(14): Bite-sized chunks

building your resilience muscle to stay committed

Author

Kevin Colangelo
January 05, 2024

Welcome Back and Happy 2024!

Here’s hoping that 2024 brings you peace, purpose and prosperity!

Turning the corner on anything new always brings renewed energy. It can also bring a major challenge in the form of sustaining that energy.

Committing to invest in yourself via a new learning journey is a perfect example of this. Registering for a seminar, purchasing a class or subscribing to an educational program. These are all easy & exciting.

But . . . most of us soon face the reality of our existing schedule, routines and habits. When something has to give, it’s usually the “new thing” or the thing that seemingly offers the lowest ROI (at least in the near term).

There is no foolproof solution to this BUT I do have a suggestion for giving your new learning journey a fighting chance:

BITE

SIZED

CHUNKS

Aka, instead of dusting-off your white flag, scale back & tailor your expectations to suit the current you.

  • First and foremost, remind yourself why you want to start this journey. What does a positive outcome look like?

  • Don’t forget, you’re not on the clock here!

  • Set practical expectations for yourself by identifying what progress looks like given everything on your plate.

  • Not meeting those expectations is NOT a failure.

  • Adjust, do what you can comfortably do, enjoy and reflect on your success in finishing that “bite,” and acknowledge that it’s OK that the plan has changed..

Follow this simple approach & you are guaranteed to stay committed to a journey that will meet (and probably exceed) your expectations!

Demonstrating resilience means you have a consistent ability to bounce back from or make an adjustment(s) after experiencing a setback, changed circumstances, or slowing of progress.

Resilience is a key foundational aspect of the Lawyer as Self-Starter learning outcome.

Cool, but wasn’t this Issue supposed to be focused on the importance of pedagogy?

yes. right. Thanks for the reminder!

So: as discussed in Issue #13 the absence of consistent pedagogies from most online learning / training programs is a HUGE problem.

To be fair, the concept of pedagogy may be new to most of you. Since we’ll be deep-diving on this frequently here’s a brief video (<4 minutes) that does double-duty by defining pedagogy and contrasting this with the common practice of experts “teaching” by sharing their expertise:

For your consideration . . .

a selection of materials related to this issue’s core premise:

Next Ish:

Finally (finally!) we’ll be embarking on a months-long exploration of the actual skills, mindset and capabilities that extensive research shows are needed in the modern legal workplace, and how to best learn them.

How will we do this?

In bite-sized chunks, of course! See you there.

Thanks so much! 2024 is THE Year!