Priming Yourself for Change

Do you always set out with the best of intentions to get more done on your to-do list or stop procrastination, yet more often than not find yourself running out of hours in the day and getting distracted frequently? How we manage our time will determine whether or not we reach our fullest potential.

Productivity is counterintuitive. Ironically, the more we try to do in a day, the more susceptible we are to stress and overwhelm, meaning the work we do is more likely to be completed at a lesser standard. Other consequences of stress and overwhelm include forgetfulness, slower mental processing, and difficulty focusing to name a few, all of which can derail productivity. Knowing this, it is important for us to be realistic with the amount we can get done in a day so that we can set ourselves up for success.

Cornerstones of Successful Time Management

Focus and avoiding distraction are crucial facets of establishing a schedule and routine that support us in feeling successful. Did you know that it takes 23 minutes to return to the original task after getting distracted? Distraction is a time bandit that we must train ourselves to be aware of and manage. It is key to first become aware of what is distracting us, then take intentional action to manage that distraction. Take the device in our pockets for example. If your phone is distracting you, then why not switch it off and leave it in a different room? This has been of great benefit to myself personally, and has allowed me to remain focused on the task at hand by intentionally removing the source of distraction.

Delegation and prioritization are also essential if you wish to make better use of your time. Understandably, delegation may prove a difficult task for those who think it’s always quicker to get the job done yourself. However, you are doing your colleagues a disservice by not delegating – we all have to start somewhere, and without allowing them the added responsibility they will not progress at a rate that will benefit them or your company. Prioritization is a crucial skill to master, we need to figure out which items are truly important to us, not just urgent, and learn to delegate or say no when we feel like we’ve taken on too much.

What Can We Do?

Practice thinking about Time Management as a learnable skill set. Learning is often misconceived as an event rather than a process. New information takes months to embed and behavioural change is gradual. Over the course of her 15 years in the field of change and growth psychology, Dr Celine Mullins has devised a 7-step programme to enable people to elicit positive behaviour change that counteracts old patterns of behaviour and helps develop learning and habit change. I’m going to take you through the two steps that I personally found the most helpful in cultivating my self-awareness around what was holding me back from becoming much more efficient at managing my time.

Clarity: What?

What is it you would like to change about how you manage your time? What would you like to do more of, less of, or do differently? Getting clarity on the specifics is where we need to begin. Get as tangible as you possibly can, as any ambiguity will hamper your chances of achieving positive change. For example, instead of saying “I want to procrastinate less” you might say “I realise my procrastination trigger is stress and my response is to go on my phone. I will rectify this issue by leaving my phone in a different room”.

Once you have realized your ‘what’, you must then check in with how you see yourself. Is it in alignment with the change you want to make? Recognizing incongruencies between how you see yourself and your goal can help you to understand what it is you need to change. For example: “when it comes to time management, I’m the type of person that procrastinates by checking my phone”. To this end, you realise you can fix this issue by switching off your phone or leaving it in a different room.

After we have realized our ‘what’ and whether how we see ourselves is in alignment with it, we then need to visualise ourselves doing it. Visualisation improves performance, motivation and focus. It involves creating a picture of what you want to happen. When visualizing, it is important to be as detailed as possible. How does it feel, use all your senses associated with your body when imagining it. For example, picture yourself getting stressed about an upcoming project, yet choosing not to procrastinate. Imagine how it would feel to lean into that discomfort and take action instead of avoiding the task. What might that look like? This mental and physical rehearsal allows us to be cognizant of recognizing these opportunities in real life.

Obstacles: Which?

We must get really clear on what the potential obstacles to change might be for us. We must look at the internal and external obstacles. Internal are our limiting beliefs – the assumptions we have around why we cannot achieve our goals. For example, if someone has always wanted to get fit and they are currently overweight, a limiting belief might be that they think that they have bad genetics and resign themselves to not going to the gym and eating unhealthy foods. In terms of time management, our belief that we are naturally disorganised, slow, or not smart enough can prevent us from taking action to improve our time management skills. Our external obstacles, on the other hand, are our life responsibilities such as our career or family.

Once we have identified the internal and external obstacles that could prevent us from achieving our goals, we must now mentally contrast. Mental contrasting involves thinking about several different positive aspects associated with completing your goal. This will help you to keep consistent. It is a visualization technique developed by Gabriele Oettingen, a motivation psychologist who wished to improve the effectiveness of traditional self-control strategies like positive-future visualization. The technique improves cognitive functioning, health and promotes helpful behaviours.

The final step is implementation. How are you going to overcome each obstacle if they do arise? Use the ‘if-then’ method. For example, “If I get distracted by my phone, then I will switch it off and put it in another room” or “If I get overwhelmed, then I will focus on my breathing and be realistic with how much I can get done in a day”.

Resistance to Change

When presented with change, our brain leans into a self-protection mode and will do everything it can to cling to the comfortability of what it already knows. Change is a process, not an overnight event, but with the implementation of these steps you are guiding yourself in the right direction towards improving your time management skills.

To Summarise

1. Productivity is counterintuitive – be realistic with what you can accomplish in a day to avoid stress and overwhelm

2. Focus, avoiding distraction, delegation and prioritization are all crucial elements of time management

3. Get clear on what it is that is holding you back from improving your time management

4. Become aware of the potential obstacles and how you will overcome them

5. Realise that nothing happens overnight, habit change is a process, but using these steps will put you in the driving seat of your time management skills

In Order To Speed Up, You Must First Slow Down

Updated July 26th 2023

In previous blogs, I have been promising we would look more at how to speed up learning new habits. We have been talking about how we can actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, in order to actually speed up the process of changing our habits!

One of the best ways to do this is to follow the steps below:

1) Decide what your new habit is going to be.

2) Sit back or lie down, making sure you are comfortable.

3) Close your eyes

4) Take 5 nice big deep breaths, breathing in through your nose, and out through your mouth. As you breath in, focus on your belly expanding and your lungs filling with air. As you breath out, feel the body softening and letting go of tension.

5) Let your breath return to its natural rhythm, in and out through your nose.

6) Scan your body from the top of your head down to your feet. Feel the contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Does it feel heavy? Where is the heaviest point of contact? Feel your hands and your feet on the floor. Allow everything to relax into the chair or floor as you scan down.

7) Get a picture in your mind of you doing the new habit. Will you be placing vegetables in to a pot as you cook a healthy meal? Will you pumping sweat and feeling energised at a gym, an exercise class, a dance class, or a climbing wall?! Will you be having comfortable warm conversations with clients that leave you and your client feeling good afterwards? Will you be asking more questions and listening more to the responses in a meeting with a colleague, because you have realised that telling people what to do is not coaching them effectively?

8) As you get that image really clear in your mind, hear the sounds you are hearing, feel the feelings you are feeling (happy, strong, enthralled, excited etc), see everything around you that would be there; the people, the weather, the building, whatever and whomever you are surrounded by.

9) As you see, hear and feel everything that goes with performing this new habit (making the image and the actions as vivid as possible), as if you are really in the situation (i.e. not watching the situation!), take as long to do the new habit in your mind as it would if you were doing it in real life.

10) Now, once you are vividly experiencing that experience, start to run it faster and faster until you feel your whole body feeling the emotions that come with having that new habit.

11) Now, as you run through the experience, imagine the neurons throughout your brain firing and connecting, just like in the image above. Imagine the neurons passing their electrical charge along to each other and see pathways being formed that represent the new habit. You could even imagine them speaking to each other as they pass the electrical charge along.

Take a look at a few seconds of this video clip to get a clearer picture of neurons communicating and to help you to imagine this happening in your own brain.

Do this exercise every day for a week, repeating the visualisation and the imagining of the experience of the event, with the neurons firing and creating pathways throughout your brain. Imagine that experience and the pathways being created 10, 15, 20 times in one sitting.

Please remember, that you have to also practice the new behaviour for real!! You have to physically cook that healthy meal, ask more questions of your colleagues or clients, or do the physical exercise!!! You need to do both the real and the imagined. Physically performing the new skill, visualising yourself performing the skill or behaviour and imagining the neural connections will work quicker and more effectively than just performing the behaviour or just thinking about it, in forming the new habit. If you want to feel healthier or have effective communication, training yourself and practicing repetitively for a few weeks will make it all stick.

Read back on previous blogs if you would like to learn more about how and why this exercise will help you to speed up a change in your habits.

What Can Your Biggest Sporting Hero Tell You About Success?

Updated July 26th 2023

I’ve been talking a lot about habits recently; getting rid of the ones that are doing us no good and replacing with ones that are beneficial to our life, including health, work and relationships.

You may recall I mentioned that it takes the average person 66 days for new behaviours to become unchangingly automatic, with research finding it can take some people up to 245 days to change a habit. The reason for this is that it can take a while to strengthen the connection between neurons representing the new behaviour.

However you may not be this patient, I know I certainly am not! Consequently, I have frequently abandoned my efforts to establish new, beneficial, and healthier habits in the past. Some of my attempts have included many efforts to eat healthier, getting fit and staying fit, maintaining a level of contentedness and gratitude in my daily life, blogging weekly about Adaptas™ or topics of interest to clients and friends of Adaptas™, posting daily messages in social media that might be helpful to anyone who cares to read in the area of communication in the workplace and behavioural change. The list goes on and on…frankly, we could be here all day!

Consider this, have you ever envisioned the person you want to become, the knowledge you seek to acquire, or the goals you wish to achieve? Visualisation as a method of actualisation has been extensively studied in Cognitive Psychology and Sports Psychology. Accomplished athletes harness the power of visualisation, which involves mentally rehearsing physical skills without actual movement

Numerous studies with athletes have revealed that combining the mental visualisation of a skill with its physical execution leads to more effective learning and retention of the skill. Any elite athlete will emphasise the significance of mental preparation strategies in achieving peak performance. The underlying science shows that these techniques reinforce the neural pathways crucial for skill enhancement, as previously mentioned.

Having studied Psychology in-depth since my teenage years, I have acquired comprehensive knowledge about the reinforcement of neural connections and related aspects. In fact, my fascination with understanding human nature, our behavior, and the influence of experiences started at a very young age, around 8 years old (possibly even earlier, though I can’t recall those early years). Observing people and their responses to various environments has always intrigued me, however I must admit that my biggest case study has most often been myself.

Even though I knew all about visualisation, it really only hit me recently (i.e. that there are ways to speed up these neuronal connections), through conversation with my colleague Erika Brodnock (Erika Brodnock, CEO and Founder, The Centre for Positive Children Ltd), that if you actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, you can speed up the process of changing your habits!

If you want to learn about effectively visualising (not all of us find it easy!), keep an eye on our blogs in coming weeks.

Priming Yourself for Change