Developing
We likely have business objectives for the coming year, such as launching a new product, increasing sales by 20%, or completing an acquisition. You may have even made personal New Year’s Resolutions, such as resolving to finally learn a foreign language, lose 10 pounds, or attend the gym three times each week.
Professional growth, on the other hand—improving yourself at work beyond reaching your specific performance goals—is all too frequently relegated to the annual performance reports’ repetitive box-ticking. We must question ourselves: How can I make sure I’m more valuable at the end of the year than I was at the beginning? in order to successfully advance to the next level.
Results from some of the investments will not be seen right away. But since so many individuals only concentrate on quick wins and disregard the others, following through on them is likely to become your personal competitive advantage.
Learning, connecting, and producing are the three primary pillars of professional development. You could wish to give one more priority than the others depending on where your career is in the year and your other ambitions.
Finding the gaps in your present knowledge or experience is the first step in developing your learning objectives. Are there any aspects of your profession or industry that you don’t know enough about? If you’ve changed jobs or functional areas, you might wish to conduct some basic study to familiarize yourself with the canonical literature in the new area.
I spent a little amount of time reading management classics like Peter Drucker and well-known contemporary authors like Jim Collins and Keith Ferrazzi when I first started my consulting practice ten years ago. You should at the very least understand what it means to “get the proper people on the bus” or “never eat alone” if you want to be regarded seriously as a consultant.
Similar to this, if you’re on a new international assignment, you should get started with narrative journalism about the local politics and society as well as the most significant novels that people in the area will discuss (and expect you to know).
You might have specific skills you’d like to master or fascinating trends you’d like to learn more about that you’ve noticed in the future. From there, you can map out the most effective strategy, whether it be individual reading, podcast listening, or taking a course (in person or online).
Looking at the locations of power in your business is the first step in developing your connecting goals. Who, specifically, is in charge of your future in the workplace? Obviously, your supervisor does, but frequently, she doesn’t make the decision to grant you a promotion or a desirable job on her own. Who else wields power? And to whom does she pay the greatest attention? You can create a power map that depicts these connections and color-code it as I explain in “A Campaign Strategy for Your Career”: green for close connections, yellow for tepid connections, and red for un-favourable or non-existent connections.
Your intention should be to transform each important relationship a different hue during the year, for example, turning red relationships yellow and yellow relationships green. Consider how you may begin to spend more time with important people (without seeming creepy or opportunistic). You could suggest getting together for coffee to discuss the most recent developments if you serve on the same committee. Maybe you might make a point of staying to have a longer conversation with your boss’ assistant so that you may establish a stronger bond. The opportunity to support a key influencer and spend three hours getting to know him outside of business may arise if he is sponsoring a table at a charity dinner and asking for people to purchase seats.
You can seek outside for your connecting objectives if you’ve been at your company for a long and already have a sizable network: who else do you want to meet in your industry or in the nearby business community?
Lastly, one of the most under utilized strategies for professional growth is creation. Professional development is often viewed as a more passive form of skill development. However, producing content and sharing your views are great ways to advance your career in two ways. Writing (or speaking, recording a podcast, making a video, or creating a podcast) requires you to organize your information into a format that’s accessible and interesting to other people. That helps you comprehend things more clearly and encourages you to consider the problems in greater detail.
Second, building your personal brand is an important part of developing yourself as a professional, as I discuss in my book Stand Out. When you openly share your knowledge, people will be able to recognize your competence, which will lead to additional client requests, peer recognition, and prospects you probably can’t even conceive. Although building an expert reputation takes time, a consistent output of, say, one blog post per week can have a significant professional impact after a year or two.
Your leadership development is a long-term investment that needs thoughtful planning in addition to time and effort. You’ll be well ahead of the competition by this time next year if you create your professional resolutions with a clear idea of how you’ll enhance your learning, networking, and generating goals.
Dorie Clark as Ref.
Dementia
According to Alzheimer’s Society in 2022. Dementia is the description of a group of symptoms that include problems with memory, thinking, language, and changes in mood, emotions, perception and behaviour. Dementia is a progressive disease, which means symptoms may be relatively mild at first, but they get worse over time.
A survey carried out by Pisonpeak in 2022 suggest that most academic failures experienced by international students in the UK is associated with Dementia.
It is very important for anyone who has regular problems with their memory, thinking, language, and changes in mood, emotions, perception and behaviour.to be assessed by a health professional. If these problems are because of dementia, getting an early diagnosis has many benefits. It gives the person an explanation for their symptoms, gives them access to treatment, advice and support, and allows them to plan for the future.
The brain has four departmental lobes with different functions;
Frontal Lobe: The frontal lobe is one of four lobes in the cerebral hemisphere. This lobe controls a several elements including creative thought, problem solving, intellect, judgment, behavior, attention, abstract thinking, physical reactions, muscle movements, coordinated movements, smell and personality.
Parietal Lobe: Located in the cerebral hemisphere, this lobe focuses on comprehension. Visual functions, language, reading, internal stimuli, tactile sensation and sensory comprehension will be monitored here.
Temporal Lobe: The temporal lobe controls visual and auditory memories. It includes areas that help manage some speech and hearing capabilities, behavioural elements, and language. It is located in the cerebral hemisphere.
Occipital Lobe: The optical lobe is located in the cerebral hemisphere in the back of the head. It helps to control vision.
Continues degrading changes applied to those lopes increases the chances of Dementia.
Common early symptoms of dementia
Different types of dementia can affect people differently, and everyone will experience symptoms in their own way.
However, there are some common early symptoms that may appear some time before a diagnosis of dementia. These include:
- memory loss
- difficulty concentrating
- finding it hard to carry out familiar daily tasks, such as getting confused over the correct change when shopping
- struggling to follow a conversation or find the right word
- being confused about time and place
- mood changes
These symptoms are often mild and may get worse only very gradually. It’s often termed “mild cognitive impairment” (MCI) as the symptoms are not severe enough
Common Types of Dementia.
Alzheimer’s Disease – It accounts for about 60-80% of cases. Some symptoms of this condition are difficulty remembering recent names, events, and conversations. Apathy and depression are also Alzheimer’s disease’s early symptoms. Some later symptoms are poor judgment, impaired communication, confusion, depression, disorientation, difficulty speaking, walking and swallowing, and behaviour changes.
Vascular Dementia – Accounting for 10% of cases of dementia. Some symptoms are impaired judgment, loss of motivation, strokes or bleeding in the brain. The number, location and size of the brain injuries will determine how the patient’s physical functioning and thinking are affected.
Lewy Body Dementia – Lewy bodies patient have thinking problems and memory loss common in Alzheimer’s disease. However, this type of dementia has other early symptoms such as well-formed visual hallucinations, sleep disturbances, gait imbalance, slowness, and other parkinsonian movement features.
Huntington’s Disease – This disease tends to occur in people aged between 30 & 50 years old. It is an inherited progressive dementia and it may affect the patient’s behaviour, cognition, and movement. The common symptoms of dementia caused by Huntington’s disease are impaired judgment, memory problems, mood swings, speech problems, frequent urination, and depression. Also, hallucinations and delusions may occur.
Frontotemporal Dementia – Some common symptoms are changes in behaviour and personality and difficulty with language, Nerve cells in the side regions and front of the brain are affected. Some main symptoms of frontotemporal dementia are decreased inhibition, often resulting in inappropriate behaviour, decreased empathy, apathy, loss of motivation, anxiety, depression, repetitive of compulsive behaviours.
Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus – Some symptoms of this type of dementia are difficulty walking, inability to control balance and urination and memory loss, in addition to impairments involving in speech and problem-solving abilities. This condition is caused by the build-up of fluid in the brain.
Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome – Another one on the list of the common types of dementia is a chronic memory disorder that is caused by the deficiency of vitamin B1, which helps brain cells to produce energy from sugar. When the level of thiamine falls too low, brain cells will not be able to generate enough energy to work properly. The most common cause of this disorder is alcohol misuse. People suffering from this disorder may have strikingly severe memory problems while other social and thinking skills are unaffected.
Symptoms of dementia – NHS (www.nhs.uk)
Kitwood’s Equation for managing Dementia
Tom Kitwood highlighted a number of different factors that contribute to the experience of living with dementia. Through recognizing that the person’s experience is not only influenced by their condition, he developed an equation that ensures care teams focus on the whole person, combining both the ‘medical’ and ‘social’ model approaches to care known as person centered care.
Dementia = B + P + H + NI + SP, where the letters stand for:
Biography
Personality
Health
Neurological Impairment
Social Psychology