3.16: MAP Challenge #2

In this podcast episode, I guide listeners through the second step of the Mindful Action Planning (MAP) Pyramid Challenge, which focuses on defining personal success. 

I emphasize the importance of aligning career goals with personal values and purpose, rather than simply checking off achievements. I encourage listeners to consider the emotional hallmarks of success and to frame their success in a 5-year timeframe. 

I also highlight that success is an ongoing journey, shaped by small milestones and deeply personal definitions, and advises against adopting societal or familial definitions without introspection. 

I conclude by inviting listeners to reach out if they encounter difficulties and tease the next episode's focus on priority outcomes.

You can access Josh's substack & podcast here:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/

Episode Details

Transcript

Hello, and welcome back to the mindful academic Podcast. I'm Jennifer Askey, your academic coach. And this is episode three of the mindful action pyramid challenge. So you have, I hope, picked up the PDF of the mindful action planning pyramid from my website, Jennifer askey.com. You've done your values and purpose, which are the foundation of this pyramid. And now it is time to create your vision of success. So this is, I believe, page three of the PDF. And it says mindful action, the pinnacle, right. So when you think of success, or the pinnacle of success for your career, you might equate that with title, position, salary, or other things that signal to you that you've achieved. Maybe you've achieved your potential or you've achieved a goal, right? Maybe you've achieved what the institution or the publisher or the family expected of you, right? I love all of that for you. And also, I want you to go a layer deeper than those achievements. And think about the feelings that you associate with success. What are the emotional hallmarks of success for you? In the PDF, you'll see prompts like, I know I am successful when or career success to me feels like I feel successful when. So the prompt isn't to say, this is what I'm going to check off the list to know I am successful. That's not what we're doing. This is how do you know, how do you feel successful? So my suggestion when filling out the mindful action pyramid for the first time, is to anchor it in, let's say, a no more than five year timeframe. So if you look at your next career phase, right, the next five years, and think about the pinnacle of that saying, Okay, how will I know that these next five years have been well spent? That's one way to think about this. Because we don't want to just check boxes, which everybody, I think, jumps past those boxes too quickly. Right? The pyramid is a reminder that even though every day isn't a home run every day isn't gonna deliver that amazing, juicy feeling of success and being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing with the right skills. Your success is made up of myriad small decisions, and small milestones. And this is an invitation to celebrate that journey. But it needs to be a journey towards something you care about. And that's where this definition of success comes in. Right? What does success mean to you? So the feeling of success for me is this. The signs of success for me are this. And this is where we get to things like impact reputation, the ripple effects that we have on people, maybe you would use the word legacy here.

 So for example, you might say, I feel successful when I'm acknowledged as the leading human design researcher in my college, right? That might be something that makes you feel successful, right? When somebody really Pat's you on the back. It's like, wow, that was great. So what this does, what a statement like that does is it points to the impact you want to have, and how that is recognized. Right? Because for some people, they don't want Pat's on the back. They don't want the spotlight on them, others do. So knowing that like your sense of success is I have worked behind the scenes to create amazing things that zillions of people are loving, right? Or, I am the first people, and the first person people call when they want somebody to get up on stage and do a thing. Right? Any of those could be your definition of success. It'll be idiosyncratic to you, right? And it'll give you a sense of what's important to you internally and externally. Now, the interesting thing about this pinnacle exercise that is different from just checking a box is that you might not ever get to check this box, right? You control the input. You control the actions and the attitude and the mindset and the work that happens that moves you in the direction of this pinnacle. But we do don't really ever control the acknowledgement. And we could put in all the effort in the world and still not get there or not know that we've gotten there. Right? Sometimes it's hard to know whether you are the leading human design researcher at your college, sometimes it's easy, right? Are you the premier cardiac researcher in your region? How would you know that maybe it's easy to find out, maybe it isn't. So this pinnacle thing, it really is a feeling, it's a way point that your values steer you toward, but you might not ever get to the point where you just check it off and move to the next thing. 

So the job with the pyramid is to stay the course and to stay motivated, you're checking in with your success, you're checking in with your values. But this isn't what we check off. It's what guides us. So once you've gotten that clear picture of success, we'll move down a layer into Priority Outcomes. But before we get there, we're really going to check on the alignment of values, the foundation of that pyramid and purpose. And this feeling of success at the top. Look at what you have. If you look at those values and that purpose statement, and then you look at what is bubbling up around what success feels like to you. Do they match up are they aligned is what you most deeply value and desired, reflected in what makes you feel most successful. When I first started developing this mindful action pyramid and taking people through it, we would spend a long time sort of figuring out where we got our definitions of success from. So what is your family background, your religious and cultural background? Were you expected to be married by a certain time have kids by a certain time, were you expected to go to post graduate school, get a professional degree get a doctoral degree, were you the first person in your family to do that? Right, all of those, the historical expectations filter into how we think of success, especially as we are still creating our vision of ourselves as young people right in college and in grad school, if you went to grad school. So acknowledging that your ability to say this is what success feels like, to me, might not be representative of what your parents are the clergy members in your, in your circle, or your undergraduate professors were your first boss, or the institution you work at, or your students, like they all have other ideas of what makes you successful. Some of those ideas will overlap with yours, but maybe not all of them. So when you think about what success feels like to you, this is not just the opportunity to say tenure and promotion to full, right, because first of all, you can check those off. What will it mean? If you get to that place? What will it mean for you? If you get tenure? What will it mean for you, if you get promoted to fall? What will it mean for you if you get to move into a different kind of role, not just oh, these are steps on a path that I should be checking off because I'm a successful person. So I want you to pursue work and pursue a vision of success that aligns with your purpose and values. 

So what have you learned, if you've spent some time really exploring your values and purpose and what success means? I hope you've learned that articulating these things matters. Frequently, we don't take time to plan. We don't take time to strategize. We don't take this time out of our day to be intentional about our actions, and to really think about what it means to be aligned. And yet what I find over and over and over again, in my own life and working with clients is I hear people say Well, now that I say that out loud, or Well, now that I've mapped it out and can see it on this pyramid, right? So actually writing it down or having a trusted friend or a coach or a mentor. Verbally have somebody to whom you can verbalize this process. Those things take all of our assumptions about how we're behaving or all of our sort of unchecked unexamined assumptions. biases. And they bring them out to the surface, put them on paper in front of us and say, Okay, this is what is going on? These are the values that have you have used to guide your career. Are you okay with that? Currently, you are behaving as if success for you means this. Is that true? And if it isn't, then then you have the opportunity to intervene and say, Okay, what would it mean to be aligned? With my best self? What would it mean to align my career goals with my values? What would it mean to align my career goals, with the work I'm doing when I feel I am at my best, that purpose work. And because we have invitations from the world to put all sorts of things as the pinnacle of success. And you know, it's like winning the lottery, you can say, be a billionaire up there, and you can buy a lottery ticket every week, it doesn't mean you're going to make it. 

So what is in your control to say, Okay, this is the direction I'm going. And I'm going there for these reasons, and I have the skills to accompany me along the way. So this is a real call to not skip the work. Right? If you're listening to this while you walk the dog, which is what I do with podcasts, and I tell myself, Oh, when I get back home, I'll go to the website, I'll print up the thing. And I'll do it. And sometimes they don't. And this is one where I think you should, because actually writing it down and looking at what you see can reveal to you maybe the autopilot that you have been operating under. So in the next podcast, we're going to move down to the second layer of the pyramid that are sort of our big objectives are the outcomes that matter? All right, I hope you come back to do the next set of these exercises with me. And as you go through these exercises, if you hit a sticky point, and you're like, Jennifer, I don't get it. This doesn't make sense. I hate it. This is frustrating, which it shouldn't be. Email me, Jennifer@Jenniferaskey.com. I'm a human. I'm on the other end of the email, and I'm more than happy to hop on a call or send you a quick response to say hey, here's one way to think about it. That might unstick your thinking a little bit. So that's the next step and aligning for mindful Career Action and I look forward to being in your ears again tomorrow for the next segment.