CARVE YOUR DEVELOPMENT: Your Source of the Confidence and Courage to Define and Achieve Aspirational Goals

Carve your development is about actions you take to develop domain expertise master activities and become more cognitively, emotionally and socially competent.?

Life provides teaching experiences but only you can achieve learning learn outcomes from those experiences. It’s what you do with the experiences that produce the increase in knowledge and skills and competencies.?

Development is about physiological changes and conditioning that expand your capacity to decide and achieve goals while learning is about deploying?that?capacity towards specific knowledge and skills. You need to learn to develop but you also need to develop to learn.?

Take muscles, for example, you need to develop the muscles to be able to carry things but you need to learn how to carry things so you can use the experience of carrying to develop your muscles.?

Think of it this way - you learn new skills and you develop mastery. You learn new subjects and you develop subject matter expertise. You learn new ways of thinking and or behaving and you develop new habits.?

Learning and development work together using your experiences to build your performance capabilities?and expand your performance potential.?

Confidence and Courage?

Confidence and courage come when you believe in yourself. This belief in yourself is not because of what you can do, but instead, it is that you can learn to do!?It is believing in your own ability to learn and develop whatever is needed to help you achieve the success you desire, that is what builds confidence and courage.?

All experiences provide opportunities to learn and develop but we optimize the learning and development value of experiences when we make learning and development a desired result of those experiences.?

What we did and achieved in past experiences influences what we do and achieve in future experiences. Our confidence to make decisions and take action is influenced. Our courage to tackle unknowns or push boundaries is influenced. The confidence comes from the success we experienced with our development efforts, we are confident because we know the 'before and after' of the capabilities we’ve developed. We know how we felt before, we know what we did, and we know how we felt after.?As we go through this process multiple times and pay attention to these feelings, eventually we'll get to the point where if we ever feel like the 'before' again, we are confident we can take the actions that will lead to the 'after'.?

In the same way, we are courageous because of the success we have had with our learning efforts which is what we did to get us from 'before' to 'after'. We know how we were able to power through the 'before' feeling and perform the learning actions enough times and well enough to develop what we needed to reach the 'after'.?

So, If we are not intentional and purposeful with our learning and development efforts, we will not be able to turn this influence our past experiences have on our future experiences into opportunities to discover how much we are truly capable of learning?and developing and through that?believe in ourselves and our potential of success.?

Learning, Development, and Experiences?

I keep saying we learn from experiences and now I see the need to talk about three specific types of experiences that provide learning and development opportunities - life, educational and professional.

Life Experiences

These are experiences situated within all the different social contexts in which we find ourselves. Each social context has its own set of intentionality, purposefulness, and accountability.

We start having life experiences from birth (or maybe even before that) and only stop having these experiences when we die.

All life experiences are inherently learning and development experiences and this layer of experiences has a common thread across all other experiences - your life. You can only have these experiences because of the part of you that makes you ALIVE. That’s the part that’s learning and developing tough life and the part that gives you confidence and courage to take on life’s many challenges and succeed.?

Formally Designed Educational Experiences

These are experiences situated within social contexts explicitly designated as learning and development contexts. Intentionality, purposefulness, and accountability here are defined as you being accountable for achieving meaningful/valuable learning and development outcomes that are aligned to your intentionality and purpose.

These educational experiences are first and foremost life experiences albeit in the context of the subject matter being studied. The explicit experience of the learning and development taking place around the subject of study exists within the larger context of life experiences.

Professional Experiences

These are experiences situated?within social contexts explicitly designated as professional where you are offering your expertise and mastery to solve problems for other people in exchange for money or any other thing that you value and consider a fair exchange. Intentionality, purposefulness, and accountability here are defined as you being accountable for solving the problem and delivering the value that is aligned with your intentionality and purposefulness. Again, these professional experiences are first and foremost life experiences.?

Developing Courage and Confidence From Life Experiences

I find exploring these five questions can open up the door to optimizing the development potential?of life experiences.?

1. Who do you think you are and what do you believe about yourself?
2. Why do you do anything?
3. What do you have the capacity to do (physiological health)?
4. Do you practice with purpose and deliberately?
5. Do you think about what, how, and why you did, you're doing or going to do the things you do?

I’ll do a brief exploration of each of these in this article and then go deeper when I explore and apply the ideas that emerge to practical development applications and solutions in subsequent articles.?

1. Who Do You Think You Are and What Do You Believe About Yourself?

This is about developing an identity in the myriad of evolving social contexts and interactions

Who do you think you are?

Who are you? Who do you think you are? Who do you want to be??

These questions can only be answered in a social context. In defining who you are, you invariably indicate who you are not or how you are different from others. This process of identity definition evolves with every interaction with the social system of which you are a part.?The process of identity formation has a direct impact on how you make sense of the world as that is merely an extension of how you make sense of yourself.

In the previous post on competency , I mentioned the need to avoid fragmentation and disassociation and to lean into healthy compartmentalization instead. A lot of how we respond has to do with how we are experiencing identity development as we engage in all those social contexts. By paying attention to the importance of social context and the idea that identity is evolving, we will be in a better position to compartmentalize instead of fragmenting and disassociating. We’ll find within ourselves a depth from which to navigate identity formation and in which to anchor the stability we need to be in control of how the identity development process evolves and influences our sense-making.?

Your decisions on what results to pursue, what to do and how to do it are driven by who you think you are, who you want to be or be perceived as being and what you have the confidence and courage to do and achieve.?

What do you believe about yourself?

More than anything, what we believe determines how we make sense of the world. We tend to seek out things that confirm what we believe. Our beliefs evolve over time and the evolution of our beliefs about ourselves works with the evolution of our identity.

If we are not paying attention, we might never realize just how much our beliefs determine how we learn and develop and use the?knowledge and skills in the situations we encounter. We might also never realize how our beliefs influence what we choose to pay attention to and the meaning we ascribe to it, or how our beliefs drive our behavior and determine what we decide to do, and how we do it.

We need to learn how to manage and control our beliefs, especially self-belief, so they work for us, not against us (for example, limiting beliefs)

2. Why Do You’d Do Anything

This is about the source of the passion to succeed and motivation to try

Most human action is goal oriented but sometimes the goals are externally defined and our internal connection to these externally defined goals lacks emotional engagement - the energy, passion, and motivation. When the reasons behind our actions are aligned with our sense of purpose and value, the connection we feel towards the results unleashes the passion and motivation that fuels our efforts.

We need to learn how to look within ourselves across our experiences and understand our own internal sense-making and value realization processes. We need to develop the ability to find and sustain the answers to the questions:?

• Why am I doing what I am doing? What results am I trying to achieve??
• What value can I realize with my results? What value am I trying to realize?
• What value do I want to realize? Do I care about creating this value? If yes, why? If not, why not?

This is what will determine how hard you try and will be the ultimate source of your courage and confidence.

We do things to achieve results or goals that mean something to us. The nature of the value we want to realize affects the strength of our passion to succeed and our motivation to try. The more we value the results or goals, the stronger the passion and motivation. Passion and motivation are the energy and fuel source that drive learning and development. Like all energy and fuel sources, they are needed but on their own can’t achieve anything. They need to power something.?

In learning from experiences, we want these power sources, passion and motivation, to power the engine of learning and development actions.?

We also want efficiency and effectiveness of power utilization. Too little and the engine dies out before achieving anything. Too much and the engine risks exploding (destroying itself). Inefficiency means the amount of power used is way too much for the results being achieved.?

It is important to keep honing the engine to increase power efficiency - optimizing what can be achieved with any level of power input - passion or motivation but first, the power must be available and accessible.?

How do you optimize the engine? By practice. More on this further down in this article.?

3. What Do You Have the Capacity to Do (Physiological Health)?

This is about keeping the “machine” well-oiled and in optimum shape.

The focus here is not your domain knowledge or professional activity proficiency, it is not even your competency level which is your capacity to develop domain knowledge and activity proficiency. The focus here is on the physiological (body) conditions that make developing competencies even possible. Maintaining the physical body at a level that makes it physically possible to learn and develop anything! ?I am talking about biological systems like the musculoskeletal system or the cardiovascular/circulatory system or the endocrine system or the nervous system and so on. These biological systems have a direct impact on what you have the capacity to do.

The assumption we make is that the necessary parts of the system are in tip-top shape. But we can not make that assumption. If these parts are not in shape, they might not withstand the pressure of the demand we need to place on them and fail to support the effort powered by our passion and motivation.

It is obvious how the musculoskeletal system enables and inhibits physical action. It is obvious how it can buckle under pressure no matter the level of passion and motivation. It is clear how it takes time and practice to build up the muscle capacity for more intense physical effort when it’s needed by eating right and working the specific muscles to have them ready to support the activity, whatever it is.?

In the same way, the other systems work together to enable or inhibit emotional and cognitive functioning. If we don’t hone them with practice, we might not be developing the capacity to the full potential, and they might fail us when we need them the most. The challenge with these, unlike with the musculoskeletal system and physical actions, is that they are less obvious, and thus we are more likely to ignore them. They only become obvious with significantly stretching experiences that place extreme demands on these systems, then the lack of capacity becomes evident and easily recognizable.

When we don’t sleep, our ability to deploy our competencies and develop them can be severely impaired. We might be able to function and thus not recognize the impairment until it’s extreme enough that we can not function.?If we don’t eat properly, the same thing. If we don’t maintain proper cardiovascular health, same thing.

Our thinking is not the only thing that can be impaired, our emotional intelligence competencies can be impaired by hormonal imbalances triggered by not taking the right care of the system.

The funny thing is that because this idea of “knowledge work” is mostly about “mental actions,” we often neglect physical health because we believe as long as we are thinking and communicating, we are still “able to function". What we do not realize is that access to our competencies is severely impaired! Some people constantly operate at the edge of complete breakdown. Besides the health implications, consider the lost, unrealized potential!?

It is therefore worth noting that sometimes, the reason for the gap is simply because physiologically, we cannot access whatever capacities we might have developed because the system is not well maintained and all that potential is locked in and inaccessible.?

Remember, just because you are mentally functioning doesn’t mean you are functioning at anywhere near your potential.?

4. Do you practice with purpose and deliberately?

This is about developing the courage and confidence to master physical actions

Deliberate practice is about performing actions with the aim of getting better at them. Given that experiences are all about decisions and actions, it means being deliberate about learning from the decisions and actions that make up your experiences.

Purposeful vs Naive Practice

Here, I want to draw on Anders Ericsson's ideas on purposeful practice versus naive practice and deliberate practice as reflected in the book "Peak: How to Master Almost Anything ."

How to Practice Deliberately

This alux.com video has a really good practical explanation of deliberate practice and shares 5 principles

1. You need more than talent, practice is what separates good from great
2. Great performance requires hard work and repetition
3. Break down your activity into smaller tasks
4. Set goals and persevere
5. Get feedback in the moment

What does practice do in our brains to make us better at things?

This Ted-Ed animated illustration by Annie Bosler and Don Greene of the neurological basis for the effect of practice and automaticity reinforces the reason why we might embrace deliberate practice if we seek to be really good at anything - "How to practice effectively for just about anything":

One of the key ideas here is repeated conscious performance of actions following a set of principles that ensure the repetition increases proficiency, eventually leading to a level of automaticity.

It is possible to perform an activity for so long that you actually stop thinking about what you are doing. While this is often called unconscious competency, I see the competence part as a misnomer because it assumes the person is achieving results, but that can not be assumed. Nothing stops you from developing automaticity in the wrong way of doing things which is possible if your practice is not guided by meaningful results.

I would rather use the word automaticity, meaning the actions have become automatic, no conscious thought precedes them, and there is no assumption of achievement of any results.?

The problem is that if no conscious thought precedes actions, then how can you develop greater proficiency? In order to develop greater proficiency, you need to engage consciously with the actions.?

That’s where intentionality and purposefulness come in. The only reason an automatic action will break down to become conscious again is if you are performing the actions to achieve clear results. So when the actions start failing to achieve the results, you will be forced to pay attention to the actions, but only because you were not achieving the results you desired and expected to achieve.

The truth is, with the pace of change in the world and the nature of “knowledge work’, I can’t imagine how we could ever reach that level of automaticity! It seems to be that we’d always need to be context-sensitive, make sense of dynamic contextual variables, and adapt our actions constantly. The automaticity will be in how we retain adaptivity and agility and not in the actions we perform themselves.?

So deliberate practice becomes something we can engage in always as we engage with experiences, especially stretching or significantly stretching experiences, and as we perform the actions we believe will get us the results we want in those experiences.

Deliberately engaging in deliberate practice activates the development value of our experiences, and the more we do it, the more we master how to practice deliberately without even having to think about deliberate practice.?

More on deliberate practice as I delve further into development through education and performance support.

5. Do you think about what, how, and why you did, you're doing, or going to do the things you do?

This is about developing the courage and confidence to master mental actions

The main goal here is to develop an awareness of mental states that are limiting us and to be able to work on those limitations.

While it is clear we perform actions based on the sense we make of the situations we are in and the results we want to achieve, many mental processes connect the data our senses pick up from the situation to the decisions we make on what actions to take.

Reflective practice is about deep, critical reflection that aims to shine a light on these mental processes. It's like monitoring our own thinking so we are more aware and able to control how we make sense of our experiences and the decisions we make as a result. With reflective practice, we are able to challenge our own assumptions and evolve our beliefs.

Challenging Your Own Assumptions, Shifting Your Mental Models and Frames of Reference, and Updating Your Beliefs

In the knowledge management world, there is this concept of DIKW, which stands for Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom and is usually presented as a pyramid indicating the relationship between these as data converted to information, information converted to knowledge, and knowledge converted to wisdom.

There are many different explanations of this model, so below is one that puts it in the context of this article and the idea of reflective practice.

• Data is what your physical senses perceive; everyone with the same sensory capabilities will perceive the same data if they pay attention to it. You see the three lights changing in front of you.
• Information is the social meaning of the data, which is usually based on language. You can recognize the different colors of the lights you are seeing as they change colors to red, amber, and green.
• Knowledge is about the contextual application of the information. You know what red, amber, and green mean in this context and make the necessary decisions based on the color you see.
• Wisdom is connecting all the knowledge together to predict what will happen, so your actions will be effective. It is about recognizing that the lights change in a specific pattern and have specific timing, knowing the significance of the timing, and putting all that together in deciding the action to take as you approach the light.

The reason I draw on this analogy is because of how it illustrates the main difference between deliberate practice and reflective practice. You will notice in the above that while the endpoint is the action, 'the action to take as you approach the light,' that is not the focus; the focus is the mental processes that precede the action.

You will also notice that these mental processes rely on conceptual awareness and understanding, for example, the concepts of lights, different colors, and timing. If you don't know what lights are or can't differentiate one color from the next, then if someone told you to stop when it's red, you will not be able to follow that instruction even though you are looking at the red light.

However, if you thought you knew what red was, but you were mistaken and actually thought green was red, then you will stop when the light is green.

In subsequent articles dealing with education, I will talk about how education expands the knowledge base, which increases the range of data that you can recognize as significant or useful in processing a situation and thus turn the data into information.

The idea of reflective practice here is first to be able to acknowledge the need to reflect on the experience of you stopping when the light is red and everyone looking at you weirdly or upset with you - recognizing the significance of the experience.

Next is then being able to self-assess to a point that gets you to consider the possibility that the data-to-information conversion you're doing might be flawed - meaning your level of conceptual understanding of colors might be impacting the translation of what your eyes are seeing into the idea of what is red, amber or green. So, even though you know what to do if the light is red, your critical reflection on what you're experiencing reveals the possibility that what you are seeing as red might actually not be red.

Finally, what you do about this realization not only allows you to remedy the situation but also improves your capacity to learn from future experiences.

Now, the example above is just one example of the type of disconnection that can happen in the DIKW and the reason for it. However, reflective practice goes beyond DIKW.

Reflective practice extends to assumptions and beliefs that define mental models and frames of reference, which can control not just how we convert data into information but also what data we pay attention to! Our assumptions and beliefs can short circuit reality, which, if unchecked, severely limits our ability to extract development value from our experiences.

I have always found the ladder of inference a very useful way to explain the full range of mental processes that link data to actions, and I thought this video explains the ladder in a simple and easy-to-understand way.

Reflective practice is a learning and development action that needs to be powered by passion and motivation. It must be deliberate until mastery is achieved, as indicated by automaticity.?

The beauty of mastering reflective practice is that it means you're automatically challenging your assumptions and evolving your beliefs, especially when your actions are not producing the results you want.

More on reflective practice as I delve further into development through education and performance support.

In Summary...

I, like most people, love the simplicity and power of the message in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr ...

"Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other"

Claim your gift

The capacity to develop what is needed for courage, insight, and serenity is innate, it is a gift given to us that remains with us till the day we stop having experiences. A gift that is irrevocable. What I have been talking about in this article and will continue to talk about in subsequent articles under this series of "carve your development" is how to claim your gift.

Insight, or wisdom (which is the often used word in place of insight in the prayer), comes from experience not simply because we experienced it but because of how we engaged in those experiences, with purpose, driven by beliefs linked to our sense of identity.

Courage and confidence come from the impact of your engagement with your experiences on your mind and body and how the resulting changes in your mind and body affect what you believe about your own abilities. The way you deal with, and what you take away from, your successes and intermediate failures on the way to success, are key.

Serenity to accept comes from being totally comfortable and at peace with who you are at any point in time such that external events or variables have limited to no impact on how you are feeling. This requires self-knowledge which comes from the insights we get from observing and understanding who we are across our experiences. Who we are is evidenced by what we end up doing and why. What we end up doing is different from what we thought we would do or what thought we wanted to do.

The key, therefore, is to recognize and fully engage in our experiences, especially the significant ones as indicated by the emotional states they trigger. In these experiences, we stay true to ourselves as we use deliberate and reflective practice techniques to ensure we remain intentional and purposeful. Our confidence and courage come from the insights generated by these practices.

Deliberate practice generates insights into how we actually move from before (i can't do) to after (I'm awesome at it) which encourages us to pursue new "I can't do" goals with the perspective "I know I can learn to do it".

Reflective practice generates insights into how we develop beliefs and assumptions and how these influence, not just the decisions we make but the data we pay attention to when making those decisions. Knowing we can challenge our own assumptions and being able to engage with our beliefs helps us see ourselves and what we can learn to achieve in a completely new light. We are able to define and watch ourselves achieve aspirational goals in areas and ways we never thought possible and that builds our confidence and courage to take on more.

Notice I am not talking about the domain of the goals themselves, I am talking about our belief in our ability to learn and develop what's needed to succeed in the domains we choose. This underlying belief in ourselves is so key.

As we seek to develop our abilities to achieve success in all spheres of life, it is important that we are willing to dig deeper and appreciate the need to practice and master the underlying mental actions that guide our decisions and actions and the internal processes that aid the development of automaticity and mastery of physical actions. We need to start paying attention to the mastery of deliberate practice and reflective practice such that these processes operate with a level of automaticity and efficiency always anchored to and guided by the progress we are making in the results we desire to achieve in our life experiences.?

We are all blessed with experiences that offer the opportunity to develop these competencies and capabilities, to pursue and achieve mastery in all layers , meta-development, development, and performance. But at the moment, we seem to only focus on the performance layer, maybe it's time to shift focus.

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