40 | How to find time for career develoment when you’re too busy to get up to pee

Hi there!

Today's episode was inspired by a conversation my mastermind community had about the fact that we get so busy sometimes that we don't even want to get up to pee. (amiright)

It's hard to make space for career development when your workday is that jam packed!

So here's an episode to help out. 

xo

Liz

Well, Hey there, I'm Liz St. Jean, and this is the unruly leadership podcast where I help subject matter experts. Like you design a career on your terms. It's where strategy meets intuition to help you break the rules, ignore the rules and make your own damn rules. So let's break free from perfectionism, imposter thoughts, and that inner rule.

Keep that's keeping you in your career comfort zone. it's time to become unapologetically you and step into the life you were meant to live. We're going to talk presence, productivity career, and having it all. Or as my four year old would say, we're going to take over the world. So let's get to it.

Well, hello there, friends. Welcome back to the show. This is episode 40. Can you believe it? I can. I can hardly believe it's so much fun. They have F 40 episodes out in the world. So thank you for being here and celebrating. My this little milestone, this little mini milestone, because we always, we always need to celebrate. Right. I hope you are doing the same all the time celebrations. I mean, there's always those big celebrations, like getting a promotion or getting a major accolades or an award.

And at the same time, we also want to get used to celebrating the other milestones and just getting in the habit of celebrating, celebrating ourselves or. For anyone who's seen my webinars or taking my programs. You know, I like to call it shining your own star because I know you shine stars for other people all the time. So I want to encourage you to shine your own star as well.

Okay. So with that, let's get chatting about today's topic. So if you saw the title, I hope you had a little chuckle alongside me because the title is. And so those of you who are with. Uh, with kids, here's a little. Um, ear Muff time. Let's get those earmuffs on the kids, possibly, depending on how you talk about things around your kids.

So the title of this episode was how to find time for career development. When you are too busy to get up to pee. I hope you had a good chuckle. I had a laugh too, and I decided to put this in the universe. So. This topic. Didn't come out of completely thin air. And it's not just a, it's not just a me thing, although I've been at right there alongside you, this is where anyone who is so, so, so swamped, you realize like you're just sitting at your desk, then you don't even get up to go be.

And it came up, it came up during one of my mastermind conversations. When one of the participants kind of said to the group just kind of confessed to the group, they're like, oh, you have to be honest. Like sometimes I don't actually even drink that much water sometimes because I'm so busy. I don't want to have to get up to go pee. And because they confess this, everyone raised their hands and said, oh my gosh, I have so been there as well. Right. So if you're listening to this, you are, you're still here with me. You have probably been that busy, right. Where you're just like, I just had to get this done and just have to get this done.

Before running off and going to the bathroom. So when you're in a situation like that, when we're things are so busy, you're in a stressful environment, or maybe, maybe it's the culture of your organization or your team, maybe in your industry could even be time of year, right? Like some people, especially in the financials have certain times a year where they get really, really busy.

Um, whatever it is. We often notice that our career development, our leadership development, our personal development, that's the first thing that gets cut. Right. Just kind of cuts to the for either. I there's. I have no time to take a course. Right. You cancel your courses, you forget about them. You don't show up. You just, you don't make that time investment because you're just, you're too busy and.

We've we've all been there, right? Where we felt career development, leadership development. That's a nice to have. It's not a need to have. So I instead, I mean, we can, we can have a whole conversation about how important it is and. You know what you'll do from growing with it, like. But I know that you know that and Nicola, princess bride, I know that, you know that I know the here though. We all know that, right? Like that's not, that's not anything new, so I'm not going to go. I don't even think I need to go there. Right. That's a whole different conversation that we can have, but actually it's much more of an internal conversation to be, to kind of be able to take that time, even when you feel like you don't have that time. That's a different conversation. I want to have the conversation with like, yeah, things are super busy and it is hard to make the time, create that time, carve out that time when you have got a million things going on and you don't have enough people and you've got all these pressures and expectations.

And there's a whole separate conversation we could have, but what to do if it's chronically that way. Right. But all those conversations aside. How can you find time for career development when it feels like it's that busy? So I wanted to give you some more practical advice about what you can do or some, or some are practical things to think about.

So I've got three things for you here that I want to share. So one is that I wanted to let you know. So this is the first thing. This is the most important is that. When it comes to career development, leadership development, you don't necessarily need a very elaborate plan or a program or in depth, or you don't necessarily need to take a lot of time.

A lot of the times when it comes to career development, personal development, leadership development. We, we kind of think that we need to take all the courses or get into this major program that's very long. Or sometimes we think we, we, we start thinking about going back to school or, you know, getting another degree, getting an MBA.

We can do that. Like, I don't take that away. Like we can do that. So if you're thinking about it, that's amazing, but we don't have to. One of the nuggets I took away from my leadership development research and training, it was a really key piece. It was a thread that I saw and I saw some really interesting data.

Is that it was often, it was less the type of development they were doing. Like, and when, I mean type, what I mean is like a course versus coaching versus mentoring versus anything else, it would be development oriented. Type. Didn't matter as much and how much time you spent doing it didn't matter as much.

The one thing that mattered the most. Was when people had a learning mindset to whatever it was they were doing. That they were taking time for reflection for self-reflection. And I don't even mean a lot of time. I just mean doing it, doing the reflection. Uh, doing things from a learning mindset.

That was one of the biggest differentiators in terms of how effective career or leadership development was for people. So what this, what this means is that. Instead of thinking that we just spent a lot of time taking courses and we need to do a lot. You. Invest all this time. What actually matters more is that you do something.

Rather than nothing. Okay. So even just a teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny bit of reflection time is better than nothing. It literally is better than nothing. If you can't go all in onto a big program, you can't take courses. Here's your permission slip. Here's me telling you that is okay. And this is actually one of the reasons for my program, my signature program, powerful presence, society. That the way I've designed it is that if someone wants to go in depth and they really want to immerse themselves in information, I've got a lot in there. They can do, right. You can do more. You can learn more, you can kind of keep pulling the thread, following the breadcrumbs. But you can also get so much out of it with just five minutes a day.

So I really designed it about learning, reflection and growth more so than information and spending three hours a day, like we're, we're not writing papers or anything like that at all. It is more focused on the growth and you do not actually need as much time as we think.

As long as we do something. Because what I've noticed is that when we feel like we don't have enough time, we just don't do anything. Right. We just, we completely put it aside. It feels like it's almost like I have to go all in a hundred percent or it's bust. Right. So you might see something about an online conference and especially even a free one, right? Like all it is is your time costs and you think, well, I don't have enough time for that because I can't commit to the entire two days or four days or whatever long it is. And so we kind of get in this mindset like, oh, if I can't commit fully a hundred percent, then I can't do it.

And I'm here to tell you that if you approach something with a learning mindset, which means that you're, you're curious and you're open and you're reflective, and you're thinking about how can I use this information to grow? How can I change? You don't have to commit a hundred percent. You could commit 1%. So I'll give you another example from my own world. So I'm going to be in January. Oh, here's a little sneak peek. I hadn't planned on talking about this, but here we go. A little sneak peak in January, I'm going to be doing a mini retreat, a mini leadership retreat.

And the whole goal of it is to help us rejuvenate refresh, replenish, like get feeling really good about ourselves and what we're doing and becoming better leaders. So that's happening in January. It's going to be over 4 day period, but it is being called a mini retreat because it's not a big commitment anyways. And I also want to give you permission if you're looking at that and you're looking at the outline, you're thinking, Ooh, I don't even know if I can commit to a mini retreat.

You don't have to commit to the whole thing, sign up for it, but you don't have to commit to at all . Just take a little bit, take little snippets, little things, little snippets here,there, a little nugget here, a little nugget there, and you will grow from it. So that's point number one. You don't need to spend a lot of time. As long as you're doing something.

Okay. Number two, number two, really important. And that is when you are doing your career development, your leadership development. It needs to be focused. And you want it to be focused on the outcome, not the process. Okay. A lot of career development and personal professional development plans and especially the templates that your organization might have you do are very process oriented.

And what I mean by process oriented is that they're very focused on what you are doing for the growth. Instead of being focused on the outcome of the growth. Okay. So you might be taking courses, which as another aside, a lot of times we focus so much on courses we forget that you can literally do almost anything for your development, as long as you're doing it with a learning mindset and you're reflecting.

So we end up gravitating towards courses and taking programs, going back to school. Mainly because that's what we're most familiar with. I know a lot of my listeners are north American or though not, not everyone, but most people have grown up in kind of a student oriented situation. Right. You go either usually to a primary school, maybe a middle school, maybe high school or whatnot, potentially into college university. We're very course oriented and teacher oriented. It doesn't have to be that way. And the other thing too is that sometimes, and this is again with hearkening back to number one, we ended up thinking it takes a lot of time investment because we are so focused on the process.

The course are going to take, Ooh, do I have enough time to commit to the course? And usually when we set our goals, they're a bit high level, right. They're a little bit more high level than being focused on the outcome. And what I mean by that is that we don't necessarily identify what, what will be different right when we achieve our goal. So let me give you one example. Um, I had someone who wanted to work on becoming more confident, and that's why they decided to work with me.

And I mean, it, it all worked out very, very nicely. Like it was great. It was a great person to work with. And at the same time, one of the very first conversations we had was when I was asking them about, well, what, what does it mean to be more confident because it's like, it feels like. We might be able to say, oh, I'm going to take this course. It will help me become more confident, but what does being more confident even mean? Like that might be our goal. And that's a very, that's a very high level goal. But what we want to do is you want to really be able to get specific about what that means.

And in this case, the person was saying, oh, well, I wouldn't ask my colleagues as much for their expertise or their insight on my report. So I would just write my reports without, going and asking my colleagues as much. And do you see how, when I give you that example, if you're someone who says, I want to work on a confidence. You might realize, oh, well, that's not what confident means to me. Right. So what I want you to do, whatever it is, you. You have said you wanted to work for, for your development? Ask yourself. Okay. Well, what does that mean? How, like, how would, how would we know, how would we tangibly be able to see that you were more confident.

Okay. And then number three. So number three will, will sound a bit obvious, but I just wanted to make sure we highlight it. And that is that you want to get it down on paper. You want to have some kind of plan. Now, for those of you who fill out one of these, you might do an annually as part of your performance review. So you might already have something, but, but I know that I have listeners and I have people in my audience who have never done a career development plan before.

So for, especially for you, but even for if you've done it before, I wanted to let you all know that I have a template, a one page career development template that you can get. And I'll talk about that in a second. So hang on, hang tight for that one. But you essentially, you want to make sure you get it on paper and you get it down so that you're getting it out of your head, because it is very easy for you to just spend some time, even just like these last few minutes is last 10, 15 minutes thinking about it and then putting it aside and getting busy again.

Right. Remember the whole premise of this episode is that we are too busy to get up to pee. How are we going to find time for career development? Okay, so you want to get on paper. And the reason that I like to have it as a one page plan is a couple of reasons. One is that it keeps it from becoming overly complicated. It helps it to stay focused.

The other reason I really like one page is it helps to sharpen our minds and get into that practice around tightening things up, making it shorter, making it succinct. And what's really cool is that when you can put your career development plan into one page, usually this means because you are using one or two words to represent an entire concept or thought, or even what would normally be a paragraph. When you can get it down with one word that, you know, represents that whole piece.

You were at a place where it is very easy for you to talk about your career plan. So when you were having career conversations with your boss, with your mentor, with anyone else really that you would have this conversation around. It is top of mind to be able to talk about it succinctly rather than going into very long detail that the other person doesn't necessarily need to know. So you've got it top of mind. You're ready to go.

And it's also really helpful. Preparation for interviews. When you're able to summarize things with one or two words, then you're going to be very well prepared going into interviews to be able to answer questions and talk to your experience as well as your goals and your desires. Um, Because you've already spent that time to summarize it.

So that's why I like to have a, a one page career development plan. Very nice, very simple out of your brain onto paper and summarized very neatly and concisely. Okay. So I mentioned it that I do have a template, which I'm more than happy to share with you. And what I also wanted to share is that I have something called a career growth assessment. If you've been hanging out with me for awhile, you probably know by now that I love quizzes and self-assessments, and I find it's just a really valuable way to help us understand ourselves.

So I've, I've developed this one. Called the career growth assessment. And what it does is it's going to tell you which of the four seasons your career is in because there's four seasons to our career growth. We go through summer, autumn, winter, and spring, and this assessment we'll figure out which one you're in. And it'll give you some personalized tips and suggestions around your development, around your leadership development.

It's going to talk a little bit about imposter syndrome for that part of the season, because a lot of people I know are always grappling with imposter thoughts. And it also, if you sign up for the emails as well, you also get the gift of the career development plan.

And then extra bonus two is actually, there's going to be a replay of a workshop. So just this weekend, I just did a workshop about the career development plan. And we talked about the obstacles, that can get in the way we talked about some of the things we even just discussed.

So, what you're going to want to do is head over to my website, the mint ambition.com/growth. That's the mintambition.com/growth. And you'll take a quick assessment. Should take you about two to three minutes or so. Take the quick assessment. You'll get your results and you'll get the option to grab that career development plan, as well as that workshop replay. So with that I encourage you to go off and just do something for your career development, your leadership development, like I said, does it not need to be a lot of time. Just approach it with an open mind, a willingness to learn, and you'll be amazed at how much you can grow. All right let's get out there and get to it.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If this podcast helped you or inspired you in any way, I would love for you to leave me a review over on apple podcasts, it takes 20 seconds, if that, and it's, it's honestly the easiest way for you to thank me for this episode. Every time I see a review, it brings me so much joy and it just lights me up.

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Thanks again. And now get out there and start breaking some rules.