Balancing Work and Family-It's Not Easy

An excerpt from my ebook Invest in Yourself

You want to improve your life. Something is motivating you to become a better person or employee. There is power in simply sitting down and putting your thoughts to paper. From this documentation comes the beginning of your plan.

Step One: Create a Current State SIPOC Diagram of Your Life (see example above)
The diagram depicts the current state of your life. Starting with life process (P), list in order of priority: Work, Family, Play (self), and God. The priority should reflect where each stands in your life. Where are you spending your time and thoughts? Your day rises and falls with what occurs in these arenas.

Be honest in the prioritization. If you are taking time to do this, you want to change so make this an honest effort.

The output (O) of this life process is your feelings. Give yourself two and one half minutes to write down (in the output O column) the negative feelings you have and the same amount of time to write down your positive feelings. These are your emotions during the course of a day. Think about this week and things you encountered at work and away from work. When you are done, add up the total amount of feelings and calculate a percent positive and a percent negative. Write the percentages in the third row under output.

Your customers (C) are the recipients of your feelings. They receive them free of charge in their daily interactions with you. They see the good and bad in you. They know you (some better than others) as a person. In general terms, use the 3F3C format: First (you), Friends, Family, Colleagues, Clients, Congregation. First (you) signifies yourself as a customer. To be good to others, we must be good to ourselves. Friends are the people you enjoy being with and need to interact (with) for your well being. Family is your immediate family and extended family. Colleagues are the people you work with. You spend a significant amount of time with them so it is important to treat them as customers. Clients are the workplace; the recipients of your skill and work tasks. They can be internal to your company or external to the company. Congregation is your church. Write the categories in descending order according to the current priority in your life.

Study your life process, output, and customers. What does this self reflection mean to you? Hopefully, this allowed you to organize your thoughts.

Write down the current inputs (I) to your life process. I suggest two sources: Physical condition and thought process. The concept is sound mind and sound body. In the S column, list the suppliers of your physical condition. What suppliers are shaping your thought process? Think of what you are bombarded with every day. A distribution of your time should help with this.

Go to the third row and summarize each section of the SIPOC diagram.

Step Two: Create a Future State SIPOC Diagram of Your Life (see example above)
Becoming lean means systematically eliminating waste from processes to deliver products and services quicker to your customers (always on time) with exceptional quality. A leading tool in lean is a value stream map. In general terms, value stream mapping creates a current picture of a key business process including areas of waste and creates a future state map of the process minus waste. Your life is no different. The current state SIPOC diagram shows where you are now. This should organize your thoughts and help you understand what is coming into and going out of your life. The future state SIPOC diagram is the vision of what your life will be minus waste (sin, etc.). God already knows the answer but you are starting (with this diagram) to learn what his plans are for you.

Change the Priority Order of Your Life Process (P)
Critique the order in your current state diagram. Does the list reflect the correct priority order? If not, put them in descending order (on the future state diagram) from most important to least important. Often, my high school football coach told us to keep priorities in order. His order was God, Football, Family, School, and all Else. This reordering of priority is your first step towards change.

Focus now on the suppliers of your inputs. To improve or change your physical condition and thought process, you must improve or change suppliers. In the supplier column, write a list of suppliers you will allow in your life. The list may contain current suppliers and/or new suppliers.

This activity is done with the belief that God is pleased with your action. He loves the fact you are excited to discover what he has planned for you. What you put on paper does not have to be correct. There is no right or wrong. The significance is you are putting your innermost thoughts to paper. You are opening your heart and mind and documenting both for you and God to see.

God knows the output. All you have to do in the output column is write down what you want the output to be. What do you want in life? Think about this using everything you have done to this point. You are poised to ask God for something. He anxiously awaits the question and is eager to help you. In the form of a question starting with “God, I ask for/that,etc.”, write down what you are asking God to do in your life.

In the customer column, prioritize the list of customers from your current state diagram. Who should be your number one customer?

In the third row, write down actions you want to take to better serve your customers and actions you will take for each supplier.

How to Write a Personal Career Development Plan

The slides above (click on each slide to make it larger) and the following are excerpts from my ebook, Invest in Yourself, which I selfishly feel is one of the best personal development ebooks available for you to read.

Are you happy with what you are doing in life? A simple question that only needs a yes or no answer. Do you drag yourself to work every day or do you look forward to applying your skills and talents in an environment that energizes you? Do you work to get paid or do you work to exercise your God given talents? (The money is a reward for your hard work) Every day, are you honoring God, your family and yourself by pouring your talents and skills onto society to help others and to improve cultures, systems, and processes?

If you are upper thirties or early forties, is your job what you want (to do) from now until retirement? Can you honestly see yourself in your current job at the age of retirement?
Do you dread Mondays? Do you come home at night in a bad frame of mind?

What do you really enjoy doing? Are you passionate about your career? Or do you only have a job? How does the work you do affect your personality? Do you come home energized or does the work sap your energy? Do you hate taking orders? Do you like to be led or do you like to lead?

If you are twenty something, are you focused on your strengths and talents or are you focused on making money? Is your work an extension of your studies in college or are in you in a completely different arena? Do you sometimes feels that you majored in the wrong subject or do you know for sure that you spent four years preparing for your career? Are you preparing to have children? If so, are you in a career that fulfills you and makes you a better person.

Do you work to exercise your talents or do you work for money? Do you get paid for what you know or do or do you get a set amount that only changes once per year?

What drives you crazy in life? What pleases you in life? How do these items manifest themselves in your career? Positively and negatively?

I will tell you how to decide on a career. But first, you must understand yourself. You must know what you like to do and don’t like to do. You must be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. If you can’t perform this introspection, then the questions will be hard to answer.

If you can analyze yourself, sit down with a paper and pencil and follow the process outlined below. I developed this process because I was in the same position you are in right now. I was thirty nine with three children working in a job for a paycheck that was not enough to provide for my family. My wife worked in a job that made her unhappy. I was a hostage to my job. I was bonded to the monthly check. I knew my strengths and weaknesses but still remained in the daily grind called the rat race.

There are countless reasons to not versus few reasons to pursue a goal. Seemingly the reasons not to do something dwarf the reasons to act. Needing a paycheck. Health insurance. Being able to pay bills. Sure we need to satisfy daily necessities but what I have learned from experience and from reading and listening is your career must be what you want to do. It must bring out the best in you. Your inner being must escape your pores to guide your career. The work should be done with talents provided by God. Therefore, we work to honor him. If you aren’t, then first, you are ignoring God; secondly, you are penalizing yourself.

Why waste your talent? My father once told me that people will pay you for what you know. I never listened to him but now know it to be true. Like an athlete that practices his skills, you must practice your skills every day. If not, they sit dormant and help no one.

I am a big proponent of the five why concept. If you have a problem, ask yourself why five times. This line of questioning will get you to the root of your problem fast. For example, if you are unhappy at home, ask yourself why. I have done so often and the majority of times answered that my job was making me unhappy. Why is my job making me unhappy? I often listed a multitude of reasons and most dealt with crappy leadership at work and the environment that surrounded me. Over time, I knew I wanted to work on my own but was afraid to do so. I even started my own company with an aggressive partner only to succumb to the reasons why not to do it. He was frustrated with me. We parted ways with him starting his own company which is now flourishing.

A career is the embodiment of what you do with your skills and talents, likes and dislikes. Your career captures who you are. A coach. A teacher. An engineer. A job is what you do within the career. At the micro level, it is the daily display of your skills and talents. For the job to be correct, the career must be correct. The career doesn’t just apply to the work you do. It applies to what you did to help society and others that interacted with you. For example, for years, my job was to be an engineer in a manufacturing plant. Every day, I went to work, sat at a desk, and did engineering stuff. When I went home, I was just a father and husband. I was not an engineer. As I matured, I developed a love of research and analysis. I went back to graduate school and obtained a masters degree in statistics. I saw my career as being a statistician. I loved analyzing data at work but also loved applying my talents in data analysis outside of work. In short, my career is a statistician. I knew for my long term happiness, what I did every day had to be in this career direction.

The Process for Deciding What to Do for a Career and a Job within a Career (see slides above for example)
1. Make a list of the things you like to do. Write them in bullet format. Each line should contain a verb and an object.
2. Make a list of the things you do not like to do in your personal life or the things that you do not like about your current job.
3. Go through the “don’t like” list and where possible, convert to the “like to do” list.
4. Go through the “like to do” list and mark the things that you love to do (passion=love) and the things you like to do (a little less passion). You are trying to separate out what your passion is. Be honest about your passion. Think hard at this step as it dictates what is to follow.
5. Take the “love to do” things and simplify the list. Try to boil each thing into a verb and an object.
6. Make two columns: verb and object. Write the verbs from step five and the corresponding objects in the columns. The verbs indicate what you should be doing in your career. The objects define the arenas to apply your skills.
7. Organize the verbs in a hierarchy. Does one verb precede another? How do the verbs relate in the totality of what you love to do?
8. Now fill in the objects with the corresponding verbs. This is the blueprint for your career. Study it. Become comfortable with it. Post it on your wall if you need a constant reminder. If you were honest, then this is what you should be doing.
9. Now, write a career mission statement using the verbs and objects and their relationship depicted in step seven. Don’t leave this step until you like what you have written.
10. Form the mission statement; make a list of the criteria that your career must meet and criteria that you like for it to meet. A Word of advise: Leave family issues out of the must section. Why? If you pick the right career, then you will be a better spouse and parent.
11. At this point, the career may become crystal clear. If so, congratulations.
12. If the way is not clear, then make a list of career opportunities that interest you or you know about.
13. At this point, I recommend taking a personality test to confirm what you have said and concluded about yourself. There is no worse critic than thyself so this objective analysis hopefully confirms what you know to be true.
14. Write down what you will do tomorrow as a result of the above process. Start working immediately. Don’t wait.

For more instruction on personal improvement, I invite you to take my personal improvement course from The Center for Process Improvement. Please go to www.cpionlinecourses.com

Stephen