Managing yourself; a key for managing your project

“The world outside is a reflection of the world inside” has been my belief for the past few decades.

What goes inside our mind and maintains its existence, becomes part of our sub-conscience belief structure, which in turn will affect how we manage ourselves in our interaction with other people and ultimately sets the tone for how our efforts in project and people management would come to fruition.

As we have all seen through the years, this is a game where both rules and the ground is always changing. Not only the players changes in our environments, but also the socio-economic factors that would affect their behavior.

The journey of self-discovery that would bring us to the enriched state of knowing ourselves is a very difficult, yet rewarding experience.

The deeper and more realistic this self-knowledge would become, the greater our chance would be in not only positioning ourselves in the best fitting environment for growth and achievement, but also to get surrounded with people who can complete us and assist us in leading to great project delivery success.

Our exposure to the variety of organizational cultures, ethnic elements and industrial norms would provide us with the tools to survive and thrive in today’s ever-shifting and volatile economy.

Among all the tools at our disposal we should rely quite strongly on our focused observation and meaningful communication.

Our observation should be enriched with the “Art of Listening”, which at its core requires us to “Listen” for the main purpose of “Understanding” and not the common pitfall of “to be able to respond”.

Our best next step forward should be to deep-dive into identifying the best approaches for getting results.

As diverse as the collection of approaches in the industry are, a key factor in enhancing our ability to be succeed as a project manager on the job would be how to influence others in the environment (i.e. how to manage our team and our boss and how to work with peers.)

Influence , when paired with the power of persuasion, provides a strong game changing ability that would separate us from your peers in the industry. The Influence pointing inwards – which translates into self-control and self-motivation, will provide us with the ability to map our strengths and weaknesses with those people around us, and allow for proper complementary coverage to make things happen and to get the work done.

It is important to note that the journey of self-discovery is an iterative cycle that would lead to success if it is combined with periodic self-evaluation and assessment of where we are in our progress.

There is no end to this journey that will last a lifetime.

Cheers

Arman Kamran