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Introduction: Four Stages to develop a new skills/behaviour. identify the gap/skill for development, plan carefully how you are going to make the change,  implement including monitoring daily and then measure/assess changed behaviour to test success.

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Introduction: Four Stages to develop a new skills/behaviour. identify the gap/skill for development, plan carefully how you are going to make the change,  implement including monitoring daily and then measure/assess changed behaviour to test success.

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To learn new information can be relatively easy, to change a behaviour or long held habit can be much harder - just think of those new years resolutions!

In my investigations into behavioural change there seems to be 4 things we need to get right.
1. Be clear about what we are trying to change and why. This needs to be really specific - what you are trying to change and how you will know when you have made the change.
2. You need a great plan for making the change using multiple strategies and approaches and enlisting support from your work and social network. You need to think about implementation objectives, the things you will do specifically to move you towards your goal objective. You will need to leverage change techniques such as Kaizen - the small things that build the habits that will make your change successful.
3. You need to act on the plan and work it using tools including daily tracking through questions and finally
4. You need to have measures for your success that can provide clarity as to whether you have made your change a reality. And you need resilience when the first attempt fails and you need to try again - most smokers take at least 3 goes to give up smoking.

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What Mindset do we have towards learning?
As Carol Dweck explains in her book Mindset the beliefs we have towards challenges and learning impacts our learning success.

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People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, see their qualities as things that can be developed through their dedication and effort. Sure they're happy if they're brainy or talented, but that's just the starting point. They understand that no one has ever accomplished great things-not Mozart, Darwin, or Michael Jordan-without years of passionate practice and learning.

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1. Do you know what you want to change or develop as a skill

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1. Do you know what you want to change or develop as a skill

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A competency library or competency assessment report may give you a better understanding of what you need to change.

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1. Do we have a compelling reason to change? 

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1. Do we have a compelling reason to change? 

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The drive to change must be compelling otherwise change efforts are short lived and easily set aside. Why do you want to change? What are the consequences of not changing? In many organisations there may be a request/demand/pressure to adapt and adopt new ways of working. Without the why it is hard for those changes to be successful. Yet we are all capable of change when the why is evident - we have studied hard to get a qualification, we have worked hard to achieve an outcome that we value and we have given our time/money in support of causes that we believe in - but we have been part of changes that have been sidelined due to a lack of commitment. The WHY may be punitive - if you don't do this you will not get the next..bonus/raise/promotion etc but these effects are short-lived, especially when everyone else putters along ignoring the same thing

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Homeostasis is the basic self-regulating feedback loops that keep us repeating the same habits over and over.

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At some time or another, we've all sought to make big changes. And almost of all of us have, after making grand plans, discovered that changing some aspect of our lives or organizations, whether adding in a new skill or simply changing an old process, resulted in great backsliding.

Why the disconnect?

As George Leonard discusses in his classic book Mastery, based on his experiences in the patient lifelong practice of Aikido, it's not necessary to beat ourselves up or derive a complicated psychological explanation.

The problem is due to a very simple mental model that explains how systems are regulated through feedback loops: Homeostasis.

Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it's for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed-and it's a very good thing they do. Just think about it: if your body temperature moved up or down by 10 percent, you'd be in big trouble. The same thing applies to your blood-sugar level and to any number of other functions of your body.
This condition of equilibrium, this resistance to change, is called homeostasis. It characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture-and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning.
The simplest example of homeostasis can be found in your home heating system. The thermostat on the wall senses the room temperature; when the temperature on a winter's day drops below the level you've set, the thermostat sends an electrical signal that turns the heater on. The heater completes the loop by sending heat to the room in which the thermostat is located. When the room temperature reaches the level you've set, the thermostat sends an electrical signal back to the heater, turning it off, thus maintaining homeostasis. Keeping a room at the right temperature takes only one feedback loop. Keeping even the simplest single-celled organism alive and well takes thousands. And maintaining a human being in a state of homeostasis takes billions of interweaving electrochemical signals pulsing in the brain, rushing along nerve fibers, coursing through the bloodstream. One example: each of us has about 150,000 tiny thermostats in the form of nerve endings close to the surface of the skin that are sensitive to the loss of heat from our bodies, and another sixteen thousand or so a little deeper in the skin that alert us to the entry of heat from without.

An even more sensitive thermostat resides in the hypothalamus at the base of the brain, close to branches of the main artery that brings blood from the heart to the head. This thermostat can pick up even the tiniest change of temperature in the blood. When you start getting cold, these thermostats signal the sweat glands, pores, and small blood vessels near the surface of the body to close down. Glandular activity and muscle tension cause you to shiver in order to produce more heat, and your senses send a very clear message to your brain, leading you to keep moving, to put on more clothes, to cuddle closer to someone, to seek shelter, or to build a fire.

Homestasis seems to be the rule when it comes to systems, yet we often forget about it, or think we're not subject to a simple law of nature. But we needn't totally despair. Homeostasis is often quite positive, and it keeps systems alive and well. Our bodies wouldn't work without it, nor would our social systems.

Homeostasis in social groups brings additional feedback loops into play. Families stay stable by means of instruction, exhortation, punishment, privileges, gifts, favors, signs of approval and affection, and even by means of extremely subtle body language and facial expressions. Social groups larger than the family add various types of feedback systems. A national culture, for example, is held together by the legislative process, law enforcement, education, the popular arts, sports and games, economic rewards that favor certain types of activity, and by a complex web of mores, prestige markers, celebrity role modeling, and style that relies largely on the media as a national nervous system. Although we might think that our culture is mad for the new, the predominant function of all this-as with the feedback loops in your body-is the survival of things as they are.

The problem is that homeostasis, like natural selection and like life itself, is undirected and does not have a "value system" - it doesn't keep what's good and reject what's bad. It's just like inertia: It's a simple algorithim that keeps things in motion as they were.

Let's say, for instance, that for the last twenty years-ever since high school, in fact-you've been almost entirely sedentary. Now most of your friends are working out, and you figure that if you can't beat the fitness revolution, you'll join it. Buying the tights and running shoes is fun, and so are the first few steps as you start jogging on the high school track near your house. Then, about a third of the way around the first lap, something terrible happens. Maybe you're suddenly sick to your stomach. Maybe you're dizzy. Maybe there's a strange, panicky feeling in your chest. Maybe you're going to die. No, you're going to die.

What's more, the particular sensations you're feeling probably aren't significant in themselves. What you're really getting is a homeostatic alarm signal-bells clanging, lights flashing. Warning! Warning! Significant changes in respiration, heart rate, metabolism. Whatever you're doing, stop doing it immediately. Homeostasis, remember, doesn't distinguish between what you would call change for the better and change for the worse. It resists all change. After twenty years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary style of life as "normal"; the beginning of a change for the better is interpreted as a threat. So you walk slowly back to your car, figuring you'll look around for some other revolution to join.

Leonard does provide a few possible solutions, or at least an approach to the homeostasis problem. The good thing is that homeostasis isn't all-powerful, it's simply a force that we must work with. He offers five ways to approach the issue:

1. Be aware of the way homeostasis works. This might be the most important guideline of all. Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn't necessarily mean you're sick or crazy or lazy or that you've made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing-just what you've wanted. Of course, it might be that you have started something that's not right for you; only you can decide. But in any case, don't panic and give up at the first sign of trouble. You might also expect resistance from friends and family and co-workers. (Homeostasis, as we've seen, applies to social systems as well as individuals.) Say you used to struggle out of bed at 7:30 and barely drag yourself to work at 9:00. Now that you're on a path of mastery, you're up at 6:00 for a three-mile run, and in the office, charged with energy, at 8:30. You might figure that your co-workers would be overjoyed, but don't be too sure. And when you get home, still raring to go, do you think that your family will welcome the change? Maybe. Bear in mind that an entire system has to change when any part of it changes. So don't be surprised if some of the people you love start covertly or overtly undermining your self-improvement. It's not that they wish you harm, it's just homeostasis at work.

2. Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. So what should you do when you run into resistance, when the red lights flash and the alarm bells ring? Well, you don't back off, and you don't bull your way through. Negotiation is the ticket to successful long-term change in everything from increasing your running speed to transforming your organization. The long-distance runner working for a faster time on a measured course negotiates with homeostasis by using pain not as an adversary but as the best possible guide to performance. The change oriented manager keeps his or her eyes and ears open for signs of dissatisfaction or dislocation, then plays the edge of discontent, the inevitable escort of transformation. The fine art of playing the edge in this case involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa. It also demands a determination to keep pushing, but not without awareness. Simply turning off your awareness to the warnings deprives you of guidance and risks damaging the system. Simply pushing your way through despite the warning signals increases the possibility of backsliding. You can never be sure exactly where the resistance will pop up. A feeling of anxiety? Psychosomatic complaints? A tendency toward self-sabotage? Squabbles with family, friends, or fellow workers? None of the above? Stay alert. Be prepared for serious negotiations.

3. Develop a support system. You can do it alone, but it helps a great deal to have other people with whom you can share the joys and perils of the change you're making. The best support system would involve people who have gone through or are going through a similar process, people who can tell their own stories of change and listen to yours, people who will brace you up when you start to backslide and encourage you when you don't. The path of mastery, fortunately, almost always fosters social groupings. In his seminal book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga comments upon the tendency of sports and games to bring people together. The play community, he points out, is likely to continue even after the game is over, inspired by "the feeling of being 'apart together' in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms." The same can be said about many other pursuits, whether or not they are formally known as sports-arts and crafts, hunting, fishing, yoga, Zen, the professions, "the office." And what if your quest for mastery is a lonely one? What if you can find no fellow voyagers on that particular path? At the least, you can let the people close to you know what you're doing, and ask for their support.

4. Follow a regular practice. People embarking on any type of change can gain stability and comfort through practicing some worthwhile activity on a more or less regular basis, not so much for the sake of achieving an external goal as simply for its own sake. A traveler on the path of mastery is again fortunate, for practice in this sense (as I've said more than once) is the foundation of the path itself. The circumstances are particularly happy in case you've already established a regular practice in something else before facing the challenge and change of beginning a new one. It's easier to start applying the principles of mastery to your profession or your primary relationship if you've already established a regular morning exercise program. Practice is a habit, and any regular practice provides a sort of underlying homeostasis, a stable base during the instability of change.

5. Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. We tend to forget that learning is much more than book learning. To learn is to change. Education, whether it involves books, body, or behavior, is a process that changes the learner. It doesn't have to end at college graduation or at age forty or sixty or eighty, and the best learning of all involves learning how to learn- that is, to change. The lifelong learner is essentially one who has learned to deal with homeostasis, simply because he or she is doing it all the time. The Dabbler, Obsessive, and Hacker are all learners in their own fashion, but lifelong learning is the special province of those who travel the path of mastery, the path that never ends.

Still Interested? Check out the classic (short) book in its entirety: Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment.

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At some time or another, we've all sought to make big changes. And almost of all of us have, after making grand plans, discovered that changing some aspect of our lives or organizations, whether adding in a new skill or simply changing an old process, resulted in great backsliding.

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Are we trying to build strategic thinking when we enjoy thinking about the future or potential scenarios?  Gallup Strengthfinder may help identify those potential strengths.

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Now, Discover Your Strengths - Wikipedia

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StrengthsFinder (or Now, Discover Your Strengths ) is a self-help book written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, first published in 2001. At the heart of the book is the internet based "Clifton Strengths Finder," an online personal assessment test that outlines the user's strengths.

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2. Have you created the right sort of goals for your learning

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2. Have you created the right sort of goals for your learning

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Implementation intention goals work more effectively than performance goals."implementation intentions take goal intentions a step further. A goal intention denotes an intention to reach a certain outcome or behavior, whereas an implementation intention denotes an intention to perform a particular goal-directed behavior when a specific situation is encountered. For example, a goal intention might be to improve interpersonal skills, whereas an implementation intention might be “when I meet with my direct reports, I will rephrase their statements before I express my opinion to ensure that I am listening and I understand their concerns.”" (from "An Integrative Approach to Leader Development: Connecting Adult Development, Identity, and Expertise" by David V. Day, Michelle M. Harrison, Stanley M. Halpin)

Start reading it for free: http://amzn.to/24NA1KE

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An Integrative Approach to Leader Development: Connecting Adult Development, Identity, and Expertise

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Quote shared via Kindle: "implementation intentions take goal intentions a step further. A goal intention denotes an intention to reach a certain outcome or behavior, whereas an implementation intention denotes an intention to perform a particular goal-dire...

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Learning information is made easier when we chunk information into groups or categories. Keep it to 4 items and relate it to existing knowledge. Repetition using different approaches builds long term memory.

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One of the proudest moments this blog has brought me was discovering the search term that has brought me the most new readers from Google is "how to learn," closely followed by "learning techniques" and the inspiration for this post - "learning how to learn." My post titled: " The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn!" has been read hundreds of thousands of times (far more than most of my posts) and many of these readers come from Google - unlike the majority of my readers who typically arrive here after my regular readers share my posts on Facebook and Twitter ( for which I am eternally grateful).

The runaway success of this post implies that the headline was not much of an exaggeration. Most of us really never did get taught evidence based learning techniques. If we did get taught learning techniques, what we were taught probably wasn't actually backed by any research evidence, we were likely told to use techniques such as highlighting, summarizing and rereading that have been handed down unquestioningly through the ages and been shown to be comparatively ineffective.

Now, just in time for Christmas, a completely free course has been put together titled: Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects. The course which is offered by The University of California San Diego is four weeks long and begins on 2nd January 2015. Watch the creator of the UC San Diego course, Barbara Oakley, give a taster on the science of how to learn below:

If you're stuck for what to get someone this Christmas, or you missed the Christmas post, I can't think of a better (or a cheaper) gift than the gift of how to learn!

Footnote: I have no affiliation with UC San Diego or TEDx and I have not been paid or asked to promote this course - I discovered it through serendipity, will be taking it myself and wanted to share it with my readers.

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One of the proudest moments this blog has brought me was discovering the search term that has brought me the most new readers from Google is "how to learn," closely followed by "learning techniques" and the inspiration for this post - "learning how to learn."

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Changing behaviour may mean changing well worn habits. Our habits have a Cue, Routine and Reward as Charles Duhigg explains in The Power of Habits. We need to recognise the cue, provide an alternative routine and associate the reward wit this new approach

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A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern-and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees-how they approach worker safety-and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation's largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren't destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

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A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed. Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds.

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2. 70/20/10 It's not all about the training program..in fact perhaps only 10%  so what's the rest?

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2. 70/20/10 It's not all about the training program..in fact perhaps only 10%  so what's the rest?

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If 70% of development is experiences on the job, new projects, assignments, new problems and working with new people, teams, roles and challenges then how are we leveraging this in the training? Are we using action centred learning/adaptive learning approaches that APPLY learning by DOING business projects.

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From Farnam Street http://bit.ly/chgstep
There is an interesting short book by Robert Maurer called, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way; in it, he uses his experiences as a clinical psychologist using something called Kaizen to help people make changes in their lives.

Kaizen has two definitions:

Using very smalls steps to improve a habit, a process, or product.

Using very small moments to inspire new products and inventions.

For this discussion let’s focus on using it to help remove roadblocks to the behavior we are seeking, or to add roadblocks to behavior we are trying to discourage. As Maurer puts it, “using small steps to accomplish large goals.”

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2. What is holding us back from changing?Why change?

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2. What is holding us back from changing?Why change?

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Are there assumptions that are resisting the change? Refer to the Immunity to Change book by Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey.
See http://bit.ly/RKeegan

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An Evening with Robert Kegan and Immunity to Change

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Prof. Robert Kegan sets up the environment for an inquiry on how come there is a gap between a person's real intention to change and what the person actually does. He recalls an illustration in which heart doctors advise their patients to take their medications as prescribed or literally die.

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3. Sustaining a new behaviour until it becomes a habit

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3. Sustaining a new behaviour until it becomes a habit

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As Marshall Goldsmith writes in "Taking it to the Next Level" we can track the behaviours we want to change and use that data to get better.
Daily tracking of key behaviours increases the likelihood of success

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Most Dysfunctional Belief of Successful People !

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When we presume that we are better than people who need structure and guidance, we lack one of the most crucial ingredients for change: humility. #1 Most Dysfunctional Belief of Successful People! By Marshall Goldsmith One of the most dysfunctional beliefs of successful people is our contempt for simplicity and structure.

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If you want to build a skill then understanding the skill components and having specific routines to build those skills with an intensity level to match your goals is necessary. Interleaving practice (mixed skills) has been found to be more effective than solely focussing on one aspect.

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3. Do we use our time wisely and create space for learning?

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3. Do we use our time wisely and create space for learning?

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Arnold Bennett’s book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day as summarised on farnamstreet asks us to consider how we invest this most precious resource.

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***

Despite having been published in 1910, Arnold Bennett's book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day remains a valuable resource on living a meaningful life within the constraints of time. In the book, Bennett addresses one of our oldest questions: how can we make the best use of our lives? How can we make the best use of our time?

Bennett begins by reflecting on our counterintuitive tendency to value money over time. This is a topic which has been discussed as far back as the Stoics, and more recently by the financial independence movement. He writes:

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum...but I have never seen an essay 'how to live on 24 hours a day.' Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time, you can obtain money-usually. But...you cannot buy yourself a minute more time.

Next, he urges people to realize what a wonder it is that our daily allocation of time appears anew each time we wake:

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours.

Bennett's original audience consisted of working people of slim means, used to structuring their lives around money. For this reason, he uses money as a metaphor for time, to make the abstract concepts seem more real:

You cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow, it is kept from you.

You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. It's right use...is a matter of the highest urgency.

Perhaps one of the starkest and most memorable lines in the book is this:

We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is.

Bennett strongly encourages his readers to pursue their dreams, even if they fail. When we listen to the regrets of the elderly and dying, they invariably lament on what they neglected to do, not what they did. It is, however, the trying which matters, the journey which fulfills us:

A man may desire to go to Mecca... He fares forth...he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he reaches Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the cost of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrated. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who...never leaves Brixton.

There is no magic bullet, no secret way to find more time. We see the desire to find one today, as people chase time management techniques which promise to free up more hours in the day:

I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect anyone else to find it. It is undiscovered... there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony and the worst part is that you never get there after all.

This could be discouraging but it's not. Bennett encourages us to focus on how we can use our time to improve ourselves, stating that it is never too late:

You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

The idea that you can reinvent yourself each hour of the day is liberating. We get stuck in ruts and tell ourselves that we cannot change because we are too old, too young, too poor, too tied down. These are only excuses. They absolve us from responsibility. Bennett reminds us that just as money can be spent on anything, so can time. And, as Seneca reminded us, most of us fail to understand time until it's too late.

Bennett foreshadows modern research on habit change and personal development, which urges people to start small:

Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own... a glorious failure is better than a petty success.

Having set the stage, Bennett begins to discuss exactly how much time his audience has available to them. It is a simple fact that most of us believe we work for far more hours than we do - the average person's estimate of their work week is out by 20 hours. Most workers are only productive for 3 hours a day. (the rest is spent on social media, gossiping and so on.) You can indeed get more done by working less.

You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earning your livelihood - how much? Seven hours on the average. And in sleep, seven? I will add another two to be generous. And I will defy you to account for me the other 8 hours on the spur of the moment.

We all know the odd feeling of time passing without us noticing. We have all looked up on a Sunday evening, baffled as to where the day went. We have all arrived home at 6 pm and found that by the time we make dinner and shower, it is suddenly midnight.

Looking at the example of the average office worker at the time, Bennett reflects on our skewed attitude to work. We view our hours at work as our day and the rest as a margin. (Another example of how we fail to understand time.)

He persists in looking at the hours from 10 to 6 as 'the day' to which the 10 hours proceeding and the 6 hours following are an epilogue and prologue ... this general attitude is illogical and unhealthy.

Next, Bennett laments the practice, ubiquitous of the time, of spending the morning commute reading the newspaper. We can apply his statements to the newspapers modern equivalent: social media. No doubt you have seen pictures of the past where a train carriage is full of people reading newspapers. Today the buses and subways are full of people on their telephones.

You calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry...your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are 124 hours in the day...I cannot possibly allow you to scatter such precious pearls of time with Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time.

If you have ever known someone who complains of being time poor, yet scrolls Facebook with all the ease of a cat watching dust particles, you can doubtless relate to Bennett's frustration. The number one question I receive from readers is how can I find more time to read? There is a simple answer but it involves tradeoffs that most of us are unwilling to make. It means putting reading and learning and growing ahead of the immediate gratification of social media. To waste vast swathes of time mindlessly consuming the day's information is a bizarre concept to anyone who shares his attitude. Depending on the activity, The Red Queen of time is indeed formidable.

(In case you're wondering how I square this view of time squandering on newspapers with the fact you're reading a wesbite right now, allow me to explain the difference. Newspapers are focused on things that change. You can't run fast enough to keep up with this world and yet while you may think it's valuable the information you receive is full of noise. Farnam Street focuses on helping you learn things that don't change over time - It's an investment. What you learn today becomes the scaffolding to solving tomorrow's problem.)

Bennett describes the average person's evening which has changed little in the last century.

You are pale and tired...in an hour or so you sit up and feel you could take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously, you see friends, you potter, you play cards, you flirt with a book, you take a stroll, you caress the piano...by jove! A quarter past eleven.

Replace seeing friends for texting them, cards for video games, a book for a movie, a stroll for a trip to the gym and that is how most of us spend our evenings. Worn out by work, we flirt between whichever diversion seems interesting, dumping it when it begins to require focus. Then, suddenly it is time to sleep. Another day is over. But tomorrow will be different, right? Not without a concentrated effort, it won't.

Bennett remarks on how different our evenings are when we have something specific to do and urges us to find specific diversions more often:

When you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman), what happens? You rush...you go. Friends and fatigue have been equally forgotten and the evening has seemed so long...can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy - the thought of that something gives a glow and more intense energy to the whole day?

Next, come some specific instructions on how we should spend our evenings. Bennett, echoing Machiavelli's ideas, suggests employing an hour and a half each evening for cultivating the mind, which still leaves 45 hours a week for errands, adventure, and seeing friends. This is a practice which we can all employ if only we'd stop the mindless diversions of Netflix and Snapchat and exchange the time for a concentrated effort on something meaningful.

My contention is that those 7 and a half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations.

The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatsoever happens to us outside our brains, since nothing hurts us or give us pleasure except within our brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on inside the mysterious brain is patent... people complain of the lack of the power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power if they chose...mind control is the first element of a full existence.

Bennett advocates an exercise which has much in common with mindfulness meditation, an idea which had yet to reach the country:

When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what to begin with.) You will not have gone ten paces before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is lurking around the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back 40 times. Do not despair. Keep it up. You will succeed.

As a subject to focus on, he recommends the works of the Stoics, which is still an ideal choice for personal study.

How can we, a century later in a somewhat different world, take Bennett's advice?

It's quite simple. His messages are uncomplicated, despite being wrapped up in his somewhat difficult to understand prose. For starters, we can stop viewing our work as our lives and learn to distinguish the two or intertwine them. We can plan specific pursuits for our spare time, rather than flitting it away. We can take stock of how much free time we actually have and where it is going. Then, we can structure those hours and minutes to ensure they are used for something meaningful. We can stop using all our spare time to consume stimulating information that changes quickly and focus on things that last. Instead, we can set aside blocks of time (guarded well) for working on our minds.

Unsurprisingly, the best way to improve ourselves is by reading. Books enable us to add the lives of other people onto our own. They are the most effective means humanity has found of making our lives meaningful, no matter how little time is available.

If you're looking to expand on these ideas, other books on the same topic which compliment this one include On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and Martin Eden by Jack London.

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How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life

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Despite having been published in 1910, Arnold Bennett's book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day remains a valuable resource on living a meaningful life within the constraints of time. In the book, Bennett addresses one of our oldest questions: how can we make the best use of our lives?

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4. How do we measure the effectiveness of our learning and change efforts?

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4. How do we measure the effectiveness of our learning and change efforts?

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Whilst that may depend on what we were trying to change there are some structures that help such as Kirkpatrick's four levels.
Level 4 To what degree targeted outcomes occur as a result of the learning event(s) and subsequent reinforcement
Level 3  To what degree participants apply what they learned during the training when they are back on the job
Level 2 To what degree participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills and attitudes based on their participation in the learning event
Level 1 To what degree participants react favorably to the learning event

http://bit.ly/Kirk4levels

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kirkpatrick's four levels of training evaluation

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Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation

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Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation

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4. Development approaches that can help you improve

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4. Development approaches that can help you improve

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Some great ideas on ways to plan your deve

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One of the most important things you can do to nurture and retain talent is provide them with personal development opportunities. This can encompass anything from leadership training or building a new skill, to simply pursuing a passion that inspires an employee in and out of the workplace.

But personal development is not one-size-fits-all: In a Forbes article, Joe Folkman writes that most individual personal development plans fail because they're not driven by the individual and his or her interests.

Members of Forbes Coaches Council share 13 ways managers can show support for their employees' personal development initiatives, while still giving them the autonomy they need to grow in their own way.
1. Create Growth Plans 2. Build In 'Growth Time' 3. Set 90-Day Learning Goals 4. Offer Innovative Learning Experiences 5. Map Out The Far-Reaching Benefits 6. Make Development Opportunities 'One Size Fits One'
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13 Ways To Regularly Support Your Employees' Personal Development

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One of the most important things you can do to nurture and retain talent is provide them with personal development opportunities. This can encompass anything from leadership training or building a new skill, to simply pursuing a passion that inspires an employee in and out of the workplace.