Developing the Habits of Highly Innovative People
To quickly recap, I decided at the beginning of this week to conduct some Action Research focusing on how to develop some personal skills of innovation and adopted as my framework, the 7 Habits of Highly Innovative People. I thought I would focus on one habit each week and report back.
The theme of this first week has been Persistence. At the start of the week I felt a structured approach would be helpful and decided to apply the idea of persistence to some goals in the short, medium and long term.
My short term goal was to be more persistent towards drinking more water (I thought this could only be a good thing and good for my health too). How could I develop a more persistent approach to my water-drinking behaviour? I’ve tried to do this in the past but failed, I just seem to forget to drink. Even having bottles of water on my desk or in my bag do not seem to have worked, so I thought this time I would resort to a slightly Pavlov approach. I set my iphone alarm during the day to remind me to drink water. It has worked in that I have drunk more water than I usually would in a week. Only time will tell if this behaviour has become habitual and whether I can disassociate the sound of my alarm with the need to drink water!
My medium term goal was to take a persistent approach to engaging more often with our social media strategies for our business development. As part of my plan I attended a workshop in the week at the British Library on the subject of Marketing and Social Media. I must admit at times during the workshop I felt rather over-whelmed by what is required to develop a good, effective strategy. My persistence is driven by the commitment to write these blog entries for the next 7 weeks and now that I’ve made that commitment, I intend to keep them going.
My longer term goal of persistence links to continuing to build a thriving business in these somewhat challenging economic times. ‘Seven Habits’ define persistence as not giving up, undertaking hard work and keep on keeping on, even in the face of adversity, rejection and sometimes feeling of getting nowhere. To me this is about developing a persistent attitude or mindset which I like to think I possess but every now and then it is worth doing a reality check. This week has provided me with some space and time to think about our goals, plans and opportunities. This time has been very useful for getting some projects back on track. So to coin a phrase, persistence is about keeping that glass half full, not half empty (that is if I remember to fill it in the first place!)
So next week the theme is Removing Self Limiting Inhibitions. Now, this could be fun!
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