Step 3: Mental Exercise

Ask yourself the following questions:

1.  How do you visualise yourself in five years’ time? What makes you passionate? If there is no vision, there is no passion. Passion is what fuels your career.

2.  Create a mental image in your head of where you will be in five years from now. Where do you want to be career-wise and in respect to your family?

3.  Are you familiar with your strengths and developmental areas in your work (also your personal life)?

4.  First identify your strengths and then your developmental areas. This will comprise your learning agenda.

5.  List the areas that require attention in respect to your work life. What changes do you require to achieve your dream? For example, consider the following:

• Do you require more formal education?
• How good are your inter-personal skills such as empathy, communication ability, listening skills, negotiation skills, self-assertion, motivation etc.?
• How are you managing conflict within work and family domains?
• Are you leading a healthy life style? Remember without physical and psychological health no work goal is achievable.
• How are your stress levels? Part two of this workbook discusses issues pertaining to stress management.
• Do you make use of mental rehearsal? To quote from Goleman: ‘Brain studies have shown that imagining something in vivid detail can fire the same brain cells that are actually involved in the activity. In other words, the new brain circuitry appears to go through its paces, strengthening connections, even as a person merely repeats the sequence in his mind. That suggests a tactic for alleviating fears that might be associated with trying out new, riskier behaviour. If you first visualise some likely situations at work or at home, you will feel less awkward when you put the new skills into practice. Experimenting with new behaviours, then, and seizing opportunities inside and outside of work to practice them – as well as using such methods as mental rehearsal – eventually triggers in one’s brain the neural connections necessary for genuine change to occur.