Clarity

Learning from observing others

Observing how other people do things is a useful way of ‘borrowing behaviours’, that might work for us, from others. Resilience building and maintenance, is no different, particularly learning from those who manage challenging work in a seemingly effortless way. It is rarely as effortless in practice as it appears and often requires developing a discipline that you might not naturally have.

Three ways of learning from others include:

1. Reading – reading blogs of people who work or live in similar worlds of work/lives to you to see what they do, how they manage themselves and what they know that is new to you and could be useful.

2. Observing – how people manage their time, writing and research work, flow of email, how they say no to things and how they (appear to) avoid being overwhelmed with commitments are all interesting things to observe in practice.

3. Asking – this may take a long time to develop but can be most useful to share good practices.