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
In this chat with Vicki Kerrigan on radio ABC Darwin we discuss the future of sex. This is the first of potentially three conversations where we look at the increasing reach of technology way beyond current online match making sites, the social pressures driving the use of technology as well as the use of technology…
Read More >There’s been a bit of discussion in recent months about a softening housing market around Australia but I wonder how much of it is more indicative of unrealistic expectations on behalf of sellers? In futures work we think in terms of Assumptions and Expectations and aim to test our understanding and so I offer this…
Read More >Unfortunately it looks like my main email address has been hijacked and has been used to send out a series of spam emails. I’d like to apologise to anyone who has received some junk email purporting to come from ‘desiredfutures’ with a series of html links asking you to go and have a look. You…
Read More >Given the amount of plastic swimming in our oceans and rivers and the volume littering our land, the NT Government is aiming to introduce compulsory returns legislation on soft-drink bottles (as happens in South Australia), something that has apparently raised the ire of bottler, Coca Cola. Although they’ve recently backed away from their initial statement…
Read More >Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common…
Read More >Vicki Kerrigan and I finished off our discussion about the Future of Clothing on ABC Darwin yesterday. We discussed invisibility style cloaks, singlets that monitor your heart rate and stress levels, runners that capture electricity to power your wearable electronics and a few philosophical questions regarding our ability to deal with stress. The file…
Read More >I’ll be talking with Vicki Kerrigan again this afternoon, this time discussing robotics as in-home carers. I’m due on at about 4.45pm Darwin time which is around 5.15pm on the eastern seaboard. You can listen to the audio stream via the link below http://www.abc.net.au/darwin/programs/webcam_radio.htm?ref=listenlive If all things go well, I’ll record the session and…
Read More >I recently attended a session with South East Business Networks where the CEO of Siemens Australasia provided some great ideas as to where Australian Manufacturing was headed and could go, and indeed perhaps needed to go. What I found most useful from Allan Goller’s perspective was the encouragement for businesses to just get on with…
Read More >In this very brief chat with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Darwin, we kick off the discussion of the future of clothing – not the ‘style’ elements but the functional elements like capturing perspiration to convert for water. You can listen to the audio via the link available here – cue it up about a…
Read More >Marcus Barber will present the case study of his work with Central Highlands Water and their use of Scenarios for Strategy setting at World Water Week in Stockholm this Thursday. You can follow the twitter feed via #watermanagement, #rightfuture or #wwweek This case study looks at the flaws in a reliance on forecasting as the…
Read More >