Planning success

Don’t assume that the action plan will now magically happen. Even if the trainee has not asked for your support or hasn’t been able to give you an answer to the last question above, you do need to agree a monitoring schedule to give them feedback and catch problem molehills before they escalate into mountains.

Get the trainee to commit to at least one regular new ‘habit’ and keep watching out for it. Don’t encourage them to try to do everything at once. The initial enthusiasm may well make them want to rush off and change the world overnight, but once the pressures of work hit them again, they’ll find they really cannot do everything and may become demoralized. They may give up and go back to whatever they were doing before because it is easier and doesn’t require conscious effort.