Plan to Succeed
Last week, I wrote about how making a great life for yourself is all about staying in a zone of continuing development. But how do you find the time to make personal and professional growth a priority?
As with everything in life that really matters, you don’t wait to find time, you make the time. This means having a strategy and appointing it well in advance. This means sitting down at the beginning of the year and determining how much you’re going to invest that year—what percentage of income and time—in your ongoing education.
I recommend that you block out your CE dates for the entire year. Yes, it’s true that you may have to make changes or additions later as you find out about new offerings, but the important thing is that you reserve this non-revenue time up-front.
So where do you spend this allotment? Broadly speaking, your continuing education is made up of three components—clinical mastery, leadership skills and management expertise—and a good, balanced CE plan develops all three concurrently.
Providing this kind of education and coaching happens to be my business, so I’ll refrain from making any specific recommendations. However, I will say that it’s important to be consistent.
Don’t cherry pick different courses from various continuums; you’ll just end up with a jumble of ideas and no coherent vision. Find an organization that you think best represents your ideals and values—one whose vision of success most closely resembles what you want your life to look like—and align yourself with their philosophy.
Once this is established, you have the opportunity to really explore and perhaps try some other courses that aren’t strictly necessary but that you find interesting and inspiring. The greatest innovation in any industry comes from people who have leveraged their personal and professional productivity to such a point that they can afford to experiment and go wherever their ideas take them.
