A festival of growth!

I spent yesterday at the magnificent LBS Festival of Growth – a festival devoted to learning, career development and wellbeing. After a day full of talks, talking and trying things out, I think there were three themes that cut through:

1.???? Learning is hard and messy…but also really fun

2.???? The power of purpose and vision and knowing your strengths

3.???? How focus and relationships are the keys to getting things done

So here’s a mini-blog covering what I took away about the first theme. More to come on the others!

With huge thanks to our speakers: Francois Ortalo-Magne , Dan Cable , Maya Gudka, MSc, CFA, MA(Cantab) , Rupal Patel , Mhorag Doig , Yvette Janse van Rensburg Assoc CIPD, EMCC .

Learning is hard and messy…but also really fun

We’ve probably all seen by now those diagrams that show that the route from here to our goal is never a neat line, but more of a drunken scrawl. That was definitely confirmed by all the speakers, but I loved Dan Cable’s insight that we’re programmed to explore and learn and that activating our “seeking systems” leads to buckets of dopamine.? So perhaps it is worth pushing through the painful bit of learning and change for the dopamine that lies beyond, and also how sometimes we like to learn things purely for the fun of it, even when they have no practical application. ?

Growth mindset

Helping to push through when we are at the hard stage of change or learning led to several conversations about growth mindset. The idea that if you reframe ‘failure’ as ‘learning’ it increases your resilience and ability to take on bigger challenges and learn harder things, has been around for a while (thanks, Carol Dweck!).? This led to an interesting debate about whether the generations reaching business schools and organisations now, who were brought up being taught growth mindset, are actually living it. We felt there is a big difference here between knowing the theory and actually applying it in real life in the teeth of failure/deep learning.? Particularly as leaders, managers or even parents, how do we really role model and enable growth mindset in the people around us, rather than just talking about it?

Chatter, chatter, chatter

Linked to growth mindset was another topic that came up in almost all the sessions – how do you stop your internal chatter from stopping you doing things.? You know the sort of chatter I’m talking about – that voice saying “If I get this wrong everyone will laugh at me” or “they’ll find out I’m an imposter after all” or “I’m just not any good at public speaking” or “I can’t do that, I wouldn’t even know where to begin”.

There were several ideas shared on how to stop the chatter. Francois Ortalo-Magne talked to the importance of teaching people to forgive themselves for making mistakes as an integral part of enabling growth mindset. ?Yvette Janse van Rensburg suggested keeping a file with all of the positive feedback, praise and evidence of your success so that when you start doubting yourself you can drown your brain in evidence of how you have succeeded at hard things in the past.?? Dan Cable talked of the power of purpose in defeating the inner voice:

“when chatter tells you to quit, purpose chatters back”

More on the power of purpose in my next blog. ?Maya Gudka also spoke of the value of being prepared to deal with our fears, particularly when we are going into a high stakes situation.

I end up talking about ‘chatter’ a lot when I am coaching people. One of my favourite ideas on dealing with chatter came from an executive coaching course I’m doing with the AoEC - The Academy of Executive Coaching . The idea is that you might give a name to your inner chatterer and have a conversation with it/him/her. Our brains are often trying to protect us from potential threat when they tell us to give up on hard things – our brains are incredible but they can’t tell the difference between fear of a doing a presentation and fear of being attacked by a bear, so there can be power in acknowledging what your chatterer is trying to do but deciding that this isn’t a bear-related-survival-situation and you will, in fact, step on that stage.

Neuroplasticity

Dan also talked about the power of the brain and body to recreate themselves based on what we ask them to do.? Whether we want to be able to do ten pull-ups or learn Italian, the more we practice, the more we physically redesign ourselves to be better at things.? This theme was echoed by Rupal Patel who talked about training our brains to focus on exploring what is possible with curiosity and openness rather than focusing on why things won’t work. She uses the insight that “our brains hate unanswered questions” to deliberately get her brain to work on possibilities rather than problems.

Huge thank you to our talent team for a fabulous day: Nikki Tysoe , Alecia Birthwright , Sara Martins Fonseca , Caitlin Ashton – it was a total joy.