Welcome to the first in Dr Richard MacKinnon's series of articles exploring the reasons we don’t take action when it comes to our own development.
WiseAmigo is an app designed with personal and professional development in mind. Yet simply installing it on your iPhone may not be enough to kick-start your journey.
So what could be stopping you?
Over the next few blog posts, I’ll explore the importance of addressing the following factors:
Values: knowing what’s important to you in life.
This is all about ensuring values guide your actions, not passing thoughts or fleeting emotions. The volatility of emotions in particular make them a poor decision-making tool. So getting clear on your values can help jump-start your development journey.
Discomfort: learning to live with the discomfort of change.
If we focus on the difficulty of change, we’re more likely to find reasons to not make it. Instead, we can learn to live with the discomfort involved in changing and focus on our goals.
Procrastination: the self-sabotage of leaving it to the future.
We procrastinate when we irrationally delay important activities until it’s too late to do them properly. You may well feel safe delaying your development for now, but is there any rational reason you haven’t made a start already?
Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine each of these perspectives, hopefully providing you with some insights to help you take the next steps on your personal development journey.
Richard is a Chartered Psychologist and Coach and is the Managing Director of WorkLifePsych, a team of workplace psychologists specialising in people development. They provide coaching, development programmes and training to employees globally, across a range of industries. Richard is particularly interested in the three complementary themes of wellbeing, productivity and professional effectiveness.
Richard co-hosts the fortnightly podcast My Pocket Psych alongside Pilar Orti of WorkLifePsych. Each episode focuses on an aspect of working life and attempts to bring clarity by translating the science into something listeners can put into action. Click here to listen now: worklifepsych.com/podcast.
Development is a journey. The WiseAmigo app and community are here to help you along the way. Join the WiseAmigo community, create a Spotlight, discover more insightful content and reflect on your development journey today!
