Self Management Project MGT 494

1. Self Management Project MGT 494 Lecture-10

2. Recap • Self-Management Competencies and the Eight Steps to the Top • Step 1: Sort out your values. • Step 2: Organize your values into life dimensions. • Step 3: Write a vision statement.

3. Step 1: Sort out your values • A vision for life is constructed from the values that are important to us. That's why we begin with exercises that help identify those values. Self-management begins by deciding which activities and returns or payoffs give our lives value.

4. Organize Your Values into Life Dimensions (Step 2) • People experience a great deal of confusion and frustration in their lives in part because experience is a great deal like a picture puzzle without a completed picture for guidance. They have difficulty sorting out the pieces into the proper patterns (e.g., background images and foreground images).

5. Exercise • Categorized your most important personal and work-related values into several or all of the seven dimensions of a life • Be able to explain the relationships between the dimensions of their lives and how they interact (if at all) with one another • Some event currents flow parallel to one another (e.g., a volunteer activity and your job). • Some event currents interact (work and family relationships). • Some event currents are dependent on something else (e.g., your ability to possess the material things you want may depend on the income you earn).

6. Write a Vision Statement (Step 3) • In self-management course, the participants must complete a vision statement for themselves that encompasses all seven (or more) dimensions of their lives. • They can use any number of tools for writing a vision statement. • The sample Vision Statement illustrates a formal approach that describes several dimensions as distinct from one another. • Some people call this formal, linear method of writing vision statements too confining and prefer to think more globally and to write statements in a form of free association; for those people, a popular method called Eulogy: Writing a Vision Statement for Your Life gives them the freedom they need (as long as they cover all seven dimensions)

7. Today’s Lecture • Step 3: Write a vision statement • Sample Vision Statement • Step 4: Prioritize Your Life Dimensions

8. Sample Vision Statement • Career: I want to be successful at my life's work, in my career, in my job. I want to learn all I can about the world in which I live. • Community Relations: By living a moral, principled life, I want my life to set an example and be influential in my community. • Family: I want my life to be filled with love, me for others and others for me. I want a family (spouse and children, as well as parents and siblings) to hold and to hold me.

9. Sample Vision Statement • Financial: I want to earn enough money through regular income and investments to make me and my family comfortable and secure. • Material Goods: I want to house, clothe, and provide things for me and my family that are considered important to a "good life." • Personal Values: I want to live a moral, principled, physically fit life and be an influential model to my family and my coworkers. • Social Relations: I want friends whose lives I treasure and who treasure mine.

10. Prioritize Your Life Dimensions (Step 4) • Sorting our lives into dimensions adds an advantage for planning we wouldn't otherwise have: If we lay out the dimensions and the goals we want to achieve in them side by side, we can easily recognize where goals conflict with one another. • However, those conflicts don't demand that we eliminate one or another; rather, setting priorities permits us to achieve as many of the goals in the different dimensions as we can.

11. Explanation • People's goals bump up against each other and conflict when two or more life goals compete for immediate attention. Why does this happen? • Because people try to balance or juggle too many dimensions at one time. • Sometimes goal jugglers do that out of the mistaken belief that everything in their lives always has equal value. • However seriously we take all the dimensions of our lives and believe that they all require attention, we don't need to assign equal value to each of them at any one moment in our lives. • Sometimes we may find it important to focus more on one dimension than on others.

12. Example • Young couples, starting in a marriage or committed relationship, find themselves at odds because they haven't prioritized the dimensions they should attend to for themselves individually and the dimensions they need to consider as a couple.

13. Prioritizing Dimensions • Rank them in terms of: • their importance to you right now; • The importance you would like them to have five years from now; and • Their importance to you as you would like them to have twenty-five years from now. • These three separate rankings will allow you to emphasize one set of goals at one time and different sets of goals at other times, thus allowing for conflicts and resolutions without abandoning one or another.

14. Illustration • The illustration is from a young, single, recent college graduate who is looking at the dimensions of her life now, in five years, and in twenty-five years. • Notice the emphasis on Career and Financial. They definitely go together at this point in the person's life. • Likewise, Personal Values stay important and harmonize with all other values throughout the person's life. • Family, Community, and material Goods don't mean as much to her as does Social, which is another arrangement you might expect from her at this stage of her life

15. Illustration (cont..) • Look how the priorities change over time. In five years, Financial and Personal Values are still of equally high importance. • But now Family has joined this lofty priority, and discussion revealed that the person wanted to get married and start a family at this time. • Those three number one dimensions can work together very well. • Notice, however, that Career has dropped down a notch, probably because Family and Career tend to conflict at this stage. • At the same time, the dimension Material Goods has jumped several levels of importance, which is not at all uncommon among young couples. • Social also drops at this time, but look at the third column.

16. Illustration (cont..) • After twenty-five years, this person doesn't think that she will be as concerned about Career as she was earlier. • Family and Personal Values still top the list of priorities, but now Community has climbed to the number two slot, along with Financial. • Material Goods will not be as important to this person by then as it was twenty years earlier.

17. Be aware • Be aware that emphasizing one aspect of your life more than the others over a long period of time and in spite of life changes can create an untenable dissonance in your life. • That's why you want to look at the dimension's importance five years from now as well as right now. • You need to ask yourself if you should be as deeply engaged in, for example, Career activities five years from now as you are now. • If you think you should, consider the adjustments that you and the significant others in your life have to make to accommodate that emphasis. • Another example: What if you plan to have two children in the five-year period? • How should you rank the priority of Career at the end of that time? You may want to deemphasize Career and emphasize Family.

18. Summary • Step 3: Write a vision statement • Sample Vision Statement • Step 4: Prioritize Your Life Dimensions

19. Next Lecture • Goal Setting (Step 5) • Three Elements of Well-Formulated Goal Statements