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Transforming Goals into Achievements with David Alvarez a Dedicated Goal Setter

• Walt Sparling

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This episode with David Alvarez is meant to compliment the recent posts on the PM-Mastery website around year-end goals and self-development planning. You can find links to the posts that inspired this episode below in the show notes. In hindsight, I believe this podcast may be a bit late for some corporate listeners, but I hope they have already read the posts published earlier this month. 

David is a friend and previous interviewee who, in this episode, shares his personal habits around goal planning and execution. The last time David was on the podcast was when we discussed goals back in 2020, episode #5, where we talked about the importance of "taking action." David, an avid goal-setter and self-improvement guru, shares how he sets and tracks his goals. 

During the interview, David will discuss the "seven life accounts"—career, financial, family, health, educational, social, and spiritual—and how they can transform your approach to personal growth. This episode promises insights into maintaining life balance and strategies for adapting to life's unexpected challenges, all while using practical tools like fillable PDFs and the thought-provoking "funeral exercise" to clarify your personal mission. 

Discover how to turn aspirations into achievements by breaking down goals into manageable tasks with David's advice. From forming life-enhancing habits to utilizing apps like Lose It for nutrition tracking, learn how to effectively streamline routines. We delve into the utility of self-assessment tools focused on project managers that include a SWOT and skills analysis that can be used to uncover opportunities for training, coaching, and mentorship. Plus, get the scoop on leveraging 360-degree feedback for personal and professional growth, as well as innovative strategies for overcoming challenges in feedback collection. 

A special thanks to David Alvarez for sharing his wisdom.We invite you to subscribe to PM Mastery as we continue to bring remarkable guests and inspiring content your way. 

Links:

Blog Posts that inspired this episode: 

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the PM Mastery Podcast. This podcast is all about helping you master your project management skills by sharing tips, tricks, tools and training to get you to the next level, while sharing the stories of other project managers on their journey in project management. And now here's your host, walt Sparling.

Speaker 2:

Welcome everybody to the current edition of PM Mastery, and this could be the last episode for 2024, which is hopefully a really good one. I hope to have this published Christmas week. That is the plan, and if you're listening to it on Christmas and that worked. So today I have with me David Alvarez. David Alvarez has been on the podcast before, I believe a couple years ago, and coincidentally, it's on the same topic that we're going to talk about tonight. Welcome, david. Thank you all.

Speaker 3:

Happy to be here.

Speaker 2:

Happy to have you so recently on my website and I've shared it in LinkedIn I did some blog posts on goals setting goals, goal planning, self-assessment and self-evaluation, and then a 360 feedback process. So the goals I kind of wrapped them around an acronym, the goal being growth, opportunity, aspiration and learning, and we can get into that a little bit. Hopefully you've read the post. If you haven't, I encourage you to do so. We're going to get into a little bit of self-assessment. We're going to talk about how David and I both have done this over the years. David is a huge goal setter and self-improvement guy, which is why he's been on here twice specific to this topic, and then we're going to get into a little more about some of the stuff that David is now starting to do on his own. So, david, let's get started off, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, walt. So, david Alvarez, I am not a project manager, but I am a listener of all of the podcasts Walt has put out from day one, so super excited, and I've learned that you can learn something even if you're not in that field Huge in a personal growth and development. I'm in Tampa, father of three, aptly married to Melissa, and I'm in the banking industry. I have worked in various roles in banking, from branches to helping small businesses, and about a year and a half almost two years ago made a transition into more of a corporate role where I work on all things bank strategy. So that's a little bit about me and what I do, and one of my passions is personal growth and development. I saw the impact that it had on my own life and so I took that and now I really love to just kind of share what's worked for me, because I've seen it work for others as well.

Speaker 2:

Awesome Thanks, david. So I mentioned that David's been on the podcast before a couple years ago and it was for the same thing. I usually do something around goals every year, but I believe two years ago on the podcast we talked about goals and we discussed a lot our men's mastermind. So we're both in a men's mastermind group. It's coming up on tail end of seven years and we typically do a retreat every year. It should have passed by now, but this year, with all the hurricanes down here, things have gotten delayed and we're not doing the retreat until next month, mid-month. But part of the reason for doing the retreat is to create goals for the following year, reflect on the past, and we've come up with a planning method that's wrapped around seven life accounts and David's the one who put this together when we first started seven years ago. So, david, talk a little bit about the seven life accounts and, on the goal planning side, how was that used?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 3:

So there's a lot of different theories around this and I've heard several different individuals that are focused on personal growth and development kind of talk through some of these.

Speaker 3:

What really resonated with me and then later resonated with our group, was looking at your life in these seven accounts right, so I call them accounts or domains, and one visual is if you take a wheel and you kind of make spokes, right, if you put seven spokes in there and you rate yourself and then you connect the dots, you'll start to notice that sometimes one of the life accounts you may not be doing as well in, and when you look at it from a distance you can tell it's a wheel and that wheel could be lopsided because we're not, you know, consistent in all those accounts. So that's why it's important to kind financial, family, health, educational and spiritual. So those are the seven, and again, we found, and science has found, that it is really important to focus in on not just one but all of them, because we can get out of whack and so it's important to periodically review where we're at in those areas and then make adjustments accordingly.

Speaker 2:

So and to address that, one of the things that we did is early on for the retreat, because most of the people that are in the group are business people of some form. Some are entrepreneurs, some engineering banking forms, some are entrepreneurs, some engineering banking, so a variety of fields but technical. So we created a PDF, fillable PDF form and you would go through and rank where you are in each of those categories and that would, like David said, it would show you how lopsided Now we did have, we did kind of break the universal rule a little bit at times where we'd say if you're really bad in one area, maybe you do need to focus on that and get that up. And maybe there is if you lose your job, career needs to be a heavy focus. So it's nice to keep it all balanced, but sometimes you do need to focus on one or the other.

Speaker 2:

But the the form, the questionnaire that you go through, and it does a lot more than just the seven life accounts. It talks about a lot of things like do you have, you know, a personal mission statement, who you are and what you want to do with your life? So one of the cool assignments we've done is it's called this funeral exercise and it's. It's basically saying if I pass, basically saying if I pass, who would I want at my funeral? Who would I want to read a final statement about me? What kind of would I want pictures? Would I want a static picture or maybe a movie? What kind of music would I want to play? Some interesting stuff. So we learned a lot about each other by going through that and of course, david kept it. So if we get surprised one day and we go to the spouse or the other, I'm like, hey, listen, this is what, this is what David or Walt or Bob wanted. So that was the thing. But these forms are available. I've adapted them for PM mastery, so they're in the resource section. There is downloadable forms that you can fill out and walk through for doing your goal planning.

Speaker 2:

So goals are important and we're coming up on that time of year where people are talking about although I have to be honest, in the circles I'm traveling now, I have not heard the word new year's or new words, new year's resolution in quite a while, mostly because I guess in the corporate world that I travel with and most of my friends are in business and corporate they do talk about goals, not resolutions. So in the early days it was like, hey, don't do resolutions, do goals, and you don't have to do them at the end of the year, you can do it at any point during the year. It's where you decide you want to make a change, set some goals and go. It's just the way we've done it is.

Speaker 2:

We have a cycle with our retreat that we do, and then, if you work for a corporation, a lot of them already set, like I'm in the middle of not only doing my own personal goals and plans, I am. My actual personal self-assessment for work is due tomorrow and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the things I include in that as well. So, david, you do a lot of goal planning. You've actually taught the group some ways that you track and how you keep up with your goals and keep moving forward and not stopping after the first couple weeks, which is a common thing with New Year's resolutions. So tell us a little bit about how you go about that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, definitely. So it's important. A couple different things here, right? So it's important to keep the goals that you set top of mind Early on. We would have a group meeting and we would be a couple weeks removed from the retreat. We go around and we would struggle all.

Speaker 3:

Once I'm done with the goal setting exercise, I go into Canva and do a quick I'll call it infographic where I take the word that I had for the year, I put that in the middle and then all around it I put an image of something that represents what the goal was and I'll put the number on top of it. So, for example, I said I wanted to jog 500 miles this year. So I have like a little running man with 500 on top of him or on his T-shirt. That infographic I then put on as a screensaver. So it's on a screensaver on my phone, my iPad, my laptop. So anytime I'm looking at my phone I'm constantly reminded oh yeah, that's the goal that I set.

Speaker 3:

Another thing is, when we do that annual goal, it looks really big and daunting sometimes. So breaking that annual goal down into not just monthly but daily results like what do I need to do daily, and then realizing that in many cases, that daily goal, in order for you to achieve it, you have to have a habit behind it, right? And we've talked about the habit loop that you can create. So I then break it down and say, okay, what daily habits do I need to have in order to achieve that goal? I have for myself, because I tend to go a little overboard, I create an Excel document where I have little check boxes. So every morning when I wake up, I've got my, my seven goals lined up and I have what habit I have tied to that.

Speaker 3:

So, for example, that jogging goal I referenced a minute ago, in order for me to hit that, I know I need to jog five times a week and so I have. Did I check all five boxes this week? So I do a morning routine and a weekly routine and that weekly routine I'm looking back at hey, did I achieve the goals that I said I was going to achieve this week in order for me to hit that annual goal? So those are the big things is, to recap, having that visual, keeping it top of mind, having breaking it down into monthly, weekly, daily goals and then creating a habit to help you obtain that and then measuring it, because you can't, you know, manage what you don't measure. So if you are measuring it, you can start to tell pretty quickly hey, am I on or off track on these areas? And you can pivot accordingly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and the kind of the previous part to the tracking, to kind of look at it in one way is my goal at the end of the year is to do X. Well, what do I need to do every month to meet that annual goal? Well, what do I need to do every week to meet that monthly goal, to meet that annual goal? And what do I need to do every day to meet that weekly goal, to meet that monthly goal, to meet that annual goal. And then that comes into what you're talking about, david, with habits. So you know you're going to go to the gym in the morning, your gym clothes are out the night before and your sneakers and socks and then your work clothes all ready to go. You don't have to try to figure out what you're going to wear. Do you have clean clothes? So things like that. And then putting that out the night before, so they're ready in the morning. Uh, setting up habits. I, I, I'm getting old, so I set up reminders on my phone. Um, hey, make sure you take your vitamins or make sure you uh, record this data or whatever. Find what works for you, but then track it too. I use Lose it. It's an app you can track your nutrition, your hydration, your steps, your weight, and then you can go back and look. It does little charts, tells you how you're doing, you're progressing, you're up and downs, et cetera. So that's one way to track. I know, david, you created this monster spreadsheet where you had all of the individual things and you have the lines for them, and then you fill in when you complete different ones each day. All right, so after the goals, which obviously we both have ways of going through, we have some forms out there that you can download to do your goal planning. There's a few tools that you can use. So one is self-assessment. So there is a post on self-assessment and then last week I added to that, down at the bottom, a form that you can download. It's a spreadsheet and it basically walks you through all of the steps of the self-assessment. You can rank yourself in different categories.

Speaker 2:

Now this self-assessment is for project managers. It's not a generic one. So it talks about skill sets, where you rank yourself in various areas and it gives you an average overall. It also does a SWOT analysis. It allows you to reflect on other areas that maybe aren't in the key skill sets and you can use that to develop a plan for, like what, what kind of training do I want to get into? Courses do I want to take? Do I want to maybe hire a pm coach or mentor to work through this with me? So it gives you some things to think about doing, doing a self-assessment which I'm completing for myself tomorrow both work and personal and 360 feedback.

Speaker 2:

So 360 feedback is where you do kind of a peer review with people around you and it talks about the various types of people you could invite and it's all personal choice. Not all of them are required. Some of them are actually may not be allowed. Like, if you're at work, they may not want you to reach out to the client and ask for feedback, but if maybe you're in upper leadership, you may want to do that. So it depends on where you fall and you've got to be conscientious of how you do that. So, david, on the self-assessment in 360, what kind of stuff do you do there?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I know we had chatted about this before. Self-assessment I'm very familiar with We've been doing a version of it in the group. I really do like in your post and the resources that you put on your website. Having it broken down, the SWOT analysis, I think is really really good too. Website Having it broken down, the SWOT analysis, I think is really really good too. So I really like that.

Speaker 3:

Some of the other tools that I've personally used just for my personal goal setting is, when I do my self-assessment, I also want to look back at some of the key things, some things I may have forgotten about from the prior year. So I have an exercise where I'll go through all of my photos and I'll just scroll through the photos for the year, pull things out. Okay, this is a highlight, this is something that that went really well and I want to make sure I give myself credit for it. And then area, you know, some photos that come to mind that, hey, this is reminds me of something I didn't achieve. Um, do the same thing with social media, go back on my account, scroll back to a year, kind of float it through. So those are just some other things that I use, but again, I really like the format that you have on the website.

Speaker 3:

The 360 feedback, I think, is huge. This is one that I feel like has been a big miss for me. When I saw your post and saw what you had put on the website, it reminded me of it. I was in a leadership class one time a few years back where this was part of the exercise the assessment went out to. I got to choose who was going to, and I believe it went out to 10 people. I think you recommended seven to 10. And so it then put together for me just kind of like a report, and in that report I got his anonymous feedback on some of the key areas like communication. Some of the things that you have listed here was what was in there, and I remember that being so valuable and impactful for me. I just honestly never thought about doing it annually, and so this is something I'm going to be incorporating this year, based on the feedback that you provided, and look forward to having this as part of my new annual ritual.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the 360 is something I've been doing for I think this was my fourth year and this one is a little awkward because I just started on a new account. I've been here seven months, so I've only had a few people. I'm working on one big project and it's three years long, so I have minimal interaction with some of the teammates, but I do I'm actually kind of coaching with we're not coaching do one-on-ones with one of the PMs on the team and kind of feed, give her feedback on her meetings and stuff like that. I have another senior person who's kind of a co-leader of the team. She runs some of the PMs. We do a weekly one-on-one, so I asked both of them for 360 feedback. And then I also asked one of the business kind of they're another service line that doesn't work for our same company, but we work together a lot and we meet at least weekly and we also meet a lot offline. So that's the best I could do this year.

Speaker 2:

As far as getting feedback, I'm not comfortable in reaching out to the client. Just haven't built that kind of close. We have a good relationship, but that might be a little too. You know too much, so I haven't done that. But get whatever you can. In the feedback and in the post that you mentioned, there is actually a generic email form of hey, this is how you can word it. Now there is some caveats in there. You know, ask this or this or this and then ask any other thing you want. So whatever it is you're curious about, you can put in there and you could do a survey. Like David you mentioned, yours was anonymous, so mine are not anonymous. They are. I dress them specifically to people when I get them back. I then summarize all them in.

Speaker 2:

What I've been doing in the past few years is I would create a draft, a letter to my manager, and say hey, I do this process, I have been doing this process, and these are peers that I work with on a regular basis, both on my team, off my team, business units that you may not actually interact with, but it would be good for you to hear their feedback, I think, for you to know how I work, and it's not always the. I mean, I get pretty good feedback, but once in a while I might get a line. Or you know, one person said you know you have a sense of humor that not some, some people don't get because they don't. They can't tell if you're serious or joking. So maybe think about that when you use humor. So I mean there's different people will give you different feedback and that's the whole point of this, cause I never really thought about I'm just. You know, I try to be funny.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, listen, we all have blind spots, and unless we're asking, we're not going to get that feedback right, and so that's why this is so impactful and, like I said, why I'm going to be putting this into practice myself.

Speaker 2:

And one of the things I hope to do here in the next week or so as I update, I do want to do kind of a summary post that's going to include all of this information and create an email template that you can just pick on and download. I mean you could copy and paste from the website, but it's an email template you can download and it will work in most email programs for doing your 360. So one of the things I thought about David, you were talking about about this was something called a brag bag. Now I call it a brag folder, but I used to create a folder for each of my teammates and my well, my team what I managed, and if they got some kind of kudos, whether from above or a peer, or they shared something with me or they were given an award, I would throw that notification into their folder in Outlook. Or I also had a OneNote folder and I would drop the emails in there and at the end of the year, when everyone does their self-evaluation, I would look at how they talked about themselves, what are their accomplishments, what are things they need to work on, and it was so common for them to forget all of the accomplishments as far as awards and kudos.

Speaker 2:

So I would try to stress that near the end of the year, after I started seeing a pattern, and then I, when I did, when I reviewed them, I would use that brag bag folder to say, hey, you did a good job here, you did a good job there, Keep up with this, et cetera. So that's a good thing. If you want to go back, if you work in an environment where you're being asked to do a self-evaluation or self-review, or maybe even if you're just doing it for yourself, you're going to go. What are the positives when, david, you're talking about the photos and sometimes you go back and you go, oh, that's right, I did that, that was cool, that was a good thing this year.

Speaker 3:

So along the same kind of lines, yeah, and I'm always surprised Every time I do that. I always I'm like that happened this year, that felt like three years ago, right, so it's important to take the time to do that.

Speaker 2:

So we've talked a little bit about you know the posts on goals and self-assessment. We've talked a little bit about you know the posts on goals and self-assessment. I think a lot of people do self-assessments. I think a lot of people set some kind of goals. Maybe they don't have a structure. Hopefully this will help with that. There are forms on the website for the goal planning, the self-assessment and the 360. I hope to add a template, but you can copy and paste the base email template out of there and modify it as you see fit. I think once you read it you'll kind of get the the intent of what it's for. So the other thing uh, david, we, you know we talked about you. You're being, you're a big uh planner of uh, your future, your self-development. You've got trackers. You've got uh your. You helped us for the mastermind, create our goal planning sheets. You recently started getting out on LinkedIn and you started a blog. So tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. Yeah, so with with the group, I've seen all of us, everyone that's in the group grow, and especially you, walt. I remember you talking about this podcast. I remember you talking about the blog, and watching you over these years not just talk about it but put it into action is, honestly, is what has inspired me.

Speaker 3:

I feel like I have something to share. I feel like what I've been able to accomplish over the past few years, if I can do it, anybody can do it, and it's just what I found is successful and I feel like it can help others. And so, because I feel like I have something to share, I just didn't know how to share it. I thought of kind of following your format a little bit. So having a LinkedIn, being able to share some things that I'm working on or some things that are helping me in the moment I know can help others, and then having a blog where I can archive all of that.

Speaker 3:

I have started a little bit of a book that I would hope that's one of my goals over the next couple of years to be able to get that done, and it would be along the same lines of what we're talking about, right? So personal growth, development, but not just that, again, productivity. I feel like getting organized, having goals, setting goals, keeping track of them really can help you 10x what you do, and when you 10x what you can do, you can be so much more impactful in all areas of your life. I feel like I'm a better father, husband, employee, friend because of the things I've been able to do, and again, I get really encouraged when I can go and help others do that too. So that's been you and a few others out there that I'm sure will probably listen to this podcast have been inspirations to get me to step out of my comfort zone. I would not have felt comfortable even doing this podcast a few years back. So I feel like I'm growing and this is going to give me an opportunity to grow further.

Speaker 2:

Well, I can definitely say that in the time I've known you which has been, I don't know, maybe 12 years, under 12 years I've learned a lot from you and you've been a great motivation for myself and for the other men in the group. It's amazing, everybody kind of jokes about David and his goal tracking and his you don't. You know. Here's someone says listen, yeah, I have a goal of 500. I think I'm around a hundred so far. Whatever David says, I am 0.27% into my goal. And here it's right in this spreadsheet, right here. It's amazing.

Speaker 2:

And I know that you've done coaching for others on the side, both in a personal and business environment. So you talked about productivity. You've helped companies with their growth. You've also helped executives within your firm where you work, do better, and I know we do kind of a casual once a month breakfast and I kind of look at that as almost a coaching thing. So if I have ideas I can bounce them off of you and you give me feedback. So, yeah, you've been a good inspiration. I know anything you put out there is going to be useful. So I'm looking forward to seeing more of that.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, I appreciate it, and thanks again for um for what you've done, cause, like I said, you've been an inspiration for us as well. So thank you.

Speaker 2:

So at the uh, in the show notes, I'm going to include links to all these things we talked about the pod or the I'm sorry, the, the blog posts yes, maybe the previous podcast, the forms for both goal planning, the self-assessment. I want to put a link in there for your blog, david, and a link which is common for us, to share your LinkedIn profile. So if what David is saying resonates with you and you want to keep up with what he's doing, I encourage you to connect with him on LinkedIn and grow your network and then maybe send us some feedback, like, if you use the forums the goal planning forums, send maybe connect with David or myself or both and say hey, listen, I've used the forums. I have received some really positive feedback from PMs that I shared that form. I did a post last year I think it was early in the year actually and I had a couple of people reach out oh my God, I've downloaded your forms and one said my husband and I are both going through it. We're going to follow this thing.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much. There's useful data there and goal planning is very important. Amen. Anything else you'd like to add to the end? I know typically we do a.

Speaker 3:

Did you know and I? I don't recall if you planned on doing it. Did you know? I did not, but I can share one. Um, I'll do, just because I'm familiar with this. You are as well. Uh, did you know? So Walt and I are both in Tampa. And did you know? Tampa is the cigar capital of the world, produce more cigars than any other city in the world over the course of the last, I'd say, I guess, 100, 200 years. So that is something that a lot of people, even in the cigar industry, don't really know.

Speaker 2:

And that's interesting and it's great for us because we're both cigar smokers. Yeah, ybor is a big cigar place here in the Tampa area. Yep, okay, that's a great. Did you know? I like it. All right, we will continue to bring in interesting guests as we move into 2025. And I want to thank you, david, for coming on again, and we'll see everyone else in the next episode of PM Mastery.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the PM Mastery podcast at wwwpm-masterycom. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player Until next time.

Speaker 2:

Keep working on your craft.