Self Development: Weekly Check-ins

It is around this time of year that we start to think about making New Years resolutions that we often don’t keep up. We have good intentions of making life changes, but a lack of consistency let’s us down. I have started something that is keeping my improvement at work consultant. It’s is taken from the Agile project management framework called Scrum.

When working on a project you would have a period of work called a Sprint, usually a week or two, and at the end you would have a Retrospective where you discuss what went well and what you didn’t get done. I’ve been setting specific goals to improve how I work and then doing weekly Retrospectives and asking myself; What went well? What could have gone better? What are the goals for the next week?

The goals are usually linked to what could have gone better with new knowledge from what went well and they morph each week as a modify my actions until something works and then I stick to it. It is a simple exercise that takes ten minutes at the end of the week and five minutes to review as a reminder at the start of the next week. Try it and let me know in the comments how it goes.

Become A Problem Solver

I heard an interesting turn of phrase recently. Someone I was listening to online said ‘When we think of Mother Nature we could think that we have a responsibility to mother nature.’ This got me thinking about our role in the interconnected web of life and our responsibilities as co-creators of life on Earth.

We are both parent and child, so to speak. Our individual existence is both of these things and there is some responsibility in both them. This got me thinking about the ownership we choose or don’t choose to take in our lives; whether we choose to make things better or not.

Whether we like it or not, we are stewards of this world, we are taking care of the world that belongs to our grandchildren, as the saying goes. When life is seen through this point of view, we become solution focused, we become problem solvers.