You probably know this freezer. It lives in someone’s garage – your parents’, your grandparents’, your in-laws’. The light burned out sometime during a previous administration. It hasn’t been defrosted since the invention of electricity. And it’s packed floor to ceiling with food wrapped in foil.
Every Thanksgiving, the leftovers go in there with the best of intentions. Good stuff. Worth saving. We’ll definitely eat those.
We never eat them. The next time anyone opens that freezer is the following November, when we need room for new leftovers and find the old ones still in their foil jackets, silently judging us.
Too often, professional development goals work exactly the same way.
You set them in January with real intentions. Maybe even some excitement. You’re going to get better at giving feedback, learn to delegate without a small anxiety spiral, finally start asking more questions in meetings instead of just answering them. Great goals. Real goals. Into the freezer they go.
And the next time you think about them is your year-end review.
Here’s what I said to a friend over coffee recently, and the look she gave me was approximately the look you’d give someone who suggested flossing twice a day: review your development goals every week.
Stay with me.
The mistake most people make is treating a weekly look like a performance review — you scan the list, see what you haven’t done, feel bad about yourself, close the document. That’s not useful. That’s just suffering with extra steps.
Instead, treat your goals more like an affirmation than a scorecard. A quick read-through at the start of the week isn’t about grading yourself, it’s a reminder. These are the things you said you wanted to work on. Are they still aligned with what you’re doing? Are you keeping them in mind as you go? That’s it. Simple as that. The practice of looking at them regularly is what keeps them from going into the freezer. Out of sight really is out of mind, and a weekly reminder is what closes that gap.
Most of us think of professional development as something we do around work, a class we attend, a book we read, a mentor we meet with quarterly. Something adjacent to the job. But that’s backwards. The whole point of getting better at feedback, or asking smarter questions, or learning to delegate, is so you can do the actual job better. Professional development isn’t preparation for the game. It’s how you get better at playing it.
When you see it that way, it stops being a separate list you maintain and forget. It becomes the lens through which you look at your week. Five minutes on a Monday morning, open the list, read it through, ask yourself whether it still points the right direction. That’s the whole practice.
The leftovers don’t have to stay in the freezer until November. Some of them are still really good.