It’s Not Enough Only to Have Aspirations, Manage Them!

Knowing the nature of one’s dreams and aspirations and understand them, indeed, only the first—yet significant—baby steps towards realizing them. There are tons of works to be done after that and lot of questions one must answer to go forward. Individual needs to understand not only what he wants or where he want to be, but also needs to address all the resources he can utilize to reach it and the challenges he would likely to face.

Inspired by the process of writing a business plan as an entrepreneur who decides to start a company, Bob Aubrey, an expert in human development, developed a tool to help individual to manage his aspirations which was named Personal Enterprise Plan (PEP). By using PEP, individual positioned himself as a entrepreneur of his own life, just like enterpreneur who use a business plan to create strategy for his company. PEP resembles a business plan because  both start with a dream and express a unique identity and make a value proposition. 

However, the PEP is not exactly same with the idea of business plan itself. The first difference is in the scope: a business plan is valid only within an economic context, while a PEP is about all aspects of life. Values are different as well: personal values are defined by the individual, not the marketplace, so the PEP balances a dual set of values. PEP also consider individual’s life aspects such as lifestyle, ethics, identity, cultural enrichment, social relations and family, and the changes in one’s life as he gets older. This means that the definition of success will also be different: a PEP is not only a tool for developing employability and human capital but for broader life enterprises.

In his book, Managing your Aspirations: Developing Personal Enterprise in the Global Workplace, Bob Aubrey shows the process of how dreams can be realized using PEP:

With this framework, PEP will help individual from the earlier steps of identifying the dreams to planning the real actions to realize them.

So, how do you think about it? Are you ready to put your dreams into works?

Source: Aubrey. (2010). Managing your Aspirations : Developing Personal Enterprise in the Global Workplace. Asia: McGraw-Hill Education.

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global network – who has written 5 posts on Global Indonesian Network.

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