What is your Professional Development ‘Rock in a Hard Place’
Professional Development April 22nd, 2010If you want to learn more about ‘Earthworks’ you could come along to the Engineering Education Australia Two-Day Earthworks Course with Dr Burt Look, Senior Design Engineer from Aurecon. However, this blog is not about Earthworks, it is about you and your professional development.
Have a look at this ‘Rock in a Hard Place’. Pretty amazing isn’t it!
And now you might like to ask yourself the question? Where is my ‘Rock in a Hard Place’ with my professional development? What is holding me back from getting the results I want to get? Do I need more professional development or do I need to focus on deploying professional development that I have undertaken in the past?
The only way to get rid of a ‘Rock in a Hard Place’ is to gradually chip away at it….. And our ‘rock’ in the picture above is going to need quite a bit of chipping away at!! (How big is your ‘rock’?).
In professional development terms, how do we chip away at our ‘rock’? Well how about we start with questions? What book should I be reading to get ahead? What relationship should you be building with a client, supplier, mentor or engineering colleague to learn more about what you do? What area of your performance could do with an update on skills and knowledge that you could get at a professional development course? These are the sort of questions that will help you as you continue your quest for better performance.
Yes, it always comes back to you and your professional development! And even more importantly for team leaders……. As you learn you help others to learn too!!
August 5th, 2010 at 11:50 am
Agree with much of this post, but there’s one thing that sticks out that you could view differently!
“The only way to get rid of a ‘Rock in a Hard Place’ is to gradually chip away at it”..surprisingly, in my experience, many rocks can be almost instantly blown apart!
What I’ve found over the years with people I’ve worked with, is that thinking it takes a long time (or chipping away) to fix something often puts people off from even trying. Humans have an amazingly limiting tendency to view things as ‘mountains’ when sometimes they’re just a small hill. And it stops many people in their tracks.
A personal example is when I set up my business running workshops and public speaking – but I had a huge phobia of public speaking! Originally, I just wanted to work one to one with people. In the end, the only viable way to make a living in the way I wanted was to teach larger groups. I decided to overcome the public speaking fear and get good at it. It was the biggest rock I knew of. The good news was, I found a way to overcome in one afternoon. Something I did clicked, and had me bursting to get in front of a group. When I did, I loved it, the feedback was great, and I’d blown my rock away. That was 8 years ago.
When I share this story, often other people share similar stories of blowing their rock apart much faster than they ever thought. Professional development appears, to most people I think, to take much longer than it has too…(probably based on underestimating what us clever brainy humans can actually do!) Hope this adds an alternative perspective