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Focus, Manage to Lead

Help Young People Choose Where to Grow

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How to help kids intentionally direct their attention

Parents, grandparents, mentors, and coaches share a wish: to help a young person build a happy, fulfilled life. A simple visual exercise invites young people to set goals that reflect their own interests and aspirations. It begins with three questions:

  • What do I like doing?
  • What am I good at doing?
  • What do I want to spend time doing?

The third question asks them to make a choice. They may enjoy an activity or have a talent for it without wanting to make it a priority.

Bringing these dimensions into harmony is central to personal alignment. Our interests, abilities, and priorities change, so alignment is something we revisit throughout life. For more on this idea, see A Note on the Power of Alignment.

Learning to choose where to spend time helps us navigate three common pitfalls:

  • Hyper-focusing on a single pursuit at the expense of everything else.
  • Spreading ourselves so thin across endless activities that none receives enough attention for true mastery or deep enjoyment.
  • Passively losing time to continuous scrolling and content engineered to capture our attention on things that do not actually align with our true interests or priorities.

Learn to Choose Early

Many adults struggle to decide which pursuits deserve their time. Young people can begin to develop this judgment while their interests and habits are still taking shape.

Sports, music, academics, creative work, friendships, and new experiences all compete for attention. A young person may continue an activity because it is familiar, because friends do it, or because an adult expects it. They may also have interests no one has thought to ask about.

The exercise below helps make those choices visible. It gives a young person a way to reflect on what matters to them and gives a trusted adult a window into their thinking. With the young person leading the exercise, the adult can ask questions and offer support in a way that invites conversation and respects their independence.

Although designed with young people in mind, the exercise can be useful at any age. The underlying principles are also explored in this video on personal alignment and fulfillment.

Step 1: Make an Activity List

Start several days before you plan to work through the exercise together. Ask the young person to list activities they currently spend time on, along with anything they would like to try.

Use pencil and paper, a phone app, or a document. Keep the list open for additions and changes as ideas arise. The aim is to capture a picture that feels complete to them.

An adult can offer a starter list or point out an overlooked interest: “What about cooking?” or “You spend a lot of time on logic puzzles.” Let the young person decide what belongs on the list and how to describe it.

Move on when they feel the list represents their interests.

Step 2: Choose What Matters Now

Ask them to place each activity in one of four groups:

  • Top priorities: Activities they most want to invest time and effort in now.
  • Keep doing: Activities they enjoy and want to continue regularly.
  • Occasional enjoyment: Activities they like but do not need to do regularly.
  • Pause or stop: Activities they are ready to step back from.

Encourage honest answers. If a long-standing activity lands in “Pause or stop,” take it as useful information. Ask what has changed and listen before discussing existing commitments or practical constraints.

These choices reflect what matters now. They can change as the young person gains experience.

Step 3: Select Skills to Develop

Focus next on the activities in “Top priorities” and “Keep doing.”

Identify which involve skills the young person wants to develop through practice, effort, and experience. Examples include soccer, drawing, piano, math, cooking, climbing, and coding.

Other pursuits may be valuable mainly for enjoyment, connection, or discovery, such as attending a concert or visiting a museum. Keep them on the activity list, but leave them out of the skill map unless the young person identifies a particular capability they want to develop.

The distinction depends on their purpose. Watching films might be recreation for one person and part of learning filmmaking for another.

Step 4: Draw a Personal Pursuits Map

The map shows how the young person sees their current capability and where they would like to be in five years.

On a large sheet of paper:

  1. Draw the center. Make a small circle and write their name inside it.
  2. Add the spokes. Draw one line outward from the circle for each skill selected in Step 3. Space the lines evenly around the center.
  3. Label the skills. Write one skill beside each spoke.
  4. Agree on the scale. The center represents just beginning. The outer edge represents advanced capability in that activity. Discuss what that might look like for each skill.
  5. Mark current capability. Ask them to place an X on each spoke to show where they think they are today.
  6. Connect the current marks. Join the marks with straight lines and shade the enclosed shape. Label it Current Capability.
  7. Mark five-year aspirations.  Ask: “Where would you like to be in this skill five years from now?” Choose a horizon far enough away to imagine beyond today’s limits, yet close enough to picture progress they could achieve with sustained effort and support. For some, three years may work well. For a younger child, use their future age: “When you turn 15, what would you like to be able to do?” Use the same horizon for every skill on the map.
  8. Connect the aspiration marks. Join them with straight lines. Use a different color or pattern to distinguish the space between the two outlines. Label the second outline Future Aspiration and note the target age or year.

The map records their perspective. It does not need precise scores or a symmetrical shape to be useful.

A Personal Pursuits Map created during a tenth-birthday exercise. The inner outline shows self-assessed current capability; the outer outline shows five-year aspirations.

Step 5: Turn the Map into Choices

The conversation about the map is where much of its value emerges.

Ask questions such as:

  • Which skills are you most excited to develop?
  • What would you like to be able to do that you cannot do yet?
  • Where would practice, instruction, or encouragement help?
  • What might you spend less time on to make room?

A large gap between current capability and aspiration suggests something to explore. Ask what the young person imagines and why it matters. A small gap may mean they are content with their current level or would prefer to direct their effort elsewhere.

Use their answers to choose a manageable focus for the coming months. Agree on a concrete next step, such as joining a class, establishing a practice routine, trying an activity, or pausing a commitment.

Adults can then direct their support toward priorities the young person has helped choose.

Revisit as Interests Change

Keep the map somewhere the young person finds useful, such as a desk or bulletin board. Return to it at a birthday, before a school year, or when interests or circumstances change.

Allow enough time between reviews for experience and growth. Ask what they have learned, what still matters, and what they want to revise. The purpose is to build a habit of reflection and choice. Some skills will become more important. Others will recede. The map should change with the person.

A question as broad as “What do you want to do with your life?” can be difficult to answer. This exercise offers a more approachable starting point: What do you want to develop, and how will you make room for it?

Over time, young people can learn to manage a portfolio of pursuits that reflects their interests, develops their abilities, and makes good use of their time.

For the broader framework, read Personal Alignment: How to Increase the Odds of Being Happy and Leading a Fulfilled Life.

Focus, People Matters

Volunteer to Improve the World … and Yourself

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Act Intentionally...Persist Variously
Act Intentionally…Persist Variously

While putting full attention on accomplishing one thing increases the odds that the thing will be done well, it is all too easy for the career minded professional to end up doing nothing other than their work!

They would be wise to realize that top performers at all levels make time for other things such as family, recreation, exercise, spiritual development, and even volunteer work.

Participating in volunteer work can add a healthy perspective to life and position for growth which makes it all the more rewarding to find a way to pitch-in. Continue reading Volunteer to Improve the World … and Yourself →

Focus, Manage to Lead, People Matters

How to make sure every top team member does one thing right.

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CEOs should consider the following when assigning tasks to leadership team members:

  • Members of the leadership team are likely to be the most capable people in the organization and therefore among the most important to deploy optimally.
  • Each needs to be especially clear about what is most important for them to do and then spend the lion-share of their time doing it.
  • If something is important to do, then someone important ought to be in charge of getting it done.
  • Each member of the top team ought to be in charge of something important.
  • It is not possible to be personally responsible for more than one or two important things at a time.

The idea is to ensure that at least what well-deployed leaders focus on goes well and to model how things should be done for the rest of the organization. Think of it this way: leadership team members don’t have to get everything right, but they each have to get something right.

The Problem

Most people, including even most top leaders, instinctively choose to spend their time doing many more than one or two things, possibly because in their minds:

  • Doing many things increases the odds that something will go well.
  • Having too many things to do gives a great excuse for not being successful at any particular thing.
  • The need to think hard about how to spend time is replaced by the much easier rule to spend time based on demands of the next email, text, tweet, phone call, conversation, knock on the door, etc.
  • Having so many things vying for attention makes a leader feel powerful and busy, often to the point of having a “Hero complex”.

On the other hand, having many things to do means the most important people do not meet their goals because:

  • Each task gets too little time, attention, and effort.
  • Each leader works hard, but gets little done, gets tired, loses confidence, and feels ineffective yet has an inflated sense of self importance.

The CEO’s job is to make clear what is most important for each leadership team member to do and to arrange for them to do it, and little-to-nothing else, even though it may cause leadership team members to feel a greater risk of failure.

The Solution

To solve the problem, the CEO should:

  • Work with each leader to rank their assignments in priority order.
  • Ask if the odds of success on the most important task would go up if the leadership team member were to spend more time on it.  The answer will likely be “Yes”.
  • Tell the leader to spend all their time on their top priority task until the odds of success would not get any better with any more time on it.

Most leaders will shudder at the thought of having so little to do as they realize it is now incumbent on them to be successful at just one important task. It occurs quickly that they might not be successful.  When they ask: “What if I fail?” the CEO should express so much confidence that the leader will succeed that s/he will absolve her/him of such risk and promise to assign yet another important task should she/he fail at this one.

The CEO should add that if the leader puts everything into completing an assigned task, but fails on six different tasks in sequence, then, and only then, maybe it will be time to discuss whether there is good fit with the organization.

The intent is to put the fear of failure far into the future to free the the leader to concentrate on the task they have been asked to do and not on the downside consequences of failure. The fear of failure thus moves from the leader to the CEO who is then highly motivated to provide assistance, resources, governance, and incentives to maximize the odds of success.

Related Points

  • When a matter comes up for discussion, ask if it is important.  If it is, then ask who is in charge of making sure it goes well.  If no one comes to mind then assign someone or second guess its importance.
  • When speaking with someone on the leadership team, ask what important thing they are responsible for completing.  If nothing comes to mind then it is fair to wonder why they are on the leadership team.
  • If something is not important then no one should even be thinking about it.
  • The points presented in this post align well with Steven Covey’s parable about Big Rocks. and the first three principles of his 7 Habits for Effective People: end in mind, first things first, and be proactive.
Focus, Manage to Lead, People Matters

Role Clarity

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The CEO of a successful organization ensures that their inner circle of leaders, or Core Leadership Team, are individually and collectively clear about their relative strengths and on what the group counts on from each of them to be successful.

The exercise below is a structured and straightforward way to make expectations explicit and to open channels of communication between them enabling them to provide each other  advice, guidance, feedback and support in a way that is efficient, edifying, and empowering to all involved.

Preparation

Ask executive team members to read the following IntelliVen posts in preparation for this exercise:

Before a break at an off-site, or in a meeting just for this, allot up to three hours for the exercise described below.

Set up

Ask each executive to print their name at the top of a sheet of newsprint laying on a table or hanging on the wall.

  • Under their name have them write the heading: Good at:
  • 1/3 from the top write: What we count on from you:
  • 1/2 way from the top write: Best Advice:

Data collection

Data Collection Sample
Example sheet for one of five executives who used the process described.

Ask each executive to move to the sheet to their right and fill in each of the three sections for the person whose name appears at the top. When everyone has finished writing, repeat the previous step for the next person to the right until each is standing back at the page with their name on it. Add additional newsprint if more space to write is needed.

Process

Step 1: Good At

Once everyone has recorded thier entries for all of the others, ask everyone to read carefully what is written under their name in the Good At section and then ask them to get ready to answer the following questions:

  • What clarifying questions do you have?
  • Do you agree that you are good at the things noted?
  • Are there other things you are good at that are missing?
  • Are there things you are surprised to see listed?

Have each person in-turn to read outloud what is written for them followed by their answers to the four questions above. Discuss what is said with the group until clarity is achieved and then move on to the next person.

Step 2: Count On

Once each executive has had a turn procesing the first section, ask them all to read carefully to themselves what is written under their name in the Count On section and then ask them to get ready to respond to the following:

  • Would you like to ask any clarifying questions?
  • Do you agree that listed items are your responsibility?
  • Is anything you are responsible for missing?
  • Do any of your items conflict with each other or with what is listed for others?
  • Are things listed consistent with what you are good at such that you can be successful doing them and such that your organization is getting highest-and-best use from you and your talents?

Ask each executive in turn to read outloud what is written for them and address the five questions above. Facilitate discussion until clarity is achieved and then move on to the next person until everyone has had a turn.

Step 3: Best Advice

Finally, ask them to read carefully to themselves what is written under Best Advice. Ask one executive to select one Best Advice item and invite her/him to:

  • Ask for clarification or explanation about what is meant by what is written.
  • Work hard to draw out what others have to say.
  • Not to be defensive in any way.
  • Repeat back what they hear to be sure they understand.

Iterate with the group until they are all clear, and until the group knows they are clear about what is being said and until all agree it is time to move on to the next point.

Repeat the process with the first Best Advice items for the next executive. When everyone has processed their first Best Advice item, start again with a second item and repeat until all items have been covered for each executive.

Step 4: Summary

Ask the group to discuss:

  • What they noticed during this exercise?
  • What they individually, and as a group, learned about their roles and the roles of others.
  • What was learned about how much they have to share with each other and how to do so?

Ask if a similar exercise should be done from time to time with their group and perhaps with other groups in which they work.

Bonus

If the group is feeling good from the exercise and there is energy for one more question, consider asking each executive to write down and then talk through what they feel is important for them to get better at in order to live up to the team’s expectations.

Pedagogy

A fundamental human need is to be known and understood by others. Steps 1 and 2  help each group member to feel known and understood by their teammates which creates the opportunity for a rich flow of information between them.

Step 3 builds on, and takes advantage of, the comfort established in Steps 1 and 2. The result is a deep sense of closeness and connectedness which allows each member of the group to share openly with the others and to be aggressively interested in what others have to say to them. Group members are thus able and inclined to help each other fulfill their potential individually and collectively in the press of day-to-day activity and not just at an offsite.

The exercise can and should be repeated from time to time to keep leaders synchronized and aligned.  The best leaders will follow suit with similar exercises with their own teams. The odds of success with this exercise are dramatically improved when it is facilitated by a trained Organization Development professional.