Reflective Analysis: Why Professionals Need Focus By Daniel Goleman

Question 1

With the attending of my first experience of the ASCS programme I immediately realised that this will be an exciting path of self-discovery with opportunities for personal growth and development. In preparation for this experience we were given articles by Daniel Goleman and Kevin Cashman as pre-reading and also had to complete the Enneagram questionnaire.

The key learnings that I gained from the article “Why Professionals Need Focus” by Daniel Goleman are the 3 types of focus that needs “sharpening” and which are important in both our personal and work lives. The article provides insight into the way in which focus drives success.

• “Inner-focus” refers to the competency to know yourself, your emotions, strengths, weaknesses,

This enables me to be a source of knowledge for other team members.

• I am able to work alone and take ownership and accountability for the outcomes.

• I am objective, calm and consider myself emotional resilient. I am able to work under pressure and in stressful situations.

• I am a good observer and generally able to make sense of complexity.

• When faced with change, I am able to adapt systematically, to embrace the new ideas and change initiatives effectively. I am able to see the bigger picture through analysis and insight.

• I am able to sift through information and use what is pertinent.

Weaknesses:

• A potential weakness is the fact that I am not assertive enough and also not comfortable speaking up in larger groups. I feel however that I can have my say in the trio meeting where I feel more in charge and can apply and share my credit expertise.

• I prefer not to share personal information to others as I am a very private individual. This can be experienced by my team members as me being withdrawn and

In my resourceful state I can move into an authority stance, specifically in my trio team, where I am able to contribute through my credit knowledge. o In stressful times – for instance when urgent and complex credit applications need to be put together, I am able to stay calm and objective. I am able to work alone and will take ownership for the task at hand. o The knowledge that I gained from using my two adjacent enneagram styles ( the wing influence) opened my eyes to the fact that I could for instance move over to wing 6 where trust, responsibility and loyalty is valued. This Enneo type is grounded and tends to provide confidence to those around them. This will take me out of my isolated and unsentimental space. o I am able to adapt to change quite easily as this is one of my key strengths to make sense of new processes and procedures. o I am able to communicate clearly with team members, both verbally and non-verbally. I however feel that I am not assertive enough towards my RE (banker) who is most probably a type 7 personality. For instance with possible new deals where a few risks are identified, he tends to not address this properly, resulting in me having to spend more time to obtain and assess additional information from the