🌱 Choose One Way to Grow This Year

Ritual 02: Strategies and Inspiration for your career and life

Feb 17, 2023

There’s no syllabus for the world of work and life. When it’s time for growth and development, we often need to design our learning journeys. However, there’s so much to choose from — it’s like being a student in an intellectual candy store with courses, coaching, certificates and more! Consider prioritizing one way to learn this year.

Why focus on just one?

Here’s what Sabina Nawaz advises in this Harvard Business Review article “To Achieve Big Goals, Start with Small Habits:”

Big goals are more burdensome than they are motivational; they require daunting effort to accomplish and sustain in our busy lives…It’s great to dream big, but the way to achieve big is to start small — through micro habits. Micro habits are small components of a larger habit.

How do you choose one way to grow?

In this article, I share strategies for selecting, focusing and achieving that goal. There’s also inspiration with examples from several leaders featured on The Switchboard and ideas I’ve come across in my search.

If you’ve already identified your focus area for growth this year and feel comfortable sharing, please comment below — this community would be honored to cheer for you along the way.

🎨 How: Strategies for Success

❓#1 Talk to Yourself

To select your area of focus, ask yourself questions to determine what you’d like to prioritize. Here are a few questions to guide your reflection:

What’s one new skill I want to learn?
What’s one past hobby I would like to pick back up?
What brings me joy, energy or motivation?
How do I want to feel at the end of this year?

📅 #2 Schedule it on your Calendar

Make your idea real by setting the time aside to focus on it. Take this appointment as seriously as you would a coffee with a friend or meeting with a colleague. Find the frequency that works for you and make it recurring.

🎐#3 Turn Idea into Ritual

To become a ritual, make it special, be intentional and repeat it. Commit to your way of tracking and reflecting in order to succeed and have a space for tracking your progress. Here’s guidance from Morgan Baden:

Sometimes it feels like time flies by in a haze of work and family and life, and I've found that spending a few minutes each day truly thinking about my personal and professional goals and dreams and then building plans for them into my day-to-day routines helps me feel like I'm actively designing my life rather than at its mercy. I actually use a paper planner that encourages frequent goal-setting and look-backs, and it's been hugely beneficial for me.

🎥 #4 Believe It’s Possible

Your mindset can make it real. Here are the ways that Julie Inouye builds this practice into her life:

The power of manifesting is real, and arguably even more important when there's uncertainty. I do this in two ways, first by envisioning specific experiences I hope to make real for myself and my family (Japan, here we come!). I also think about "how" I want to manifest these experiences, such as "living vibrantly" and "moving with confidence," as a way to guide my decisions and actions throughout the year. This simple practice has allowed me to stay focused and unapologetic about prioritizing my growth journey.

🍭 #5 Celebrate with Rewards

As you make progress, find tiny ways to celebrate. Tiny moments can be magical just like the Tiny Doors around Atlanta that have captured the imagination of the city.

When you reach a mini-milestone, post on LinkedIn to share a goal update with your network, tell a friend about your progress or treat yourself to a cup of tea or coffee from a local shop.

📷: Tiny Doors ATL in Grant Park | Atlanta, Georgia

✏️ Our Growth Focus Commitments

Here’s what leaders from The Switchboard have chosen as their focus areas:

📛 Get Rejected | Jacob Bank

My professional goal is to get rejected at least once a week :). I'm way too cautious about reaching out to new people or writing publicly because of that fear, and I know I'm missing out because of it.

✏️ Take a Local Class | Cynthia Horiguchi

I like to set myself up for success by setting small, attainable goals each year. A couple years ago, it was to never run in an airport. (I had to re-do that one.) This year, it's to take advantage of the free courses at City College available to all SF residents. I'm a couple of weeks into a conversational Spanish class where we watch movies and chat about them — it's been fun!

❤️ Prioritize Health | Holly Nicola

I'm prioritizing my health this year — mental and physical. It's hard to carve out time for myself while working remotely and juggling mom duties. I hope to do this by setting boundaries at work and delegating tasks to my support circle aka family, friends, and colleagues.

🤿 Dive In | Adrian J. Hopkins

I’m signing up for beginner swimming lessons and practicing regularly.

⌛ Focus on Balance | Surbhi Ugra

I’m having my first baby this year — 2023 is a year of massive personal development while figuring out how I’ll balance raising my daughter and continuing to do the work I love. Luckily, I have an amazing support system at home and at work, so I can’t wait to grow into my new roles at home and at work!

☯️ Meditate | Q Hamirani

I plan to resume my transcendental meditation routine daily.

🌃 Take an Evening Walk | Toby Frankenstein

I've always been a big believer that personal-professional growth is intrinsically linked — working on the "personal" directly impacts the "professional," and vice versa.
And so in 2023, my goal is that at least once a week, once kids are down and the house is buttoned up for the next day, I plan to take an evening walk with my wife to decompress, soak up the night, and reflect on the myriad of things we're juggling at work, as well as on the home front. Such moments help us stay connected, support each other, and create the space for me to bring my best thinking to client work.

🏫 Explore New Products and Swim | Farrah Mitra

This year, I have greater mental and physical bandwidth to focus on professional and personal projects. At work, I'm creating new and exciting products and offerings, including creating a communications for change workshop! I am nervously excited to push my design and development skills forward to make this happen.
I'm also diving into my swimming skills. I find it meditative, but I never took formal swim lessons as a kid. So, I just know how to "frog swim," but I want to make swimming more fun and physically challenging. I am on my 4th lesson and will keep at it!

📺 Curate Carefully | Christopher Pearsall

This year, I'm trying to be more selective about the news and information I let into my life. That looks like not always having cable news on in the background, curating my social feeds a bit more, making room for silence in my day, and seeking learning opportunities over infotainment. When I'm successful, I find I'm more focused, less stressed, and able to spend time on more valuable things in my professional and personal life — and I'm not missing anything!

📖 Reflect Daily | Morgan Baden

More reflection, and more intention! Sometimes it feels like time flies by in a haze of work and family and life, and I've found that spending a few minutes each day truly thinking about my personal and professional goals and dreams and then building plans for them into my day-to-day routines helps me feel like I'm actively designing my life rather than at its mercy. I actually use a paper planner that encourages frequent goal-setting and look-backs, and it's been hugely beneficial for me.

📘 Growing as a Dad | Nathan Fisher

Being a dad is my number one job, so I'm reading The Self-Driven Child and What Do You Say? by Ned Johnson & Bill Stixrud and working on helping my son to take on new challenges and be resilient.

🖼️ Celebrate Inspiration | Julia Levy

I'm trying to keep a weekly log of a few moments that inspire me — whether it's social posts, blog posts, new books, a text from a friend. At the end of the month, I hope to review them to look back at what brings me a sense of awe.

⭐ Ideas for Inspiration

Here are a few more growth and development ideas to consider personalizing and making your own:

🚌 #1 Go on 20 Field Trips

There’s something about the word Field Trips that makes me smile — I remember visiting museums, exploring new places and having freedom from classroom walls. CreativeMornings organizes virtual versions: “FieldTrips are free, community-led, virtual experiences where learning meets connection.”

Consult the schedule with meaningful upcoming free options Laughter Yoga for Hard Working Humans, Narrative Wayfinding: Using Stories to Discover Opportunity and Purpose and more creative options.

☕ #2 Schedule 108 Coffee Chats

Meet new colleagues or friends for exciting conversations. Find the number that works for you. Lisa Bauer has set an inspiring goal:

I recently scheduled 108 coffee chats. ☕ ☕And it was the best decision I’ve ever made at 1am in the morning.

🌅 #3 Create Your Challenge Network

Ken Shuman suggested this great idea in my conversation with him:

Five years ago, I was introduced to a philosophy that’s been transformational for me — creating a Challenger Network. When I saw this post by Erica Alioto on LinkedIn about how she's created that network, I immediately loved the term! We all have a network that pumps us up. It feels good and cheers you up, but is it really going to help you? This challenger network takes a subset of your network to truly challenge you — they're not just friends that always say nice things, but they will push you.

📖 #4 Start Your Learning Circle

Find peers with similar roles and ask to meet with them. Assemble a close-knit group to bounce ideas off each other and share best practices. Roseli Ilano has curated this community to learn:

I’m part of my own community of other community builders. A group of four women who support one another and share best practices, we meet once a month to keep pushing ourselves to make sure that we're leading by example and doing our best work.

📝 #5 Journal One Sentence a Day

Similar to setting one goal, if you’ve ever wanted to start a journal, but have hesitated, here’s a way to make it happen from Jessica Wan:

January 26th, 2022, journal entry: "I think I'm supposed to be a coach!" 🤯
A couple years ago, I started keeping a one-sentence-a-day journal (created by Gretchen Rubin). I had never been a consistent journal-keeper; in fact, I have plenty of diaries that I received on Christmas that had exactly one entry in them: 12/25/XX!
But somehow, this journal has withstood the test of time. And I've now looped over into new territory. I can go back and see all that's happened since I narrowed in on the type of work that truly feeds my joy.

I hope this article will support you in a meaningful year of growth and development! Ready to commit to your one goal? Let us know by commenting below or requesting an accountability champion.

☎️ The Switchboard Exchange

This monthly footer section is a round-up of intriguing articles, podcasts, posts and more content that made me smile. Let me know what you think of what’s below and if it resonated by replying to this email.

Imagine delivering mail in a National Park. This Yosemite postmaster retires after more than 40 years. Read More.
Embrace Unreasonable Hospitality in your life and work. The most important lesson from Eleven Madison Park cofounder Will Guidara is not what you’d expect. Learn More.
Give your peers a guide to working with you. For years, Björn Levidow has perfected his User Manual. Learn from his deck. Give It a Try.

From the Archive: 💼 Internal Communications Introductions: Meet Laura McCafferty | Vice President, Global Employee Communications at Indeed.

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