Welcome to The Inbox Coach, a monthly email to bring you a little bit of coaching to your inbox and help you to make time for your personal development. This month I’m looking at what it means to show up consistently for your career. 

If you are new to The Inbox Coach, then welcome. I hope that you find these Monday morning notes a chance to reflect on your career and what you want to prioritise. If you have been reading them for a while, then well done for showing up again to make time for your personal development. This month I’m exploring what it means to consistently prioritise your personal development and why this is beneficial to your longer-term success in your career, whatever you define that to be. 

The detail of the everyday 

I’ve talked a lot in this email series about how the big moments of our career are the ones that stand out, yet how we feel at work every day is what is going to determine whether or not we feel fulfilled. It is the same with our personal development. There will be times when we notice just how much we have achieved but for the most part the changes will be happening so slowly that it isn’t until we stop and look back at all we have done that we notice the change. It is also true of how we learn, there will be tangible moments when we are aware we are learning something new, such as attending a course, but for the most part we learn and get better by doing. If we want to maximise all the learning that goes on while we are doing our jobs, then we need to consistently be aware of what we are trying to do and the opportunities we have to support our growth. 

Little and often

I am a big believer in making your personal development something that you do a little bit at a time but frequently. Rather than seeing learning as a big piece of work that requires a clear hour or two to really make a difference, it is something that can be done in 10-15-minute chunks. Of course, there will be times when you want to get into a topic in some depth, attend a course or work with a coach, but for the rest of the time the little tasks or reflections can really add up.  If you spend 10 minutes a day working on your development over the course of a year it is the equivalent of five full working days of learning.

So why is consistently making time to think about your development so important? Firstly, we learn whilst we are working whether we notice it or not. By paying attention to what we want to work on, we can leverage those opportunities to learn without doing much extra work. Secondly, the more we pay attention to what we are working on, the more likely we are to spot opportunities that help us to achieve our goals. And finally, as I discussed last month, we are continuously changing as people and what we need or want from our career’s changes over time too. The more consistently we create a space to think about what we want, the more likely we are to notice when our needs change and we can adjust our work accordingly.

Consistently doing the work

The Inbox Coach is designed to help you to show up consistently for your own development. Having one topic per month allows you to go into some depth about an area that you might want to focus on, and the weekly nudge emails are a reminder to keep thinking about that topic and making time to do the reflections and actions. The cycle of reflection and action is an ongoing process, reflection leads to action which in turn leads to reflection, and so the cycle continues. Whilst it would be nice to think that we can show up to a course for an hour and learn all there is to know about a topic, in reality it is the hours of doing and reflecting on what worked well and what can be improved that adds up to making a significant change. If we show up consistently for that work, we are giving ourselves the best possible chance for success. 

Reflection

*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar

Consistently making time to prioritise your development means figuring out what works best for you. There isn’t an ideal timetable to follow or way of being consistent that I can teach you, but if you can work out what it looks like for you, then you will be creating the conditions to continually work on your career. To help you to figure out what consistently working on your development looks like think about the following questions:

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being never and 10 being like clockwork, how consistently do you make time to work on your personal development?

Where would you like to be on that scale?

When do you consistently show up for something in your work?

What have you put in place to do that?

What gets in the way of you consistently showing up to work on your development?

Write your answers down in your journal and spend some time thinking about what consistently making time for working on your career would look like.  

Action

Consistently showing up to work on your development requires you consciously think about what your development opportunities are, to carry them out and to also make time to reflect on how you are doing. 

Task

List out your top three development activities for 2021 and for each one write down the specific tasks that will help you to work towards these goals. Think about what you can do, if it can be broken down into 10 minute chunks and what you need to do to be ready to grab those 10 minutes when they come up. 

If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.

Inspiration 

“Where we spend our money is a real time vote for the kind of world we want to live in” - Nicole Antoinette 

Nicole Antoinette is “a writer, recovering self-help junkie, retreat & mastermind group facilitator, and host of the Real Talk Radio podcast.” I discovered her blog A Life Less Bullshit around 2014 and I’ve been a fan ever since. Over the last 7 years the work that Nicole has put out has been ever changing. She deleted her whole blog, absolutely all of it, in 2015, launched a brilliant podcast called Real Talk Radio and she continues to evolve and develop her work today, looking at new funding models and how what she does in her career aligns with her values.

Since I first found Nicole her work has changed immensely, but at the same time she has consistently been interested in understanding “the wonderful mess of being human”. Her work may have changed, but it has done so because she has listened to what she needed in each moment and adjusted her work to meet her needs, something she does in a very public way through her monthly reflections.

Showing up consistently for your career doesn’t mean that you have to do the same thing every week in the same way. It is about consistently making the time and space to listen to what is going on for you, what you need, what you desire and taking an action that moves you closer to those things.

You can read more about why I think Nicole is a brilliant Unconventional Mentor here and find out more about her and her work here. 

Consistently making time to work on your career is one of those things that in the moment might not feel like you are making progress, but if you trust the process and put in the work, over time you will see amazing results. I’ll be back next weeks with some practical tips to help you to consistently show up for your career 

See you then

Laura