Monday, August 4, 2025

Emotional Engineering II, Self Support: DCII for Keeping Track

Emotional Engineering II, Self Support: DCII for Keeping Track

Copyright (c) 2025 Akien Maciain, all rights reserved.
Email me to use this material elsewhere.
This version: 20250819.1

📁The Development, Capacity, and Impact Inventory…

I noticed a long time ago that I'd have times where I'd feel down on myself... And I'd go to work the next day, and there was a folder in my inbox called simply 'kudos'. You know the kind, like an email from my boss that says atta-boy. But my performance reviews wound up in there too. And when I left, I took that folder with me. At my next gig, I did the same thing. This has been following me around for like 30 years at this point.

I'd go look in there... And be reminded of my value to my boss. Eventually emails from friends and partners wound up in there too. 

Fast forward to very recently, and I'm having a conversation with someone very dear to me. She's a general manager for a very small tech firm. And she confessed to me that she was having a very difficult time with imposter syndrome.

🕵️ What is Impostor Syndrome?

It’s the habituated feeling that you’re faking it... Even when the evidence says you’re not. You assume your success is luck, or timing, or other people being fooled. And underneath it habit... The habit of seeing yourself as less than up to the task at hand. 

I explained to her about my kudos file, and how I could use that to help build myself back up after a setback of some kind. Like a scrap book, but targeted at supporting honest looks at myself, growing through issues, and reminding myself of my strengths.

She asked me if I had a template for that... 

✍️ The Template

I asked her to give me a few days. Then I went online, and started doing some research on 'strengths-based interventions', a topic under the kinda pointy rubric of 'positive psychological interventions'. The idea was to use the latest science to bolster this template idea.

These include tools like:

  • Values inventories
  • Strengths assessments (like VIA or CliftonStrengths)
  • Accomplishment logs
  • Gratitude journals
  • Best-self reflections

They're all part of the wider toolkit used in positive psychology to build on what’s right with people rather than fixing what’s wrong. The Development, Capacity, and Impact Inventory is an example of a strengths-based intervention in action. A whole pile of them all at once.

And a place to keep your shiny new habits as you develop them.

https://trainmymonkey.blogspot.com/2025/08/personal-personnel-file-template.html

You can add sections, remove them, change the order... 

Here's mine as an example:

https://trainmymonkey.blogspot.com/2025/08/akiens-personal-personnel-file-as.html 

📖 Development, Capacity, and Impact Inventory Use Guide (DCII)

  1. Purpose & Ownership  
    • The **Development, Capacity, and Impact Inventory** is **yours**—a private, self-owned record of strengths, growth, and accomplishments.  
    • You decide what stays private, what you share, with whom, and when.
  2. Modular Structure for Privacy  
    • You CAN break your DCII into different files or pages, each it's own logical sections.(e.g., “Professional Skills,” “Projects & Milestones,” “Personal Reflections”).  
    • This makes it easy to share only relevant parts while keeping private insights protected.
  3. Sharing with Confidence  
    • If you're using the DCII at work (which is recommended)... When needed, such as for annual reviews or coaching, you can safely email just the relevant section(s) to your supervisor, mentor or coach, while keeping the rest of your information private.  
    • Because each section can be standalone, you avoid accidental exposure of personal reflections.
    • See below for the process
  4. Regular Updates = Clarity & Accuracy  
    • Aim to **jot down updates regularly**, ideally weekly or every other week.  
    • This keeps your file fresh and makes all content easier to recall and compile later.
  5. Tone & Content Guidelines  
    • Use **straightforward, example-rich language.**  
    • For shareable sections, keep descriptions concise, professional, and focused on impact or learning.
  6. Long-Term Value  
    • Keep older sections archived in your PPF. They’re part of your journey—even if not shared now, they provide context later.
  7. Fill it with everything you can. Every email where somebody told you that you did a good job, every new thing you learn about yourself. 

💼 For Personnel Improvement, Celebration and Performance Measurement in the Workplace

  1. Purpose: This process is, as much as possible, to be centered on celebrating accomplishments and growing capabilities of our individual team members as a team effort. And to measure the efficacy of that in a way that’s useful to dependent business processes.
  2. Tracking Frequency: Measurement shall be taken in team staff meetings whenever possible. Weekly or semi-weekly preferred. Tracking any less often results in a lot of ‘what did I do again?’ that this process strives to avoid. Instead we create documented institutional memory instead.
  3. Team Tracking: Everyone on a team shall, as a team, fill out the periodic updates for each of the individuals. This will require some expeditiousness in the process… However one of the goals in the process is to celebrate our contributions and progress, so not too much expeditiousness. Why like that?
    1. Because if you're just responsible for doing your own, too easy for items to fall off the queue...
    2. Because the group is celebrating the accomplishments of each person, creating more sense of accomplishments being seen, more sense of being valued...
    3. Because we can sometimes undervalue our contributions, but the group won't let that happen.
  4. Tracking Mechanism: The Development, Capacity, and Impact Inventory - DCII 
    1. The introductory page for rewriting habits:
      https://trainmymonkey.blogspot.com/2025/07/emotional-engineering-i-introduction.html
    2. The page that explains the DCII:
      https://trainmymonkey.blogspot.com/2025/08/emotional-engineering-iii-keeping-track.html
    3. The DCII template:
      https://trainmymonkey.blogspot.com/2025/08/personal-personnel-file-template.html
  5. At each team meeting, the team shall review each of the categories (shown below) and note individual contributions. When the process is done for that person, 

  7. Annual Review: At the end of the year, supervisors will utilize all inputs from periodic reviews to conduct a comprehensive annual performance review.
    1. Each contributor shall contribute their own copy of this tracking to their manager via email.
  8. Management Leveraging  – Managers are in a unique position to help people grow by coaching, offloading select management tasks, and including those in goals tracked by the team. Such as ‘Define my job role’, ‘learning to set goals’, ‘teach the team how to receive and give useful feedback’, and by tying the value of tasks back to the organization’s needs.

📁 The Section titled Livelihood & Professional Skills

It may be valuable to have this section in it's own file.

This is the tracking section for the livelihood, and is designed to be shared if that's what will make this easiest for you.

Self Definition

Put in what are the professional skills I am most proud of?

Put in what are the professional skills I most want to grow?

🎯Active Goals in Focus

List goals here of any size. As goals are completed, that is noted and moved from active goals to the log section.

Annual goals go here, as well as shorter term ones. You can even do it in an outline if you want to break a goal up into tasks. Goals should be specified as to what kind of goal they are. Annual goals, Personal goals, habit change goals, anything you want to track here.

When a goal is complete, move it to the '📜Prior week's entries log' entry at the end of this section.

📊 Tracking

Can be updated by me, but if I'm in a team, and the team supports it, should be filled in by the team.

🤝 Collaboration & Relationships

How have I supported my teammates? Where have I relied on them? Example: Helped the collections team prep the new exhibit, even though it wasn’t my department.

🗣️ Communication & Storytelling

How have I shared information clearly, both inside and outside my workplace as appropriate? Example: Wrote a quick visitor FAQ for front desk after we got the same questions 5x in a day.

🚀 Initiative & Resourcefulness

Where did I step up without being asked? Example: Noticed the archive’s labeling system was slowing us down, so I proposed a fix.

📅 Planning & Organization 

How have I kept myself and projects on track? Example: Built a simple timeline for the Día de los Muertos prep so all departments knew their deadlines.

✅ Responsibility & Follow-through

Where did I show reliability or ownership? Example: Took point on ordering supplies and made sure they arrived before setup day. This is a good section for goals and for tracking work habit change efforts.

🌐 Visitor & Community Experience

How have I made a positive impact on visitors or community members? Example: Took extra time with a family to help their kids connect with a historic artifact.

📜Prior week's entries log

[fill this in]



-------------------------------
Complete Contents


By at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)