The past few posts have been focused on establishing your
vision, your why, your reasons for being a project manager to provide an anchor
for practicing. Now that there is a clear purpose to you growing your project management
capability you will be able to draw on that motivation when you are faced with
a choice and you will be faced with choices throughout your day, your career,
and your life. Whenever you find yourself making a choice, use your anchor,
your why, to guide your path.
Our lives are filled with choices, I know, nothing new
about that statement, this is where I’d think to myself, duh – give me
something new. Our brain is a problem-solving machine and it creates problems
for us so that we can solve them. Yes, our brain actually generates problems so
that it has something to focus upon. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say I’m
writing a book and in order to write the book I get to write every day. My
brain will come up with so many other things that I have to do that makes
writing every day impossible, voila – problem created. This can occur at work,
at home, anywhere. Our brains have an immense ability to create a problem where
there isn’t one except the ones that are generated by us. Is this a problem,
well, not really, and, only if we make it one. Let’s say, trying to eliminate
the mental hoop jumping is part of what practicing is all about. Practicing is
about creating automatic behaviors which reduce the number of choices we have
to consciously make throughout the day which frees our minds to focus on those things
which require our attention. If we are practicing well, focused on those things
that will make a difference in our careers and other areas of our lives, we
will succeed at what matters most to us.
The question becomes, what do we practice so that we can
automatically make choices which move us forward. Putting the building blocks
in place will allow us to handle things smoothly when a project goes sideways. We
will have the mental capacity and the capability to solve the opportunities we
are facing. If all of our energy is being used for standard day to day tasks like
brushing our teeth, taking a shower, eating, walking or other activities, we
will have little energy or mental capacity to tackle the things we get to do
throughout our day. What that means is we get to practice those things in our
career and our lives that will allow us to move through our days with ease and
grace as we look for opportunities to continue to grow.
The way we choose to do things and the way we behave, when
done repeatedly, are considered our habits. As I’ve been writing these articles
about practicing, I’ve also been reading a myriad of books focused on habits. Practicing
skills and behaviors are what create our habits. This isn’t a new take on
building habits since the number of books written about habits covers a number
of perspectives. Instead of writing about habits and habit building, I’ll
provide my insights from the books I’ve read in coming posts.
