Lasting Habit Change; Take 7-Steps to get there!

Updated July 28th 2023

In recent months, our blogs have been considering the 7-STEPS to learning and habit change. We now know there are 7 Steps or facets that need to be considered and applied in learning to make it addictive, to enable people to learn and for neural changes to take place in the brain to have lasting impact.
These are:

Imagine ‘Why?’
Motivation
Fun
Memory
Repetition
Feedback
Two-Way Street

Let’s take an example of when the 7 facets that are necessary for learning and brain change are not fully utilised (using a simple example that many of us will be able to identify with).

Visualise this; Liz wants to lose weight. She is aware she has put on weight, as she is not fitting into her clothes comfortably anymore and is feeling lethargic. Liz has booked a holiday leaving in 3 months and wishes to fit into the clothes and swimwear she wore two years ago on holiday. Since that holiday, she has put on approximately two stone, from not exercising and eating on the go (IMAGINE & MOTIVATION INTACT).

She commits to a gym membership and starts to go 3-4 times per week. She is measured and given an exercise regime. 1 month later her gym visits have dropped to 2 times per week as she has noticed no difference and the scales says she has put on weight. In reality she has strengthened up (muscle is heavier than fat but she doesn’t realise this). (REPETITION SUBOPTIMAL)

Also her gym visits have dropped to twice per week because she didn’t identify something that could be fun (she detests running on a treadmill, but she loves dancing), that might have been more fun for her as a mode of exercise (NO FUN).

Also, she did not ask the gym instructor to keep her motivated by agreeing to check in weekly to look at measurements, and track progress (FEEDBACK SUBOPTIMAL).

Liz is eventually going to the gym only once per week, as she can’t see any real time benefit of the exercise and is feeling more tired than before because she didn’t listen to, or implement the gym instructor’s advice on eating more vegetables, cutting out bread, drinking more water etc,. Additionally, she is not getting feedback from people around her telling her she is looking well. (REPETITION SUBOPTIMAL)

This regime is not hard and fastened as the right thing to do according to her mind and brain!

While running the 8th mile on the treadmill, Liz keeps thinking, ‘I don’t want to look awful on the beach’ instead of visualising herself ‘I am looking fantastic in my bikini’ (TWO-WAY STREET NOT INTACT).

Liz eventually stops going to gym (‘Falls off wagon’, and doesn’t get back on because she has no support and encouragement and does not have enough self-discipline) (MEMORY & FEEDBACK SUBOPTIMAL).

Liz goes on her holiday. Every day, she gets annoyed with herself that she didn’t keep up the exercise, and she feeds herself with more negative language (TWO-WAY STREET NOT INTACT).

Hopefully you can now see the 7 Steps coming to life.

There are 5 ingredients that create a foundation for these 7 Steps and depending on if they are in place will either support or hinder these 7 steps.

We are going to take you through these 5 ingredients in upcoming blogs so that you can actively apply and turn yourself and your learners into real addicts! Between now and our next installment, it’s time for you to reflect on what you eat, how much exercise you do, and how much sleep and relaxation you do or don’t get.

The Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning: #6 FEEDBACK – Everyone needs Feedback!

“It takes 21 days to change a habit!”
How many times have we all heard this?

Jeremy Dean (Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick) has collated research around habit change, and found that it takes on average 66 days (not 21 days!) to change a habit, with people often taking beyond 230 days of repetition to change habits long-term!

As discussed in the ‘REPETITION’ step of the 7 steps to learning a few weeks ago, we know that the brain forms a model of the brain connections that contribute to a good try. Repetition strengthens the connections between neurons engaged at the same time. Additionally, we know from the ‘MEMORY’ step, that the more we can create meaningful, emotional and elaborated opportunities to practice the more likely long-term learning is to occur i.e. emotional connections create more permanent memories.

Be it 18, 21, 65 or 265 days it takes to create change, let’s call a spade a spade…it is difficult to commit to practicing in order to embed change! Not only must the brain receive feedback on good versus bad tries. We NEED feedback from others on good versus bad tries…we need feedback and support to know it’s working! FEEDBACK on performance and acknowledgement from others encourages us to repeat.

It’s about recognising what needs to change, then doing it repetitively, and getting feedback, especially with a focus on how improvement is being noticed by others. We all like to be told we are doing a good job! Constant monitoring of progress by oneself, one’s peers and one’s superiors is tantamount to long lasting change.

In my experience, most people in management positions just don’t have or prioritise putting the time in to do this. People remember how they feel. If you make them feel good for attempting to make changes, they are much more likely to succeed. People must see results – one of the jobs of a manager should be to support and coach.

We need to be reminded that it is working, even when we ‘fall of the wagon’. We must track behaviours, and get feedback on how that behaviour is being noticed by others and how it is impacting on others.

It is important therefore, to work with people over a period of time. If that means writing reminders to check in with your colleagues on the change they are looking to make, do it…you might be still checking in with them on that change they were looking to make in 6 months time, but accountability and repetitiveness lead to new habit forming. It may take 21 days, it may take many many more. But imagine the difference it will make!

Thank you for reading. We’d love your Feedback. Leave a comment or share on your social pages.

The Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning: #5 REPETITION| Repeat, Repeat, Repeat!

Updated July 28th 2023

We are what we repeatedly do.
A common thing I hear from people I am working with is something along the lines of ‘I’m too old to change’ or ‘I’m too old to learn anything new’, or ‘The damage has been done, it’s too late for me’ or ‘ you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’!

In the 4th step of the 7 steps i.e. ‘Memory’, a few weeks ago, we learned that incoming data is held in short term, or working, memory and will be quickly lost if not consolidated. How well we encode a memory is critical to how effectively we will be able to recall it at a future point. And this my friends, is regardless of what age we are!

As Alfred Edward Perlman says; “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century”.

Storage of information takes place in SEVERAL neurons at the same time. You have to give your neurons the chance to repetitively communicate with each other so that the learning sticks.

Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show the important role of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, in the learning process.

Dopamine is the brain’s chemical reward and is triggered in response to positive feedback during the learning process. When we eat in response to hunger, feel the warmth of the sun, or receive a smile for an action taken, the brain releases a short dopamine burst to signal its pleasure and give us a quick reward for gaining it. This dopamine reward mechanism serves to reinforce the neural connections in the associated network, strengthening it with each repetition of the thought or behaviour that caused it. This is the biological process that embeds learning.

In other words, we have to repeat, repeat, repeat, because initial changes are only temporary. Stronger and faster connections between neurons form through repetition and the feedback about the outcome of the try, versus what the brain wants.

The challenge for us is to actually repeat, because sometimes we just didn’t grasp the learning the first time, and sometimes we just don’t think we can prioritise repeating new behaviours because other things take precedence i.e. just getting through all the things we need to do every day.

Ultimately, it comes back to how badly you want something. As per the first step ‘Imagine’, have you imagined what you want the outcome to be? Or if you are managing other people, have you assisted them in imagining what they desire the outcome to be; how it will benefit them; how things will be different? People will only repeat new behaviours if they can clearly see the personal gain or benefit.

One of the jobs of a manager, in my opinion, (for everyone’s gain), is to keep noticing, and to continuously support and coach to encourage repetition. I’m also a great believer in some type of buddy or peer system, where people are held accountable to doing what they need to do to make the learning stick, i.e. repeat, repeat, repeat.

One of my favorite sayings is “Amateurs practice until they know it, Professionals train until they OWN it!” Clinton Swaine.

You can teach an old dog new tricks…just follow the 7 Steps to Learning 😉

The Learning Challenge – The Ageing Brain and Ageing Workforce

Updated July 28th 2023

In this weeks blog post, we bring you a post from our special guest Nigel Paine, whose book, “The Learning Challenge” features a case study written about Adaptas™ CEO Dr. Celine Mullins. Nigel gives us his thoughts on the Ageing Brain and the Ageing Workforce.

Three things came together to stop me in my tracks. The first was reading that if the incidents of Alzheimer’s disease continue to develop in proportion to the ageing population in Japan, the entire GDP of the country will be consumed treating those patients by 2050. This is, of course, a national catastrophe.

The second was visiting rural Japan and being astonished by the number of elderly Japanese citizens sitting quietly in front of their houses with apparently nothing to do. Rural communities seem void of younger people, work opportunities and, indeed, of life.

Third was a quotation by Dr Joel Kramer of the Osher Centre for integrative medicine at the University of California San Francisco from a lecture that he gave which was filmed and put on the excellent University of California TV channel on YouTube. He said:

“Ageing can have a significant impact on brain structure and function, but these changes are neither universal nor inevitable.”

There is now a massive research effort being conducted by neuroscientists around the ageing brain and what we need to do to keep the brain healthy. What seems to be emerging are some clear indicators that the critical dimension of brain health is to maintain neural plasticity throughout life. Neural plasticity builds, what Joel Kramer refers to as ‘cognitive reserve’. Cognitive reserve is the ability of the brain to react to trauma and to disease and attempt to maintain functionality. The Osher Centre has looked at the evidence for Alzheimer’s in ageing brains and discovered that identical patterns of Alzheimer’s can debilitate one individual, whereas another individual can function pretty much as normal. One brain is able to route around the Alzheimer’s plaques, the other is not.

Clearly Japan and other countries with growing ageing populations should invest not only in medical research to discover a “cure” for Alzheimer’s, but also in ways it can work with 50 and 60-year-old adults to develop some of that cognitive reserve which seems so powerful in helping the brain cope with trauma.

This immediately impinges on the world of work. Most organisations slowdown their ageing workforce in the years before retirement. They offer them few challenges and let them cruise quietly as they prepare them for life in retirement. The research would seem to indicate that this is entirely the wrong approach. To maintain neural plasticity the brain needs challenges, and above all it needs to continue learning new things. An alert and physically fit individual, motivated and taking on new challenges right the way through to retirement is probably the best insurance policy against dementia, and possibly the best protection against the effects of early Alzheimer’s. Four things to suggest going forward:

1. We need to work with large employers on new programs and new activities for their ageing workforce and track their progress longitudinally and certainly into retirement.

2. We need to inspire our L&D professionals to develop new learning pathways paying attention to the 70:20:10 model for their older staff teams.

3. We have to look at work organisation to ensure that the diversity of the four generation workforce is celebrated and leveraged.

4. As the research conclusions emerge about the ageing brain, much more needs to be done to share, debate and draw practical conclusions for action.

It would seem the height of common sense to invest real money into these programs because the costs of not doing this on a national economic, and personal lifestyle level, are catastrophic. If we do nothing, Japan points the way to disaster.

In my recently published Kogan Page book: The Learning Challenge, the chapter on neuroscience explores this in much more detail. You can buy the book at a special blog readers 20% discount from the Kogan Page website using this code: TLCAD 20

Nigel Paine

The Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning: #4 MEMORY – Encoding, sorting & retrieving information.

Updated July 28th 2023

Memory is crucial for learning.
“Memory is a process of encoding, sorting and retrieving information” (Carlson, Martin & Buskist, 2004).
The brain creates predictive models about where it thinks it is going, models about performance during an attempt and models that reflect cumulative learning of those attempts to create the desired outcome. The actions that are attempted and those that resulted in better performance must be remembered. Otherwise learning cannot occur.

Theorists of memory agree that there are various stages of memory; 1) short term memory (STM) or working memory and 2) Long term memory (LTM).

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi-store memory model (1968) states that we take information from the external environment through our sensory organs (e.g. eyes, ears, skin etc.). This information gets moved to the STM where it stays for a short time (i.e. less than one minute; STM has a limited capacity and duration). Only with rehearsal can information be moved to the LTM. Peterson and Peterson (1959) found that the more time information goes unrehearsed in the STM the more difficult it is for participants to retrieve this information.

“Short term memory is the set of processes that we use to hold and rehearse information that occupies our current awareness” (Robinson-Riegler & Robinson-Riegler, 2008).

LTM consists of:

Declarative (explicit) memory: Knowledge of facts and events.
Procedural (non-declarative, implicit) memory: Knowledge of how to do things.
Skills and abilities.
Conditioning and subconscious responses.

Other than rehearsal, there are other ways to help the encoding of information from the STM to the LTM. For example, mnemonic devices are “special techniques or strategies consciously used to improve memory – make use of information already stored in LTM to make memorisation an easier task” (Brunswick & Buskist, 2004).

These devices do not simplify or lessen information, they create a more detailed version of the information in such a way that the information is easier to retrieve at a later time. This is possible because of the way in which the information is elaborated upon. The information is strung together in a meaningful way.

Most approaches to training soft skills in people are missing an approach that enables learners to elaborate on what they are learning in the classroom. In my experience, the solutions are as follows:

A) Learning must be ‘applied’ in the training room, i.e. create more meaningful, emotional and elaborated opportunities to practice while in the training room, to engage both hearts and minds.

B) In line with the 70:20:10 rule, make sure that people get the opportunity to apply and practice in the context of work. In his excellent book, ‘The Learning Challenge’ (2014), Nigel Paine refers to ‘at the moment of need’ and ‘just in time’ learning, and quotes Nick Shackleton-Jones approach to learning ‘for people who care’. Here people care deeply about learning something because they have been challenged and want to/ need to solve the problem, and therefore are motivated to learn.

For a case study of the approach taken by Nick Shakleton-Jones (Director of Online and Informal Learning, BP) see Nigel’s book. You might see Adaptas mentioned there too ;-).

Ultimately, there is no point in sending a person to attend a training if they are not going to be able to apply their learning immediately (either actively in the training or ‘on the job’), because it will not get stored in their Long-Term Memory, unless they get a chance to use the information supplied immediately.

Plain and simple, we all forget what we have learned unless it is dynamic, motivating, emotionally stimulating and useful in the here and now!

Click here for more Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning

The Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning: #3 FUN – Learning is about having FUN!

Updated July 28th 2023

People always learn faster and better when they are having fun and are being creative.
Change can occur only when the brain is in the mood: Change is enhanced by behaviour and circumstances. Learning occurs with focused attention and is inhibited by an intentional refusal to accept new experiences.

You know how when we were children, we played all the time? We learnt through playing. But then the education system kind of squashed that out of us, because we were told to sit still and listen.

And into adulthood, fun is often missing from approaches taken to learning and development.

Of course, fun and creativity is experienced differently by all of us, so be cautious not to make assumptions here! Our experience of fun can also change based on experiences we find ourselves in and the people we are surrounded by.

The brain is a social organ innately designed to learn through shared experiences. Brains grow best in this context of interactive discovery and through the co-creation of stories that shape and support memories of what is being learned. Evidence from the field of neuroscience shows us that we require positive social interaction and nurturance in order to learn.

Dorothy Billington, author of In ‘Life is an Attitude: How to Grow Forever Better’, has run studies on why some men and women continue to grow as long as they live — while others do not. For example, she has studied English-as-Second-Language classes for new immigrants, and comments that “In classes where students feel safe, where lessons are focused on current language needs, where students are asked for input on what helps them most to learn, where students are actively involved in interesting and fun exercises, where there’s lots of laughter and congeniality, students of all ages and backgrounds learn English fast and well. In classes where students are made to feel inadequate and threatened, little is learned.”

She comments, ‘these findings support the thinking of Malcolm Knowles (The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, 1986), recognized as the father of adult learning; his trailblazing work underlies many of our most effective adult education programs. He reminded us that in optimal adult learning programs, where adults learn best, both students and faculty also have fun, for it is exhilarating to REALLY learn.’

My own experience is that a safe, trusting environment will support people to get in the mood and find themselves having fun when they least expect it.

Click here for more Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning

The Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning: #2 MOTIVATION | The Power of Knowing ‘WHY’

Updated July 28th 2023

MOTIVATION – For change, we need to be clear on our ‘Why?’
We recently published the 1st of our 7-Steps to Learning. We received a great response to our IMAGINATION blog, where we explained that ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’, so to continue as promised, outlined below is the 2nd Step – MOTIVATION.

MOTIVATION is a key factor in brain plasticity: It can be looked at as a cycle where thoughts influence behaviours and behaviours then drive performance; an inner drive to behave or act in a certain manner. It is the driving force that causes the change from desire to trying to achieve in life. If you are going to commit to making changes in your life, then it requires dedication and practice to create lasting change. Understand your motivation and you’ll understand the process that arouses, sustains and regulates your behaviour.

In Step 5, you will see that repetition is the key to making stronger connections. Repetition will only occur if people are motivated. People need to see a personal need, or a reason for them in making the change. For change, we need to be clear on our ‘Why?’.

People must think about two things in answering this question. Emotionally, what we can gain, by creating this new behaviour, and what do we stand to lose by not creating it? Performance impacts thoughts.

Our role as educators and learning leaders is to help people to become aware of what is not working for them or where the gaps exist, why they want and need to change (emotionally and logically) and where that will take them in their life and career. If someone does not want to learn, no change will take place.

The question then is, what is stopping them from wanting to learn? I refer back to point Step1: Have they been given the opportunity or given themselves the opportunity to IMAGINE & dream big?!

Click here for more Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning

The Adaptas 7-Steps to Learning: #1 IMAGINE

Updated July 27th 2023

Have you ever considered yourself and your learners as potential addicts?

Have you ever heard of the neurotransmitter Dopamine? Dopamine is a chemical released when people are doing something they enjoy. Dopamine consolidates new circuits and causes addiction.
Addiction is a plastic change in the brain.

Imagine for a moment, if you could turn all the people you are looking to develop into ‘learning addicts’. They are so addicted to learning, they cannot wait to apply everything they have learnt so that they can come back and learn more. The impact of the “learnings” would then ripple across the organisation, affecting the bottom line, as your training budgets would expand twofold, threefold and more. Wouldn’t that be something? From my perspective, we should be looking to turn everyone into addicts who enjoy learning and thus consolidate new neural pathways, which in turn leave people wanting more. We all know how challenging it can be to change an existing habit.

I recently spoke at The 2014 Learning Technologies Conference in London. Following that talk, they asked me to write an article for their Inside Learning & Technologies & Skills Magazine which was published this June. In this speech I outlined 7-Steps or areas that need to be considered and applied in learning to make it addictive, to enable people to learn and for neural changes to take place in the brain that have lasting impact. Over the coming months I am going to outline these 7-STEPS here. They all overlap as you will see:

1) IMAGINE

Neurons that fire together wire together: The brain strengthens connections between things that happen in real time and predictions of possible outcomes. The brain blends what happens and the predictions together. The expected outcome and the reality of the outcome; the brain weaves its own explanation of reality that is the basis of new skills. Therefore, people need to get clear on what the benefits of changing their behaviour will be. We need to help people think bigger for themselves. My experience of many approaches to working with changing people’s behaviour, is that the time is just not put into this. We’ve got to allow people to dream, to IMAGINE and to see all the possible outcomes. Otherwise, there is very little chance they will commit.

We look forward to sending you the 2nd-Step in this 7-Step process. We are currently delivering an interactive workshop to teams and groups in organisations to actively assist them in applying these 7-Steps. Get in touch if you’d like us to talk you through what we can do for your organisation.

The Necessity of Learning and Embracing Change

Updated July 27th 2023

Do you know what the workplace of the future will look like?
I don’t, but I do however know one thing, it will be very different to the workplaces we see nowadays.

Many would argue that more changes have taken place in the world of how we work in the past 5-10 years than had in the previous 100 years. There is new technology, new approaches to management & new roles in the workplace than ever could have been imagined in the past.

I was present at a talk Bob Savage, MD and Vice President of EMC Ireland, gave at a recent conference (National Stakeholders Conference on Science Education).

EMC Ireland in Cork is their largest manufacturing site outside the US, spanning 600,000 square feet, with 28 business functions and 44 nationalities on site speaking 26 languages. Bob leads this Centre of Excellence’s team of highly skilled people serving the global market. Bob said, “the ability to build relationships with customers, to relate to others, is one of the differentiators for employees and companies of the future. Another differentiator is a culture which encourages people to have an openness and ability to transform their skills, with a compulsion towards life-long learning”. Many people don’t see their job as a place to learn. However, in another interview Bob did last year, he was asked what he looked for in people working for EMC. He said, “The ICT area is a fast moving environment and people need to be able to handle and embrace change.” He also mentioned that he looks for a team of dynamic players and career minded people with integrity and passion who think outside the box.

Therefore, the more responsibility we take to learn within and outside the workplace, the better our chances for success are. If you have read previous articles we have written, you will know that we see one big happy connection between learning, change and relating to others. In my mind, learning in the workplace is best looked at with a sense of wonder. The wonder at the extent of endless possibilities that could be explored when we are open to change and willing to challenge how things have always been done.

What’s more, this is further charged with more possibilities because everything we learn at work about embracing change and relating to others and ourselves, can feed into our personal lives, creating even more positive relationships with our family and friends for example. John Henry Newman once said, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” And well, if Bob and I agree with him, then he must be right 😉

Are You Still Using Your Childhood Emotional Intelligence?

Updated July 27th 2023

Educators need to put more focus on developing a child’s Emotional Intelligence, giving them the skills to assist them while in school, as well as to prepare them for the adult world.

These skills include communication and coping skills as well as helping them to build their confidence.

I remember when I was 11 years old sitting in class, and someone spotted a pool of liquid on the floor under the chair of another girl in my class.

It was class time, there was no liquid to drink and she had not split anything, if you get my drift. Everyone in the class started pointing and laughing. This young girl was humiliated. Her reaction was a mixture of fear, anger and sadness.

This girl was generally being treated badly by her classmates. She was excluded from everything in the playground, was being passed cruel notes, calling her a ‘freak’ and was generally having a terrible time of it. On reflection, her accent would have been perceived as different to the rest of us, because she had spent the first few years of her life in a different country. I think, most likely, that she was singled out based on this.

This type of exclusion and bullying is also not uncommon in the workplace, when children become adults.

Call me weird, but I remember at that time in school thinking it was strange how they didn’t teach us how to protect ourselves, how to understand our emotions, how to be confident, how to make friends.

Einstein is said to have written ‘Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school’.

Good point! How much specific information do you remember from your time at school? Or maybe I should be asking, how relevant is any of it to your life now?

Often those who have been bullied in school, see that pattern re-emerging later in life. Alternatively they become the bully themselves. Much of the behavior in the workplace echoes exactly what happened in school. What’s worse is that it takes only one person to be the bully, or one person to be negative or one person to be in resistance. Eventually many people in the organisation will be living from a similar mindset. We’ve all heard of the herd or mob mentality.

In my humble opinion, educators need to think about giving children and teenagers the skills to assist them while children in school, as well as to prepare them for the adult world. These skills include communication and coping skills as well as helping them to build their confidence.

Many of the skills needed are very different to the skills that you or I ever would have thought we needed back when we were school age, until we became adults and realized the world can be a tough place, where we often don’t feel heard, or we feel blamed, or attacked for doing the wrong thing, or for just not being in the ‘IN’ crowd.

As we can’t turn back time and revisit our school days (phew!) we need to be given or seek out the opportunity to develop our emotional intelligence, our positive intelligence, and to question our patterns of behavior as adults. Otherwise the same issues just repeat themselves over and over again.

The damage to individuals, teams and organisations is sometimes not possible to turn back. We are not children anymore, but if you can put your hand on your heart and tell me you are not repeating any behavioural patterns from your childhood, you deserve a medal!

How Can We Become ‘Brainier’?

Updated July 27th 2023

Has it ever dawned on you that your brain may be the best piece of technology you have?

You might ask whether we have any control over that technology that rests on our shoulders?

The answer is YES.

Brain plasticity, is a term that refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. In this technological age we live in, machines have the knowledge and know the facts. It is nevertheless down to how creatively we can use our brains to interpret and use this information to a high-level that drives our success.

This week, my colleague, Dr. Celine Mullins, is speaking at the Learning & Technologies Conference (www.learningtechnologies.co.uk) on the topic ‘Why change isn’t easy and how to help people tackle it’ Celine, together with Brid Nunn (Learning & Development Design Manager, Marks and Spencer Retail) will validate how engaging employees creatively and in a way that the brain best commits to change, makes real business sense. Positive engagement by staff inevitably leads to higher rates of customer satisfaction directly impacting on bottom line sales. Whilst all at the same time, employees are happier too!

This talk will be all about putting the employees and customers in the centre of the action. But how can we put ourselves in the centre of the action everyday? How can we engage our minds to make the best use of this technology available to us? From the latest research in neuropsychology, here are some simple no-nonsense tips:

1. Concentrate on what is working and the motivation will naturally follow When we focus on what is working more than what is not, our brains become positively charged. As a result it is less likely for negativity to set in. The brain finds it tricky to be positive and negative at the same time! When you are in this frame of mind, you will naturally be more motivated to produce really good quality work, and your colleagues and customers will enjoy being around you too. Find out what things trigger you to enjoy yourself more in general, and explore whether you can integrate them into your work in any way. That way you are creating the motivation to become the best version of yourself, inside and out. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!

2. Bite-sized goals (i.e. chunking down) Why clean the house from top to bottom in one evening and be so wrecked that you are not inspired to do it again for a month? The brain likes good memories of things so when we break goals or jobs into bite-sized pieces, the memory of the ‘job’ is not so bad and we are happy to take on the task again and again.

3. 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. The more we repeat things and the more we want to repeat things, the more hardwired the new habits become in the brain. I liken this to programming a computer! Using this approach, we are less likely to slip into bad habits again.

4. Keep the self-judgement to a minimum Finally, if you do fall off the bandwagon with a change/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. It also blocks channels in the brain from seeing solutions as it goes into blinkered survival mode. There is always a positive way to reframe a mistake or stumbling block. Just make a decision to love learning and move on! If we are not learning we are dead!

If you have just read this entire blog, you have already begun to use many of the principles of neuroplasticity. You are on your way to becoming a very ‘brainy’ person. Go forth and conquer!

Why do managers go through leadership training and not improve?

Updated July 24 2023

On reading the 14th CIPD Learning and Talent Development Annual Survey 2012, I was delighted to see an emphasis on the need for new approaches to learning!

According to the survey, ‘nearly three-quarters of organisations see a deficit in management and leadership skills’. This means that despite years of management training and development, much of the skill base of managers remains unimproved. This survey indicates that senior managers are perceived, as much as line managers, to be lacking in management and leadership skills.

The report states that ‘Learning & talent development practitioners have a big role in using their insights on leadership and behaviour in making sure those leaders are developed properly’, and that ‘a lot of this activity is going to require a step-up in our awareness of a new and emerging evidence base from the sciences about how people think, act and behave.’

The report states that familiar models such as Myers Briggs, Kolb, and Honey and Mumford which have been used to generate insight on how people learn and develop are too familiar, and that the challenges we face now require different insights and a refreshed evidence base.

Yippee!! That’s what we at Adaptas™ have been arguing!! Yes, of course all of these theorists and measurements have their place in people development, but as the survey states ‘there is a low awareness of the emerging evidence base from neuroscience, cognitive research and areas like economics which could transform the way we think’. Yes, for most organisations and for most training providers there is a lack of awareness of all the new findings and the power of the brain. However, Adaptas™ combines approaches taken from these areas and which are monumentally important for adult learning and for organisational change!

The report states, ‘Understanding neuroscience issues such as how the brain codes, captures and cleans knowledge and memory, helps us to know much more about how to pace and develop our learning interventions.’

Agreed! The reason so many managers and leaders, who have gone through staff training are still not effective, is because the trainings they have received have not been cutting edge. They have not taken into account what we now know about the human brain! Are you ready to be one of the organisations who actually sees a change when your managers go through training? If so, get in touch with us….

Note: The 14th CIPD Learning and Talent Development Annual Survey 2012 was researched and developed by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (www.CIPD.co.uk) with Cornerstone OnDemand

Lasting Habit Change; Take 7-Steps to get there!