Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow

2016 was quite an intense year.

Highlights — non-exhaustive

Lowlights — even less exhaustive

On the personal side, it was a transformative year where past-frustrations led to accelerated personal growth.

Naturally, that didn’t happen out of the blue. A mixture of coaching, personal experiences, and countless hours of thinking allowed me to distil the following…

5 lessons about effective communication and personal growth

1) Building for sustainable growth, both personal and professional, consists of designing every single action to replicable, atomic, and strictly necessary.

Buckling up as many tasks in parallel as possible, led me to assume I was optimizing for SPEED.

Speeding things down helped me to take the necessary steps and freeing up enough time to think, and absorb, the WHY, HOW, and WHAT of my actions.

2) Communicating effectively is made out of repeating multiple times and getting others to repeat it back. *Again, communicating effectively is made out of repeating multiple times and getting others to repeat it back.*

Having a fast-paced type of living, led me to assume that saying things once would give people the necessary understanding of what I was trying to communicate.

Confirming that I communicated clearly helped me to keep moving with the right foundations and context in place.

3) Defining goals that are not specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and limited in time augments the probability achievement failure.

Setting clunky and poorly planned, yet oddly ambitious, goals, led me to assume that all necessary steps were predicted.

Thinking thoroughly every single step of the way of a journey towards a goal, helped me to start delivering on the path I was setting myself to cross.

4) Silence opens space for observation and understanding.

Trying to rush reactions and quickly share my point of view, led me to block important time that was necessary for absorbing what was just shared.

Enjoying the silence in a conversation, helped me to think how what was just shared resonated with me and sharply and bluntly formulate my point of view.

5) Deeming one’s action as adequate or not is heavily dependent on the level of context we provide.

Assuming everyone had the necessary context when performing an action, led me to interpret things differently than it was intended by the first person.

Containing myself from reacting and confirming the WHY, HOW, and WHAT of one’s actions helped me guide myself towards the necessary context that was given, or that was still in need to be provided.

These lessons helped me understand that in most of my actions**, speed is achieved not by speeding things up but by slowing down and taking the necessary time for every single action to be performed**.

“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

2016 was quite an intense year.

I learned that:

  1. Setting goals is as important as configuring ourselves to be committed to achieving them;
  2. Reducing the number of unattainable and poorly-designed goals takes time and discipline;
  3. Letting ourselves down and frustrated for not achieving our goals should help us improve our systems and not dropping them by design.

And that’s how I started managing my goals, personal communication, and growth in 2017.

For me, building systems, processes, and routines around the idea that we can become a better version of ourselves comes down to the understanding that such are designed by us, the only stakeholder for setting the direction that keeps us moving forward.

“Whatever your leave unsaid will be unsaid forever, even if you say it later.”

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