Your Working Style And Conferences

You hear about a new conference in your field coming up next month. The topics all seem interesting at worst and ranging all the way up to super-fascinating. The guest speakers are experts you've heard of and would love to connect with/ And, best of all, your diary is clear for that week and your boss is paying.

Are you excited? Or not so much? That will probably depend on your Working Style. If you learn best in groups, by looking and by listening, in a noisy environment, during the day and by sitting still, then conferences are the thing for you. Change some of these preferences into non-preferences, and you might actually not enjoy your conference experience very much. Of course, there are always the tea breaks to look forward to.

With this in mind, we've decided the time may be right again for a Learning Styles conference. Watch this space for more details.

What is your own Working Style? Find out.

Easter in Style

If your Working Style is tactile with a non-preference for mobility, chances are high that you may enjoy dabbling in various crafts from time to time.

Easter is a perfect time for crafts. Depending on the part of the world you live in and your cultural background, you may want to try your hand at painting eggs, making palm crosses, knitting fluffy yellow chickens and designing the world's best treasure hunts for those yummy chocolate treats.

More often than not, you will have a festive meal with a creatively decorated table. Have a look at our photos for some ideas. And have a very happy Easter - in Style.

Introverts unite - separately, in your own homes

If you feel drained by too much contact with other people and need to recharge your energy levels by being alone after a day at the office or a night out, you are probably an introvert. Today's workplace, however, is geared towards extroverts: team work, open-plan offices and frequent meetings.

If this sounds a bit like you, you might like to have a look at this website about managing your inner introvert. Also, our Working Style Analysis report will have ideas on how best to arrange your work place and work pace to suit your needs.

This tool guides you through your individual working style needs, helping you in the following areas:

• Better communication between you and your colleagues
• Sharper problem solving and creativity
• More productive meetings
• Better time management
• Less stress under pressure
• Happier healthier work areas
• Stronger team spirit
• Increased flexibility and tolerance
• Easier learning curves

WSA costs less than psychometric testing, but it goes deeper. WSA reveals all your bio-physical makeup and conditioned style elements across the six key areas in the Working Style Pyramid Model: Information Processing, Sensory Modalities, Physical Needs, Environmental Preferences, Social Aspects, Professional Attitudes.

 

Leadership: It's a Marathon Not a Sprint

Leadership is a quality that people need to learn. Whether you are aspiring to a business or management career, or want to be a leader in other aspects of your life, you will want to read this interview with Gordon Tredgold, the author of a new book called Leadership It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint.

Q: How does one move from being a manager to being a leader?

A: To me leadership is all about creating and having influence, so you can actually do this whilst you're in a management position, and then you can use this influence to inspire your teams and motive them to achieve their goals wrath than through command and control structures. There is also the view that management is about getting your teams to do things right, whereas leadership is about getting your teams to do the right things.

Again, as managers we can take the double view of checking first that we are dong the right thing, and then checking that we are doing it right. With this approach we will definitely help to improve the results.

In many companies people who are good managers are often promoted to leadership positions even though these are ostensibly different roles, so being a good manager is definitely one way of becoming a leader.

I would say that an even better way would be to start leading whilst in your management position, these roles are not mutually exclusive and many of the best leaders i have worked with combined both skill at the management level before becoming leaders.

This also gives us the added bond of being able to practise our leadership skills prior to being in a formal leadership position.


Q: What other topics does your book cover?

A: My book covers many different aspects about leadership such as goal setting and inspiring people, the interrelationships between aspiration, inspiration and motivation, team building, reward and recognition and about achieving sustainable results.

You can read the book from start to finish, or you can pick a chapter at random to get a better understanding of a particular leadership topic.


Q: What made you decide to write this book?

A: I've had a lot of positive feedback over the years on my leadership style, people seem to have liked the way i have led them and the successes that we have achieved, so i thought it might be a good idea to talk about my approach and to put it down in words to share it. I don't necessarily think my approach is unique, but it has been effective and its not one that i often see written from a practitioner perspective so i thought this might be an interesting angle.

Also, my approach is very simple and straight forward, as is my writing style, so i thought that might be a refreshing change from of the more technical or theoretical books on leadership.  Dealing more with the how, than the what or why. I do believe the what and why are important, but i haven't seen many how to guides.

Also I wanted to write a book to help aspiring leaders, given them approaches and then examples of how those approaches could be implemented, to make leadership more accessible. 


Q: Tell us a little about yourself.

I'm from the north of England, which I think is what helps  makes me a pragmatic, no nonsense, straight talking leader, as these are definitely traits of people from that area. I also have a great sense of humour, which i often use to try and  reduce the stress in tense situation. I like to have fun, especially at work, i think if we can make it a more fun environment people then this will help us increase our chances of success and levels of success.

I'm a very determined character, I used to play a lot of rugby, and being fairly short and playing right in the trenches, I was always a fully committed, lead from the front type player, and this is definitely reflected in my leadership style.

(Visit Gordon Tredgold’s blog - http://www.leadership-principles.com/en/
Leadership It’s a Marathon Not a Spirnt - http://amzn.to/1fW2lmX)

Sochi Winter Olympics and Learning Styles

With the Sochi Winter Olympics firmly on everybody's mind, it's worth remembering that the way we get better at sport depends on our own Working Style.

Some style features to consider are:

·         Motivation

·         Perseverance/Persistence

·         Responsibility

·         Teamwork or training alone

·         Time of day

·         Need for structure

·         Need for routine

·         Sequential or simultaneous learning.

A beautiful example of this is golf as Wayne Thomas, a professional golf coach near Melbourne, Australia, describes it:

“I have always recognised that there is something missing with coaching, despite the excellent results many of my students reported receiving. What concerns me most is a person’s inability to sustain new levels of performance and continually falling back into old patterns. My continued pursuit of knowledge about golf swing, human movement, mental approach to oneself, equipment and communication skills wasn’t providing the key that would open the gate to the amazing potential we all possess.

When I first met Barbara Prashnig and she put forward the notion that HOW people learn is more important than WHAT people learn, it sparked for me a new era in coaching: I immediately began changing my coaching style and the learning environment to match the students’ learning styles. This has led to astonishing improvements and sustained playing ability in my golf students.”

What is your working style? Find out. 

Work Smarter, Work Less, Work in Style

Working long hours is not a badge of honour. Being busy does not equate being successful. How would you like to work half the hours you’re working right now and still achieve the same results? You can, with Working Style Analysis.

Understanding whether you work best in low or bright light may prevent you from feeling lethargic or burned out. Discovering your most productive time of day – early morning, late morning, afternoon, evening - could drastically increase your productivity. Learning whether background noise helps or hinders your work could further help you concentrate on tasks at hand and cut the hours you spend at the office.

Working in a team or alone, sipping water, adjusting the thermostat in the room – they all may have an influence on how much work you get through every day. Check what makes you more productive and shorten your hours – today.

Help - my working style is interfering with me exercise routine!

Say the word routine and, depending on your working style, you will experience either a sense of stifling or a wave of well-being. If you have a preference for variety, the idea of an exercise routine, any sort of routine, will be enough to make you want to run a marathon in order to avoid it. It’s no good for your personal trainer to set up an upper body schedule on Monday, leg exercises on Wednesday and abs on Friday, it’s the mere thought that every Monday you work on your biceps and triceps from 6.30 till 7 will be enough o set your teeth on edge.

So how do you stay fit if you hate routine? Make it as un-routine as possible: swim twice one week and do aerobics the next. Jog around the neighbourhood instead of going to the gym. Play squash once a week for a month, choosing a different time slot every time – include weekends in your schedule. Exercise in the morning the one week, at lunchtime the next and before dinner the third week. Go swimming at the local pool. And at the beach. You may not get as much benefit as the person who has an optimal exercise routine, but at least you’ll stay healthy.

Good luck. Do it with your Working Style!

CLS – Learning Style and Experiencing Life

How do you experience the world around you? Is it a collage of images, colours, people’s faces? Is it all sounds, music, echoes of people’s voices, snatches of conversations from two decades ago? Does every object have texture, and even if you don’t touch it you know exactly what it would feel like under your fingers?
Depending on your learning style, you may experience the world in a visual, auditory or tactile manner. You will notice what people wear and the pattern of the wallpaper in a restaurant. Or you will be able to recognise a song after the first three notes. Or you’ll be able to select your favourite mug from the pantry by touch alone.

Depending on your learning style, you will get upset if someone’s late for a meeting… or it won’t bother you at all. Depending on your learning style, you will find bright light stimulating or stressful. Depending on your learning style, you will forever want to crank the thermostat in the office up or down.

In a way, it feels liberating to know it’s not your fault. Your spouse has given you three verbal instructions and you can only remember the words, “Honey, could you please…”? Not your fault. Your work station is messy? Blame your learning style.

The Creative Learning tool for assessing an adult person’s learning style is called the Working Style Analysis (WSA). Create your personal report now.

Introverts and Working Styles

What does the Working Style of an introvert look like? They are usually the ones who prefer working alone in a quiet room. They don't usually communicate very effectively in a situation where they have to address a large audience. Sometimes their contribution to the workload will go unnoticed, because they won't brag about it.

In today's world, we value talkers (extroverts) and often choose them as our leaders. And yet this phenomenon is relatively recent and can be linked to the advent of TV. Prior to that, many leaders were introverts, although the term wasn't widely used back then. Check out this video about the power of introverts.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Your Working Style will hold the clues. Have a look.

Star Trek Into Darkness and Working Styles

While the second Star Trek movie, INTO DARKNESS, is making millions at the box office, here at Creative Learning we're thinking about working styles.

Specifically, what working style does Kirk exhibit? If you're thinking integrated with a tendency towards holistic, you may be right. Spock is definitely a learnt analytic. But what about Uhura? We'll go with kinesthetic internal unless somebody writes in to convince us otherwise.

What about your own working style? Are you like Kirk, Spock or Uhura? Find out.

Bad Working Habits That Are Good

Working Late

Do you yawn your way through the morning, drinking coffee and staring at the computer screen, only to get your best ideas after dinner? You're not alone! Many people concentrate best in the evening - that's when they are at their most receptive and creative. Its part of their Working Style, a scientifically proved way to perform at your optimum.

Moving About

One of the elements of your Working Style is the preference or non-preference for moving about when you're busy with something new or difficult. Are you somebody who thinks better while pacing a room or tapping your foot?

Snacking

According to Barbara Prashnig, a world expert in education and the director of Creative Learning Systems, snacking on healthy food or sipping water may aid your concentration. Check your own Working Style today to see whether that's the case.

Success, holidays and working styles

We don't need researches to tell us that taking a holiday will improve our work performance. We don't need researches to tell us how it takes a week to shift gears and stop thinking about work, and therefore it's imperative to make your holidays at least 10 days long in order to reap the benefits. We do need researches to tell us whether we're the type of person who can successfully enjoy a holiday, and why.

Enter Working Styles and the Working Style Analysis tool (WSA). The WSA report will tell you almost 50 things you may not have realised about yourself. Among others, it'll predict whether you're the type of person who truly enjoys a holiday.

Although it may be difficult to understand, some people get stressed at a prospect of going away on holiday. Typically, those are the people who have a non-preference in the Variety element of the WSA pyramid. Those with a preference for responsibility might also worry about the work and domestic tasks they're leaving behind. Those with a preference for structure may fear unstructured days ahead.

Are you someone who can truly relax when away on holiday? Find out.

Striving For Excellence

Excellence is not perfection. It's the result of putting quality into everything you do. It's the gradual result of always trying to do better. It's being the best you can be.

Some of the tools that can help you along the way:

• Enthusiasm for your job;
• A can-do attitude;
• A sense of responsibility and pride in your work;
• Taking initiative and owning problems;
• Going the extra mile;
• Understanding your working style.

Do you know the optimal conditions under which you concentrate best? Is the office light too bright? Would you operate better in a smaller team? Find out.

10 Ways To Increase Your Productivity

Did you know?

1. Researchers at Hiroshima University conducted a study, called The Power of Kawaii (Japanese for ''cute''), which found that the positive emotions produced by looking at baby animals seems to trigger not only happiness but a ''narrowed attentional focus'', which in turn improves our ability to concentrate. They suggested workers be subjected to cute images to induce careful behaviour.
2. Everybody has the best time of day in which they are at their most productive. When is yours?
3. Our lives and brains are cluttered with too much information. Go on an Information Diet to eliminate unproductive Internet surfing.
4. Take a short break - it'll boost your output.
5. Do you work at your best when the room's silent or filled with soothing background buzz? Find out.
6. Reward yourself for finishing a task.
7. Use caller ID and voice mail to make sure the phone doesn't interrupt you unnecessarily.
8. Some people concentrate better when they nibble a healthy snack or sip water. Do you?
9. Prioritise your tasks in terms of urgency as well as importance. Remember, if you only ever do the urgent stuff, you may never get to the less urgent but more important things in life.
10. The light in the office may make you unproductive. Discover how.

The Ultimate Productivity Booster

The single most efficient way to increase your productivity is to be happy at work. No system, tool or methodology in the world can beat the productivity boost you get from really, really enjoying your work. (Alexander Kjerulf)

So how do you achieve that? How do you start liking your workplace so much, it actually makes you happy to go to work every day?

A lot has to do with the work conditions and the environment at the office. Yes, a good boss and friendly colleagues go a long way to achieve that. But there is also something more basic, more elemental at play: the preferences of your own working style.

Even something as innocuous as the office lights may contribute to your levels of happiness. If you need a darker room in order to concentrate, a brightly lit office (especially one fitted with fluorescent lights) is going to contribute directly to your feeling tense. If, on the other hand, you need bright light and sunshine, a dark office or artificial lights will depress you or slow you down do that your productivity is affected.

Another element that can contribute to the amount of stress you feel when trying to work is the time of day. If you’re an evening person, for example, it’s physically stressful on your body and brain to function early in the morning. If you’re not a night owl, it will be stressful and exhausting for you to try and catch up on work when everyone else is asleep. Determine when your best “working time” is (early morning, late morning, after lunch, after supper) and try to do the bulk of your work then, particularly the complex and difficult bits. You'll emerge a lot happier and more productive.

What's your working style? 

Why The World Won't End In 2012

It's official: the world won't be ending on 21 December 2012. Not only because the Maya didn't bother to add a leap year to compensate for the fact that a year is actually 365.2422 days, thus making their date 60 days out of kilter with our calendar (i.e., their Doomsday was meant to happen back in our October). No, there's another more compelling reason: Creative Learning's new group profiles.

Group profiles are useful for corporates, high-risk professions,  team leaders, managers, church ministers, teachers, even home-schooling parents. They show the synergies of the group and how best to communicate your message to the members of the group. In conjunction with the LSA Manual or the WSA Manual, a group profile is a powerful tool that allows lesson planning, training planning and team work planning.

How do you get them? Easy. Have a look here. The Maya liked them so much, they've cancelled the end of the world....

Working Styles Explain Diversity

Your manager asks you to conduct a survey and you suggest a colourful questionnaire, professional but light-hearted in tone. The boss, however, insists on a sombre set of formal questions. You try to comply, but despite all your efforts, the survey doesn’t seem to take shape. You feel frustrated and de-motivated. You may even feel worthless and not suited to your job.


What you’ve just experienced, is a typical example of mismatched working styles: your working style was not compatible with your boss’s. Barbara Prashnig, a leading world expert in the field, defines working style as the way in which people concentrate, work, make decisions and solve problems.

“Some people are analytical in their thinking and perform tasks step-by-step,” she explains. “Those are the ones who like formal questionnaires. Others prefer to approach problems holistically, with colour, humour and thinking outside the box.”

And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to human diversity in the workplace. Some people fidget and pace the room when pondering the next sentence in the report. Others need to chew or nibble when working on a project, and if a snack is not around, they will bite on pencils, fingernails, hair or ties.

And then there’s the timing. The proverbial owls and the dawn-driven larks. Somebody who leaps out of bed at five in the morning, completely refreshed and ready to tackle the day’s workload, will never understand a colleague who arrives in the office at nine, yawning and demanding coffee.

What about noise levels? If Paul from accounts finds it impossible to work in a room full of people, it doesn’t mean he’s anti-social. It may be that his working style is stifled unless he has absolute silence. The secretary, on the other hand, might need the reassuring buzz of traffic outside.

Do you prefer working in a darkish room or one filled with bright electric light? Do you think better when your bare arms tingle from the cold, or when you’re wrapped up in a big woolen jersey? Is your desk tidy and your paperwork in neatly labelled files; or do you use your in-tray to store your lunch and the floor around your desk for piles of work ‘to be done’?

So much to find out. Start today.

July Holidays Special

July means school holidays. No school. None. It's time to relax and... hang on. Did I hear there's a special going on Learning Styles?
That's right! For the entire month of July 2012, we're selling our Home Packages at half price! 2 WSA and 3 LSA Mini! This means:

• mom can check her Working Style;
• dad can check his Working Style;
• 3 kids can discover their Learning Style.

Home Package. For a happy home.
Just use this promo code when ordering: 796KLU9.
Happy shopping!

Creating Successful Companies

In the year 2012, you  need a lot more than just a PC and an unlimited access to the Internet in order to achieve in the continually-changing business world. Your web site may be the most popular link of the week, but if you don't understand yourself or your colleagues, you will fail to utilise your most important resources: the people.



Have you ever felt frustrated because your assistant takes such a long time to reach the simplest decision? Or because your best marketer never contributes during those early-morning brainstorming sessions? Have you ever wondered why you and your staff members are constantly under stress?


Such questions form just the tip of the iceberg. Diversity is what it's all about, and it has nothing to do with gender or race. We are all individual human beings and we all have different Working Styles. Some of us like working in an open-plan office, reassured by the steady hum of voices around us, others find background noise counterproductive. Some of us keep our desks tidy and make use of filing cabinets, others insist on piling their work on their desks and floor. There are those who have to know every single detail before making a decision, and those who require the overall picture first. Nothing wrong with any of those approaches, of course, provided we all know what we want. The problem, however, is that often we are not even aware of our own needs.

Do you know what makes you tick? Find out.

 

Stress and Learning Styles

The amount of stress in your daily life, whether you are 5, 15 or 55, will depend - among other factors - on your unique learning style.


Take something as simple as the light in your house or office. Did you know that some people feel lethargic in dimly lit rooms, while others get stressed in a room in which the light bulbs are very bright? Fluorescent lights in particular can make you feel extremely agitated because of their constant flickering that your eye doesn’t notice but your brain still registers.

Noise levels can be a powerful stress-fuel too. If your working style calls for a silent environment in which to work, a modern open-plan office with its constant buzz of activity is going to make you tense and irritable.


Are you someone who loves fixed routines? Then any change at work (like moving office, a new boss, a new software package) will cause you stress. Don’t let people make light of your anxiety by saying “It’s just a little computer program, why are you so upset?” If you like routine, you will be upset by any departure from the known and the trusted. It’s in your biological makeup and you can’t change it.


Do you do mornings well? If not, having to attend a meeting at 8.30am is likely to make you feel grumpy and strained.


What are the factors affecting your stress levels? Find out.