Category: Personal Effectiveness
Managing yourself: attention, time, energy, priorities and habits. The unglamorous foundations that determine how much of your capability actually reaches the work.
-
Discovering and Focusing on Your Highest Value Add Activities as a Leader
A few things you do each week genuinely add value, most things you do don’t. Low value add activities are emotionally attractive but, with practice, we can break out of this unhelpful pattern of work, if we actually want to. You are almost certainly spending most of your time on work that […]
-
A Personal Leadership Vision: How It Helps and How to Create One
A personal leadership vision is a clear, aspirational statement of the kind of leader you want to be and the impact you want to have. It belongs entirely to you and serves as a compass for how you lead regardless of the role, team, or organisation you happen to occupy. Most leaders […]
-
Proactivity at Work: Beyond Just Taking Initiative
Proactivity at work is a well-researched behavioural construct that involves anticipating future problems, actively shaping one’s environment, and persisting through setbacks without being told to do so. Many organisations claim to value proactive employees, but fail to create the pre-requisites that actually foster proactivity, such as psychological safety, genuine autonomy, and tolerant […]
-
Psychological Capital: The HERO Within
Psychological Capital (PsyCap) is a higher-order positive psychological resource comprising Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism (HERO). It is linked with improved performance, wellbeing, engagement, and reduced cynicism, making it one of the more robust and practically useful constructs in organisational psychology. Psychological Capital Psychological Capital, or PsyCap, is a concept developed primarily […]
-
The Four Stages of Competence: From Unconscious Incompetence to Mastery
The Conscious Competence Model describes four stages that people move through when learning a new skill: unconscious incompetence (you do not know what you do not know), conscious incompetence (you become painfully aware of the gap), conscious competence (you can do it, but it requires deliberate effort), and unconscious competence (the skill […]
-
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Introduction for the Workplace
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a third-wave cognitive behavioural therapy developed by Steven Hayes. It’s organised around six core processes. Unlike traditional CBT, ACT does not attempt to change or eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings; instead, it aims to develop psychological flexibility, the ability to be present, open up to experience, […]
-
Dual Process Theory: A Simple Summary
Dual process theory loosely says that humans have two types of thinking. Type 1 is unconscious, quick, makes use of shortcuts, is a bit sloppy but is relied upon most of the time. Type 2 is intentional, calculated and often more accurate, but it takes effort and is slow. Dual Process Theory […]
-
The Pomodoro Technique – Tomato Based Time Management
The theory goes that by working in 25 minute sprints followed by short breaks, that we can be more productive. Especially if we time ourselves using a timer that looks like a tomato… Pomodoro Technique The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. Named […]
-
E143 – Flow (w Helen Amery and Rob Robson)
From the archive This episode is from The World of Work Podcast, made by James Carrier and Jane Stewart at the World of Work Project — a previous venture of ours. All 187 episodes, recorded between 2019 and 2024, are kept here because the conversations still hold up. You can find Jane on LinkedIn, and…
-
Procrastination: A Simple Summary and Hints for Change
Procrastination is when we engage in irrational delays to action, and that delay has a meaningful consequence. It is something that many people do. Luckily, it’s also a habit that it is possible to change. Procrastination Procrastination, or putting off actions we know we should do, is something we can all relate […]
