2012 International Year of Resilience – top 10 Tips
In thinking about the year ahead I’ve decided to call it the International Year of Resilience. With everything that appears to be going on in the world there’s unlikely to be any quick fixes and so I provide for you here below, my Top 10 Tips for building more resilience into your lives. If you want to follow and contribute to the Twitter conversation, please use the following tag #2102YearofResilience. Tip 1: Be Productive, not ‘busy’ – you can’t be both.
From what I can tell, busy people are RARELY productive. So stop doing all that stuff that makes no difference or even harms your productivity.
Tip 2: Understand that variations to your times-lines are likely. This tip reminds us that what we expect might need to change because things might take longer or happen quicker than what we anticipate
Tip 3: If you haven’t thought about a preferred and realistic future outcome, you have no right to complain when you don’t like what you end up with. Don’t think I need to explain that one further, though I know some people will complain all the same!
Tip 4: Planning is NOT execution. But without it you might bet better off NOT executing at all. So think and prepare is the key here because acting without thinking first might put you in a far deeper hole than you really want to be in!
Tip 5: Resilience means to have the ability to bounce back into shape. From what? From the ‘impact’ of unexpected outcomes and the occasional surprise. The more you’ve thought about potential outcomes, the better prepared you are likely to be and the less need for resilience.
Tip 6: Make sure your expectations are realistic – base them on a wide array of information. If your expectations are realistic you’ll rarely be disappointed but if not…
Tip 7: Your Future is a negotiation with yourself and with others. It will almost NEVER arrive in a smooth & straight line Remember that there are stops and starts and diversions is every part of your life – that’s what makes your life interesting!
Tip 8: It might be frustrating but it’s probably not really a disaster. This tip reminds us to take a breath remember tips two and seven, to then think about options and then act
Tip 9: Stuck? You can overcome your current challenges – It may need persistence and it might also require you to come up with a new plan. Your future is about options. People who lack resilience have often run out of options or (as is more likely) can’t think of alternatives. Tip 10 can help here too
Tip 10: Ask for help and then ALLOW people to help you in ways that they know how. One of the biggest hurdles we face is our belief that we have to do it alone. For others they ask for help but then insist their ‘helpers’ do things the way they want them done.
So there’s my quick tips for 2012 International year of Resilience. I’d love to find out your tips too so Twitter in at #rightfuture using the tag #2012YearofResilience
Columbia University’s Earth Institute have just made publicly available their World Happiness Report, joining the expanding list of happiness reports emerging ultimately from Bhutan’s Happiness Index. There’s some interesting results in this one and some that you might expect were more obvious, like the idea that at a certain point, more money won’t make you…
Read More >Whilst the main thrust of Australian economic activity is said to be in the hands of the Federal Government, we should not overlook the significant role that Local Council Government’s can have. As the Federal Government wrestles with falling taxation revenues and an apparent inability to get the message across about distributing the income of…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber chats with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Radio Darwin about the challenges facing the Northern Territory, the farming and mining sectors. In summing up the emerging signs of a clash between agricultural uses of land and land use for resource and mining needs, Marcus uses the phrase ‘Eat or Extract’ as the…
Read More >As most of you know I nominated this year as the 2012 International Year of Resilience because frankly, that’s what I reckon large chunks of the world need right now. The twitter feed is #2012YearofResilience. I sent a few of these tips out at the start of the year and have seen a few of…
Read More >A new city is due to emerge in Darwin over the coming couple of years and the key question is – what sort of attention is being paid to weather related disasters in the design phase? Paul Dale on ABC Radio Darwin chats with futurist Marcus Barber about planning and weather. You can download the…
Read More >Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’ is best known for its second verse – “I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains”. As vast tracts of Australia again face the prospect of massive floods I wonder if our Urban Planners ever consider the significance of…
Read More >Potentially the biggest area of untapped competitive advantage (and arguably one of the biggest areas where costs could be reduced) is within supply chains. Most approaches to Supply Chain Management are linear and isolated with one player trying to squeeze the other with no regard to the overall effect of the full supply chain. It’s…
Read More >There’s a shift underway in the mining industry that will likely catch Australian airlines out if they aren’t paying attention – the shift toward ‘remote’ mining. Remote mining is being pushed by the automation ability across all aspects of current mining technology, which at the basic level, means that fewer humans are needed on site…
Read More >Simple question really. Or is it? In this quick article I provide an overview of the difference between strategy that is D.E.A.D and A.L.I.V.E Think of it as a potential ‘do this’ collection for your Organisation You can download the article for free here – ‘Is your Organisational Strategy D.E.A.D or A.L.I.V.E?’
Read More >Lots of thoughts for the year already underway, with some covering a range of ideas from ‘don’t cut corners on relative incidentals when the project is significant for you’ to ‘you can’t change your approach if you keep thinking inside the same box’. But for now a reminder about planning for your future: If you…
Read More >