Status quo

With Status Quo in this context, we refer to your status at this moment in time. Your status comprises your resources: intelligence, style, knowledge, skills.

Styles and Preferences

It is important to know your strengths and your weaknesses to be successful, in particular:

- Who you are

- How you work, learn and operate best, and

- Your preferences when taking up a challenge or tackling a problem.

Knowing your preferences, traits, characteristics and habits helps you to focus on your habits that lead to success and avoid habits that block success. This way, this field is about self-change, which often means learning. In this context, learning is not viewed as something that mainly takes place in educational institutions. Learning in our understanding relates to all activities and situations that lead to personal development and change. It applies to the workplace and any area where you meet challenges.

I am enough

An essential part of your current status is the realisation that you have had everything that brought you to the current position in life - you survived well. In the same sense, you also have everything today that you need today. All in all, you are enough for the tasks that you have to tackle today. That means you need not and should not expect more for today from yourself that what you are today, i.e. your expectations should be below (or at the same level as) your current capabilities. However, for the future, your expectations should be above your current capabilities, i.e. you improve yourself. The crucial part is that you improve yourself on the basis that you are good already. You become better from being good. If you start from a situation where you are not enough, and improve from there, the goal will move while you grow. This way, you will never be good (enough). So you want to start from being good (enough) and improve from there to become even better.

Reflection and Metacognition

You can assess your performance by reflecting on what you have achieved, what you have not achieved, and what you can do to improve your achievements. The reflection should cover both the process and the result. This process is called metacognition (thinking about your thoughts).

If you prefer to work with other people (in pairs, groups), you will benefit from feedback by friends, colleagues in addition to self-reflection.

Metacognition is a crucial concept when you want to improve your learning processes and performance. Metacognitive people learn/perform better than others because they are aware of the approach that suits them best.

Your mindset determines the way you approach challenges. Usually, you approach problems by building strategies. For success, it is a good idea to be conscious in this choice, to know different strategies and deliberately choose the best option. A strategy is a plan of attack. When we talk about a success strategy, we talk about how to attack our goals. A valid success strategy is a plan that helps you to prepare, implement and evaluate your efforts.

* Reflection and metacognition are prerequisites for making your own demanding, but realistic goals.
* Reflection and metacognition are necessary to evaluate your progress, revise goals, strategies and time spent.
* Reflection, metacognition and learning style are crucial factors for ensuring and maintaining your resilience to reach your goals and stay motivated.

When you have a problem, metacognition allows you to choose an approach that suits you the best.

Find out your Preferred Style and Role

There is much research on learning, implying that you will find many ways to plot or test your preferred Learning Style. One of the first steps is to construct knowledge based on and connected to what you already know and practice.

Below we provide a list of resources you can use to find out and plot your preferred approach, your favourite style, and your strongest intelligence.

• Multiple Intelligences test, based on Howard Gardner's (Seven/) Eight Types of Intelligences
• VARK Test, VARK makes use of four different learning styles.
• Belbin Team Roles Test and read more about Meredith R. Belbin's Nine team roles.
• Find out your own Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats using SWOT Analysis.