Happy New Year 2018 - SCIPAB for Resolutions
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Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a festive and restful winter break! I sure did! (FCC Disclosure: I work for IBM. IBM is in our 17-day "quiet period" before it announces full-year and 4Q results on January 18. Therefore, I picked today's topic that has nothing to do with storage products, recent client wins, or financials.) It's January, so I thought I would discuss [New Year's resolutions], a tradition in United States in which a person resolves to change an undesired trait or behavior, to accomplish a personal goal, or otherwise improve their life. Early Romans made promises to their god Janus, for whom the month of January is named. Sadly, most of us are unsuccesful. This is often because the resolutions were unrealistic, people failed to measure and track their progress, or simply lost interest midyear. From my own experience, most resolutions can be lumped into four major categories:
A technique I use to develop presentations might help people keep New Year's Resolutions. The technique called [SCIPAB®], created by Mandel Communications, is an elegantly simple, six-step method for starting important conversations or create [Effective Presentations]. Since Resolutions are basically "conversations with yourself", let's give it a try! SCIPAB is basically an acronym of the six steps. Inspired by a blog by [Dick Stark], we can demonstrate SCIPAB with a familiar story line of [Dudley Do-Right], a fictional Canadian Mountie, featured in segments of [The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle] television show.
Let's see how we can use this approach on different categories of resolutions. To get healthy, we might use:
Rather than resolving to "Eat less and exercise more", the above approach is more focused on the end result, rather than intermediate actions, and therefore has a better chance of success, getting your health within normal range. Let's try another one. To get better organized, we might use:
I could go on, but you get the idea. In his WSJ article [Blame it on the Brain], Jonah Lehrer cautions against trying to change too many habits all at once. If you have multiple resolutions, try to focus on establishing new habits for one resolution for a month or two, before starting the next one. Prioritize what is most important.
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