˚isn’t it wonderful?
Posted on 26/10/2014. Last edited on 30/10/2014.
- post 2
Ariane Benefit calls her methodology the Agile Way.
S Small, simple, specific and sustainable
Agile goals fit your lifestyle and are small enough to integrate into your life without overwhelming you or your resources. They hit the sweet spot of feeling both challenging and doable. They incorporate the need to take time to become ready to act, and take into account the natural cycles of fluctuating motivation.
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M Meaningful, memorable, and magnetic
Agile goals are designed to connect small seemingly insignificant actions to meaningful, big picture emergent outcome goals such as “Improve my health” or “make more money.” In this way, even the most trivial of daily actions and habits become easier to act on. Agile goals connect even the tiniest of actions, including taking some time to think, to highly valuable and significant outcomes. Agile goals are stated briefly and simple enough to remember. You can visualize yourself doing each tiny step and you could even capture it with a video if you wanted to.
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A Aims for the agile zone
The agile zone is about establishing a full spectrum of expectations that range from a bare minimum, to good enough, to a challenging target of “ideal.” In the agile zone, standards are clarified and flexible enough to address the normal fluctuations of available time energy and other resources. Functioning in the agile zone includes shooting for ideals but also acknowledging the value of the full spectrum of good enough. Many things are worth doing imperfectly — While you are learning something new, your attempts may be clumsy, but they are still worthy of acknowledgement. Agile zone goals support optimal functioning because they encourage you to keep trying even when you aren’t getting it right yet. Goals that aim for the agile zone are attractive and motivating because they anticipate and allow for the inevitable setbacks, mistakes and even failures that are part of the process of achieving any goal. Instead of agonizing over setbacks and obstacles, setbacks become fuel for learning, creative iteration, and personal growth. Instead of spending a lot of energy trying to make things turn out a certain way, we spend more time creatively adapting tasks to fit the resources we have available and give ourselves credit for making an effort – even if we drop the ball, at least we tried to catch it. We trust that if we just keep working on catching it, eventually we will. Mistakes are a natural part of the process.
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R Relevant to emergent outcome goals and to satisfying multiple needs simultaneously (e.g. sensory, emotional, mental, creative, practical and functional needs)
Agile goals become increasingly meaningful and magnetic to us when we are clear about how they enable us to meet multiple needs simultaneously with one activity. Designing agile goals involves learning how to integrate needs so that you can accomplish more while actually doing less. Agile goals resolve conflicts between competing needs and values. For example, eating high quality, delicious nutritional food on a low budget is challenging. But that doesn’t mean we should completely sacrifice good tasting, good-for-you food to save money. You don’t have to choose between eating crap food all the time and saving money. Agile goals are creatively designed to meet long term needs at the same time our short-term needs are also also being satisfied. It requires a bit more creative problem-solving, but it is possible to learn how to integrate multiple needs into one goal.
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T Tweakable
Agile goals are easy to modify as needs change. Agile goals are open-ended enough that you could meet them in a number of ways. Rather than defining success in a narrow way, they offer targets that guide you in designing and improvising your way to achieving the intentions of your goals. Agile goals allow you to easily tweak them on the fly, as needed, when available resources change (such as time, attention, energy and money).
Tweakable agile goals are designed so that any part of the goal can be adapted, as needed, to meet the current conditions. The way the goal is stated ensures that that there is more than one way to succeed in making progress on your goal.
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The Agile Approach to S.M.A.R.T. Goals can be found here
The SMART Goal Setting acronym has been around a long time. It states goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely or Timeline Driven. The Agile Approach to S.M.A.R.T. Goal Setting is an updated way of setting goals that are designed to magnetize you into action. No forcing yourself required. to read more
S.M.A.R.T. is a useful acronym – but, it is often NOT a good fit for the most challenging and difficult goals. It’s a good start, but the conventional SMART model does not provide all the tools needed to master the art of using goals to change habits and enhance performance. There are times when an updated agile approach is what’s needed to make our goals more effective and more *user-friendly.”
“Agilizing” is a word I made up. I took the word agile and made it a verb to make it easier to articulate the complex process of becoming agile – which involves getting unstuck and getting into action in a need responsive, organic way. Agile is about being flexible and adjusting to the situation at hand in a way that produces helpful results. Agilizing is the process of making something that is rigid, stuck, or not working, into something that is more flexible, customizable and adjustable.
Getting caught in the yo-yo effect is a form of procrastination. It’s also a sign that your goal is somehow turning you off. Instead of trying harder, it’s time to shift gears, stop trying to “make” yourself do it, and start agilizing your goal till you are magnetized into action.
Agilizing a goal is the process of converting it from being rigid, stuck, or not working, into one that is more flexible, customizable and adjustable. Agilizing a goal is sifting out a clear. small, simple, first step that is capable of melting your resistance to it.
Agilizing a goal may involve:
Connecting with your heart’s true intention and needs behind the goal, Reducing the pressure to get it right, Respecting and addressing your heart’s innermost objections, and/or Figuring out how to go deeper than just wanting it really badly– you need to make it compelling – worth the trouble to get started.
to read more
Feeling productive, confident and respectful of yourself should not be the “prize you earn” for accomplishing everything on your goal list. In fact, the opposite is true.
Positive feelings about yourself are the fuel that enables you to figure out what really needs to be accomplished and be flexible about how you accomplish your goals.
Enjoying life in all its messy unpredictability is what gives you the drive to wake up every day, make meaning out of your messes, and go for what you want out of life even when progress is slow.
to read more
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Our brains are fast when we are inspired or generating our own ideas, but not so fast when trying to answer a question or to follow instructions. Ariane Benefit
The habit of “authenticating” your perceived limits and acknowledging yourself for subtle signs of progress is like turbo-charging your habit learning engine. Asking new questions is great, but acknowledging yourself for each attempt is how you get yourself to practice enough times to actually deepen the neural pathways of your experiences and learning to form the new habit. Ariane Benefit
Learning is easiest when you approach it as a challenging game where there is no wrong way to play. You get better and learn more every time you play – regardless of whether you win or lose. The most important criteria for your experiments in changing your habits is that you design the game so that there is NO WAY TO FAIL OR LOSE, only to improve your mastery Ariane Benefit
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Innovate and Iterate. We don’t learn by doing the same exact same thing over and over. Instead we learn best by “iterating.” Iterative learning means that you learn from each attempt, and next time do something a little different. So if one attempt doesn’t “work”, explore some tiny change you could make to the experiment to try next time and then see what happens.
The iterative approach makes all the difference in sustaining your fascination and intrigue. Instead of “grading” your performance as “pass” or “fail”, you are gathering feedback and using it to encourage yourself.
Ariane Benefit
Acknowledging yourself with a little victory dance, inner smile, or high five is like putting pavement on the new dirt road you just built. It makes it so much easier for you to travel that path again. Ariane Benefit
Each time you acknowledge yourself is like adding streetlights and signage systems that make it easier to go down that road again in the future. You can’t build the road in a day, but if you keep yourself busy focusing on celebrating each iteration, you will suddenly realize one day that you can barely remember what it felt like to automatically limit your possibilities. Ariane Benefit
That’s how learning keystone habits works – each layer of bricks is needed to make a house, but the foundation of the house is what makes it last. Once you have built the house, you rarely even notice the foundation. But the fact that the house is still standing is proof that the solid foundation is there AND that it was worth taking the time needed to build it. Ariane Benefit
Once you really master something, you often can’t remember what it felt like to not be able to do it. You may not even be to articulate how you do it. Can you remember not being able to walk, talk, or drive or ride a bike? It’s like that. It becomes a distant memory and a “non-issue” in your life. It becomes your new normal. Ariane Benefit
One of the amazing side benefits of learning how to teach yourself habits, is that you naturally reduce anxiety and overwhelm with very little effort. When you understand the VALUE of “forgetting,” you learn to let go of the fear of forgetting and start trusting the power of allowing what you have learned to become part of your “autopilot” habit mechanism. The more you “trust” in your deep learning process, the less you need to “know” things in your conscious mind in order to feel confident. That means you can actually welcome “forgetting” instead of being afraid you’ll forget
After all, are you ever afraid that you will forget to walk? Do you fear that unless you write down or can instantly articulate how you walk, that you might not remember how to walk again? Of course not. In fact, you have already learned so many habits that you can’t articulate AND can’t forget – it’s not even funny. Ariane Benefit
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Some Bio Info
Ariane Benefit M.S.Ed. – Thought leader, designer, coach, productivity healer, and founder of AgiliZen™ and Agile Life Design™ – Framework and toolkit for designing life to support optimal functioning, fit, flow, flair and flourishing.
Serving natural agilizers and outliers who are creative, gifted, neurodiverse, ADHD, and ready to breakthrough conventional approaches to navigating life (time management, life balance, stress management and organizing) and uplevel their performance and life satisfaction by cultivating personal agility.
Ariane’s popular Neat and Simple Living Blog has appeared on numerous top productivity blog lists and continues to receive over 20,000 page views each month. Ariane’s deep expertise and experience with healing chronic disorganization, clutter and productivity addiction has been featured in such notable publications as The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, and The Washington Times.
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Ariane Benefit’s views on strengthening personal agility.
from the The 8 Habits of Personal Agility and Resilience for Living in Your Agile Zone of Optimal Functioning by Ariane Benefit
Resilience – the ability to work through and recover from setbacks, relapses and obstacles – is what makes your future goals easier to accomplish. In fact, resilience in response to adversity – also called “grit” – may be the most essential ingredient to achievement. Even more important than expertise or social skills.
High Resilience is a capability that some people seem to just be born with. However, the good news is that it is comprised of a set of cognitive and emotional skills and habits that can be taught and then cultivated through experience. But it requires adversity.
How do you Cultivate and Strengthen Personal Agility?
Cultivating personal agility involves discovering your own rhythms with creative flow and peak performance, respecting them, and using them to navigate your way through life using non-peak time to build your readiness to make the most of peak performance states as well as to recover from adverse situations. The more agile you become, you naturally begin to experience less adversity and spend more time in the sweet spot of creative flow, but you must accept thatyou cannot live in your sweet spot full-time, and you cannot “control” or “schedule” it.
What you can do is:
╰☆╮¤`» Reserve time for it to happen.«´¯`·.¸¸.°¤╰☆╮
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Trust it
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Encourage it by creating conditions that enable it
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Optimize your use of it while you have it.
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Instead of wasting energy trying to figure out techniques to make it happen predictably and instead of agonizing over how to “avoid adversity” or “overcome your blocks”, I recommend making a project out of learning how you do it when you do things well naturally. How does it work for you? Pay closer to attention to what’s going on when it happens naturally. For example, rather than analyzing why you are late so often, try looking for an example of when you were on on time and study that. How did that happen? What you learn will most like be surprising counter-intuitive and maybe even seem ridiculous to you. But all we care about is this. Does it help? Does it work? If so, figure out how to turn it into a power tool.
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Instead of trying so hard to solve your performance challenges using other people’s strategies, focus on learning how you naturally perform the desired behavior or accomplish the desired result. (To simplify, let’s just call these instances “flow state”) When you are researching how your own flow states work, ask questions like:
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What tends to trigger you to enter your flow state?
Look for clues that seem to not make any sense…creative solutions are generated in ways our logical minds can’t even dream of.
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More questions to help you learn about your own peak performance creative flow state rhythms:
What time of day does it tend to happen?
How long does it tend to last?
What are the signs that it is coming?
What are the signs it’s starting to fade?
What was going on during the 24 – 48 hours prior to flow state?
What kinds of interruptions are easy to recover from while you are in flow state?
What tends to derail you from getting into flow state?
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Bottom Line
Worrying about, fearing or struggling to micromanage peak performance flow states actually diminishes your capacity for peak performance.
Ariane Benefit
to read more
5 Steps To Cultivating The Power of Habit With Agile Thinking Habits
Sample questions that open up the possibility that there is at at least one other alternative future include:
“What might inspire me to be interested in doing my paperwork? or (_______) ?”
“What might make it easier for me to learn about or discover a simpler way to deal with doing my tax return or (______)?
“What might make looking at my calendar several times a day (or ________) more bearable or maybe even enjoyable or something I look forward to doing?”
Agilizing is the new Prioritizing
What is Agilizing?
Agilizing is shorthand for a different way of thinking about strategizing your life and how you want to use your time. Agilizing to me means taking time to be mindful of my present context and to:
Notice what’s happening in my body, mind, emotions and in the context around me
Identify the needs
Negotiate to resolve or integrate any conflicting needs based on short AND long term impact (like wanting to stay up and keep working but needing to sleep)
Figure out the ingredients needed to act on the higher impact needs
Make it simpler and easier to choose to meet the higher impact needs (like sleep)
Make it easier to transition, get started, or finish
Figure out how to use fewer resources to make the better decision
Figure out which standards matter most (fast, inexpensive or quality) and adjust the relevant standards or processes as needed to meet all the important needs without doing harm
to read article in full
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video- temporary video 10 Mantras
video temporary video AgiliZen Agile Time Management – Clip from Class by Ariane Benefit,
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I prefer creating and exploring new ways of doing things
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intro post
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I AM
Peaceful:
Emotions,
Sensations ,
& Feelings
˚isn’t it wonderful?
Posted on 26/10/2014. Last edited on 30/06/2015.
The next individual is CynthiaAckrill M.D
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˚Leveraging Energy/Resilience [CynthiaAckrill]
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENCE by CynthiaAckrill M.D
- ☆1 Optimizing and sustaining performance with resilience to cope with the inevitable stressors of life is really a matter of leveraging energy- becoming aware of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy levels and finding ways to regularly renew energy expended.
Raise Awareness – Create a ritual of checking in with yourself- monitoring your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy/state, perceived stress level. You can’t change it if you aren’t aware.
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- ☆2. Cool Down to Power Up! –learn and practice an in-the-moment ritual to cool down your amygdala, your stress reaction, and power up your frontal lobe and energy. There are multiple choices- the key is to make it a habit that takes no effort.
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- ☆3. Create and Commit to Long Range Stress Strategies –
1. Commit to a meeting with yourself dedicated to this
2. Identify your values, strengths, purpose (your why)
3. Create a word/phrase/mantra that reminds you of your why
4. Do and energy/stress audit
5. Create strategies to balance your energy, choose your perspective and strengthen your resilience
☆KEYS TO CREATING STRATEGIES TO EASE THE DRAIN OF STRESS☆
■1. Start/middle/end with your WHY – let your values and purpose guide your choices and boundaries.
■2. Create habits, rituals to keep your WHY perspective- this develops mindfulness.
■3. Put self-care first. Weekly, put YOU on your calendar.
■4. Continue to build self-awareness. Be brave and ask for input.
■5. Operate from your strengths.
■6. Know your needs & create habits to meet them.
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to read more: http://www.cynthiaackrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/STRATEGIES-FOR-RESILIENCE-Worksheet-Newtown-Educators-3-22-14.pdf
■9. Practice your best mindset – positive, curious, mindful, accepting.
■10. Practice self-compassion. Thank your inner critic, and ask him/her to step aside.
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■13. Practice focus/distraction management. (Multipurpose instead of multitask!)
■14. Integrate work/life- this is the future, get creative!
■15. Don’t add to the stress epidemic.
■16. Celebrate more!!!!!!
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to read more: http://www.cynthiaackrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/STRATEGIES-FOR-RESILIENCE-Worksheet-Newtown-Educators-3-22-14.pdf
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“ bio”:http://www.cynthiaackrill.com/bio/
Speaker-Leadership Coach-Stress ExpertSend Message828-777-9730
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Bio
Cynthia Ackrill M.D. is a leader in the field of stress management and an expert in the critical relationships between lifestyle choices, performance capacities, and leadership effectiveness. As the only physician trained in neuroscience and wellness and leadership coaching, she travels the world to teach better ways to lead and thrive in the face of stress and constant change.
She leads workshops to reduce the waste of human capital, health,happiness, and profits lost to stress and ineffective leadership. And she continues one-on-one and team coaching and create realistic stress strategies and advance performance and leadership goals.
Dr. Ackrill earned her B.S. at Duke University and M.D. at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and practiced primary care medicine for over a decade before taking time off to raise her daughter. It was her daughter’s ADHD that triggered a deep interest in neuropsychology and led to her study of brain mapping, neurofeedback, and biofeedback for a variety of mood and behavior challenges, including stress. Fascinated by how humans struggle with behavior choice and change, she trained in wellness and leadership coaching.
In addition to her extensive integrative medical training, Dr. Ackrill is certified by Wellcoaches, Wellness Inventory, The College of Executive Coaching, and Team Advantage, and has advanced training in positive psychology, motivational interviewing, and peak performance. She contributes widely as a stress and behavior change expert to a range of media- radio, TV, and print- including Katie Couric, Huffington Post, eHealth, SPA, Today’s Practice, BAR Association, IMF, Daimler, Corning, AIBTM, Employers Association. She is dedicated to finding real life strategies based in neuroscience and the science of human performance and to making the learning process engaging and fun.
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“ Creating New
Habits■ “:http://www.cynthiaackrill.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Creating-new-habits-11-19-13.pdf
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. – Ayn Rand
I AM
Peaceful:
Emotions,
Sensations ,
& Feelings
˚isn’t it wonderful?
Posted on 30/10/2014. Last edited on 17/03/2024.
╰☆╮¤°.¸¸.·´¯`» saved for related content «´¯`·.¸¸.°¤╰☆╮
By Cynthia Ackrill
☆KEYS TO CREATING STRATEGIES TO EASE THE DRAIN OF STRESS☆
■1. Start/middle/end with your WHY – let your values and purpose guide your choices and boundaries.
■2. Create habits, rituals to keep your WHY perspective- this develops mindfulness.
■3. Put self-care first. Weekly, put YOU on your calendar.
■4. Continue to build self-awareness. Be brave and ask for input.
■5. Operate from your strengths.
■6. Know your needs & create habits to meet them.
this is part of an article I found once / glad I kept what I did.
I love # 4
■4. Continue to build self-awareness
. Be brave and ask for input.
My feeling is don’t be afraid to look at yourself .
And if you have someone you really trust ask for input.
A person who is not full of self reproach and has done ‘the work’
A well rounded person . Know they might be wrong , and speak & listen to others who know while they believe in themselves, they too can be mistaken
It’s okay to rely on yourself , just don’t forget how your spiritual path ties in / bc we are all so much more than the sum of our parts … and w/ a good spiritual path - we access the more
I AM
Peaceful:
Emotions,
Sensations ,
& Feelings
