Earlier this week, the ADPR team spent a super fun, inspirational and engaging day learning how to Live BIG with Rob Chilcot from Claims Consortium Foundations, a Taunton based company that provides training services to businesses.
Live BIG is the leadership methodology Claims Consortium introduced to their company over five years ago. It revolutionised the way the company did business and served its customers and people. It is the force that drove the company to be listed on the Sunday Times Top 100 companies to work for in 2017 and 2018, to be awarded the Investors In People Gold Standard and the Institute of Customer Service Mark World Class accreditation. The Claims Consortium Foundations team loved it so much they wanted to share their knowledge with other businesses too.
At its score, Live BIG is a way of thinking and being that stops us playing small. It’s a leadership development programme that empowers people to be great, love work, and go beyond what they thought they were capable of.
When we heard about the programme, we couldn’t wait to try it out for ourselves! The full Live Big course focuses on six powers that make Live BIG real: Optimism, Focus, Creativity, Action, Purpose and Energy. Combined, the six Live BIG powers give a blend of mindset and strategy skills that together develop the way we think, feel and act. In our one-day introduction session to the Live BIG philosophy, we focused on Optimism and Purpose.
Rob – a former professional rugby coach – started off our session by giving us a human behaviour 101! He talked us through the way the brain works, how it learns and processes information through learnt “filters” which can be either helpful or limiting (the “stories” we tell ourselves). We discussed the six human behaviours that matter most to people: variety, certainty, significance, love/compassion, growth and contribution and how these human behaviours drive performance.
Optimism
The first of the Live BIG powers we looked at was Optimism. This is founded on the important lesson that it’s not the events that happen to us that define our happiness and success, but how we interpret them. The Live BIG Optimism power teaches us to accept ‘it is what it is’ and stop worrying about the things we can’t control. Once you have accepted the situation for what it is, you then must shift your thinking, to focus on what you want, as it is clinically proven in neuroscience that what you focus on you get!
Purpose
The second part of our session was focused on the Live BIG power of Purpose. Currently a bit of a buzz word, purpose is being spoken about by brands a lot. Not only does a company with purpose connect better with the consumers of today but it also drives deeper levels of employee engagement. According to Live BIG, deep and lasting motivation does not come from bonuses or pay rises, but from knowing that what you do at work really matters. In order to find the ‘why’ behind what we do and create a clear direction of travel, you need a North Star. In Live BIG, the North Star is the story of your best future to set your direction of travel. It is a vision of your ideal that sits beyond a company’s goals. We worked on developing an ADPR Company North Star, where we discussed what it is we really care abut as a team and what future we want to build. Having this clear direction of travel means we can all check in that our actions, behaviours and choices are lined up – helping us to hold each other to this higher standard. We will be sharing our North Star soon – so watch this space!
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We’d like to thank Rob and the wider Foundations team for all their wisdom and time! We thoroughly enjoyed the course and every team member came away feeling fired up, inspired, positive and ready to really Live BIG!
“Sometimes we are tested, not to show our weaknesses, but to discover our strengths.”
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