Status quo

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

Styles and Preferences

In order to be successful it is important to know your strengths and your weaknesses, 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 and this is most often connected to 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 are geared towards personal development and change. It is applicable to the workplace and any area where you meet challenges.

I am enough

An essential part of your current status is the realization 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 willmove while you improve. 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

The main way to assess your own performance (both the process as well as the result) is the process of reflecting on what you have achieved and what you have not achieved, and what you can do to improve your achievements. This process is called metacognition (thinking about your thoughts).

Those of you who prefer to work with other people (in pairs, groups) instead of on their own will benefit from feedback by friends, colleagues in addition to self-reflection.

Metacognition is a key concept when you want to improve your own 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. Normally, challenges are approached by building strategies. In order to be successful, it is a good idea to be conscious in this choice, to know different strategies and deliberately choose the best option. A strategy may be defined as a plan of attack. This means that when we talk about a success strategy, we talk about how to attack our goals. A good 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 you own 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.

Given 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.