It was around forty years ago that I found Martin Rhodes’ book, “Personal Achievement”, in a library sale, and it’s been close by me ever since. That was my first encounter with self-improvement and it was a real inspiration. Well, now, I want to talk about some Personal Development techniques of my own, and show you how they can help improve your life.
I often use the expressions “Personal Achievement” and “Personal Development” too loosely. It’s sloppiness, but for my purposes, they usually mean the same thing.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I like to pull ideas from unrelated areas and build Personal Development messages from them. A while back, I mentioned my Protocol Model, in which I modified a few computer networking concepts. I’d like to begin explaining it here.
One of the basic principles of Personal Achievement is that you can achieve anything you want in life, if only you’ll work hard enough. It goes almost without saying, that hard work implies smart work. There’s no point working hard toward the wrong end. For that reason smart working always needs a plan.
I wanted to devise a model to help me plan and achieve personal development goals in a systematic way. I wanted a framework to guide me in asking the right questions. I figured, if I could get the questions right, then I’d be well on the way to building my implementation plan.
In creating this model, I looked for the common types of ideas I’d met in my personal achievement work. I came up with these:
- Occupational
- Recreational
- Creative
- Mental
- Physical
- Social
- Spiritual
The list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s always proved more than adequate for my purposes.
This is how it looked on paper:
Setting targets and achieving them would involve ideas from these areas. Any thoughts in one area could interact with those from one or more of the others. This is illustrated with links below, in what we call a fully connected mesh. You can trace a link from any one thought area to any other. These links are the paths over which the protocols (the rules) operate and they will be in the form of questions and answers.
For example, a spiritual question to the occupational area might be, “Is the sales copy I plan to use in my work legal, decent, honest and truthful?” Spiritual, in this model refers to the rules by which you live. So one person could give a valid answer, “Yes” to the question, while another would have to say “No”, because they live by different personal codes of conduct.
It’s useful at this point to give a name to these linked idea components. I thought long and hard about this, before settling for “Hubs”, because it’s simple.
The questions and answers between the hubs must be coordinated and the way to do that is through a supervisor, or controller, which happens to be you. You may have experienced your thoughts swirling around aimlessly at times, when suddenly you decide you have to take control. You may call it a light-bulb moment, or a eureka moment, or simply a pull-yourself-together moment. It means you have to get on top of the situation.
So the model now looks like this:
The power of this model is contained in the questions you’re forced to ask yourself in developing your plan. You can use it to build long-term or short-term goal plans by asking questions at the appropriate level. You can also sub-divide larger goals into smaller sub-goals, almost ad infinitum. In order to keep track of your plans and to communicate with the outside world, whether that is other people, a printer, the Internet, yourself via notes, or other goal plans – any interaction with this particular goal plan network takes place through the network’s Social Hub. You can think of each Social Hub as an Input/Output (I/O) unit or a communications port.
To be continued….
Terry