9. Personal Development

Question 1

What are techniques for minimising the impact of your weaknesses?

Answer 1

• Compensating for a weakness or lack of skills in some areas
• Avoiding/masking: Avoiding situations in which a weakness is particularly dangerous or hiding the weakness
• Leveraging strengths, rather than trying to improve weaknesses
• Love your flaws: Turning flaws into strengths (or a personal trademark) by selectively exposing allowable weaknesses and focusing on what is special about oneself

Question 2

What is ‘exposure’?

Answer 2

Putting yourself in the challenging situation, to overcome fears. E.g. arachnophobia exposure therapy - fear response usually remains dormant 6 mths later

Question 3

What is key to personal development?

Answer 3

Training to help people break old behavioural habits and establish new ones: requires an individualised
sed approach (professional coaching, peer coaching, observation) and a lot of practice and feedback (role-play, on the job, video-tapes) until it becomes automatic.

Question 4

What are the two stages of personal development?

Answer 4

1. Self-awareness and developmental readiness. Requires a sense of autonomy in your decision to change: Decide the WHAT, the WHY, and the HOW
2. Learn new habits. Force the brain to think in new patterns to deliberately overcome the automatic response (and become part of your personality).

The more instinctive a behaviour becomes, the less self-control from the rider it requires, and the more sustainable it becomes.

Question 5

How can someone build habits?

Answer 5

1. Emphasise the feeling of being ‘almost there’ (e.g. maids experiment). Pay attention to moments in which you break your automatic patterns of behaviour. This increases feeling that you are already there
2. Shrink the change. Create small wins within immediate reach → Confidence. Big changes come from a succession of small changes
3. Be specific: what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. In the face of ambiguity and uncertainty: we paralyse and go back to default patterns of behaviour
4. Inflection points: have instructions on how to deal with inflection points (challenges), and practice the chosen behaviour until it becomes automatic

Question 6

Explain the impact of willpower on personal development

Answer 6

Bad habits are hard to break. Our willpower depends on our pre-frontal cortex (PFC), which has too many other things to worry about. PFC gets tired and needs time-off.
Pay attention to times when it is exhausted, as we are more likely to fall back into old behavioural patterns.

Question 7

What are some hindering habits of our mind?

Answer 7

→ Filtering
→ Polarised thinking
→ Over-generalisation
→ Mind reading
→ Catastrophising/magnifying
→ ‘Shoulds’

Question 8

What is mindfulness?

Answer 8

Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally;

A different way of relating to our thoughts and feelings that gives us the ability to pause before we react

Mindfulness is a habit. We can observe our thoughts, rather than reacting to them.

Awareness. Acceptance.

Question 9

How can mindfulness impact on HRM?

Answer 9

1. Leadership and Influence
   - Active listening and understanding others
   - Leaving ego aside/ Reducing automatic tendency to want to control and push others
   - Manage stress better
2. Decision Making (individually and in groups)
   - Overcome “default” tendencies
   - Catch one‘s own biases and allow oneself to correct for them
   - Active listening and understanding others (reduce pushing one‘s views and control for effect group decision making)
3. Diversity issues
   - See beyond “categories” of people
   - Realise one‘s implicit associations and overcome them
   - Reduced tendency to judge and dislike what is “different”