In our Leadership Development Program this morning, I tried out some new content. We were talking about growth, growth mindset, growth plans, and career development, but as I prepared this week my heart snagged at the thought of presenting this so straightforwardly. Here’s a career vision, here’s a goal, here’s how to make it SMART, and on and on.
There needs to be room for more individuality, more nuance, more humanity in how we think about personal and professional development. So in addition to going talking about Carol Dweck’s work on the growth vs fixed mindset (which I love) and reviewing one format for developing a growth plan for yourself, I shared this Ted Talk: Why some of us don’t have one true calling.
I think we are allowed to be interested in a lot of things, to explore, to try, to change. I think we are allowed to be in stages of comfort rather than constant career ambition.
My definition of personal growth is this: that I’m working towards living in my values more and more. That’s my version of keep growing and that can mean a lot of things, but it doesn’t always have to be tied to career, title, compensation . . .
We are allowed to just be.
One of the program participants shared these two tweets with us that I thought also drove home the point:
We spent the back half of our discussion talking about our values instead, going through an exercise from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead where you identify your two most important values and think about what the behaviors look like when you’re living in those values . . . and what it looks like when you’re not.
It felt better than pretending we have everything all figured out. There’s just not a formula for this stuff.
With Love,
Natalie