success in my professional field(s) can create wealth
Doing the right thing and love overlap with philanthropy
Having a lot of money of my own can help fund my NPO
Meaningful work and philanthropy
Business strategy
Marketing/sales
Project management
Public speaking
Step 3: Harvest the ideas.
Based on overlaps, do you see anything that can be incorporated into what you do or how you work?
My passions for creativity, excellence, deep thought, and success, combined with economic needs/wants, tell me that I should pursue a career that involves marketing, business strategy, and/or project management.
I should work in companies and projects that I find meaningful, ethical, and beneficial to others.
Look at your answers carefully and consider as many ideas and overlaps as possible. Even if something you think is useless, writing it down anyway is good.
Next week, I will share my answers to key reflection questions. Building the reflection “muscle” is important as a leader. I will share my reflections for each step in the leadership development process.
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I’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. Congratulations! We have arrived at the final step in innovative leadership development. In this post, we will cover the second set of reflection questions to strengthen your understanding of embedding innovation systematically into your lifestyle. My answers are in italics for you to use as a reference to further understand the questions.
