This week, I have a fantastic insight from a mentee to focus our Thursday Thought! for the week. The question, deeply rooted in any professional improvement programme, is:
“Behaviour change – How easy do you find it?”
What follows is a personal insight from someone who has the courage to share it and the determination to make it happen. My thanks to Peggy for sharing. Behaviour change is not easy. Our personal habits and patterns have usually evolved over many years, as coping strategies to get through the day the best way we can. But when you are truly committed to lifelong learning, behaviour change has to feature in that programme. We live in fast moving professional contexts and being open-minded to different ways of doing things is a core competence of remaining successful in this sort of environment. So, with that in mind:
“How easy do you find it to change your routine behaviour?”
“My name is Peggy, and it has been three days since I had a ‘to do’ list. It has been hard, at first it was liberating getting rid of the shackles of that list, written in red, staring at me and making me feel guilty that it never seems to go down. I nearly fell off the wagon last night as I remembered three things I needed to do, I did manage to resist it, although I did debate whether sending myself an email would be cheating.
I have also been liberated from my in box. A colleague sent me an article on how to manage your emails, and I scanned it and it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know, so I just got on with it and sorted it out, filed away stuff I was never going to get to and sorted out the important / action ones and the less important ones. I now have one email in my in box – the one about the article to remind me what I should be doing. The weight was lifted off my shoulders I suddenly I felt free.
These two significant events for me have reinforced a message my mentor keeps telling me, changing my behaviour is within my gift. Only I can do it, she can give me all the tools and techniques, all the proven processes and models (as she knows I love these) but knowing it and doing it are two different things. I will need support to keep this going and moving me along the journey I am taking to the ‘better me’ so mentoring will have to continue. The next battle is sustaining that behaviour; I have created myself a trigger word to remind me of what I need to do, I am not going to tell you what it is as it is only relevant to me and probably won’t help anyone else. I will let you know whether it works……”
Improvement is everyone's concern: +44 1550 720902 will start that process today.
My name is Peggy, and it has been five days since I had a ‘to do’ list and I still only have three emails in my in box……..see it does work
Let’s just take one day at a time Peg.
Can you post a link to the article on managing emails? I have managed to get rid of things older than 6 months, but still can’t seem to my inbox down to a single screen.
For those who are interested:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lifehacker-Working-Smarter-Faster-Better/dp/1118018370/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340286287&sr=1-1#_
I even manage it after day’s off, and funny I am also managing to get my important file down as well as I feel less panicked about it.
Good luck
Interesting Peggy. I actually have this as an i-book. I think tomorrows Thursday Thoughts will be an e-mail management one!