Product Leadership Essentials: Try this quick self-retro to re-align and reboot your 2022 goals
Research shows that by the second week of February, the majority of our grand plans for the new year are usually out the window. Before giving up on the intentions and plans you made a month ago, though, try doing a quick self retro.
It’s really easy:
1. Map out your level of action with your goal over the past month. It could be a simple chart with an X-axis being Time (in this case the month of January) and a Y-axis being Actions taken.
2. After you draw out your activities over time, write down the answers to a few key questions:
What were the key actions you took?
How did you feel when you took them?
What did you do that made taking the action more possible?
What did you do to make the actions even more enjoyable? More successful?
If there was very little action, what was holding you back?
There is a Step #3, but let’s take a look at an example of a self retro so far before we get to it.
Self Retro example
Here’s a self retro that I did for a personal goal of mine this year: learning French! My partner and I recently moved to a beautiful spot in Southwest France, but we both need a lot of work on our language skills. We really want to communicate with neighbours and become more of a part of the community, and learning the language is key to that.
Our minds were set on taking action. In January, we both set an intention to each find a teacher we like and take a least two classes a week. And as you can see from my quick self retro below, we achieved our goal!
So, from the first two steps in the self retro, it looks like we achieved our goal … right? Hmmm … well, kind of.
This is where Step #3 comes in. Step three is about going a level deeper, looking beyond the activity to actual engagement.
3. How might you re-align your goal to work with those key moments of healthy engagement … not just activity!
What my partner and I both noticed is that while we hit our initial goal within month one of setting up two lessons a week, we didn’t feel as though we were really learning … or that we were that engaged in the classes. After talking about it, we realised that we don’t do a great job at practicing between lessons and we often do any homework a few minutes before the lesson. We took our actions seriously but didn’t go further than that.
So we moved to Step 3 and took one extra step in our self-retro and took a look at engagement levels instead of just the actions taken.
Looking at our engagement levels, it’s clear that they remained pretty low. Continuing to focus on actions wasn’t going to really get us closer to the ultimate purpose of the work … learning French so that we could better become part of our new community. We needed to re-examine our approach and find new ways to get past surface actions into actually engaged learning
Goals are not one-and-done
When it comes to intentions and goals, remember what you passionately state at the beginning of January may not be the actual goal or intention that sees you through achieving your ultimate purpose. And that’s completely OK! In fact, it makes perfect sense.
Our goals - be they personal or professional - are not one-and-done. They are not static in nature. They need to be revisited, revived, and simply reworked to ensure they’re still relevant and are getting to the heart of what we really want to achieve.
Instead of just focusing on actions of setting up lessons, my partner and I are playing with new ways to bring French into our daily lives. Creating post-it notes with vocabulary that we learn in each session and pinning them to items around the house is one new example of how we’re trying to be more engaged. We also have adopted a dog who came from a French household. So that means learning some basic commands in French. We’ve shifted our focus from what actions should we take to how can we engage with the goal.
Meet Max.
Our new dog who only speaks French! Having Max around the house brings a whole new level of engagement with our goal to learn French.
So before you throw those new year’s goals out the window, take a few minutes to reflect on the past month and the purpose and meaning behind the goal. What are you actually trying to achieve and how can you focus on building engagement … not just taking surface-level actions?
A short self retro can help you realign your energy and continue to build that crucial leadership muscle of self-reflection along the way.
Suggested reading:
For more on setting positive, learning goals that connect with you intrinsically, check out “Goals gone off the rails, here are three ways to get back on track.”
For more on building self-awareness: check out, “What the heck is self-awareness and why should you care.”
For a deeper Leadership Retro, check out an article from Nobl.io that inspired this post.
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