A step-by-step approach to realizing your unlimited potential
- Are you a recent graduate looking to make your mark, but don’t know where to start?
- Maybe you want to return to college, finish your degree, but are worried about keeping everything in balance?
- Do you struggle to learn as effectively as you’d like? Are your learning speed and quality holding you back?
- Or maybe you just want to improve yourself, learn how to coach yourself, and become a strong self-grower?
As a soon-to-be or current professional in any field, your success depends on many behaviors, mindsets, skills, and knowledge. But more than that, you need to know how to learn, grow your ability to learn and coach yourself.
In our soon-to-be-published book, we present the 50 professional characteristics that you’ll need to reach your goals. You likely have strengths in many of the characteristics. But you can always improve. Our approach is to first survey the strength of any of the 35 risk factors that are the most common areas that impact your career. You’ll create a prioritized list of 6-12 risk factors to reduce over the next 6 to 12 months, each one involving strengthening 5 professional characteristics.
In just a month you’ll have strengthened 10 professional characteristics and capable to more powerfully live your life. In the end, you’ll have transformed yourself into a self-grower and strong professional.
What is a Self-Grower?
Professionals are Life-Long Learners who are focused, highly motivated, responsible and take ownership of their own learning process. They are committed to their success towards their life vision through hard work, persistence, and self-efficacy. They seek challenges to develop self-growth: take risks to get outside their comfort zone, embrace failures, seek feedback and use self-assessment. In their efforts, they prepare, engage, and collaborate.
They communicate, ask questions, think critically and write and share insights publicly. They effectively plan and prioritize to manage their time and resources and disciplined when working their plans. They approach each day positive and intellectually curious, and supportive of others. They apply their learning and expertise in new contexts by using higher order thinking to contextualize and generalize their knowledge to solve complex problems. They develop and grow without limit to realize their life vision and potential.
Life-Long Learner: they embrace and use learning to adapt; they take ownership for their learning by identifying its purpose, objectives, and performance criteria; they analyze information and models by asking critical questions, synthesize meaning, elevate understanding, and explore and apply this advanced understanding to multiple contexts; finally, they use meta-cognition to generalize this knowledge to any context.
Learning Processes: they study, analyze, and improve their use of methodologies for information processing, reading, writing, problem-solving, and reflecting; they work to improve their performance in these critical process areas.
Self-Grower Mindset: they develop a strong belief in their current capacity and with this build a positive and open-minded attitude towards increasing future capacity; with feedback from others, they consistently use self-assessment to improve their future performance potential.
Professional Mindset: they establish and document professional and life goals aligned with their life vision and consistently use resources to clarify expectations and understanding using effective inquiry questions.
Professional Strategies: they that start with effective work plans, assert themselves into the middle of opportunities, and through collaborating with others and hard work continue till the planned outcomes are validated.
Productive: they come prepared for each performance and organize, initiate action, and place themselves fully into the challenge; they manage time effectively and focus on what needs to happen.
Outside the comfort zone: they take risks, embrace failure as a frequent and productive road to success, leveraging these failures for growth, and with balance and wellness have the strength to persist until they achieve this success and growth; they self-challenge and operate ever more outside their comfort zone.
Grit: they adapt effectively to new situations, manage their frustrations and anxiety, manage their time productively, prioritize and do important things first, and when barriers arise that prevent progress, they ask for help.
Interpersonal Skills: they extensively network, partner with diverse people, perform team roles effectively, converse, listen actively and assert themselves publicly.
Professional Image: they follow their plans with discipline, self-motivate with a passion to make a difference, act with self-confidence, take responsibility, and take action to not simply succeed, but to exceed expectations.