Personal Action Plan

My friend Jason has been scolding me these past days for not updating my blog. I'm guilty! Been busy, been lazy. Hehe. For his sake, I'm gonna spend time in the computer today, writing something he can read. (Are you happy now, Jase?) ;-)

Before the end of this week, I need to come up with a Personal Action Plan. It's my fourth and last assignment in this short course I took in UPOU called Personal Entrepreneurial Development. We spent the last three parts of the course studying about personal entrepreneurial competencies, characteristics of a person that makes them a good entrepreneur. Now that we're done, our assignment is to come up with a short-term and long-term plan for our life and long- and short-term goals for each role we have. We need to give it a lot of thought before we can make the plan, our professor said.

Since I've undergone a modified version of this exercise during a leadership training in my office last year, I can just rehash what I've written in the vision-mission part of it and add the details of my plans. Should be easier to do, I hope. Deadline for the assignment is saturday next week.

I'm still considering if I should go to the UPOU campus on saturday for the last face-to-face session. I don't know if there's anyone else I can go with among my classmates. We'll see. Meanwhile, my personal action plan is to finish my plan and start it rolling.

First Class

It’s been more than a month since I last posted and much has happened. I finally got into Personal Entrepreneurial Development at the start of February. It’s a non-formal, distance learning course, in the UP Open University. It will run until June. It’s been occupying my weekend afternoons and some of my workday nights, when I’m not busy with Marthe, but it’s providing the adrenalin rush I’ve been missing in my current job. I used to have it everyday as a reporter covering the travel & tourism, lifestyle and IT beats.

The course included four face-to-face sessions each month from February to May. I met my classmates for the first time on Feb 28 at the UPOU Learning Center in Diliman. As usual, I arrived last, after going through MRT and waiting for like 30 minutes in the UP Campus jeep queue in Quezon Avenue (which I later abandoned and rode a Fairview-bound jeep instead, which will take me to Philcoa), and getting lost. The cab driver and I missed the National Computer Center, as the building name was behind an overgrown bush. The learning center was inside NCC.

I actually didn’t know what to expect of the session, but it turned out to be a consulting period. The teacher, Angela Cielo, summarized what we’ve read in our thick study material and emphasized the importance of each module. Then she opened the floor (or should I say the table, as we were just 10 seated around a long table) to questions that may or may not be related to the modules we’ve just discussed.

When the questions were answered, she proceeded to ask each of us to talk a little about what businesses we’ve involved ourselves in so far or what our entrepreneurial plans are. It was humbling to know that some of my classmates are already managing businesses – either family-owned or of their own ventures. There were very good ideas that came up.

I intend to use this class as a venue to explore possibilities and to learn from my colleagues, although I have my own plans too and they are under way. Next meeting will be in the learning center in Los Baños. I initially didn’t plan to attend but this is getting interesting. I might.