habits Archives - Inspiring Portfolio Careers

August is a great time to catch up with yourself!

Stephen Covey who wrote the classic book ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’ talks about the importance of blocking out time in your diary for ‘important not urgent’ tasks.

He defines important not urgent tasks as:

• Preparation
• Prevention
• Planning
• Relationship building
• Empowerment
• Self-awareness, learning, exploration & development
• Learning new skills
• Creative thinking
• Networking
• Prioritisation
• Training & development
• Exercise

People are naturally better at some of these and less so at others.

What are your goals for each of these areas? Do you block out time in your diary for these things? Most people don’t. They spend most of their time reacting, fire fighting and chasing their tail!

Why not choose August to create some new habits?

Ask yourself these questions and score yourself out of 100% for these key effective habits:

1. How good am I at managing time well and prioritising tasks for maximum results?
2. How good am I at marketing myself in a relevant, consistent and targeted way?
3. How good am I creating better systems, healthy habits and behaviours?
4. How good am I at developing my skills/knowledge to stay one step ahead?
5. How good am I at reflecting, planning, refocusing and follow up?
6. How good am I at setting compelling goals with plans to achieve them?
7. How good am I at creating and building key relationships to help me grow personally and professionally?

If your total core is less than 400, coaching would be very beneficial indeed to protect your current work position and ensure you are planning your future with more competition. If your score is 400-650, coaching would help you to achieve excellent results faster than you can do alone.

The world of work is changing REALLY fast at the moment and there is less time to do these things but they are becoming more important to create a secure long term future for yourself.

Important not urgent things to do in August:

5 tasks I am focusing on this month are:

• Catching up on sleep and de-weeding the allotment
• Reducing the paper mountain that has built up over a few months of writing and doing events
• Identifying and removing the cause of annoying ‘niggles’
• Reviewing my technology
• Mapping key systems and processes to streamline them

Here are 6 more ideas for creating some sunshine in August:

1. Reflect on your achievements and learnings from the last 3 months
2. Review your career strategy
3. Tag your LinkedIn connections
4. Update your CV
5. Follow more followers on Twitter
6. Research networking and training events for the Autumn

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Get in touch if you are ready to explore coaching with us. Thanks!

My goodness, we are creatures of habit, aren’t we?! Every morning I ritualistically line up 4 glasses of water on the worktop and chuckle to myself. I picture the creation of habits of like a lawn mower cutting grass. Neural path ways in the brain take time to create and it’s easy to keep on mowing the same route until the grass doesn’t grow so much and there’s a path that you go down, always going the same way. It takes conscious effort and persistence to change a habit. I moved the location of the bin in my kitchen and was intrigued to see that it does, as the experts say, take about 28 days to establish a new habit and break an old one. Had to get a new kitchen floor as well due to wear and tear.

What habit would you like to change? I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day and I gave up about 7 years ago. Cigarettes were like punctuation in my day and there were lots of full stops, commas and dashes. I’d tried everything; hypnosis, collecting old butts in jam jars and keeping them on my desk in water, buying smaller packets, patches. You name it, I tried it. Do you know how I cracked it? It was three things; 1) I kept a diary of how I felt before, during and after a cigarette which gave me insights about the triggers, 2) I thought about how to deal with the triggers and ‘fill the gap’, e.g. playing a song which gave me a ‘feel good time out break’ without the smoke and 3) I realised that smoking was stopping me from getting what I want.

At that time, I especially wanted to be more creative, and sitting on the sofa one day, with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I observed myself, I was inhaling in the gap between my thoughts. This is the space where insights emerge and creativity happens. I was stopping myself from being more creative. The light came on – an ‘aha moment’ as we call it in coaching. Armed with this insight, which ironically having a fag break and time to think had given me, I stubbed out the cigarette and haven’t touched one since. Don’t worry you smokers out there, I haven’t become all evangelical and anti smoking, in fact I think that non-smokers would benefit from time out 5 minutes breaks too – time to think. But that topic is one for another blog.

Sometimes smoking is a displacement activity, in other words you are doing it to avoid looking at what really needs looking at, like changing your job or career. For the FREE 30 page “Pain free career change” report, click on this link:

http://www.careerstrategies.co.uk/

How are you creating some sunshine in August?

What Vices Do You Have?