What I had been up to lately – status update May 2021

Dear reader,

My intention for this post is to brief you on what I had been up to from the beginning of the year until now.

I assume you know me, or you had stumbled upon my blog out of curiosity. You can check more about me here: https://aleksvladimirov.com/aleks-vladimirov-about/

Thank you for taking the time to visit my page and I would be happy to receive a feedback from you about what you are interested in learning or reading on my blog.

It was a quite an intensive past few months, even if we are still in Covid. I had received a feedback on numerous occasions from people who know me about the fact I am doing a lot. There is always one question they had asked me – “How are you able to do this?”. I must confess the best way to do a lot of things is to be committed. Only then you and I can become a truly productivity ninja. However, being committed is hard and not everyone can make it.

“Life is what happens to you while you‘re busy making other plans”

John Lennon

I had lots of plans at the beginning of the year. Being stuck in a Covid lockdown was definitively not one of them.

Below you will find clustered what I had been up to with my work and life.

Learning

You might already know – I love learning and I love self-development! I had taken many courses. I had also designed and delivered many courses on the topics of self-development and professional skills. In my deliveries, I like to add my experience, both professional and volunteer, which exceeds 12 years. This includes taking leadership roles, winning public speaking competitions, technical expertise and product management. I had taken coaching certification courses, and I had also delivered sessions to students and coaches about different aspects of being a coach. I find those techniques as a nice toolbox you can use.

The big moment, what I had been learning for the past few months?

On my agenda, for longest time was to go deeper into the field of psychology.

I had worked a lot on my coaching skills. Having some clients as well and delivering sessions to coaching communities. My wish was to learn more and also undergo a formal degree. This could lead me to new opportunities in the future, lets see. It definitely helps with being a better people’s manager and project/product manager. My biggest take away is to turn the negative situation like the Covid-19 pandemic to a positive opportunity to learn something I had wanted to do for a while. I had already passed my first year as a student and I am very proud to combine studies and work. Just imagine during the December holidays instead of watching Netflix to have to study for exams. Or taking days from your precious vacation to study and to go to exams. This is something I had done before while I studied for my master’s in Telecommunication Engineering and I know perfectly well that the key is to have stable habits, some would say it Atomic Habits.

My take away from this experience is that if you want to achieve something, set a deadline and if you don’t go for your dream just forget about it and move on. Many people just talk about the idea of learning new things and never take an action towards it. Recently I saw on my Facebook feed other friends who did similar thing. They started learning new skills and even got a certificate.

I am also upgrading my Product Management skills by attending a few courses and joining amazing communities. I had worked on an app for a smart watch by doing some designs and sketches.

If you are Product Manager, I would be happy to learn more about what you work on. Lets connect!

Podcast

Me and my co-host Edu from Brazil launched last year the Beyond BEST podcast, which was very successful. We focus on interviews mainly with engineers and we present to you what skills and mindset they needed to strive in their profession. Our guests are mainly Alumni from the student organization BEST, but we also had interesting episode about 3D printers in December which is worth checking out. This year in April we had elections for the new board and this means Edu and I were quite busy interviewing the leaders of the organization and presenting their experience and what did they take away from these 2 years. If you are interested in leading your own organization, it is worth your time to check those episodes.

We are working on improving the podcast and the process of creating new episodes, which means that soon we will introduce new changes, so stay tuned and please subscribe to receive the latest episodes.

If you have interesting stories, and you want to be part of our podcast or you want to provide us with a feedback, please contact me!

Training Delivery and more

If the above things were not enough, I had also been part of the trainers’ team for an on-line training even on Fundraising, which was 3 weeks long. The preparation started at the end of December. After that, we had planned all the activities, participant selection, schedule and everything else for a few months before the event. We had 18 participants from European countries, located in different time zones and working together remotely.

I love Fundraising, because it is the heart of any organization. No matter if you are a company with a product and you want to reach out to your customers, or a non-profit organization. There are expenses you need to take care, so you better have a plan and a strategy how you can reach your goal and create relationships and strategic partnerships.

Our goal was to provide the needed skills for the future generation of Fundraiser to use and to be even more successful. Since the event was too short, believe me we could have added even more ideas and content, we focused on the most important aspects of being a fundraiser.

We provided to the participants guidelines for new and creative ways of doing Fundraising in the modern ages.

We had the challenge to prepare everything for a such short time and also we were only few trainers to deliver so the other challenge was to split the work and no one to be overwhelmed with activities. Luckily everything turned out for well in the end.

I had also delivered workshop for a big training event to participants in January on the topic of creativity. I love this topic and I had delivered it mainly offline, which made me even more excited to change it for the on-line world and it worked very well.

Another thing I am leading is the so called on-line learning lab. Where trainers and educators share their knowledge with bigger community. We had one session at the beginning of the year led by Krisy from Germany, If you deliver sessions and would like to share your knowledge or lead a discussion, please contact me and lets see if your expertise could be interesting for our community as well. Just follow this link: https://aleksvladimirov.com/contact/

On-line workshop on Creativity

This was another fun and educational thing I did. At the beginning of the year, I developed on-line workshop which the goal was to boost your creativity. I had many people signed for it on my website and I am considering to open it again later this year. If you are interested in attending it, please contact me https://aleksvladimirov.com/contact/

Youtubing

Another thing on my mind is to record more videos on my YouTube channel. At the moment this project is on hold due to many other high priority activities, but I plan to revisit it soon. If you want to see what I am working on, you can subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8kHTF-6N_HslqNqXkJ143g

Summary

The first half of the year was very busy for me. I had been studying, passing exams, delivering sessions, expanding my skills and delivering training sessions.

It was a fun start of another rewarding year. It’s hard to describe all the projects and activities I worked on and I did my best to capture the most important things for the first half of the year.

I hope you enjoyed reading everything I wrote, and I appreciate your curiosity. I hope we will meet in the real life somewhere in Europe or on-line at another event.