You need to separate work from personal life...Can you really?
Today we are all about Continual Professional Development (CPD) and it is wise to keep a CPD record. Having spent time on mine for the last four years and stretching back into the mists of time the details get a little hazy.
This was an interesting mental exercise to understand if my memory could work from the starting point up to present day or work back from here and now to the starting point, wherever that may be.
The revelation for me was both turned out to be as equally important. Some details "looking back" came easy to me (others did not). While starting from school, college then university and onto my working life filled in even more detail. I was able to see an even bigger picture of my own "evolution" into the professional world.
What I thought was the big picture a few years ago now seems like detail the further I get from the event. I am sure what I see as the big picture now will seem like detail in a few months or years from now judging this intellectual foray into knowledge, skill and behavioural acquisition.
Uncovering the fossils of my professional past, lessons learnt, situations overcome or at the time looked upon as simply survived all served to create my tree of life experiences all contributing in small and epic ways to my own CPD.
I also uncovered the flaw in my own thinking the mistake I had made and I am guessing others have too. I had placed the word "professional" into my evolutionary developmental record to comply with context not specifically my own development.
I now believe one should not differentiate between personal and professional development since incidents and events personal or professional make up who you are at home and work. It is simply the context of where of you apply this learning that turns it from personal to professional.
An over simplification of Darwin's theory of evolution, a blink in the eye of natures journey of self still applies to individuals. Our events, experiences and training make us who we are as a whole person and reveals the flawed thinking (for me) that professional and personal development serve only to create a bi-polar view which in turn leads to what we call social masks. But we are facets of the same experiences and these experiences are adapted to serve context.
It we were to get a little crazy (excuse my mind-dump here) you could stretch the idea to include strategic vertical and horizontal alignments by taking a closer look at Darwin's observations.
Nature (strange we speak of this as something separate form ourselves) has long term goals (strategy of vertical alignments) by surviving through adaptive evolution, businesses do exactly the same. The horizontal companions to success (for ourselves) are those things we may think of as big-picture but turn out to be details as we move away from that point of learning / development.
My own expedition into my development journey revealed as sort of memory microscope and the closer I got to the present the microscope morphed into a magnifying glass.
At the time studying Psychology was a really big thing for me later hypnosis became the big picture and psychology became the foundation. Later NLP was the focus and hypnosis became the foundation while psychology simply helped me to understand the current learning and so on.
Now as I sit studying for my CIPD L&D management while working as a trainer for a global company the accumulation of all that has been is microscopic and CIPD is magnified. Smaller details of the past, magnification of the present and the details of the future have revealed to me the bigger picture of my own evolution.
A bell-curve of my own perception of development; detail/small (past) magnified detail/large (present) followed by detail/small (future). It seems ironic since we always talk about seeing the big picture in terms of where we want to go as individuals or as a company and yet it seems smaller since it is far away. (How do we see the big picture of the five year plan now?)
It would seem that as far as development or perceiving plans or ideas we truly do go "back to the future."
Darwin set out to explore and discover the fundamental drivers of nature and in a few cases businesses like to think they do the same. It would be wise to understand that human nature is a fundamental part of a company's success and we should think about a genetic mutation of our message (language) when it comes to CPD.
For me the idea of genetically altering the DNA of our mindsets is a no-brainer (pun intended).
Change CPD to encompass whole person thinking: Continual Personal & Professional Development (CPPD) and you may reap the rewards as a business by gaining a greater buy-in from your evolving and developing staff since they do it with or without you anyway.
If you get interested in knowing how your team naturally thinks then you can move towards what they should think, most companies seem to have it the wrong way around.
Robert LaMont (Trainer/Coach) on linkedin
Work full time for a global company as a trainer / coach. I am not selling anything except the love of sharing my knowledge and experiences to help you think about you.