In January 2025, the university’s organisational development team sent out the 15-day challenge to coincide with staff preparation for the new year, as well as the performance, planning, development and review (PPDR) process. I took on the challenge.

What I learnt each day

Day 1 | Embodying a growth mindset with feedback

“Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I’ll think about how that works for me” – this response to constructive feedback strongly resounded with me. It is a gracious way to openly hear and listen to feedback without simply accepting the feedback as being true.

Day 2 | Adopt a daily success log

Neuroplasticity, have you encountered this concept? If not, you should engage. It refers to training your brain to find ways to acknowledge your successes and to focus on small improvements daily.

Day 3 | Sharing goals for accountability

The key takeaway today was sharing your goals with the right people. A study in 2020 (Zahrai, 2022) revealed that you are more likely to achieve or to commit to achieving, if you share their goal with persons you respect.

Day 4 | Metrics that matter

Not weirdly, this exercise did not resound with me. I was not inspired to reflect on the reasons why I did not find connection with this challenge.

Day 5 | Five minute brainstorming on goals

The time pressure or time parameter forced my thoughts to target goals I immediately wanted to work on. I was then able to revisit and expand on my thoughts better at a later time. What it did help with was clearing the fog, ending the procrastination, and zeroing in on my priorities.

Day 6 | Leveraging strengths

Trigger warning | conundrum. This day the focus was on confidence. Knowing what you are good at and recognising this. There was a disconnect for me, some things I am really good at, I don’t actually enjoy doing.

Day 7 | Understanding the three pillars of a future-prepared career

Day 7 inspired me to start this blog because it is important to share your story with community.

Day 8 | Honing a growth mindset

I found connection between the growth mindset and lifelong learning.

Day 9 | Communicating with confidence

Go into conversations with positive intent, which by the way, I note in this micro-learning you cannot do this without the other person in the conversation also has positive intent.

Day 10 | Rejection means revising your approach

This was a difficult lesson to learn. I feel I have trained myself to try and avoid rejection as much as I can. To do that I have been safe in my dealings with life, work and the universe in general. I will need to practice reframing my strategy to deal with rejection.

Day 11 | Confidence is a skill that you can train

Nate Zinsser, the director of the Performance Psychology Program at West Point talked about cognitive habits – can it be trained? Or, can it be learned? Will need to revisit this.

Day 12 | Positive thinking skills

Dealing with adversity by having a reflective journal, post the adversity. This activity suggested reflecting on the adversity once you are over it. Hmmmm. I remember a few instances where it was really helpful to reflect on the adversity as it happens, and then revisit the reflection once you are over the worst.

Day 13 | Reframe stress to build resilience

There is a disconnect between the perception of stress, and how it plays out in past triumphs. You either do not remember the amount of stress you went through towards the successful outcome; or you just do not remember the successful outcome because it was overshadowed by the stress. A great reflection exercise.

Day 14 | Maintaining self-integrity

Values, Intentions, Beliefs and Energy (VIBE) | read “My boundaries” – this needed longer than 5-10 minutes to work on. It required space and time to reflect on what my boundaries were, i.e., what I would not compromise on when it came to undertaking a task or engaging with anything in life or work.

Day 15 | Reflect on the 15 day challenge experience

Three takeaways from this experience.

• Days when I completed more than one micro-learning, not only did it speed up learning, I was able to engage with connections between the various micro-learnings on offer.
• Days when I undertook one micro-learning, it provided me with time to clear my mind in between the daily work/busyness.
• Interesting concepts and topics covered across the 15 micro-learnings. It allowed me to think about what else I could explore in terms of growth in my practice.