Mindful Academy
Mindful Academy
3.14: Intro to MAP
In this kickoff episode of the Mindful Action Planning (MAP) Challenge podcast, I introduce the Mindful Action Planning Pyramid, a tool designed to help academic professionals align their career goals with their values.
The pyramid consists of four horizontal slices—tasks, goals, outcomes, and success—built on a foundation of personal values. I emphasize the importance of shifting from a reactive, hustle-driven mindset to a more intentional and mindful approach.
I explain how to use the pyramid to create a career plan that is aligned with one’s values and desires, starting with defining a purpose statement.
Throughout the next four episodes, I will guide listeners through each step of the pyramid, helping them to prioritize tasks and goals that lead to meaningful outcomes and success.
Listeners are encouraged to download the Mindful Action Planning Pyramid PDF from my website and follow along with a friend or colleague.
https://www.jenniferaskey.com/
You can access Josh's substack & podcast here:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/
Hi, and welcome to the mindful Academy. I am Jennifer Askey, your academic coach. And this is the kickoff episode for the Mindful Action planning challenge. We're going to use my mindful action planning pyramid of a map to help you find your career North Star in academia and create a plan to help you get there. The mindful action planning pyramid is available on my website at Jennifer askey.com under Resources, and I use this with all of my clients at one point or another as a visual planning tool to help us see what they can prioritize what they can't prioritize according to their values and their biggest success goals in their career.
Regardless of what that successful is, this isn't just about productivity. So if you can, right now, go to the website and download the mindful action pyramid. But if you're on the go, while you're listening to this, that's okay, you can picture the pyramid shape. And we'll be coming back to this over the course of the next four episodes. So you'll be able to use this visualization and the PDF over and over again, as you sort of get into the mindset of planning according to your values and your biggest desire for success. So if you're on the go picture, a pyramid shape, with four horizontal slices, segments, it is resting on a solid, oval shaped foundation that encompasses it and more. Okay. So this is the oval on the bottom, upon which the pyramid rests is your values. And the pyramid is built on a foundation of tasks. And that's the bottom layer, the bottom slice of the pyramid, then we go up to goals, then we go up to outcomes, and then we go up to success. So success is at the tippity top. And your values are the basis upon which it rests.
Now I call this the mindful action planning pyramid. For three reasons it is mindful, because my goal with my clients is for them to be able to choose to shift out of go go go hustle, hustle, hustle reactive mode into a calmer and more grounded mental and emotional space from which to make their decisions. It's an action plan. Because the goal is to pair your intentional being with aligned action, right? So I often ask Who do you need to be in order to do that work? Right. So that's where the action comes in. And it's a plan because the process of creating a plan gets you clear on what fits and what doesn't, in terms of alignment fit in terms of time fit in terms of values fit.
So over the course of the next four podcasts, I'm going to walk you through who now will start with your values and create a purpose statement. You are asked to be and do many things in this world. You're asked to respond to so many other people's needs and agendas. And an authentic and mindful planning process needs to start with your own desires and values as the bedrock not what you've inherited, not what your parents or your dissertation director or your boss says. But really what you value in this world. Right? Then the purpose statement, it's a ton of fun, and a huge challenge. You'll be invited to find a metaphor for yourself when you are doing your best work. So who are you when you are doing your best work. And then you'll fill in sort of a Mad Libs kind of sentence and see what bubbles up. And this will be a draft of your I'm here on this world to be to do sentence your purpose statement. And then we'll go to the tippity top of the pyramid and work our way on the top of the pyramid as I just said, represents success. might hear my notes rustling in the background. So the tippity top of the of the pyramid isn't for your goals, but it's your desire orientation. How does success feel? How do you know? And what do you know about the you that is and feel successful? What do they embody? What do they have? What do they know? Right? How similar? Is it to what you have a note today? Is it just bigger and better? Or is it qualitatively different, right, so we'll get a sense of what success feels like to you and what success means to you. Okay, then we move down to the second slice from the top. And these are the outcomes that you're looking for. Sometimes you can think of them as big rocks, right? These are the significant projects or results that you believe will move you closer and closer to your feeling of success. I love this part of the process. Because this is where the rubber hits the road. This is the sticky part of the process. Because we're not starting with what's currently on your to do list. Because if we start with what's on your to do list, you're gonna give me or yourself in a big long honkin list. And that's great. But what's already on your plate may or may not overlap with the big and significant projects and outcomes that are going to move you in the direction of the success that you want to feel. Right. So if your vision of success is, you know, retiring to a lakeside cottage with seven dogs, and all of your projects right now all of your to do items right now, move you further and further away from that, because of the decisions you're making on a daily basis, the work you're undertaking, I'm thinking as I'm talking here, and my my illustration is going to get lost. But we're going to start planning intentionally and mindfully. So it's this notion of okay, if I want tenure, if I want to. I want to have the esteem of my colleagues in my discipline, if I want to be seen as an expert in my field, those are sort of the success feelings, well, what might you need to create or produce? Or have in order to get there? Right? Are you is this books is this roles and titles? Is this certain kinds of grants is this certain kinds of relationships, certain kinds of independent projects, right? So those big things, what you come up with for those big outcomes may or may not look like what your current to do list is. So this is where the, the process begins to reveal to us sort of the difference between, I'm working and I'm busy. And I'm working, and I'm working in a values and success aligned way that is really doing what I want to do for my career and for my career trajectory. And I feel really good about it. Right. So there's a big difference there. So by starting with your values and your desires, you get a clearer picture of the alignment that you're looking for. The third slice down is the goals. This is where you figure out what elements or elements of the big outcomes can be on your priority list right now. So this is where you look at your fixed commitments. This is where you look at those big projects that you just listed under outcomes where you look at your life and say, Okay, what, what fits in this year, what fits in this semester? I can't do it all right now, and I can't do it all at once. But can I take this big project, you know, become the leading expert in X, and break it down into smaller segments that I can work on a semester or a term at a time, for example. So what we're doing is we're planning on getting as far towards success, as is reasonable right now, not circumnavigating the globe, all in one shot immediately, all on our own. Okay. And then the final layer of the pyramid is tasks. And there are sort of two elements to thinking about this. One is, can you break that term length goal into smaller chunks? A day, an afternoon, 90 minutes, right? And can you schedule these into your calendar so that you follow the plan?
Right. And if we want to take you know writing a book as an example, and the book is one of the big outcomes, and this semester, you can maybe write a chapter because it's a teaching semester and you have a heavy teaching load, how might you time block? Writing that chapter? And how might you take the task of writing a chapter of the book and break it into smaller chunks so that when Tuesday afternoon rolls around and you have writing on your calendar, you can look at your list of writing tasks and no, okay, today's a bibliography today day today is methods day today is right. So you've broken your writing down into recognizable chunks. And it isn't just right. It's do this thing, right, do the next thing on the list. So this is a quick overview of the process. And in each of the podcasts that's coming up in this challenge, I'm going to go into more depth and walk you through it in the way that I walk my clients through this when we work together. So if you haven't gone to the website to download the mindful action, planning pyramid, do so now. And if you have a colleague or a BFF, in academia, where you think, oh, gosh, it would be really good to sit down with somebody and go through this. Absolutely. Send them a copy, you know, have them come to the website and get a copy, listen to these podcasts together. And email me and tell me what you think. Tell me what you found easy. Tell me what you found hard. I have done this process, as I said, with almost every client, and I teach it as a planning exercise in sort of three hour workshops. And I've taught that workshop to over 1000 people at this point. And people find it a bit challenging and find that it is so worth the time to set aside time to really do some intentional planning about their career. And I hope that is what you find too. So thank you again for being here. Go grab a copy of the PDF from my website, have your friends do it. And we will do this challenge to map out your career plan together in the next week. Thank you so much.