We spend our professional lives meeting and exceeding goals. But personal goals can play an impact in our professional growth as well. Recently, the KWSM team sat down for a personal development session with our good friend, Leisa Reid, of Productive Learning. Within a few minutes, she had us shouting out the things that we want to achieve this year, deconstructing them to give us insight into how we view our own path, and finally, creating vision boards (thanks, Pinterest!) to manifest what we want into a visible, tangible goals. It was an afternoon of reflection and refocusing: and we’d like to share those revelations with you!
What We Learned
Throughout the course of the hour, we focused primarily on how we often forget to connect the dots between our feelings and our actions. As organisms with highly advanced brainpower, we have on average 30 thoughts per second, most of which we naturally tune out – the unconscious mind. However, our thoughts, even the unconscious ones, have a way of influencing our actions, even when we don’t realize it. Therefore, your thoughts become feelings, and these feelings become actions. Ultimately, this directly affects both your personal and professional lives if you’re not stopping to consider the factors that influence these decisions.
How We Learned It
To put these concepts into context, Leisa presented us with a scenario. At the head of our conference table, she held up a five-dollar bill with the provocative statement, “I’ll give this to whoever wants it the most.” As we all shifted awkwardly in our seats waiting for the first brave soul to walk up and snatch it, we realized quickly that our own thoughts about taking the money were preventing us from actually grabbing it. Whether it was because we were concerned with how others would perceive us, indecisive on how exactly to proceed, or certain that this must contain some sort of trick, not a single member of our fifteen-person team stood up to take it. It was only after we shared these reasons with each other did we realize how interconnected our thoughts and feelings truly are, and how this can translate to productivity… or lack thereof.
Why We Learned It: The Power of Vision Boards
Taking the time to consider the roots of your actions and how they relate to your goals is an effective exercise for anyone, but particularly for a growing business. Without a clear direction or understanding of how and why you’re making decisions on a daily basis, you can quickly get lost in the clutter and confusion of the day-to-day, keeping you from realizing your success. In order to cut through the noise and keep us focused, we sat down, as all good digital marketers do, and created vision boards using Pinterest. In relation to every facet of our life, personal and professional, we started pinning images and articles relating to what we’d like to accomplish in 2016. From having more free time to write, to testing out new videography strategies and spending more time with our families, the list was long and eclectic – but with a team as driven and diverse as we are, that’s exactly how we like it.
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