Lesson 1: Develop strategies, habits, and skills

Strategies

Which strategies will help you with your career? Some of these strategies may also be habits. For example, do you want to do any of the following?

• Plan: Review and execute against my career development plan monthly, taking action weekly.

• Network: Build relationships with colleagues, mentors, manager, and sponsors where I can connect, give and receive feedback and advice, meeting monthly or quarterly.

• Network: Attend industry events quarterly to build expertise and expert network.

• Prepare: Strategically review the upcoming milestones, meetings, and deliverables and build workback plans to prepare weekly.

Or, what other types of strategies come to mind for your career?

Choose 1-3 strategies that you’d like to keep top of mind and potentially develop habits for.

Write them down in the PDF.

Habits

In Atomic Habits, James Clear outlines that habits are broken down into the cue + craving + response + reward. In other explanations, you’ll hear it as trigger + thought/belief + action + reward/consequence. Almost every action that we take, can be broken down into this equation and fortunately, we can re-design aspects to create new habits or to refine our habits to become better and better.

Here are some examples:

Undesirable habit #1:

• Context: small group meeting

• Old habit: when Alexis wants to speak up in meetings, she doubts that what she has to say has value, and refrains from speaking up. Broken into the habit language: cue - wants to speak up, craving - wants security, response - stays quiet, reward - safe but lacks visibility.

• New habit: cue - wants to speak up, craving - wants voice heard, response - speaks up, reward - shares insights/visibility.

• Supporting thought pattern: cue - self-doubt, craving - wants to be confident, response - positive affirmation, reward - confidence.

Undesirable habit #2:

• Context: avoids hard tasks

• Old habit: when Tyrone has a hard project in front of him, he tends to procrastinate and spend time doing unimportant tasks, responding to emails or even flipping through social media. Broken into the habit language: cue - hard task, craving - comfort with doing something he knows, response - small tasks, reward - comfort, but no progress.

• New habit: cue - hard task, craving - progress on the hard task, response - break hard task into smaller tasks and get started on one of them, reward - progress on hard task.

• Supporting thought pattern: cue - fear of failure for hard task, craving - progress, response - positive affirmation (I’ve done it before, I can do it again, etc.), reward - belief in self

Hopefully, you can see that each action can be broken into a habit and possibly a supporting habit or two. We can break our actions down into these habit formulas and then see which elements we want to redesign, then start practicing, to see if we can get different rewards.

So, what are the habits that you’d like to build to help you with your career?

These can be personal habits, like getting more sleep or exercising, or work habits, like speaking up or breaking things into small pieces.

What is the one habit that you’d like to start building today? How can you design the cue + craving + response + reward?

Choose 1-3 habits to start building today.

Write them down in the PDF.

Skills

What are skills that you need to develop or refine to thrive on a daily basis?

Do you need to improve your communication, your strategic planning, your execution/delivery, your organization/time management, or your relationships or influence? Or, something else?

Identify 1-3 skills that you’d like to improve; these may already be on your career development plan.

Then, breakdown how you want to improve them. For example, if influencing is a skill you’d like to develop, you might want to focus on practicing understanding your stakeholder, doing research, observing, learning, listening to really understand what’s important to them and how they operate, before you try to influence them. If you need help with identifying how to develop a skill, utilize AI by searching, “what are the steps to develop <insert skill> for <insert career/role>?

Pinpoint 1-2 actions that you want to take to improve each of the skills.

Write these actions down in the PDF.

Next Steps

Now, take these actions daily, building up the muscles to execute these strategies, habits, and skills. Set a calendar reminder - give it a title that inspires you and that will get your attention.

Once you feel like you’ve developed these, pick 1 or 2 more to focus on.

Continuously build, so you can always thrive in your career!