Site icon Irina Scarlat

From resolutions to a personal growth plan

Irina

Resolutions time of year is behind us now, with most goals being put away as we’re drawn in the regular whirlwind of our lives. Contrary to popular belief, resolutions aren’t inherently bad. I’ve written about that here. Still, they are constantly mocked and have become the topic of seasonal jokes. This is because most resolutions are never attained. Quite on the contrary, plenty of people will forget about them or completely give up on them before February comes. Of course, this has nothing to do with resolutions, but with how they’re set and the person that’s setting them.

I don’t believe in “New Year” Resolutions. I do believe though in the power of setting SMART goals and consistently following them through completion. And, while nothing changes overnight and it’s “new year, same you“, the time around NYE is actually a good time to think about our goals. Not because it marks the end of a calendar year and the beginning of new one, but because we all have more free time at hand during this time of year.

I’ve been setting resolutions for 12 years now. It’s been an iterative process that taught me how to set my right goals for the year ahead. For the past 6 years, I’ve been complementing the goal-setting process with a personal growth plan. This has brought significant improvements in my goal completion rate so I’m going to share my process here, in case it’s useful for anyone else. So here’s my 5-step process for building a personal growth plan.

Step 1: Resolutions. Set the right goals

You can call them resolutions, goals, KPIs, whatever works for you. Their naming doesn’t actually matter. What’s important is to stay away from the “make a wish” mindset. Leave the wishful thinking aside when going through the process. Setting the right goals for ourselves is as challenging as setting the goals for a business. So give yourself the time and mental space to actually do this right.

I always take myself out for a coffee and spend a couple of uninterrupted hours to think about what’s important for me and what I would like to accomplish in the year ahead. Over the past years, I noticed my goals revolve around the same topics and evolve year over year. For simplicity purposes, I divide the goals in categories:

I. Personal goals

Here I outline what I would like to achieve on a personal level. For me, this comes down to three things:

  1. Health. Living a healthier life, from exercising & nutrition to sleep & time for myself;
  2. Family. Spending quality time with my family. Not all time is made equal and more time doesn’t actually mean better time. As a result, I aim to have clear goals on spending quality time with my loved ones;
  3. Hobbies. I am an avid reader and a passionate traveller. By setting specific goals I make sure my hobbies don’t fall through the cracks and I keep them top-of-mind.

II. Professional goals

These are my objectives for the year ahead for my work & career. I divide them in three categories here as well:

  1. Work. These are exactly the KPIs I own at work, if I am part of a startup. Alternatively, these are related to what I want to do work-wise, independent of a full-time role: finding the next best thing in my career, starting a startup, raising money, advising x founders, etc.
  2. Learning. Learning is always part of my professional goals. I add here the programs / courses to take and business books I plan to read
  3. Writing. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. This is why I set writing goals (that I somehow manage to deprioritise consistently, year over year).

Bonus: Giving Back

A couple of years ago, I started practicing gratefulness. This helped me build emotional resilience and acknowledge how lucky we are for all the things that we have in our lives. Every single night, I do a gratefulness exercise with my son – we just state one thing we are grateful for that happened that day. Probably related to my NGO-background, having an impact is important for me, personally and professionally. This is why giving back and getting involved is not optional, and I always include it as part of my goals.

Giving back comes in many different shapes or forms. First, I always choose a couple of causes that I want to contribute to. Besides the donations, I look for opportunities to volunteer my time and get involved (this year I plan to take the kid with me). I am also keen on teaching / holding workshops / mentoring new generations of entrepreneurs and I always set goals related to this.

Set SMART Goals

One key thing that I’ve learnt in the goal-setting process was that goals have to be SMART. There’s plenty of content on how to set SMART goals – a really good article here from Attlassian. In short, your resolutions or goals need to be:

12 years ago, when I embarked on the “resolutions” journey, one of my personal goals was “Be happier”. One year later, I stared at it and I wasn’t able to decide whether I actually achieved it. While this can be a life principle or a wish, a goal should never look like that. It is not clear what exactly I wanted to achieve, there was no way to actually measure success. Since I couldn’t measure completion, it was not achievable. Not to talk about relevancy and timeliness. Now I know, back then I was quite confused.

To turn “Be happier” into a goal I should have asked myself what makes me happy and set a specific goal of doing the thing that makes me happy x times per week. While it’s ok to aim to be happier, being specific and intentional about it is what turns an unattainable wish into a realistic goal.

Step 2. Do a personal 360-review

Even when you’re setting resolutions right, this is just the beginning. Unfortunately, most people stop at the first step of the process. Self-awareness is a key skill to have both for setting goals and for accomplishing them. Being self-aware means understanding your strengths and improvement areas, as well as the drivers of your behaviour and attitude. Oftentimes, we see ourselves differently than how other people see us. Getting their feedback is essential to better understand where we stand. This is why I am a big advocate for doing a personal 360-review.

In business, 360-reviews are a performance management system that requires every employee to get feedback from multiple colleagues in the organisation (manager, direct reports, peers), as well as submit a self-evaluation. I was first exposed to the 360 review process at Uber and the feedback I got helped me grow, both personally and professionally. At Uber we used a simple framework to give & receive feedback – we called it T3/B3 (Top 3 – Strengths; Bottom 3 – Improvement areas). It’s a really powerful framework and I use it to date whenever I give feedback. Here is how I approach my personal 360.

  1. Self-assessment. When evaluating myself, I expand on the T3/B3 framework. The end goal of the process is to identify my strengths and my improvement areas. I separate hard skills from soft skills and I do a T3/B3 for each area. While it seems simple, this process actually takes time and requires a high degree of self-awareness. To come up with the end result, I look at the key achievements of the last period, as well as the misses, and think thoroughly about the strengths that helped me succeed, as well as the weaknesses that contributed to the failures.
  2. Ask for feedback. If I’ve gone through a 360-review process at work, half the work is done and I have a strong starting point. However, if not, I just openly ask for this feedback myself. Besides asking feedback from people I work with, I also talk to my partner and 3-5 close friends. I just casually ask them what they think are my strong points and where I could further improve. People that love us will be reluctant to give direct constructive feedback. I always explain the process I’m going through and emphasise how the constructive feedback helps the most, since it enables me to identify improvement areas and work to address them.
  3. Listen. Asking for feedback is not enough. I need to actually listen, without getting defensive. I might disagree with what I hear. However, I just take notes and make sure I don’t start explaining myself. Instead, I focus on asking questions to understand where the feedback is coming from. Worst thing one can do when receiving feedback is to start arguing with the person giving the feedback and explaining them why they are wrong.
  4. Analyse the feedback received. Once I’ve gathered the feedback, I thoroughly analyse it. In doing so, I go through the notes and look for variance between my self-assessment and the feedback received, trying to understand where is it coming from. For example, I discovered that people rate me as a much better communicator than I rate myself. The difference comes from the fact that I am quite strict when assessing myself, understanding where I could be versus where I am today. Another area where I saw a slight discrepancy was in the decision-making skills, where I rated myself higher than my colleagues. Thinking about this, I realised that I am very methodical in my decision-making process, but I somehow fail to share the process with my peers, hence not offering them enough visibility into my thought process (which gets us back to the communication part, where I rated myself lower).
  5. Finalize the 360. After weighing in both the feedback received and the self-assessment, I wrap up the 360. As mentioned earlier, I always identify the top 3 & bottom 3 hard skills, as well as the top 3 & bottom 3 soft skills.

Step 3. Decide what to work on

With goals now set and the personal 360-review done, it’s time to actually decide what are you going to work on. To make a thorough decision here, you need to connect your goals with your strengths and improvement areas. I always ask myself a straightforward question: What skills do I need to improve OR further leverage in order to reach my goals?

After going through the skillset – goals alignment, I decide which improvement areas to work on and which ones to just acknowledge and leave as they are. Prioritisation is key. We simply don’t have the time to work on all our improvement areas. Aiming to be perfect is not realistic, some of these improvement areas are deeply ingrained in our personalities / who we are and will remain our Achilles’ heel. Deciding what improvement areas NOT to work on is equally important to choosing those we decide to tackle. And the choice is a highly personal one, depending on the goals each of us wants to achieve.

One thing oftentimes overlooked is that it’s not only our improvement areas that need to be addressed, but also our strengths. Our superpowers have muscle-like behaviour: they need exercise to stay in shape. If we are really good at something, we need to keep practicing to maintain our strength and further leverage it to reach our goals. This is why I always include skills in the T3 part in the personal growth plan as well. For example, my superpowers are product marketing (hard skills) and problem solving (soft skill). Every single year, I make sure to keep learning / reading more in these areas.

Lots of people fall into the trap on working on their improvement areas only. However, in some instances, you will simply never get “good enough” in those areas. As a result, you have the option of working hard to become mediocre at something vs. investing the same amount of time to become world-class in what you already ace. I would choose the latter in the blink of an eye.

Choosing what to work on in your personal growth plan is a decision no one else can take for you. This choice is tough, but necessary to keep growing. From my experience so far, you need focus to actually develop a specific skillset – this is why I normally choose 3 things to work on throughout a year. A maximum of 5 could somehow be fit in a year, but never more. Otherwise, the choice can quickly become overwhelming and end up either being abandoned, or treated superficially.

Step 4. Decide how are you going to do it

Once I’ve decided what to work on for the year / months ahead, it’s important to actually outline how exactly I am going to do it. In doing so, I normally ask for advice from people that ace that particular skill or research online to understand how I can further build that skill. I am really specific in my intentions, outlining how I am going to do this:

If you’re not sure how to meet a particular learning goal in your personal development plan, don’t worry. First, you don’t need to outline every single thing you’re going to do right from the start. Start with the learning resources you know about and find experienced people in the topic to guide you and recommend you further resources. As you learn more about a particular topic, you will get better at researching online and choosing how to develop that particular skillset even further.

Step 5. Personal Growth Plan: wrap-up, review and iterate

All these, put together, are what I call a personal growth plan. In case it’s useful, here you find a link to a Google Docs template, including my T3/B3 approach, resolutions & personal growth plan.

Personal growth plan template

Review frequently & iterate

Irrespective of how well you translate your resolutions into a personal growth plan, this is and always will be a living document. So are our resolutions. This is because life happens, we change and hence it’s just normal for our goals and learning objectives to change as well. When I was going through the process once per year I oftentimes found myself starring at a screen with completely irrelevant goals for the person I was one year later (both personally and professionally). To avoid this, I always review my goals quarterly and my learning plan monthly. This enables me to iterate quickly, drop what is irrelevant and add new things to the list.

In the end, personal growth looks a lot like experimentation: we become better professionals and better human beings through a never-ending trial & error process. While the process of turning resolutions into a personal growth plan helped me, it might not be the right approach for you. I just wanted to give a sneak peek into my process, hoping it might be useful, in a version or another, to somebody. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you approach personal goal setting.

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