Every Friday, I'm posting about things I'm learning and sharing the resources and information I found most valuable during the week. 

Setting Some Appreciative Goals

I'm currently reading Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization and finding it to be a wealth of wonderful ideas for bringing appreciative inquiry into my daily practice. 

In setting my development goals for February, I've added these two ideas from the book to my list:

• At the beginning of the day, I'm asking myself: How will you contribute good today? How will you add value to others, bring out their best and/or set positive ripples in motion? Then I'm checking back on this at the end of the day for my one-sentence journal entry. 

• Ask questions at least 3x more than you give advice. People--this is HARD. It's reminding me that I tend to immediately go to solving problems and giving advice, rather than using questions to help other people draw out their own answers. I'm trying to be more mindful of this tendency and to pause when I feel myself wanting to give advice and to, instead, go back to asking questions. I can tell this will be a work in progress. 

How Do You Learn and Stay Relevant? 

My colleague and co-conspirator in the Leadership Lab, Rebecca Fabiano, had 6 hours to kill on a train during the recent blizzard that blasted the East Coast. She spent part of that time pulling together this newsletter where she listed all of the listservs and newsletters she subscribes to in order to stay relevant in her field. What a fantastic resource for the people she's working with! Imagine if you and other colleagues did something similar. . . 

What About a Weekly Personal Career Newsletter? 

Rebecca's newsletter reminded me of this article from Aja Frost that I'd seen a few months ago on the career benefits of starting a weekly personal career newsletter. Aja recommends using TinyLetter (a Mailchimp product) that is a free and lightweight way to share what you're working on, your ideas, thoughts, etc. 

How could you jumpstart your career aspirations if you started a newsletter like this? 

These are just a few things from my week. . . what have you been learning about? What resources can you share?