Although already some time ago, I'd like to say a few words about this wonderful pilot event which I co-hosted in March 2016: Levelling Up 2016!
In short, coordinated by James Brooks (Developing Cognition), five of us got together and created a day of workshop sessions all centred around the idea of personal development: making learning easy, taking small steps, creating habits, and having fun while doing so.
My main take-away from the day was the importance of approaching personal development from lots of different angles and letting different approaches complement each other.
In short, coordinated by James Brooks (Developing Cognition), five of us got together and created a day of workshop sessions all centred around the idea of personal development: making learning easy, taking small steps, creating habits, and having fun while doing so.
My main take-away from the day was the importance of approaching personal development from lots of different angles and letting different approaches complement each other.
The day was made up of the following main workshops:
Goal Achievement - Tools to make what we want to achieve easy, accessible, routine.
Decision-Making - Tools to make thoughtful and informed decisions.
Happiness - A talk on what makes us happy and how we can contribute to our own happiness.
Mindfulness - Tools for more awareness of our body, mind and core values.
Communication - Tools to extract, value, and build on ideas during conversations.
The five topics were all linked together, looking at being mindful about who we are, what is going on at the present time and what makes us happy, making sure our actions are in keeping with our core values, exploring how our goals can best be achieved, what decisions we need to take and how we can have conversations that are in line with our intentions and contribute to our undertakings.
The whole day was designed with a solution focus and every session was a mixture of theory and practice. Our participants got to work on their own goals and also engage with each other.
Each one of us easily had enough material to run at least a half day workshop, so this was a taste of our five approaches. Our aim was to provide our attendees with many different tools which they can pick and choose to apply immediately to fit their own style of learning and living.
I believe that having this choice and breadth of options is important, as no two people are the same. We do not all have the same goals, habits, or problems in life and there is no fixed formula of how to best develop ourselves. Also, we can get very used to one style of learning, be it based on theory or practice. The first half of the day was mainly cognitive, while the second half was much more body focused and intuitive. This meant that there was something familiar and also something new for everyone.
As facilitators, we all participated in each others' sessions and we follow up with each other to see how we have been applying our new learning to our own lives. I enjoyed the day very much and hope that we will put together another one in the near future.