• maintaining set of habits that enable me to tackle the ups and downs of life and business and;
• setting aside time to reflect, plan and set a direction for the year ahead.

As we ease into February, I can report that my plans for this year’s have hit a couple of speed bumps already. Talking with friends and colleagues, this seems to be a common theme with challenges following early successes as the year build momentum. This being so, I want to share two tried and tested techniques that have allowed me to remain resilient and keep things heading in the right direction.

Build and maintain a foundation of core habits

Last year, I set aside time to work on myself, finding and trying ways to help me maintain resilience, be more content and tackle the inevitable ups and downs of life. Below are six science-backed practices (via Shawn Achor and James Clear) that I have adopted and consistently work for me:

Replay gratitude – write down three things from your day for which you are grateful. This could be big stuff like landing a new job or simply the perfect cup of tea your friend made you. For me, in recent weeks these have included fish and chips on the beach with friends, being given a lei by a client and simply having options in my life.

Put one foot in front of the other – get out, about and moving for 15 or more minutes each day. In my world, this looks like walking the dog (no phone/earphones), hiking in a regional park or, on office-based days, simply lapping the block three times a day to increase my heart rate and my step count.

Look for the positive – take three minutes each day to write down as much as you can remember about a positive experience in the last 24 hours and how it made you feel. Recent examples for me include a hearing a great podcast episode about gratitude, having a meaningful chat with a daughter and finding pleasure in the flavours of a meal.

Practice kindness – when there’s no-one to help across the road or comfort through a tough time, we can simply take a few minutes each day to send a text, email or direct message to thank, praise or lift up a friend or colleague. Last week, I baked and shared cheese scones with the secretaries in the neighbouring office, much to their surprise which made me smile all day.

Small talk is healthy – strong friendships and professional networks are great but ‘weak ties’ – those fleeting interactions we have each day – can boost our mental health too. Swapping pleasantries with staff in stores, bantering with your barista and saying ‘Hi’ to strangers in queues can reduce loneliness and help us feel connected to the wider world.

Quiet your mind – do a short meditation each day to slowly build your mindfulness ‘muscle’. Having struggled with this in the past, I have found that apps like Smiling Mind, Calm and Headspace have really helped me learn how to meditate without feeling like a failure when I have to scratch my nose.

Use a reflective practice to plan the journey ahead

When I lived in London, I used the cold dark winter holidays between Christmas and New Year’s Day to think about what I had accomplished over the year past and what I wanted to do in the year ahead. Although I now celebrate Christmas during the hot and sunny New Zealand summers, I still find the holiday a great time to plan and have found a great resource that works well.

For the last four years, I have used YearCompass to review and close out the old year and then use those reflections to imagine and plan the next one. First developed in 2012 by a group of friends and colleagues in Budapest, it comes in the form of a printable PDF. This contains a great set of questions that assist folk to reflect on the last 12 months and use those insights to guide their future plans.

I have found that looking back before planning ahead has allowed me to keep my mistakes in proportion, remember and celebrate achievements and milestones and draw a line under past events I needed to leave behind.

What next?

If you have a favourite way to be present, stay focused and remain on track to accomplish your plans, why not practice a little kindness right now by sharing your tips and tools in a comment below. Alternatively, if you’d like some help yourself, please drop me a line to see what we can do to make 2020 a year to remember.

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Yup.*

Personal development and lifelong learning are woven through my professional practice. I talk about it in design sprints, encourage it in training and coach it. Investment in oneself is a foundation for professional and personal growth. Self-directed learning is great but sometimes we need to eat our own dog food, so I’m taking a week or so out to practice what I preach.

What brand of dog food am I eating?

I am participating in the brand new Design Sprint Masterclass, led by Jonathan Courtney & Dee Scarano of AJ&Smart and Jake Knapp.

AJ&Smart is a leading design and design training agency. They have won many design awards, working with the likes of LEGO, General Electric, Uber and Netflix. Jake Knapp is a world renown design practitioners. The inventor of the Design Sprint while at Google Ventures, he has led design work for YouTube, Gmail and Microsoft and many others.

Why am I telling you about my dog food?

As a designer, I have solved business problems with innovative thinking, ideation and prototyping. Yet it is easy to become comfortable with the familiar and let my work get stale. So, whether you are a fellow designer, a client or a passer-by, I am engaging you all as partners in my professional development.

For those I work or contract with, I hope this provides growing confidence in choosing to partner with me and a sense of excitement for how design thinking and sprints can grow your capabilities and your business.

And when I’ve finished eating the dog food?

My aim, as always, is to help my clients achieve their goals and desired outcomes with less time, effort and cost. As an aspiring early graduate of the Design Sprint Masterclass, I see this world-class certification as an investment in my journey towards design sprint mastery.

I will keep you updated on my progress. In the meantime, if you would like to know more, feel free to contact me for a chat or book a two-hour Lightening Sprint to experience the process for yourself. Either way, leave me a comment, send me a message, drop me a line or give me a call on 021 233 1445.

*A hat tip to Tom for telling me about eating dog food.

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This evening, I am packing before leaving tomorrow on a ten-day, two-city trip delivering leadership training for a client in Pacific Asia. I am no stranger to business travel but, up until now, almost all of it has been while working for someone else. The flights remain as long as ever, the security screening is  still a chore and the jet lag just as tiring, but there is difference is now. I am doing it for me and my business – and it feels great!

Last week, I read about a study conducted by the Universities of Exeter and Sheffield, which found that self-employed workers in the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand are among the happiest. Despite often working longer hours and the perceived lack of employment security, the study found that, thanks to the greater freedom and control they have over their work lives, self-employed people across a broad range of sectors are more engaged and happier at work than those employed by others.

Autonomy seems to be the key factor. When self-employed, we have the freedom to pivot quickly to meet an opportunity, share our expertise to become a trusted advisor and innovate to partner for change or compete with others. Such autonomy and flexibility help to keep engagement and energies high, even when obstacles are encountered and problems arise.

Much of the satisfaction and fulfilment I get comes from providing high quality effective solutions that deliver added value for the organisation and individual employees as well. For me, the trade-off between the risk, long hours and the ups & downs of flying solo are more than worthwhile in terms of the gains in personal wellbeing and improved work/life balance.

As the world of work moves away from traditional salaried roles ands towards project and contract roles of the ‘gig’ economy, do you have a preference for a salaried role or do you dream of being your own boss? I’d be keen to hear your thoughts so please leave a comment, post a reply on Facebook or drop me a line with your thoughts.

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This is the wonderful idea my friend Jason Borowicz shared with me and continues to share with others he meets.

He isn’t talking about implementing Kaizen in your personal life or promoting the aggregation of marginal gains. Instead, Jason suggests that one simply spends fourteen and a half minutes – that’s 1% of a day – intentionally reading, researching or studying a subject we would like to master or simply know more about. As someone who isn’t particularly goal driven and is easily distracted, this struck me as a great habit to adopt and embed. I have a couple of A4 notebooks with ‘1%’ written on the covers, where I have scrawled facts, learnings, ideas and thoughts as often as I have remembered to work on myself over the past few years.

I frequently draw on whiteboards and use simple graphics in my work so today, I decided to work on one of my current 1% topics: improving my drawing skills. I tried to find an old video that showed Dave Gray working with a group of people to help them draw simple figures. In searching for that video I found another, of a TEDx talk by Graham Shaw called ‘Why people believe they can’t draw – and how to prove they can’ that explores the same theme. Both Gray and Shaw make the point that while we all draw as children, as adults we often say we can’t draw, having lost confidence through teasing or criticism in our teenage years.

I enjoy drawing and doodling and was encouraged to do so from an early age by my Dad. Among other things, he was an engineer and amateur inventor, who almost always talked with a pencil in his hand. This was so he could illustrate whatever he was talking about on the nearest surface – the back of an envelope, a piece of scrap paper, one of many notepads lying around and, on more than one occasion, the table cloth.

So, grinning at memories of drawing with my Dad, I took fourteen and a half minutes to watch a YouTube clip while scribbling away under the watchful eye of his photo which sits on my desk. The cartoons above are the result of my dedicating 1% of today to getting better at drawing – what you would like to accomplish with 1% of each day? Leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know.

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