Image provided by AmChamChina.org
Hi all,
The father of all personal development books is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This book is a classic for a reason. In addition to the seven habits, which can be accessed on Wikipedia, I find two ideas especially helpful.
Role-based mission statements: I have a mission statement related to my career, but I also have goals/principles related to the kind of parent, friend, and spouse I would like to be. It’s useful to write out your principles for each role you play in life. When I plan my week each week, I plan an action related to my mission and goals for each role I play.
Urgent versus important: See the figure below. Because we all juggle multiple roles in academic medicine, we are particularly vulnerable to the tyranny of the urgent. It is important to carve out time for activities like long-term planning. It’s useful to look at your activities for any given week and ask what quadrant they fit into. As an example, composing this email is a quadrant II activity. It is important to me to be an impactful mentor and maintain/ grow my relationships with all of you, but it is not urgent necessarily
Image courtesy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
Warmly,
Urmimala