I love spending time working out in the gym during the mornings. As I do my exercise routines, I often use the quiet time to think & reflect.
So, I now have a new & interesting idea to share with readers.
I reckon, based on my own self-directed learning pursuits over the years, in order to plan effectively forward, one must first understand one's position as to where one has already been, as well as appreciate one's current position in the scheme of things.
For me, the primary objective is to draw valuable lessons from the past - hindsights, as some people prefer to call them.
Of course, I do realise that the past doesn't equal to or guarantee the future, but my point in the retrospection exercise is finding out more about what had worked in the past & what didn't work, & more importantly, how can we draw useful hind-sights from our own past learning experiences, coupled with in-sights of our present, to prepare for the future.
In other words, to ultimately generate fore-sights to deal with future challenges & problems.
Personally, I believe in "everything is connected to everything else". Nothing in the world actually happens in isolation. I also believe in synchronicity.
More explicitly, at least from my own personal perspective, past history can be an interesting platform for intellectual deliberation of one's personal strategic planning endeavour.
Going back to the early nineties, when I was contemplating to quit the corporate world, where I had spent almost a quarter of a century, & to design the second half of my life, I had embarked on my retrospection exercise with the aid of two powerful self-evaluation tools.
I can't recall exactly from whom I had learned the tools, but I believe it was the brilliant work of Anthony Robbins, which I must admit I had studied at great length during that crucial period, among other "mid-life transition" stuff from Richard Leider, Frederic Hudson, & Richard Bolles.
In sharing with readers, I will outline the first one of the tools in this blogpost, & the second one in a subsequent blogpost.
Take a very large sheet of blank paper, In my case, I recall, I had use a flip-chart paper.
Draw a matrix grid as follows.
Working across the page, horizontally from the top, draw ten (10) vertical columns & mark out, say, ten years into the past, e.g. '2009', '2008', '2007', '2006, 2005' & so on. That's how I had started when I did mine, & later on I had expanded it to cover my earlier 25 years on two separate sheets.
Now, working vertically downward from the left edge of the page, draw twelve (12) horizontal columns across the page, denoting the monthly periods from 'January' to 'December'.
The completed matrix grid will look exactly like a very large spread-sheet, with "cells" for you to fill in.
Start from the current year, say, '2009', & ponder about your personal as well as professional achievements, e.g. "got married to a rich & beautiful lady", "vacation in the Sahara Desert", "secured a salary increment of S$1,000", "got a promotion to GM", etc.
As you recall, & using a black colour marker, jot down each of the positive events into the "cell", corresponding to the period of occurrence.
When you have completed for the year 2009, pause for a moment, & this time, ponder about your personal as well as professional setbacks, disappointments & obstacles you have overcome, e.g. "my laptop was stolen", "got into a big row with my mother-in-law", "lost a S$1 million contract", etc.
As you recall, & using this time a red colour marker, jot down each of the negative events inside the "cell", corresponding to the period of occurrence.
As soon as you have completed '2009', go to '2008' & repeat the process till the ten years profile is completed.
For the current year, & possibly the first few preceding years, memory recall is not so much a problem, but it gets increasingly difficult when you start looking back, say 10, 20 years ago.
In my case, I was fortunate to have had kept pretty good records, as far back of my days at the Technical Institute, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, around the mid-sixties.
To my pleasant delight, I generally have a comparatively good working memory when it comes to my own personal life pursuits.
In fact, my good friend Dilip Mukerjea once asked me how much I could remember of my childhood, & I told him that I could remember as far back as when I was a 7-year old young boy.
I actually have relatively vivid memories of my childhood, starting in the Bukit Timah area where I was born, & then, the early years of growing up in Yong Peng, Johor, Malaysia. I had already written quite a lot about my childhood experiences in this weblog of mine.
Coming back to the matrix grid, I do not expect you to complete the exercise in one go. You probably will have to do that over several days or maybe weeks.
I did mine over several weeks. In fact, I recall going back to my matrix grid from time to time to add &/or embellish as necessary, to ensure that I had thoroughly captured all the important events of my life.
Frankly, as I recall, it was a tedious & painstaking process, but it was worth it, since I was contemplating the second half of my life.
In retrospect, that was truly the first step of my personal strategic planning.
After completing the matrix grid, in my case it was 25 years back from 1991 - that's was actually the year I quit the corporate world - stand back & look at your own "profile", so to speak.
In my case, somewhat to my chargin, there were many "blank cells". In other words, I didn't have any notable events to record in those particular periods of my life.
I recall, the feeling became scary & unsettling the moment I had started to think about & project myself into the next ten years.
The troubling question that crossed my mind at that time was: Is this exactly what I wanted to have replicated in the next 10 years, or more specifically, for the rest of my life?
At this juncture, I like to add that the foregoing exercise is just the beginning of a personal self-evaluation of where one has already been.
In the next blogpost, I will share with readers the second self-evaluation tool, with the view of completing the first one.
Please stay tuned.
[to be continued in the Next Post.]
