• 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 week, I found a great tip from Allen Wyatt at tips.net on how to search a document for text that is not shown a particular font (such as the default font I use in all my materials). Quick and simple, I have added this to my training documentation creation workflow to ensure consistent font use throughout each document.

As I am currently converting and rewriting much of my existing material from one font to another, this is a useful check-step to catch those pesky text boxes and footnotes that didn’t convert, as often happens with Microsoft default fonts like Times New Roman and Arial.

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For me, this talk provides good evidence as to why business professionals benefit from coaching just as much as athletes, if not more. Working with a coach can:

• Help you see your own reality (where you are and what you face);
• Encourage self-belief and a positive mindset (who you are and skills you already have);
• Prompt reflection for self development (what you might stop, start and continue doing to work towards your desired future);
• Guide and focus your vision / goal setting (help you establish the right target and how you might reach it);
• Provide support for your action and activities (ask you hard questions, track progress, hold you accountable to your vision/goal).

Atul Gawande found that his clinical practice had reached a plateau. Concerned he was in danger of stagnating, he employed a former professor to assess his clinical practice in his operating theatre over a year. He found it difficult and uncomfortable, once receiving a whole page of feedback after what he thought was a near-perfect procedure. Ultimately, Gawande derived great benefit and insight from being observed and viewing his performance through another’s eyes, commenting that “it’s not how good you are now; it’s how good you’re going to be that really matters.”

How good are you now? And how good are you going to be in the year ahead?

*As pointed out in the video’s comments section, checklists and coaching are only a partial solution to the difficulties of delivering better healthcare outcomes in complex and challenging environments. That said, these soft skills and simple methodologies have their place alongside improved funding, infrastructure and facilities.

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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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This question comes up every so often when speaking with a prospective client or in conversation with colleagues. A couple of weeks ago, I came across just such a discussion on LinkedIn. Kevin Callahan was one of those involved in the discussion and he has written a short article in which he clarifies the similarities and differences he sees between the two disciplines.

Kevin’s key point is that the primary difference between coaching and mentoring is the focus of the conversation. As a mentor, one joins the mentee in focusing on the issue at hand, while a coach focuses on the coachee, supporting them to focus on the issue. Keen to be able to refer to this in the future, I grabbed my Sharpie and PostIts to capture the essence in the simple visual mnemonic above.

I thoroughly recommend reading Kevin’s piece, Coaching and Mentoring: 5 Similarities and 2 Critical Differences, as he condenses a good deal of common sense and wisdom into a few short paragraphs.

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I’m in the middle of a hectic few weeks. At work, I am enjoying working with some awesome folks in the health and fitness industry. Evenings and weekends are full of chores, errands and fun stuff with family too. When things are busy, it can be hard to carve out a little time for myself, time when I can switch off and let things go.

Last Sunday, I read a great quote which reminded me how important these time-outs are:

Don’t just do something, sit there.*

You can find this as a popular meme all over the internet – easy to read and move on regardless. Instead, I took it as a prompt and decided to stop what I was doing and take time to sit and be. I made myself comfortable on the couch in our sunny kitchen, closed my eyes and tried not to think of anything.

Of course, thoughts continued to race through my mind. Rather than get frustrated, I smiled and enjoyed not having to deal with them there and then. My mind gradually slowed and I became aware of my surroundings. First, the hum of the fridge. Then the birdcalls. The mooing of the cows. The bleats of lambs. The wind in the pines on the ridge above us. After that, I spent a glorious twenty minutes with myself – not the business owner or husband or dad – just me.

I grew up in a faith tradition which worships in silence and yet I still forget how powerful a practice it is. Those twenty minutes provided valuable rest and respite for my brain. Made space for my mind to relax. Allowed my intellect to switch off. Prepared me for another hectic week.

None of this is new. Meditation has been around for centuries and mindfulness is now marketed as yoga for the mind. As such, these can seem like mystic skills we can never learn or clever life hacks to make us more productive. Yet we can all find a little space, a little calm and a little peace if we just stop doing and sit for a while.

Around one in six New Zealand adults is diagnosed with a common mental disorder at some time in their lives. These disorders include depression, bipolar disorder and/or anxiety disorder and many others.

I am one of those people.

In my case, pressures of work, too many commitments and a series of bereavements took their toll. Like many, I tried hard not to let things show, particularly at work. I tried to manage things on my own, thinking that I could cheer myself up and stop feeling down by sheer will.

It didn’t work. After a breakdown on a crowded international flight, I sought help. With support from family, friends and our doctor, I began to tackle the problem and things improved. Aware of the triggers and what I can and can’t control, life is more enjoyable. There are good days and not-so-good days but, more and more, there are great and fantastic days.

If you struggle with depression or anxiety, I encourage you to seek help and assistance. Below are some great places to start.

Mental Health Awareness Week
www.mhaw.nz

Depression.org.nz
depression.org.nz

The Lowdown
thelowdown.co.nz

Mental Health – conditions and treatments
www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatments/mental-health

* This quote is attributed to many sources. These include Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, author Sylvia Boorstein and even Buddha himself.

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