Small habit changes to achieve your goals

Success in schools (and if life generally) isn’t just about knowledge or experience—it’s also shaped by the small, everyday habits that staff build and maintain.

This course focuses on helping staff develop soft skills for goal-setting and achievement through the aggregation of marginal gains: making small, manageable changes that build into significant results over time.

Developing soft skills is essential at every level of school life, from support staff to senior leaders.

This course helps participants understand how habits are formed, how to break unhelpful patterns, and how to implement incremental changes to achieve long-term professional and personal goals.

The course includes video presentations, downloadable notes, reflective tasks, and a completion assignment, allowing staff to learn at their own pace.

• Understanding why “all or nothing” approaches often fail

• Addressing systems rather than focusing solely on goals

• Understanding how habits are built and how they function

• How long it takes to build a new habit

• The eight principles for building effective habits: Make it easy, Link them, Add on, Make it attractive, Make it satisfying, Make it obvious, Keep doing it, Missing a habit isn’t a failure

• Principles for breaking bad habits

• Putting it into practice: Identifying ultimate goals, defining the “person” responsible, breaking goals into sections, identifying tiny habits, starting and tracking progress

Outcomes - By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Recognise how small changes can accumulate to create meaningful results.

• Build new, productive habits using practical principles and techniques.

• Break unhelpful habits and replace them with effective behaviours.

• Apply goal-setting strategies in a step-by-step, manageable way.

• Track progress and adjust strategies to sustain long-term improvement.