My Personal Agility Story — How to Stay Agile Everyday and Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Updated: Dec 9, 2020
Written by: Adelina Stefan, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As a Professional Coach passionate about personal development and continuous improvement to catalyze individuals’ potential, I was curious to try Personal Agility System to help me better organize my work and achieve and maintain a balance between work and personal life.
Living in an uncertain, volatile environment and holding different hats every day, including the coach, entrepreneur, mother, wife, and ex-pat hat, I often feel overwhelmed having too many things on my plate and limited time to do everything I intended to. My recurrent thought was, "How could I become more effective, getting everything done and still maintaining a healthy work-life balance?"
The Start of My Personal Agility Journey
I came across The Personal Agility System (PAS) during my Scrum Master Certification with my trainer — Liviu Mesesan (liviumesesan.com), who presented PAS as a simple framework to keep your personal and professional life on track while reflecting on your goals and moving in the right direction. In other words, Personal Agility can be seen as Scrum used on an individual level, where instead of working with an entire team, it’s only you and yourself who is in charge of your journey.
Using the Personal Agility framework daily made me realize that, as the sailor of your own boat and to navigate, apart from sailing skills, you also need to adjust the sails properly to ensure that you are moving towards a more balanced and fulfilled life. Hence, when I feel that I’m not going in the right direction, by asking myself powerful questions such as: What really matters? Which possibilities do I have? What brought me value last week? What could I achieve this week/today? Which things are important, and which are the urgent ones? What can I start working on immediately / soon and which later?, and last, Who can I delegate it to make it better and faster?, my state of mind started changing, creating and working more towards my goals and vision, and keeping my motivation constantly high, while continuing sailing towards my target destination, without getting my energy lost into unnecessary tasks and details.
5 Tips How Can We Embrace Change and Make Personal Agility a Daily Habit:
1. Be present and calm when something is not working the way you would like to. Validate your emotions. Remember that you cannot change the circumstance itself, but you can change your perception of it and your prioritizations using simple visualizations such as the Personal Agility System.
2. Redefine your dream destination and revisit the What Really Matters list. Identify the red flags and think about how much time you spent on things that are not so important. Reflect on what may have caused this deviation.
3. Ask for help. You will realize that there are many people around you, and, even if at the beginning you may think that you can complete a task faster than others you may help you, remember that in time, you can achieve more than you have initially thought. Get a mentor or coach who can help to validate yourself and implement new healthy habits.
4. Avoid procrastination. If you aren’t taking any action quickly, the chances are that your goals will become even more distant. Adjust the sails, change your boat's direction so that it navigates towards what really matters, removing any obstacles or unnecessary details that may delay your work.
5. Celebrate small wins weekly to achieve big goals. We often tend to focus on the outcome, ignoring any important steps along your way that contributed to our success. Remember that big achievements don’t happen overnight or in a few days, but you need to work constantly towards your vision. Rewarding yourself for small goals regularly will help you acknowledge that you are on the right way and increase your self-esteem.
Using Personal Agility will unearth your higher self-potential, empowering you to take control over your own personal and professional life and do what is most effective for you.
Adelina Stefan, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Adelina Stefan is a Professional Certified Coach & Intercultural Facilitator specialized in Career Development, with a deep expertise in international HR recruitment and selection and Training and Development. Having worked for 10+ years across cultures, Adelina seeks to catalyze individuals’ potential, helping them create and implement their unique career blueprint and, at the same time, achieve a healthy work-life balance. She specializes in working with ex-pats and mid-to senior-level executives dealing with challenging work environments that can affect their performance and well-being. She supports organizations in building a corporate coaching culture by highlighting individuals’ maximum potential and engagement to become dedicated and highly successful employees. Her practice includes Career, Life, Executive, and Agile Coaching for individuals and developing and implementing corporate Human Resources practices for improving intercultural relations.
