As a combined organisational and personal development nerd, I get a kick out of simplifying ‘corporate concepts’ and using them to improve my life outside of work. I also enjoy finding lessons from my personal life that I can use to improve my work life.
Last year I wrote about what overcoming my dislike of dusting taught me about reducing ‘excessive busy-ness’ in the workplace. Today, I have some suggestions on ways we can use risk assessment techniques to drive sustainable personal change, such as building good habits.
I thought this would be timely now that we are well into February and the excitement of setting 2020 goals may have worn off. At this time of year, we are often trying to figure out a way of making those planned improvements more sustainable and not feel like an uphill battle all year long.
To demonstrate my proposed solution, I will use the example of sustaining a regular exercise regime. ‘Building exercise into your week’ was the most popular post in my 31 days of intentional productivity tips last year so it seems that I’m not the only one struggling with this.
Regular exercise is not something that comes naturally to me so I’ve had to be intentional about including it in my life…and finding ways to battle my excuses, which is where the risk assessment comes in. So let’s dive in.
1. Start with your objectives
When conducting a risk assessment, my main tip is to start with your objectives or what you are trying achieve. Otherwise, why bother.
This has several benefits. First, it forces you to figure out what you really want. Second, your assessment is focused on what you are trying to achieve and not on something random or abstract. Third, it makes you think about what success means to you, which helps you better define your objective.
In the case of building good habits, ultimate success is when the behaviour has become automatic (or fully embedded into your life); so much so that you no longer have to think about it and can move on to the next thing.
Going back to our example, let’s say that your objective is to work out 2 hours per week. You could expand the wording of this objective by saying that you are doing this to maintain a healthy weight, combat stress and so on, but as there are multiple ways we can achieve this, let’s narrow the scope of our sample assessment here and focus on building the habit of exercising at least 2 hours per week. For me, this meant that I would be walking outside for 30 minutes four times per week.
2. Identify the risks
The next step is to figure out what could get in your way. Those are the risks to achieving your objective.
Once you’ve listed them, have a think about whether you’ve defined them well enough. Have you identified the symptoms or the causes? Have you gotten to the bottom of the problem? My suggestion is to focus on the causes so that your assessment is targeting the source of the risk and not just providing band-aid solutions.
So, in our example, the general risk is the opposite of our objective – not exercising 2 hours per week. However, that’s not specific or deep enough. Think about why you wouldn’t meet this target. What would get in your way? What would you use as an excuse? What would lower your motivation to stick to your routine?
Some examples are:
poor weather conditions
construction on your usual cycling/walking/jogging route
increased work-related travel
mental overwhelm due to an increased workload
illness
lack of sleep
poor food choices, which leave you feeling lethargic
an unsuitable workout (too long, too difficult or boring)
can’t find a suitable time in the day
family members often interrupt your home workout
being embarrassed to work out in front of others at the gym
ugly workout clothes (it’s a real thing, people).
(I think that’s enough excuses. Let’s move on.)
Now, before you rush off to identify mitigation strategies (or things that you can put in place to reduce the risks), take a moment to think about how likely the risks you’ve listed are and whether their impact is significant enough for you to spend time assessing them. If some are highly unlikely and not really a big deal, it’s probably not worth your time worrying about them anyway. Also, having less to pay attention to or deal with will make this a much easier, more focussed and valuable exercise altogether (pun intended).
For the purpose of our example, we won’t bother with risk ratings. Ratings are more useful in a corporate setting, where we would use a risk rating matrix to ensure that risks are rated and prioritised consistently across the organisation. But as we are just dealing with one brain here and conducting an assessment for our personal use only, we don’t need to fuss with ratings. Just pick your top three threats, based on gut feel, and move on.
3. Identify the mitigation strategies
All right, it’s time to look at mitigation. Think of the things that could prevent the risk from occurring or lower the blow if it does occur. As I mentioned above, if you’ve gotten to the root of the risk, then your mitigation strategies target this as well.
One thing that is important to identify here is whether and how much control you have over the risk. You may not have much control over the weather or some changes at work, for example, but you do have control over your own behaviour.
In terms of things we can control, let’s say that your biggest issue is that you bore and tire easily, which is why you’ve given up so many times before. To address this, you will need to find something that’s neither too challenging nor too boring to do on a regular basis, plus set a workout session length that you can actually stick to.
How do I know this? Well, I have this issue. This is why I picked walking as my chosen exercise. I love to walk and I can listen to podcasts during my walks to make it more engaging.
Further, I only walk 30 minutes each time but over four days so it doesn’t seem too onerous on any given day. Also, 30 minutes is easier to carve out than 45 or 60 minutes.
But what about things we can’t control, such as the weather? This was an issue for me since I established my lovely walking routine during the Dry Season (a period of low to no chance of rain for several months here in the Tropics). Then, once the Wet Season was upon us, I was worried whether I would miss too many walks and give up on my routine altogether. To address this, I identified the exact 30-minute YouTube workout video I would do at home if I woke up and it was raining. This has actually happened several times over the past few months and I can report that my back-up plan worked every time and helped keep me on track.
4. Set a review date
The final thing to do is to pencil in a time to review your progress and your assessment. Are any of the risks now redundant? Have some of your goals become habits that you no longer need to keep on the radar? Or do you need to add new risks and identify corresponding mitigation strategies? Is your mitigation working or do you need to change something?
I usually have a monthly check-in to see how I’m progressing with my goals. This is just a quick, 15-minute exercise. I look at my goals and jot down some things I either need to change or be more intentional about. I also try to block out time for them in my diary to serve as reminders.
For example, during my most recent check-in at the end of January, I realised that for the next few months I will have an early morning work commitment three days per week which will affect my walking routine. So to deal with this, I’ve shifted two of my weekday workouts to Saturday and Sunday. I’m not one for sleeping in on the weekend anyway, so problem solved.
The key benefits
This approach has really helped me build sustainable personal change because I am:
thinking and preparing for potential pitfalls before they occur
making sure I am reviewing my risk management plan regularly to keep myself on track.
Any thoughts?
Have you applied a similar approach? What has helped you build good habits? Contact me and share your thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time to read the post.