Are Your Beliefs Stifling Your Confidence at Work?

In our careers, success and confidence often seem inextricably linked. This can be stressful as confidence is a tricky thing to hold on to. Too often we allow our confidence to be dictated by the events and people around us.

Here at Adaptas, we believe the missing piece is the understanding that confidence is something we control for ourselves.

At its essence, confidence is a sense of “sureness.” Feeling sure that we are equal to the task at hand. This sureness comes from preparation and deep-seated beliefs about ourselves. Confidence is not the complete absence of fear, worry or self-doubt. When we are trying to feel more confident, we often focus on technical preparation, failing to tackle the core beliefs that are fuelling our feelings of self-doubt in the first place. Why? Because they are big, intimidating things to tackle, and because sometimes we aren’t aware of them. Here is the problem: if we don’t tackle the beliefs, we can get stuck in a long game of bluffing ourselves and playing a part, all the time feeling like an impostor.

Our core beliefs act as a life blueprint. Forming the foundations of how we interpret the world, core beliefs shape how we react to success and struggle and the way that we see and understand our thoughts and actions within the context of our lives. Sound a little complicated? Well, it is! It can be tricky to identify our core beliefs and understand how they are influencing us. The best place to start is by analysing the thoughts that pop into your head un-invited.

“I won’t be able to answer the questions they ask me at the end of the presentation.”

“I don’t know enough about ________ to be in this meeting.”

“I am terrible at speaking in front of people.”

These unhelpful thoughts are little clues to the core beliefs that are creating them. Identify a negative thought and ask yourself: why do I think this? Follow the thought back into your mind. You’ll know when you stumble across a core belief because it will feel 100% true, even if you wish it didn’t.

I am stupid.

I am not good enough.

I don’t deserve success.

We call these types of negative core beliefs ‘Limiting Beliefs’ because they prevent you from reaching your full potential and they are not true. They feel true but they are not. These beliefs are a habitual way of thinking about yourself, built on faulty information. Like all habits, they can be changed. Our workshops build confidence by guiding participants through the process of confronting and changing their limiting beliefs around important work-related behaviours, while also teaching the tricks and tools of long-term habit change. This empowers our clients to continue the process of developing their confidence long after the workshop is over.

Creating and Maintaining Culture: Leadership of Self and Others.

Updated August 3rd 2023

Understanding Personal Values: Responsibility To Ourselves And Others

Since recently writing a blog about why it is important to understand our own personal values before we can live an organisation’s values, I’ve received a lot of comments, both on LinkedIn and in private messages and conversations.

It’s great to hear from so many people who are really thinking about what their values mean to them and are more aware of considering how their own values drive their behavior, decisions and their choices. It’s also super to see that more people are thinking about how important it is to understand ourselves before we can understand or have expectations of other people, teams and organisations. Additionally great to hear and see people considering where their own personal responsibility to their values and the values of the organisation they decide to work with are, rather than looking to blame. It is clear that we still have a way to go on this. People might be less disappointed when they settle into a role if they know how to look for evidence that an organisation and the people in it are really actively looking to live to the espoused values and holding each other accountable to same

Why Have Values Become So Important to Business?

Research shows that when an organisation creates a strong culture by focusing on values and the day-to-day behaviours that align with these values, the result is an increase in employee engagement. This is at least in part because these values are guiding principles for how everyone in the organisation makes decisions, and what they hold each other accountable to in their actions. An organisation cannot implement its stated values if the values and the ensuing behaviours are not fully understood, and supported by the people within the organisation.

As I think I have made clear at this point, many leaders and organisations are ‘missing a trick’ by not helping people understand their own personal values, before they ask them to live the organisation’s values and behaviours, in line with the culture they want to create or maintain.

The call to “bring one’s self to work” with one’s interior value set aligned with the work-place has been found to enhance individual engagement and organisational success. Yet, organisations are comprised of people from a variety of different personal and professional backgrounds, with different personalities. Therefore it cannot be taken for granted that personal and organisational values will fully align. Awareness is the key, as with all success and contentment in life. With awareness comes choice around the decisions we make and the actions we take.

Why Are Values So Important In Leadership?

A huge obstacle to creating and maintaining a culture that works well for all stakeholders is when senior management fail to consistently role-model the values and behaviours that have been agreed upon. I have seen so many examples of this, some of them quite hilarious in an ‘are you serious?!’ kind of way. Like when the head of training at one organisation expected his staff to be customer focused, friendly and proactive but yet he couldn’t bring himself to say ‘good morning’ or ‘how are you?’ to any one of his direct reports, and indeed only did so in the company of his senior peers.

How can we possibly ask other people to live a certain way when we are not willing to ‘walk the talk’?

The 21st century has been plagued with extensive, and disheartening leadership failures. For example, Enron, AIB, Fanny Mae, Northern Rock, FIFA just to name a few. Of course the stories could be told from many different angles but many charismatic, dynamic and seemingly transformational leaders who rose to prominence in both the public and private sectors have shown evidence of moral and ethical deficiencies.

In response and in reaction to ego, corruption and ethical blunders, people have been looking for something else. Leadership and management theorists have more recently placed an emphasis on the importance of ethics and morality in leaders. What has emerged is values based leadership theories.

The key qualities of a values-based leader have been described as;

self-reflection
balance
self-confidence
humility

Values-based leaders align their own values with those of the organisation in which they work. Self-reflection is a discipline in itself and communicating that through behaviour is a skill. Reflection on the self is not always accurate, because as individuals, we have so many blindspots and unconscious bias.

Leaders Must Model Values To Create A Culture

Values based leadership requires leaders to model values. Ciulla (1999) described different leadership styles and their relationship to values and commented on transforming and servant leadership where the leader demonstrates values but also ‘help followers develop their own values’ which fit with those of the organisation in which they work.

It’s up to leaders and managers to live the values and to help their people understand these values. Where many organisations have made mistakes with this, is where a senior team decides the values, stick them up on the walls around the offices and buildings, send an email out, rather than asking for people’s opinion, and then not living the espoused values themselves. Because, the opinion of the employees is not asked for, there is no buy-in and it becomes a wasted exercise and the leadership teams lose the trust of their colleagues, teams and customers.

One considerable difficulty in developing and maintaining a culture where people hold each other accountable to the Values and Behaviours is that there is a presumption that managers have the skills to implement and share them. As stated previously, this requires self awareness. With the levels of stress, mental health issues, and levels of bullying that exists in modern organisations, we have a way to go when it comes to self awareness in our own behavior; what drives us, what blocks us and the personal impact we have on our working relationships.

What one thing can you do to create and maintain an organisational culture that is values based?

Creating And Maintaining Culture: Living The Values And Behaviours.

Updated August 3rd 2023

Why Are Values Important at Work?

I’ve been having many ongoing conversations with clients recently about Culture; the Values and Behaviours that create a culture.

Working with individuals, teams and organisations to help people understand their own values and then exploring what the behaviours are that enable us to live the organisational values is something that consistently enthuses me.

The ah-ha moments that people have when they start to recognise the decisions they are making in their own lives based on the values that they either took for granted, or had never named is often mind-blowing.

The clarity that teams and organisations get from understanding how our values drive the decisions we make; and from naming the behaviours we can hold each other accountable to can be quite enlightening.

What Have Personal Values Got To Do With Work?

Too often, however, I see organisations trying to encourage their employees to live the organisations values without ever having invited the individuals to firstly get clear on what their own personal values are, and secondly investigating whether their personal values align with the organisations values.

Posner (1979, 2012) defines a value as being something that an individual will make a sacrifice to obtain; or a belief upon which a person acts by preference or an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct is personally or socially preferable.

Examples of values (of which there are hundreds at least) are accomplishment, agility, boldness, calmness, health, honesty, integrity, learning, love, playfulness, passion, purposefulness, respect, reliability, rigor….the list goes on and on.

Do We Really Know Our Values and What is Driving Us?

Generally, we take our values for granted and don’t really think about them.

I remember the first time I did a coaching exercise to work out my own personal values, approximately 10 years ago. Listing out the values that were important to me, I realised my top value was ‘freedom’. Suddenly all the decisions I had been making in my life up to that point made sense. I was being driven by my value of freedom, but it wasn’t necessarily bringing me to where I wanted to be in life. I had to become more conscious of the decisions I was making around this top value.

Our values arise from our beliefs. Many of our beliefs come from our society, our parents, our peers. And therefore some of our values might not consciously have been chosen by us personally. It’s therefore important to get clarity on our own values and ask ourselves if we have chosen them, or if they have been passed on to us by others. If we are living our parents’ values, which many of us are, unbeknownst to ourselves, we are potentially going to make decisions, consciously and unconsciously that are not what we actually want for ourselves in life.

How Can I Clarify My Personal Values

I recommend writing a list of your top 10 values in no particular order. Then re-organise the list in order of importance to you, from most important to least important. Identify your top 3 from this ordered list of 10 and ask yourself: “If I lived in an alternative universe, and I could only take these top 3 with me, would they definitely be the ones I would take (knowing I have to leave the other 7 behind)?”. If you are happy that they are the top 3 values that are most important to you, ask yourself: “Am I truly living to these top 3 values, in how I spend my time, and the decisions I make in life and work?”. You might be surprised!

Coming back to what personal values have got to do with work; Gleeson (2017) and Branson(2008) argue that the failure to align staff and organisational values removes the bedrock, the very foundation upon which all truly successful organisational operate and on which organisational change depends. This can cause a wide range of staff disengagement behaviours, most noticeably when there is a failure of the necessary two-way relationship between employee and employer. So, let’s look at this in more detail next time!

When It Comes To Leadership, Your Development Can Accelerate Through Curiosity

Updated August 2nd 2023

How Curious are you about things?

A conversation I often find myself having in my work with people and teams, is around questions and general curiosity. Have you ever noticed how you make assumptions about other people and about yourself and that you make statements when people come to you with problems, rather than asking questions?

When we were children we asked open-ended questions all the time. For example; ‘Why?’, ‘What’s that?’, ‘When are we going?’ As adults, we largely lose the ability to ask questions and to be truly curious. I used to wonder if this was because of the experiences the world provided us with, including the impact of being embedded in formal education! I also wondered if we used our curiosity less, because it is too important for our survival in the workplace and other areas to appear like we know more than we do.

I have since learned that there is more than meets the eye with curiosity!

When we consider how the brain works there is a very good reason why, as adults, we become less curious.

The area of the brain (prefrontal cortex: PFC), that is the most recent to evolve and is the area that is jutting out in our skull at our forehead, is the region of the brain that filters our actions. Cognitive processes – including reasoning, problem-solving, planning, carrying out new and goal-directed patterns of behaviour, inhibitory control, sustained attention and decision-making – takes place here. And it is the area of the brain that allows us to read and react to social cues in everyday interactions, to use language fluently and to regulate, or manage, our emotions (Siddiqui et al., 2008).

The PFC occupies one-third of the entire human cerebral cortex and is one of the final cortical regions to undergo full myelination (The myelin sheath is a protective membrane that wraps around part of certain nerve cells, and affects how fast signals travel through those nerve cells) during adolescence and young adulthood in the human (Fuster, 1997; Anderson, et al., 2001). The PFC also interacts with our limbic system. The limbic system is where our emotions and memories are housed. During adolescence significant changes occur in the limbic system, which may impact self-control, decision making, emotions, and risk-taking behaviours.

For those of us who were risk-takers when we were younger, or who currently have teenage children who are taking risks and making decisions that we don’t understand, the above piece of science will not be a surprise.

If the area of the brain that enables us to perform diverse cognitive processes, for example, to inhibit our behaviours is only fully developed late into adolescence/early adulthood, then it makes sense that we stop asking so many questions and being curious in adulthood compared to when we are children, because we are in ways more “rational” as adults and expected to be more “rational”.

But that doesn’t mean that it serves us well to be less curious as adults. Just because our brain is fully formed, does not mean that all the assumptions that we make about situations and people are useful, or that the decisions we make are the best ones for ourselves or others. The processing of the interaction between the PFC and the limbic system is happening unconsciously, and therefore we are not aware of how our memories and our emotions are ruling the assumptions we make, and how we make decisions and how we are problem-solving in situations and with other people.

As there is so much information coming towards us every second of the day, a brain must make shortcuts, and so it relies on what it already knows instead of expending energy and attempting to look at things in a different way. Our entire nervous system is focused on keeping us safe and so it will do whatever it needs to do to fulfil that job; to keep us safe is a better bet for the brain and body, than to be actively curious, which means taking risks.

Learning triggers neuronal changes in the brain that contribute to information acquisition and memory formation, including the activity and strength of existing synapses, the formation of new synapses, and possibly the birth of new neurons. Being curious, for example, asking ourselves and others questions gives us a moment of reflection time that enables learning.

What if we could start asking questions and getting curious again more regularly, like we did when we were children?

If we focus on asking a colleague more open-ended questions rather than providing them with the solution, we open the opportunity for them to reflect. While reflecting they will use more areas of their brain and they are more likely to have insight. In turn their brain becomes more focused and motivated to solve the problem, or to carry through on their own insight to the problem. By asking more open-ended questions we help that person’s brain to create more connections between neurons, and therefore we are influencing their learning just very simply through asking the question rather than providing the solution,

In becoming more curious and asking more open-ended questions, we engage the people we work with in a way that is conducive to high performance. They will likely come up with a better solution to the challenge than we had thought of. Through genuine curiosity, which is supported in our communication through open-ended questions, we can together become more creative in our approaches and make more effective decisions.

I don’t like to prescribe open-ended questions, as every situation and person is different. Just focus on questions that begin with words such as ‘What…?’, ‘How…?’, ‘Which…?, ‘When…?

Here are a few examples:

‘What do we already know about this?’
‘How does… affect…?’
‘What alternative ways of looking at this are there?’
‘Who benefits from this?’
‘What could we assume?’
‘How did you choose those assumptions?’
‘What do you think causes…?’
‘Which implications are important to consider…?’

In my experience with individuals, teams and organisations, one of the hallmarks of a true leader, is having the COURAGE to be CURIOUS! It takes practice for most of us. I have seen the fruits of it over and over again. See if you can ask more open-ended questions this week, and see where it takes you?

Changing Your Habits? Focus On The Gains, Visualise The Outcomes.

Updated August 2nd 2023

It’s difficult to change old ingrained habits, isn’t it? To create a hunger for change, we need to be clear on what the benefits of changing our behaviour will be.

Kahneman and Tversky, two of the most famous of modern psychologists are well known for the theory of “loss aversion”. This refers to people’s strong preference for minimising losses over acquiring gains. People in fact prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. For example, it’s better to not lose 5 euro than to find 5 euro. We feel almost twice the emotion over a loss as opposed to a gain.

Changing how we do things in life and work can be challenging in three ways; firstly, the loss of the familiar is immediate and significant (this is usually experienced as a negative effect); secondly, the gain is distant in both time and in relation to self; and thirdly the so-called gain is really more abstract than real, meaning that incentive to pursue the change is not optimum.

This dynamic plays out in all changes we attempt to make and at all levels in a business setting. (e.g. reducing a behaviour that saves the business money in the long-term) because doing things a different way can often be associated with loss.

This means that to help us make change, we often need to be supported in thinking bigger or differently for ourselves. And as we know, in our busy lives, there isn’t always time to think about this.

Imagined outcomes are really important. It’s been shown that the brain makes connections between things that happen in real time and predictions of possible outcomes. The neural wiring blends together what is currently happening with the imagined predictions. In this way, the brain weaves its own explanation, or interpretation, of reality and this can be used as the basis of new habit and skills formation. Fundamentally, belief in the outcome significantly raises the likely hood of that outcome or behaviour associated occurring, be that outcome/behaviour positive or negative.

What are you afraid of losing? Could you practice visualising the outcomes you desire to get your brain focused on the wins? Hopefully just being more conscious of our brain and body’s strong preference for minimising losses over acquiring gains can help you to get back on the change train!

Want To Keep Your Brain Young?

Updated August 2nd 2023

Want to keep your Brain young?

In the book “The Brain That Changes Itself” Norman Doidge (2007) states that the way to stave off memory loss into old age and to keep your brain young, is to keep learning new things “learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and materials.”

This is partly because the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is involved with memory, grows if it is being challenged. It also grows if you exercise regularly. Exercise is one of the items encouraged by Neuroscientists to stave off certain types of dementia.

As adults, learning and growing requires us to actively make an effort to do so. It means finding new things to learn and then focusing on these. As well as making life more fun and stimulating, it will help to hold off old-age memory loss. Worth a go, don’t you think?

New Year’s Resolutions- Help Yourself With Goal Setting By Understanding The Power Of Your Brain.

Updated August 2nd 2023

Every January, it seems the world at large, puts themselves under huge pressure to force habit change and adopt unrealistic RESOLUTIONS. By middle to late January, the feeling of disappointment is epidemic.

This series of short and simple blogs hopes to tap into a few key tips to help you understand how your brain actually works in creating habit change in your life.

Understanding the Power of your Brain.

The brain has been shaped by evolution to adapt and readapt to an ever-changing world. The ability to learn is dependent on modification of the brain’s chemistry and architecture, in a process called “neural plasticity”.

Neural plasticity is the ability of neurons to change their structure and relationships to one another in an experience-dependent manner according to environmental demands.

This means that everything you think you know and feel now can change for better or worse depending on what you focus on.

It’s easy to think of the brain as being responsible for processing information and problem solving but not always as obvious how much it controls our habits and behaviour too. In all areas of its capacity, it is not a static quantity. It can be grown and shaped deliberately.

How Can We Engage Our Minds to Make the Best Use of Our Brain?

Here are a few tips for you.

Concentrate on what is working and the motivation will naturally follow.

Set bite-sized goals (chunking down). When we break goals or jobs into bite-sized pieces, the memory of the ‘job’ is not so bad and we are happier to take on the task again and again.

Keep doing it until it becomes habit. If you are having fun and chunking things down, new habits (e.g. going to the gym) will become easier to repeat.

Keep self-judgement to a minimum. If you do fall off the wagon with a change or a new habit, don’t give yourself a hard time. Negative self-chat imprisons you in your own fear and makes it difficult to take action to get back on track again.

Are You Controlling Others Or Are You Letting Them Control You?

Updated August 1st 2023

In our most recent blog, we shared an example of someone who is High in Controlling Thinking and Behaviour.

Ted: A great guy, technically excellent, leading teams who are making an impact in his organisation globally. But at the same time, has been disempowering others who would potentially take the reigns for him in teams he has been building so that he could operate on a more strategic level. There is also potential for some of them to get promoted; this is a very fast growing organisation and it would be much more effective, in terms of expertise and resources to promote internally straight into management positions!

Before finding out his BIAC Thinking Styles results, Ted believed he was a fair, well measured manager who managed to get on with everyone and who was doing things better than most of his peers. In actual fact, his High Controlling Thinking and Behaviour style has been doing him, his team and the organisation a huge disservice!

Ted, recently said, “I have reflected on this (his results) hugely! I am feeling a lot calmer and less stressed. Am definitely asking more open-ended questions, and stopping myself when I am becoming too controlling. In meetings I am taking a less aggressive approach and white boarding people’s opinions and talking things through with them. Before each 1-2-1, I am thinking about the controlling piece and making sure I extract ideas from people and not ram things down their throat. So all in all I am feeling good!”

A person who is centred in Controlling Thinking and Behaviour (as measured by BIAC; a thinking, behavioural & adjustment profiling tool) will have no difficulty empowering others but is fully capable of being in charge, if required.

So what about if you are Low in Controlling Thinking and Behaviour? What happens then? Tune in next week to find out…

How Controlling Are You?

Updated August 1st 2023

In our previous blog, we explored the significance of clear and consistent communication as a fundamental factor in fostering high employee engagement. However, I’ve observed that some managers mistakenly interpret clear and consistent communication as simply issuing directives and, in some cases, resorting to controlling or micromanaging their staff. True clarity and consistency in communication should encompass a more balanced approach that encourages open dialogue, active listening, and empowerment, rather than solely relying on one-way commands.

A client who truly brings this to life, has recently been promoted to a senior management position in a multinational. Let’s call him Ted. He is clearly good at what he does, with his teams leading the pace and breaking all sales targets worldwide.

Just before our most recent session together, we measured him on his thinking styles, using BIAC (A thinking, behavioural & adjustment profiling tool created in Ireland and now being used worldwide). Turns out he is extremely high in ‘Controlling Thinking’, scoring an 8.

Someone in his position needs to be a 4/5 to be effective in how they manage others, never mind the stress he is causing himself with his thinking operating at this extreme.

In my first two sessions with him, prior to completing BIAC, he told me he has ‘a very good relationship’ with everyone on his team. They’ve been beating global targets. All is great.

Except my client is stressed beyond belief. He wakes up worrying about maintaining these targets, about whether everyone on the team is doing what they have been ‘told’ to do.

Through our conversation he realises that what he thinks has been effective conversations with his staff (performance and other) has actually been him ‘telling’ them and he is suddenly aware that he has not in anyway been empowering his team and has actually been aggressive.

Through our conversation, he realises that he is partly to blame for two of his team members not getting a promotion they were in line for. Many of their KPI’s were not achieved, because of him and his controlling tendencies!

This has been a huge blind spot for him and there is now potentially massive room for improvement for himself, and also growth for the individuals on his team.

What is High Controlling Thinking?

A person who is High in Controlling Thinking and Behaviour finds difficulty letting go of control, puts down perceived challenge and will create a dependent dis-empowering culture within a team or group of colleagues. Too high on controlling usually means having to be in charge at all costs. Losing control can set off alarm bells leading to aggression, sometimes to intimidation, and ‘stress overload’ in one’s self and others.

Controlling thinking behaviour can go various directions. Some of us are high in it, some of us are low in it, and some of us are centred. See our next upcoming blog to learn more about where your Controlling Thinking might lie.

Positive Leadership Engages Employees

Updated August 1st 2023

I am involved in, committed to and enthusiastic about my work and workplace…does that sound like you?

Gallup (a US workplace research company) have been studying employee engagement for years. The above is how they describe an engaged employee. A recent article by Mann & Harter (2016) illustrated that worldwide only 13% of employees in organisations are considered to be engaged workers.

Additionally, did you know that managers who are optimistic are more engaged and are more likely to manage teams that produce better results? This is according to a study by Arakawa & Greenberg. The study also showed that managers who valued their employees strengths, who had a positive perspective and regularly provided recognition of accomplishments, had employees who were themselves optimistic and engaged. Positive leadership is shown to be related to employee engagement and performance. This illustrates the importance of optimism in the workplace.

Arakawa & Greenberg found that employee optimism was related to their engagement in work which was linked to their project performance. These findings “suggest that managers who currently embody positive leadership are contributing to the effectiveness of not only their employees, but also the organisation as a whole.” (Arakawa & Greenberg, 2007).

There is much evidence showing that leaders need to reflect on the emotions that they are portraying at work every day, as their mood will be reflected by their team. And as Barsade & O’Neill suggest, leaders need to focus less on their ‘cognitive culture’ (teamwork, performance etc.) and develop more their emotional culture using (as mentioned in recent blogs) companionate love, joy and pride. Hold out for our next blog to learn more about how to do so.

Conversations With Your Employees; Are You Asking The Right Questions?

Updated 31st July 2023

It may seem obvious, but an employees well-being and happiness plays an important role in the performance of an organisation.

Obvious, but is it being taken seriously enough, I ask?

The results of numerous studies shows that there is a relationship between employee happiness and workplace engagement. Happy and engaged workers are a lot more likely to have positive relationships with their managers, and are better able to handle new challenges and changes. They also feel valued by their employer, and as a result can deal with stress more effectively and overall are more satisfied with their lives (Krueger & Killham, 2005).

Throughout the past week, I found myself in various situations, from collaborating with groups in organisations, to engaging in heartfelt conversations with friends about their struggles in different relationships outside of work. These experiences served as poignant reminders of the challenges many of us face when attempting to have honest conversations that foster positive and flourishing relationships. It became evident that avoiding these crucial conversations can lead to a great deal of unhappiness and stress, underscoring the importance of addressing our communication barriers head-on.

Some of us skirt around the issue that we should be discussing, others ‘tell’ people what to do, and hence miss an opportunity to let the individual take real ownership of the solution. Sometimes people avoid having the conversation at all, and we’ve all seen examples of what happens then, at work and at home…

The thing is, we don’t have to be perfect communicators. We just need to listen, ask questions to understand, stop making assumptions and stop planning ahead in the conversations i.e. be present with and to the person in front of us and to the conversation that is actually happening.

I love the simplicity of the message in this TED talk, well worth a watch!:

Remind Yourself To Be ‘Mindful’ Today!

Updated July 31st 2023

We received a great testimonial during the week from one of our regular newsletter readers about the effects that following the Mindful exercises in our 7-Steps to Learning & Habit Change series had on them.

It’s great to receive positive feedback from our readers. We write these for you guys to read on the move, when you’re in a hurry, on public transport, in a shopping queue or just taking five and looking for a bite sized read. We aim to deliver a short, direct message in each blog, so receiving engagement and feedback from our readers makes it all worthwhile.

If you’ve been inspired by anything we’ve written, reach out and let us know. Like or share our posts, it would be really appreciated. We would like to take this opportunity to wish all Adaptas friends, readers, supporters and colleagues a Safe and Peaceful Holiday break. Here’s that testimonial:

“The Adaptas blog I was most struck by this year, was from your 7-Steps to Learning & Habit Change series on Mindfulness. I would like to remind everyone of the benefits of Mindfulness heading into this Christmas period. In your blog, you spoke of the difficulty in learning this habit. Of being mindful in every moment, ‘when having conversations or drinking a juice.’ You are spot on about this. Since reading your blog in August, I set about intending to master this and practise mindfulness in my every step. You were so right….it’s not easy but I have to tell you, it is totally worth it. I have learned; It’s about giving, not receiving, it’s about being kind to yourself and to others. It’s about taking responsibility for getting to this point and believing that change is possible. Change is essential, in everything. Change is the ebb and flow of life.”

http://www.adaptastraining.com/mindfulness-foundations-for-the-7-steps-to-learning-and-habit-change#sthash.RwmNhGSo.dpuf

Anonymous

Are Your Beliefs Stifling Your Confidence at Work?