Our own Kirsty Ritchie featured as an expert in this everywoman article. Click on the link below or read a summary of the article here.
“I love the everywoman Network and there are so many great resources on it to help me grow professionally. But, I find it hard to find the time to do as much personal development and learning as I want to. I am forever noting down webinars and workbooks I want to attend or complete or bookmarking articles and quizzes and then before I know it a week or two have gone by. I can’t seem to keep the momentum going. My job is very busy and I also manage quite a large team, so to a certain extent my time doesn’t feel as if it is my own. How can I carve out space or create the conditions that will allow me to invest in myself and my learning consistently without causing me stress? I’d like it to feel it was part of my everyday career journey, but at the moment it is just another thing on my to-do list. Do I need a mindset shift or a practical one — or both?”
WHEN WE ARTICULATE AN ISSUE IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION AS YOU HAVE DONE HERE, IT CAN BE A WAY OF ASKING OURSELVES FOR PERMISSION TO MAKE A DIFFERENT CHOICE.
“You probably already know the answer here, which means the real question then becomes what are the consequences of making a different choice at work? It’s easy to allow CPD to fall down the priority list — we all firefight without realising it because the amygdala in our brain — the part that triggers fear — is always primed. It focuses on urgent issues because they have an immediate consequence. But this part of the brain doesn’t know the difference between actual threat and perceived threat and while we have to respect the protective function it provides, we also have to learn to ignore it sometimes.
If you’re jumping from one crisis to another and getting little else done, I recommend starting with the ‘important versus urgent’ principle. Important activities have an outcome leading us to achieve our own personal goals, and these can include personal development and learning. Urgent activities demand immediate attention, but they’re normally more associated with someone else’s goals. On our to-do list, the things that come to the top are almost always the urgent ones. So, we need to consciously help our amygdala to feel ok, and stop it constantly pushing us to focus on unimportant but urgent activities. Then we can start to make space for what is important for our own success. Look at everything taking up your time at work and ask is it important or urgent? If things are important and urgent, it’s usually because you couldn’t have possibly foreseen something or have left things to the last minute. Understanding that will help you work out whether you need to plan more effectively or escalate this if it’s a constant problem.
From a mindset perspective, it comes down to giving yourself permission to make choices that are beneficial for your professional development — deciding an amount of time each month and ensuring it’s blocked out no matter what. And part of that is also about how capable you are of saying ‘no’ to people to reclaim time. Could the person asking you to do this urgent task handle it themselves? Can you instigate time slots when you’re available so others know when they can approach you? If colleagues can see that you’re clear on your professional boundaries they might well think twice about asking you to do these unimportant activities in the future.
Ultimately, it really does come down to giving yourself permission to make choices that are beneficial for your professional development; deciding a reasonable amount of time each month and ensuring that time is blocked out no matter what. I would also suggest looking around at what others are doing, for example, your own line manager — are they role modelling this behaviour? Because if they’re not it’s very difficult for you to then put that time aside because it’s not the standard. It’s also about having a collective conversation with your peers around what you want to be role modelling for your teams. And if there’s a general sense that this [space to learn] isn’t happening at all around the organisation, then maybe it’s a wider problem and needs to be escalated upwards. It’s definitely the time to be making these changes now — everybody’s talking about work/life balance, but actually a balanced working life is just as important.”
