5.2. How To Achieve Your Goals With Balance
Self-Management EQ: Achievement Orientation with Adaptability and Positivity. Set Goals aligned with your Values and Strengths in the Thriving Challenge
Hi! 🙋🏻♀️ Welcome to WonderLead.Tech!
In the last 2 weeks, we doubled the size of subscribers, and I feel very grateful to have you here.
I believe we can build together a great community of wonder leaders in tech!
What You'll Learn:
💡 Transform from being overwhelm to strategic achiever.
💡 Align your goals with personal and team values.
💡 Combine self-awareness with self-management to keep focus.
From Overwhelm to Achievement
I used to own too much and became a bottleneck for my team.
Juggling too many high-priority tasks led to missed deadlines and compromised quality. I wasn't choosing the right battles because, for some of them, it wasn't the right time. I also couldn't meet delivery dates because I had too many big rocks in the jar. Through practice and mentorship, I learned a system that helps me thrive. And combined with self-awareness, I can self-correct and align my goals with my values and vision.
This week in the Thriving Challenge, we are going to start diving deep in thriving through self-management of our emotions and challenges. We will address challenges with curiosity, positivity, and focus. This will allow us to learn from failure, innovate, and adapt with success. I will share with you 4 tips during the week. After practicing self-awareness, we are ready to set habits and tools that will make us thrive. At the bottom of each challenge post, you will find self-awareness tips. Self-awareness is an ongoing process that we have to keep practicing to become great leaders!
Share in a Comment 💬 Your Goal for the 30 days Thriving Challenge.
Ask for Feedback, Guidance, or just Share it with the rest of Wonder Leaders.
Hold you Accountable by filling The Accountability Sheet with accountability partners.
The Foundation of Right Achievement is Self-Management
Self-management in Emotional Intelligence helps us to regulate our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions in a productive way. So that we can excel for the benefit of ourselves and our team. It includes the competencies Emotional Self-Control, Adaptability, Achievement Orientation, and Positive Outlook.
Achievement Orientated Balanced Leaders
As wonder leaders and in our lives, we strive for excellence. We look for ways to do things better and set challenging goals with calculated risks. However, staying in this overdrive all the time may make us toxic leaders or unhappy in our lives. To avoid it, we need a balance with the rest of Emotional Intelligence competencies.
How To Achieve Your Goals With Balance
For achieving my goals I use productivity technics (Big Rocks, GTD, and Pomodoro) together with self-awareness. You may already have your own system that works and that makes you an achiever. Then, I suggest you to incorporate in it self-awareness and align your goals and tasks with your core values, while following your purpose or vision. For details on assessing your values, you can read the post below.
Starts by Defining our Goals, Aligning them with our Values, and Prioritizing what Matters
1. Adopt Time Management Methodologies
There are several ways to self-manage ourselves; The Big Rocks methodology is about fitting in our time or resources (Jar) high priority projects (Big Rocks) while eliminating, delegating, or de-prioritizing less important projects and tasks (little rocks and sand). It creates time for our highest priorities and still having space for other less important things.
Benefits: It allows to grow in our role, impacts our customer significantly, and contributes to our team or organization. Because they maximize our resource allocation, enhance focus and clarity, boost morale and productivity, reduce stress by prioritizing overwhelming workloads, and deliver superior results by achieving more important tasks.
2. Plan Goals Aligned With Values
2.1. Define Your Aligned Goals
Identify your high priority projects (Big Rocks) from the plan of the year, strategic documents, level guidelines, or customer metrics.
Choose 3-5 Big Rocks for the quarter that:
Drive significant team/customer impact.
Align with organizational goals.
Support personal/professional growth.
Connect to your values and purpose. 🚀
Define them with the SMART🌟 framework. Relevant should have your purpose.
Why: Not aligning your goals with your values can lead to burnout despite external success, decreased job satisfaction, internal conflict and stress, reduced long-term motivation, and potential damage to relationships or well-being.
2.2. Your Success Roadmap
Plan your Big Rocks by breaking the projects into manageable tasks.
Track and Prioritize your plan and tasks weekly. This way, you make progress and boost your focus. Otherwise, some tasks might linger for weeks in your list before you consider them while you Keep The Lights On or firefight urgent issues.
My Example: Last week I worked on a 5 Customer Questions (Little Rock) document for a new technical product (Big Rock). While at the same time supported the team with reviews and writing a COE. What I did was break the doc down into the following tasks which allowed me to make progress on the project: (1) Initial section notes, (2) PM/SDM alignment, (3) UXD visuals planning, (4-6) write draft of section 1-3, (7) refine draft and add visuals, and (8) do the first review. This week finalizing the doc is urgent because I want to review it with the Leader PM of the org.
Tip: What was important may become also urgent, which is a state you must avoid.
Under urgent situations, our brain is in reactive mode and doesn’t do its best.
3. Plan and Execute Your Roadmap Daily
3.1. Mindfully Review and Plan every task
Our work is never just Big Rocks, so we need to account for smaller rocks. With a daily plan you will know what to tackle, instead of prioritizing instant gratification or getting tunnel vision, our brain’s default choices. Tunnel vision might neglect smaller important tasks and miss opportunities.
3.2. Maintain Daily Focus
Try first a small, slightly related task or tasks previously done to boost your motivation. For instance, clean up your inbox before writing an important email, or sync with a stakeholder about your doc before writing a specific section.
Block in your calendar the high priority tasks of the day or from yesterday.
Keep a single backlog for the tasks you want to do and focus on today.
Skip not important and conflicting meetings by following up asynchronously.
3.2. Adaptive and Positive Mindset with Self Awareness
By combining self-management with self-awareness we can thrive. Do the following:
Delegate and Collaborate. Your little rocks might be the big rocks for someone else. You can use the Eisenhower Matrix or GTD to identify what to delegate/drop. Also remember that you don’t need to do actively all important and urgent tasks always.
Think in the positive customer and team impact to keep a positive mindset.
Balance tasks with values and purpose. In your reviews, ask yourself if the new task (1) process and (2) outcome align with your Values and Purpose by asking “Why am I doing this?” and “What do I want to achieve?”. If the goal task is not aligned, think of a way to tackle it so that in the long term you will have a positive outcome out of it.
Balance urgent needs with important priorities. Values, culture, leadership development of your people, and building and maintaining strong team relationships all fall into the important and not urgent category. Being able to maintain these important functions when the demands are pulling towards the urgent tells your teams that when a crisis hits, you care about them and you are maintaining a wide perspective.
“Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you”. — Franklin Convey
Thriving Challenge Action Plan
Step 1: Define Your Goals (Today)
☑️ Write down your top 3 Big Rocks for this month.
☑️ Align each goal to specific core values and your purpose.
☑️ Use this template:
Goal: [Your SMART Goal]
Value(s): [Your Value(s)]
Impact: [Team/Customer/Personal Growth]
First Action Step or Detailed Plan: [Specific Task]Step 2: Set Up Your System
☑️ Schedule focused work blocks in your calendar.
☑️ Prepare your inbox.
☑️ Practice delegating and saying no.
☑️ Do daily and weekly reviews with values checks.
Step 3: Join the Thriving🌟Challenge and Get Accountable
Put these principles into practice with other wonder leaders right now!
☑️ Share your most important goal for this month in the comments or chat.
☑️ Share your core values aligned with your goal.
☑️ Ask Us Anything. Experienced leaders such as
☑️ Get Accountable by filling out this Accountability Sheet!
Self-Awareness Side Practice
Pre Step 1: Define your Values and Strengths
To align your goals with your values and strengths as part of your weekly reviews, you need to define your values first. Your values and goals will become the compass of your actions. 🚀 One tip: You likely admire the people who exhibit those values in their day to day lives. Join the chat and share your values with Marion with Animalsofa, Artur Henriques, and me.
Define your core values and strengths. Share them in a comment or chat.
Read Self-Assessment: Knowing Your Why Leads to Your Dream Job
Pre Step 2 - Mindfully Identify Your Purpose
As leaders, we need to be intentional. To be able to thrive, we need a sense of fulfillment, and for achieving it, some of our goals and actions should be aligned with our purpose and mission. Today, mindfully identify your mission, passion, vocation and profession in your life and career through an Ikigai exercise.
Find your Ikigai, the intersection between 1) What You’re Good/Skilled at, 2) What Others Need, 3) What You Get Value From, and 4) What You Love. Reflect, and share your ikigai in the chat or comments. Is your job and life aligned with it?
My Recommendations
Thriving Books
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R. Covey
Getting Things Done — David Allen
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
Thriving Tools
WonderLead Obsidian Vault Automated Planner — Patricia Juarez Muñoz
WonderLead Digital Planner — Patricia Juarez Muñoz
Thriving Related Publications
How TOP engineers structure their day to maximize their productivity without burnout — Strategize Your Career
Get In Touch
You can find me on LinkedIn and X.
If you wish to make a request on a particular topic you would like to read, you can send me an email to patri@develagora.com.
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