What are your development goals for this year? Assuming that you have some development goals, I’d like to ask you another question: How did you decide on those goals?

Hands up if you assessed your capabilities across the whole range of your responsibilities before setting goals. Or maybe you did that in conjunction with your line manager, coach or mentor. I think that’s a good start.

Have a look at what you’re expected to deliver and gauge how easy it is for you to do that. Identify your skills, strengths and – um… are we allowed to call them ‘weaknesses’? Or do you call them
‘areas for development’?

This is where it gets interesting. If you call those aspects of the work that you’re not so good at ‘areas for development’ you’re almost bound to then set development goals to address those shortcomings, aren’t you? It would seem strange to identify ‘areas for development’ and then set development goals that ignored them.

Now, think about this: if you have a limited amount of time and money to spend on your development is it better to develop your strengths so that you become truly outstanding in a specific area? Or is it better to spend your limited time and money working at something you have no aptitude for?

Your answer to that question will depend on whether you (or your boss, HR partner or coach) are working towards a vision of you as a specialist or a generalist. Or whether you aspire to a qualification. Most vocational qualifications require demonstration of competence across the full range of relevant skills. Some allow a degree of specialisation, but not all.

Most corporate appraisal systems assume that the process will identify weaknesses and work on them. In effect, they seek to create an organisation full of generalists.

Transferable skills! I hear somebody shout. But what about experts? What about specialists? What about honing your skills to a level of mastery in a small number of areas instead of trying to be equally good at everything?

I can’t help thinking that an enormous amount of time and money is wasted on people attempting to develop skills and capabilities that don’t come naturally and don’t appeal to them as a learner.

And as the Learning and Development profession worldwide prepares to excommunicate me, I’d like to put forward a different philosophy:

• What if we encouraged people to develop the skills that come naturally and the activities that they enjoy?
• What if we encouraged people to do more of what they’re good at instead of wasting their time and effort trying to address their ‘weaknesses’?
• What if we also showed everyone how to work in teams so that the team demonstrated the full range of capabilities even though the individuals within the team specialised, or even excelled, in a few areas?

Now, I realise that this is an idealist philosophy. I know that there are times when some of us have to carry out tasks that we don’t find easy or don’t much enjoy.

But instead of regarding that as an unalterable state of affairs, why not make the development goal focus on how to delegate that task rather than master it?

At the very least, let’s balance up the development that address weaknesses with some that also build on existing strengths and aim towards mastery. Otherwise, we’re spending our training budgets to foster mediocrity.

Personally, I’d rather see people develop into their own talents instead of focusing on their shortcomings. I’d like to see everyone have the opportunity to shine.

What do you think? Let me know…

Set some goals recently? Started a new project? Maybe you are now some months into the project and are at the stage of reviewing your progress towards your goal.  I hope you are succeeding.

If not, then staying motivated is a key piece of the puzzle.  Sometimes we might not like the tasks involved with achievement of the goal and so it's easy to become distracted by tasks we like better and then the further behind we fall, the less motivated we become.

Motivation is a renewable resource.  It's not enough to feel motivated at the start of a project; you have to top it up on a regular basis, digging deep through exhaustion or boredom.  Zig Ziglar said:

"People often say that motivation doesn't last.  Well, neither does bathing – that's why we recommend it daily."

Here are 5 simple ways to help you stay motivated and achieve your goals:

1. Start specific

"Win more clients" "Get more done around the house" "Exercise more" etc just don't cut it.  Make your goal quantifiable so you can track your progress e.g. "Win 6 new clients spending at least £1000 each by end August", "Attend 3 aerobics classes at the gym each week"

If you’ve spent time looking at or working with NLP, then you’ll know the importance of setting well-formed outcomes.  It makes the process of staying motivated so much easier.

Once you have your well-formed outcome write it down somewhere you'll look regularly.

2. Remember why you're doing it

Write a list of all the great reasons why you're doing this; the benefits it will bring and what the end result will look, feel and sound like:

• Earn a bigger bonus so we can have a better holiday
• Show my colleagues that I can compete
• Earn the respect of my boss
• Make new contacts which will lead to even bigger things
• Put me in a good position for promotion next year
• Improve my self esteem

Cover all the angles – that way, when you're struggling to crack on one day or you feel yourself starting to flag, something on the list should give you the necessary boost to take action. 

3. Have fun

If you view the activities associated with your goal or project as 'just another chore' or find them boring and stressful then it is going to be hard to keep motivated!  Find ways to make the tasks more interesting or, dare I say it, fun! Fun is different for each of us so think of little things that will make tasks enjoyable.

4. Try something different

If you're feeling less than motivated and don't seem to be making progress at the rate you'd like, take a moment to look at the whole task.  You might be doing things correctly and efficiently but sometimes that approach isn't the most motivating and so it slows down your progress or just makes it feel like a duty or a responsibility.  Consider whether you could use a different approach – it doesn't mean you're giving up, just looking for a better way.  Keep trying different approaches until you find the one that keeps you motivated and achieves the results you want.

5. Create, track and celebrate achievement of smaller goals or milestones

Smaller goals and milestones act like stepping stones making a big goal seem easier to achieve.  They give you a plan of action and a more frequent sense of achievement as you reach each one.  Make sure you monitor progress so you don't miss out on the buzz of achievement and think about ways to celebrate or reward each step of the journey.

Written by Debbie Stone, Associate Partner at Brilliant Minds

Most people have heard the term ‘phobia’ and most have an idea of its meaning. In conversational usage, it refers to an extreme, and usually irrational, fear. Common phobias include fear of heights, spiders, moths, closed-in places, open spaces, lifts, flying and snakes.

For most purposes, phobias are regarded as irrational fears. There are various forms of help and support, treatment and de-sensitisation available. For example, if you are afraid of flying there are short courses available which offer lots of information to allay your fears and then take you for a short flight to prove that you can do it.

I’m told that such courses have a success rate of over 90%. Brilliant! 

The remaining 1-10% is made up of the people who have a phobia of flying as opposed to an irrational fear. There is a difference:

An irrational fear is a mental construct. A person creates anxiety by thinking about the thing they fear and can work it up into a major problem, but faced with the actual situation they can be reasoned out of their fear and encouraged to face the thing they feared.

A phobia is a neurological connection between the thing that is feared and an intense state of fear. It triggers the fight/flight response and cannot be reasoned away. In fact, the more the person attempts to face their fear, the worse the response may become.

When someone is on the grip of a phobic response they have no choice about their behaviour and cannot easily shake off the fear. Someone with an irrational fear is likely to be able to suppress their emotions or hide them from others.

When people encounter someone with a phobia they may treat them with anything from total derision to sympathetic concern.  Neither of which makes any difference to the experience of the sufferer! However, it can be very uncomfortable after the event to realise that you have displayed your fear of something others do not find even slightly unnerving.

Working with phobias has traditionally been a clinical process. Traditional desensitisation therapy can take anything up to 2 years of weekly sessions to completely dissolve the phobia. People would only seek help for a phobia when it became completely debilitating and most people simply learned to live with it.

For example, the music teacher who had agoraphobia built himself a comfortable life at home. His pupils came to his house for their lessons and no-one ever suspected that he was afraid to go outside.

The businessman who suffered from claustrophobia chose a car with large windows and drove himself everywhere. If he had to take a train he’d make sure it was a quiet time when he travelled and he never used the London Underground.

But what happens when a person can no longer ‘work around’ their phobia? What if the thing they fear suddenly becomes a part of their daily life? Or their working life?

This can happen when a company re-locates. Employees who have been working at ground level might be re-located to a high-rise building and suddenly find that their phobia of taking a lift has become a big issue. Walking up three flights of stairs is easy. Walking up twenty-three flights is not so easy – and takes a lot more time!

Not many companies have any specific provision for dealing with phobias. They are probably covered by Occupational Health policies, but that often requires a person to volunteer for therapy – a thing many people are embarrassed to do.

In fact, a phobia does not require therapy in the traditional sense. It’s not an indication of any kind of mental health issue or instability. It’s a demonstration of the person’s brain’s fantastic ability to learn quickly:

A phobia is an example of ‘one-trial learning’. That means it is learned on the basis of one experience. Something happens once and the phobia is created and never forgotten.

How many other things in life can you say you learned on the basis of one experience and have never forgotten?

So if you have a phobia it’s a good sign that you learn easily.

Even knowing that, you’d probably still prefer not to have the phobia. Or would you?

One of the indicators that can be used to distinguish between an irrational fear and a full-on phobia is the degree of motivation to overcome the problem. A person with a phobia is usually so scared of the thing they’re scared of they’re also scared that if they lose the phobia they’ll get hurt. Added to which, some people have heard about desensitisation therapies and they’re terrified that in order to dissolve the phobia they’ll have to face the thing they’re phobic about. 

This is obviously very stressful and so most people would rather live with the phobia and work around it.

Until that’s no longer possible.

The NLP Phobia model does not use the desensitisation principle. It is based on the understanding that a phobia is a learned response. The first step is to discover when this learning was acquired. Not surprisingly, it’s often in early childhood. Often the child learns to fear a certain thing because a parent does.

For example, a lot of small children spend a lot of time exploring the floor – it’s the main thing they can access easily. At some point a child may encounter a spider for the first time. ‘Look Mummy!’ he exclaims, excited at his new discovery. If ‘Mummy’ has a spider phobia she’s probably going to scream, snatch him up and run away.

This is not only frightening for the child – he’s not used to seeing Mummy scared – it also imprints a powerful message: the spider is to be feared. Not surprising then, the next time he encounters a spider he screams and runs away.

The process of uncovering the point of learning is simple, and even if the person with the phobia has no conscious memory of that point of learning, there are methods to access the unconscious memory.

Once we have located the incident where the phobia was learned, we scramble the memory in a systematic fashion to break the neurological connection between the trigger (the spider, the lift, the snake etc) and the state of fear. The sufferer does not have to re-live the memory or face their fear at any point in the process.

This process takes – on average – about 40 minutes. So, in one session a person can be released from their phobia permanently. Sounds incredible? The reason a phobia can be dissolved so quickly is that it is a discrete piece of mental programming. It usually stands alone and does not have many connections to other behavioural patterns that could hold it in place.

However, some phobias create a kind of ‘background programme’ that is constantly on the alert for the thing that scares the person. Someone who is scared of spiders may involuntarily scan every room they enter to check there are no spiders. A person with claustrophobia may regularly check to see they have enough space.

With the phobia gone, this background programme is redundant. It stops. And that frees up mental (and physical) energy for other pursuits.

This alone is a good reason to get help for a phobia. Many people live with a phobia but don’t realise how much energy it consumes and how much their quality of life will improve without the phobia. Some people, however, have a greater need to address their phobias, like those whose employer is about to relocate them to the 26th floor of a new building.

With proper help, that move could really be the start of a new way of life!

[If you have a phobia and you’d like some help to get rid of it, please get in touch]

The modern world presents us with constant minor decisions to be made  from choosing one TV channel out of about 200, ordering a coffee (latte, cappuccino, Americano, whole milk, skimmed, soya, decaff, extra shot, syrups, extra hot, wet, etc) or a tea (English breakfast, Earl or Lady Grey, chamomile, peppermint, fruit or builder’s) to the number of options when buying a train ticket as well as the more traditional major ones:  to buy or to rent, whether to take that new job or stay where they know you, which car to buy, who to spend the rest of your life with (or whether to spend the rest of your life with them).

We’re bombarded and many of us feel overwhelmed. It’s not that the decisions are particularly tricky it’s more the sheer volume and the pressure to decide right there and then. When you’ve had a tough day at work, making frequent decisions, even simple choices, like what to have for dinner seem challenging.

Deliberating over every minor decision – coffee or tea, brown or white, eat in or take away, could be wasting energy. Try asking yourself: “How important is this decision and how much time does it deserve?”

When it’s an important decision, the first choice you need to make is to actually deal with it; stalling doesn’t make the decision making process any easier.

Make sure you give the problem due consideration rather than deciding on the spur of the moment. Remember, these decisions you make today can result in consequences that may impact on the rest of your life. You owe it to yourself to listen to both your head and your heart. Set yourself a deadline for collecting all the information and making the decision.

That doesn’t mean you should spend hours, days or weeks agonising over it, writing long lists of pros and cons, asking the world and his wife for their opinions. I’ve read research that shows that spending less time consciously thinking about a problem and allowing our unconscious minds to work on it can pay dividends. I’ve certainly applied this to certain work related tasks; when I’m designing training I find it helps to spend some time actively thinking about it and then “forget” about it for a while. I give myself a deadline and frequently, quite well-formed ideas have popped into my head before the deadline.

Our minds can only consciously process a limited amount of information at a time and this makes it difficult to weigh up several factors at once. But our unconscious capacity to process information is almost unlimited which gives rise to the suggestion that unconscious thought is far more effective than logical, rational, conscious reasoning. You won’t necessarily know why you’ve reached a decision but chances are it’ll be the right one for you.

Other people will try to rush you for a decision or try to make your decisions for you but you’re the one who’ll have to live with the consequences so be firm about how much time you need.

You can probably eliminate the obvious “non-options” quite quickly, leaving your brain fewer options and ideas to mull over.

If all else fails and you’re left with a choice between two seemingly equal options, toss a coin and notice how you react to the result. Disappointed? Chances are you were favouring the other option all along.

When things don’t go according to plan, remember that you made the best choice on the information that was available at the time.  Indulging in too much hindsight can be bad for the soul.

Written by Debbie Stone, Associate Partner at Brilliant Minds

[Written by Debbie Stone, Associate Partner at Brilliant Minds]

It doesn't matter where you're going, you're always late.  Always. You spend your life dashing about, risking a speeding fine, and still you arrive 10 minutes late, out of breath and full of apologies.

Was the saying 'late for your own funeral' invented for you?  Do you find it hard to imagine arriving at a meeting relaxed, calm and breathing normally?

If so, you're not alone. A significant number of people – some estimates say up to 15 or 20 percent – have trouble arriving on time.

Do you need an incentive to break the habit?

Habitual lateness won't help your career prospects nor will it create great workplace relationships. For one thing, your boss and colleagues are relying on you to be at work when you're scheduled to arrive; you don't want to disappoint them. If your chronic tardiness bothers you, think how much it infuriates others who are constantly wasting their time waiting for you.

Just because nobody confronts you about your tardiness, that doesn't mean that no one's watching the clock and forming an opinion about you or your work ethic.  These judgments can damage you when it comes to performance reviews and promotions.  Those few extra minutes of sleep or squeezing in that extra task could cost you your reputation – or worse, your job. 

"Look at the costs of being late and the payoffs of being on time," says Julie Morgenstern, author of 'Time Management From the Inside Out.' "I think people's stress level is very high when they're late. They're racing, worried, and anxious. They spend the first few minutes apologizing. One of the payoffs of being on time is that you eliminate the stress of the travel time and you eliminate the time spent apologizing."

So for everyone who's ever felt punctuality-challenged, or for those who have loved ones who are constantly showing up late, here are ten strategies and tips you can use to kick the lateness habit and start showing up on time (and please forward this article to all of your friends and family who could use a few lessons on being on time). 

1. Identify why you're chronically late. Reasons for being late run from legitimate (the motorway's closed) to procrastination (you didn't prepare for the meeting ahead of time and instead tried to do it that morning) to pure feet dragging (you're unhappy at work and simply take your time showing up). Address the underlying cause of your lateness, whether it's dealing with procrastination, finding a more enjoyable career, or learning how to better estimate how long things take. 

2. Learn to say no. Perhaps you would normally be on time, but at the last second your neighbour, mother, friend or colleague asks you for a favour that throws your entire schedule off track. Realise that it's sometimes OK to simply say, "Sorry, I don't have the time right now, but I can help you with that another time."

3. Be realistic about how much time you need. It may be that you're late because you underestimate how much time things take. To get a better handle on this, keep a journal for a week or two and write down how long things (such as personal grooming, the daily commute, dog walking, or grocery shopping) take. Then, you'll know if you're trying to fit too much into one day.

4. Leave some "margin" in your life.  Add in a few minutes in between events for those unforeseen occurrences in life … which tend to be the rule, not the exception.

5. Develop consequences. Sometimes consequences of being late come whether you like it or not, such as not getting a job because you were late to the interview. However, in other cases, developing a negative consequence to arriving late can help curb the behaviour in the future. If you're late for a lunch meeting, offer to pay.  A few occurrences of this and you'll soon have another motivation for being on time.

6. Stick to your "leave-by" time. Most people have a time in their head when they know they must leave the door by to make their appointment on time. Once you decide on this time, stick to it no matter what (no last-minute phone calls or errands allowed).

7. Place your alarm clock strategically so that you have to get out of bed to turn it off.  You're much less likely to hit the snooze button. If you really can't bear to get up when they alarm first goes off, then set 2 separate alarms 5 minutes apart.

8. Invest in a water resistant watch and wear it in the shower or make sure there's a clock in the bathroom.

I was chatting to someone about lateness at a recent conference.  She said she was often late for meetings and even workshops with clients, but didn't know what to do.  Looking at her arms, I made the observation that she doesn't wear a watch.

'Oh,' she exclaimed, somewhat surprised 'do you think it would help?'  Amazing.

9. Silence is golden.  Breakfast TV or your favourite radio station just act as a distraction when you're getting ready in the morning – leave them in the off position.  On mornings when I have to leave early, I use this strategy and I reckon it saves me a good 10 minutes.

10. Keep your car's fuel tank half-full.  It's so annoying when you're already pushed for time, you jump in the car and then realise you need to fill up with fuel on the way.  Make a promise to yourself that you'll always fill up as soon as the needle dips below halfway.

Use one of two of these tips tomorrow.  Persist with them and soon you'll be developing the Punctuality Habit, feeling less stressed, building better relationships with those around you and making time to do things you never could before.