Well what a shock to the system for us at Cullen Scholefield!! Monday was a bit of a blur, Tuesday less so and by Wednesday we were just about ready to start planning key actions for 2015 and we will continue today.
January is inevitably a time for new beginnings and pledges to do better – detoxing, dry January’s, WeightWatchers and Health Club memberships soar! This got me thinking about how you do change and how can you stick to those great resolutions…?
We are in a privileged position at Cullen Scholefield as we talk to a large number of our students who work in just about every sector you can imagine. Last year a number of key themes emerged the need to:
- Change behaviours
- Be resilient
- Be able to multi-task and cope with shifting priorities.
If this resonates with you may I recommend a wander across to the newly emerging area of Neuroscience. It is on my list to learn more about this year!
Over the Christmas break needing a break from Mince Pies and Bubbly I came across James Clear’s paper – Transform Your Habits. It looks at how psychology can make it easier to stick to our goals. This grabbed my attention!! Clear draws our attention to Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit. Both Duhigg and Clear talk about a three step pattern. Clear has called this pattern “3 R’s of Habit Change”.
- Reminder – the trigger that initiates the behaviour
- Routine – the behaviour itself, the action you take
- Reward – the benefit you gain from doing the behaviour.
Worth exploring definitely!
On the resilience front I had planned to go to see the film produced by Angelina Jolie Unbroken – still on my wish list! The film tells the extraordinary survival story of Louis Zamperini, a champion distance runner who competed in the 1936 Olympics.
There was an excellent article in the Guardian just before Christmas entitled Unbroken: what makes some people more resilient than others? http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/dec/19/unbroken-resilience-louis-zamperini-post-traumatic-stress-disorder
The article quotes Steven Southwick, professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and author of the book – Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.
“Zamperini was defiant, a risk-taker and people who are like that, people who are optimists, tend to be more resilient”.
If you then link these two ideas especially if you are feeling the need to be more resilient you can start to evaluate your behaviours – especially when you are leading people. How are they going to react if you show that you have all the worries of the world on your shoulders? I am not suggesting that you suddenly appear to be a different person but by being self aware and learning how to be true to your personality whilst also thinking about changing your behaviour could be a useful way to becoming more resilient!
This could be an entry on to your CPD Plan for 2015. You can download a new plan and record here!