PLAYSTUDIOS Professional Growth Framework

 

playstudios-logoWelcome to the resource page for managing your professional growth at PLAYSTUDIOS. Below you will find guidelines and tools you can use to develop professional growth goals, plan a great week that keeps you connected to them, and become a master of setting realistic goals that keep you focused and in the flow.

All of this fits into a curriculum of classes PLAYSTUDIOS offers to help you build skills toward your professional growth.

For teachers, at the bottom is a template for creating a class and a checklist to help you guide students toward professional growth during your class.

The Method

It’s fairly simple how to implement the growth framework, and within a few minutes of crafting realistic goals for the week, you are likely to experience more focus and less anxiety. The real power comes after a few weeks of practice. Here are the steps:

  1. Draft your long term goals; review with your manager.
  2. Plan a great week, every week.
  3. Master crafting goals that keep you focused and motivated, every day.

The tools are linked below. Read on to understand the context.

Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is the attitude you take when you are learning something, especially when it’s difficult. Our society in general promotes a fixed mindset through labels like “smart” or “talented.” If you’ve ever been called smart or talented, then it’s likely you struggle with learning new things. Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

Carol Dweck’s book Mindset offers a thorough review of her groundbreaking research on the growth and fixed mindsets. People who have been praised for their abilities often choose easier tasks instead of challenging themselves. Conversely, people who have been encouraged to try difficult tasks and praised for effort, strategy, and progress tend to embrace challenges with tenacity.

Our goal is to embrace a growth mindset, encouraging each other and ourselves by avoiding show-stopping comments like, “You’re so smart.” Shift your encouragement to, “I love how you take on challenges,” and “I wonder how you’re going to solve this one.” Challenge people who need it. “That’s great, and I think you can do better.”

Important vs Urgent

Urgency is seductive and sometimes it feels great. It focuses our attention triggering dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins, and other feel-good biochemistry. Problem is: most of the things that are really important to us, like professional growth, personal health, and deep relationships are rarely urgent. Deadlines, social media, and real-life crises almost always take our attention from the important things.

Growth is about learning how to focus on what’s important and not necessarily urgent. Learning how to set goals that help use focus on growth, sharing those goals with others, and scheduling growth into our calendars can start to shift our attention to what’s most important.

The growth framework is about focusing on what’s most important to us through regular planning and masterful goal crafting.

Tools

Here are three tools to help you with your professional growth. Use them to craft long-term goals, short-term goals, and plan each week to help you stay focused.

Set Up Professional Growth Goals

Setting professional goals includes four categories:

  • Vitality – staying energized
  • Building valuable skills
  • Building strong relationships
  • Creativity – making something better

Use this worksheet to create long term goals. Tune them up them with your manager. Share them with your colleagues. Visit them every week when you plan your week. Never let them go stale. Goals change so adjust as needed. These are your beacons. Come back to them when you are feeling lost or overwhelmed and use them to reconnect to what’s most important to you.

Plan a Great Week in 20 Minutes, Every Week

Every Friday, use this simple process to connect long-term goals with a week’s plan that will help you stay balanced, keep you focused, and give you the best chance of finding flow in your work.

Send your week’s plan to your manager every Friday. Ask your colleagues to keep you accountable. Learn how to craft goals that keep you focused, productive, and balanced.

Master Crafting Goals

Learning how to set realistic goals that align with our values is a lifelong practice, and in my opinion, the path to a rich, fully engaging life. We don’t know if achieving our goals will make us happy—life is unpredictable that way—but we do know from fairly extensive research that focusing our attention so that we fall into a state of Flow almost always makes us feel good.

The SMART & SEXY Goal Checklist is a tool designed to help you set goals that are realistic, engaging, and aligned with your values. Use them to make long-term goals and, especially, creating short-term tasks that help you drop into Flow.

Teaching Tools

As a teacher, you have the opportunity to create a growth environment in which students embrace difficult challenges and learn how to assess their own growth. Help them set realistic goals as they learn difficult skills. Help them avoid a “fixed mindset.”

Two things you can do: 1. Prepare a course that includes clear learning goals. 2. Prompt your students to document what they learned and craft goals for building more skills.

Creating a course with a growth mindset

Use this template to create a course with clear learning goals.

Use this checklist during your class to remind students about their Professional Growth Goals and help them take the next steps.

Resources

Here are some excellent books to help you grow as a professional and embrace the growth mindset.

Mindset. Carol Dweck teaches us how a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in business, education, and sports. It’s something we can all learn, share, and teach. Read the book. It’s inspiring and very helpful. For the 10 minute version, watch her TEDx talk.

Flow. Pioneer in the field of positive psychology and champion of creativity, curiosity, and a life of meaning, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Me high. Chick sent me high!”), wrote the books on Flow, the deeply satisfying experience of complete immersion. Crafting goals is a step toward mastering Flow.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You is Cal Newport’s extensively researched and convincingly articulated treatise on how following your passion is just bad career advice. He offers a much better path to a great career by building rare valuable skills. In his latest book Deep Work he teaches us how to focus in a distracted world.

First Things First. One of the early self improvement thought leaders, Steven Covey offers a practical guide to planning a week that helps us keep the important things first in mind and in our calendars.