Now that we are slowly coming out of the pandemic, it’s time to think about 2021-2022 and begin planning for everyone returning to work in the new world.

The past year and a half has thrown many obstacles our way, both in our personal and professional lives, but how can we use the chaos of Covid-19 to make the ‘new world’ better?

Reflect

The first step is to take a look at what has happened since the pandemic began and reflect on it. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• What has happened in both my personal and my professional life?
• What have I achieved?
• What didn’t I achieve and why?

The key to reflection and learning from the past is self-awareness and honesty. Before we can learn from experience, we must be able to admit our own mistakes.

Reset

Often when we think about the things we didn’t manage to do or things we wish we’d achieved, it can be rather demotivating. However, in order to use these experiences in a positive way and to better ourselves, we must learn to see challenges in a positive light.

“Problems aren’t problems, but rather opportunities to improve”

The key to using past experiences to improve is having a growth mindset.

Having a growth mindset means:

• Believing that skills are built over time and there is always room for improvement
• Having the capacity and willingness to learn and grow
• Inviting feedback to identify your areas of improvement

Once we develop a more positive mindset, we are much more likely to feel motivated and excited for the new normal as, instead of thinking about everything we’ve missed this year, we will be focused on everything we want to achieve and work towards post-pandemic.

Return

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Now that we know what we want to achieve and we have the right mindset, we need to create an action plan or a Professional Development Plan.

Professional Development Plans (PDPs) are used to document your career goals and set out a strategy on how you plan to achieve them. Having a PDP can also be extremely motivating as, when done correctly, it can make goals feel much more realistic as it breaks them down into smaller, more achievable steps.

We explored how to create an effective PDP in a previous article and created a PDP template that you can use for yourself or your staff.

You can click here to read the article, and you can download the resource below.

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Next on The Daily Dot, we will be delving into how many organisations’ operational plans have changed as a result of the pandemic, as well as exploring how to craft a new post-pandemic strategy.

Until next time...