The Lifestyle Coach

Australian National Research Priorities

RESEARCH PRIORITY GOALS

Australia's national research priorities were announced by the Prime Minister in late 2002 and were enhanced and refined in 2003 to take greater account of the contributions of the social sciences and humanities research.

The new research goals are:

A. Responding to climate change and variability - increasing our understanding of the impact of climate change and variability at the regional level across Australia, and addressing the consequences of these factors on the environment and on communities.(NRP: Environmentally Sustainable Australia);

B. Strengthening Australia’s social and economic fabric - understanding and strengthening key elements of Australia’s social and economic fabric to help families and individuals live healthy, productive, and fulfilling lives. (NRP: Good Health);

C. Promoting an innovation culture and economy - maximising Australia’s creative and technological capability by understanding the factors conducive to innovation and its acceptance (NRP: Frontier Technologies); and

D. Understanding our region and the world -Enhancing Australia’s capacity to interpret and engage with its regional and global environment through a greater understanding of languages, societies, politics and cultures. (NRP: Safeguarding Australia).

B. National Research Priority _"Good Health"

Average life expectancies have increased markedly in recent decades. Australians also expect to lead longer and healthier lives in the future, and to remain productive and independent over an extended period.

Enabling individuals and families to make choices that lead to healthy, productive and fulfilling lives will yield economic and social benefits and add materially to national well being.

Australians expect that their children and grandchildren should have a healthy start to life.

Developing strategies to promote the healthy development of young Australians, and addressing the causes and reducing the impact of the genetic, social and environmental factors which diminish their life potential will be critical.

A revolution is also underway at the other end of the life cycle. Australia, like many other developed nations, is undergoing a major demographic shift involving significant growth in the aged population.

To meet this challenge, it will be important to promote healthy ageing by developing better social and medical strategies to ensure that older Australians enjoy healthy and productive lives.

Informed insights into the causes of disease and of mental and physical degeneration will contribute to the achievement of this goal.

All Australians stand to benefit from preventive healthcare through the adoption of healthier attitudes, habits and lifestyles.

Evidence-based preventive interventions may help reduce the incidence and severity of many diseases, including major health problems such as cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, mental ill-health, obesity, diabetes, asthma and chronic inflammatory conditions. These could include interventions that reduce exposure to contamination of the physical environment (eg air pollution).

Improvements in the health and well being of the young, of older Australians and in preventive healthcare will be underpinned by research.

However, while Australia has an enviable record in health and medical research, the research effort is spread across the many universities, hospitals and health and medical research institutes, resulting in critical mass only in limited areas of research.

There is also a need to draw on multidisciplinary approaches that include research contributions from the social sciences and humanities.

This priority is designed to promote health and prevent disease through a more focused and collaborative effort.

Priority goals for research fall in the four areas of a healthy start to life, ageing well, ageing productively, preventive healthcare and strengthening Australia’s social and economic fabric.

Priority Goals

1   A healthy start to life

Counteracting the impact of genetic, social and environmental factors which predispose infants and children to ill health and reduce their well being and life potential.

Human health in the developing foetus and in early childhood is critical to the future well being of the adult. Research shows that health and well being in early childhood is predictive of later positive outcomes, and that health in middle and late childhood is also crucial. This goal supports the Government’s National Agenda for Early Childhood initiative.

2   Ageing well, ageing productively

Developing better social, medical and population health strategies to improve the mental and physical capacities of ageing people.

Australia’s population is ageing, with a significant projected increase in the number of people aged over 65 and over 85. While Australia is relatively well placed compared with many OECD nations, major shifts in cultural expectations and attitudes about ageing are necessary to respond constructively, at both an individual and population level. A healthy aged population will contribute actively to the life of the nation through participation in the labour market or through voluntary work. This goal supports the Government’s National Strategy for an Ageing Australia.

3   Preventive healthcare

New ethical, evidence-based strategies to promote health and prevent disease through the adoption of healthier lifestyles and diet, and the development of health-promoting products.

Preventive healthcare research will improve the prediction and prevention of disease and injury for all Australians through the adoption of healthier behaviours, lifestyles and environments. Research will generate an improvement in the design, delivery and uptake of programmes such as exercise-based rehabilitation. There are several major disease targets amenable to immediate study, such as cardiovascular health, neurodegenerative diseases, mental ill-health, obesity, diabetes, asthma and chronic inflammatory conditions. Research on prevention will emphasise interdisciplinary approaches, including research on ethics, drawing on contributions from the social sciences and humanities, as well as from the health and medical sciences. It will also focus on developing new health promoting foods and nutraceuticals. This goal supports the Government’s Focus on Prevention initiative.

4   Strengthening Australia's social and economic fabric

Understanding and strengthening key elements of Australia's social and economic fabric to help families and individuals live healthy, productive, and fulfilling lives.

Living in today's society involves a complex web of choices, yet many of the traditional support structures are weaker than they have been in the past. Enabling people to make choices that lead to positive pathways to self reliance and supportive family structures is more important than ever. The interactions between the social safety net, social and economic participation, financial incentives and community and private sources of support are critical in helping people maximise their potential and achieve good, healthy, lifetime outcomes. In the decade ahead, it will be vital to understand and support the drivers for workforce participation and the broader social and economic trends influencing Australian families and communities. This goal supports the Government's welfare reform and participation agendas. Research in this area will emphasise interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on contributions from the economic, behavioural and social sciences.

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Comments written by the Medical Journal of Australia in 2005, about progress in the preceding 3 years weren't encouraging.

Your Career As A LifeLong Learner

Our changing world of work

Gone are the days of jobs for life. Lamented by many and remembered by increasingly few. The concept now seems outrageously outdated. To our youth it appears ‘quaint’ in an old-fashioned way; sort of back there somewhere with black and white television. It belonged to an era of family certainty and cultural 'givens'. Many baby-boomer children remember their father (mum didn't work) attaching his working identity to the company he worked for. "What do you do?", "Oh, I'm with BHP, what about you?", "Yeah, I'm with Shell!". It was long term tenure, and Dad was the bread winner. That family sameness extended across a full span of childhood memories for many individuals who are in their 40’s and 50’s today. Perhaps in hindsight it was the peak of industrialized culture in terms of the ‘world of work’. 

Trend analysts now describe contemporary life as unchartered waters. Authors such as Salzman & Matathia in their recently updated work titled "Now, Trends for the Future", tell us that today, age-old certainties have crumbled. Known’s such as normal family, where do babies come from, how old is old, what’s a job, have all but disappeared. Changes are coming so fast and on such a broad front people are left bewildered and guessing. This has resulted in a shift in people’s identity and what they feel is their place in the world.

For most, certainty has been replaced with constant uncertainty. The world of work is more dynamic and change is constant. Many permutations and combinations of paid employment now exist. New work opportunities will continue to evolve from new combinations of multi-disciplinary skills, knowledge, understandings and technologies. As a result of these changes individuals now face full responsibility for their own career development. And employers are faced with staff who as individuals, have new needs and expectations. 

In career development language, the era of lifelong learning has been ushered in. In the world of work 'lifelong learning' informs us that it’s now individuals who need to consider themselves managers of their own careers and its necessary and sensible for us all to regard ourselves as self-employed. Old learning theories have been critiqued; new learning theories have been added. Narrow trait and factor tests have been replaced with the need for values and context framed learning environments. 

According to a recently published paper on career guidance the term career has taken new meaning. Career has increasingly broadened from a term that is synonymous with occupation or job, to be one that represents the configuration of all facets and roles of an individual’s life. Indeed current thinking is that all individuals have a career, and paid employment is but one element of it. Career development is considered a lifelong process and this process is unique for each individual. Increasing emphasis has been placed on the process of career development, holism and interconnectedness. www.education.edu.au (Career Guidance Paper) 

The Australian Business Foundation has commented that the commercial world is still adjusting to the shift in staff's new career expectations. Business enterprises are digesting the reality that working life is simply not homogeneous and stable, but affected by a complex array of forces for change. They suggest that the challenge for business leaders is to understand that the new nature of work and their ‘contract’ with employees is not standard. There are now whole new cohorts of workers with different perceptions and aspirations for their working life emerging. One size no longer fits all. Workplace design and flexibility are all open to interpretation and must be tailored to distinctive circumstances of individual businesses and their myriad employees.

These expectations are now being framed in policy and new government legislation. For small enterprises this might yet prove an unwelcome reality. While larger corporations in Australia have been wrestling with these issues for some years, now it’s the smaller local employers who may unwittingly be forced into the spotlight. 

For instance your local doctors’ clinic was not traditionally considered a rich learning environment by either Doctors or their staff. Training and development was rarely a budgeted item and staff certainly didn’t expect it. It was a bonus if you happened to work for a more pro-active and professionally oriented clinic. Times have changed. 

New accreditation levels has come into play which include assurance staff have adequate training and development. This will develop new expectations for both Doctors and their staff. New obligations will be nothing more than another layer of burden and irritation for a boss who considers staff as solely a negative on the balance sheet. Their cry will be "Just get the right compliance boxes ticked, and be done with it!" Professionally minded clinics  are not likely to embrace it with open arms either, but for them it will simply formalize what they know and do already. Perhaps most significantly, it will begin to affect the thinking of staff towards their place of employment. 

Just as 2006 ushered in websites where students rate their teachers according to student perceptions, perhaps the future will contain similar web entities where practice staff might rate their Doctors and local clinic in terms of their employment appeal. (a Doctor or Practice Managers very own cyber "Wall of Shame")

"But why would staff bother?" Certainly most won't. But human nature would suggest that some would enjoy firing a cyber dart at their former boss. After all it's anonymous and safe.  But in the bigger picture, there will be a more strategic long term motivation, and that is all employees will understand and accept that they must accrue some certified training and develop a portfolio of demonstrated skills to remain employable and current. It will become a simple survival skill in tomorrows employment environment, as individuals pursue their own distinctive mix of work, life and family.

Staff members are now as big a stakeholder, as suppliers and clients in the quality and reputation of the enterprise. Perhaps more than ever before, training and development of a certified nature will play a role in the new world of work for everyone involved in large and small business.

Marathon Man (or horse)

Long work hours, stress, debt, poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle. If that described a Melbourne Cup runner, would you chance a bet?

Perhaps..., perhaps not! I guess it depends on your concept of risk? But just as a marathon 'horse race' takes preparation, discipline and good trainers; so do our lives. Rather like the famous 'Melbourne event' our lives could well be considered more of a marathon than a sprint. Despite the unknowns that tomorrow brings, if we prepare now, we can hope our quality of life as we age wasn't a total gamble.

My Grandfather was a fine man. He died on one of those searing hot, blustery, northerly wind days in January. How I hate those days! He died before I knew him well enough to really appreciate him. It was afterwards that others in the local community told me of his virtue and involvement in their lives. What he officially died of that day was a heart attack. But it was downstream in time of the true cause. His heart attack was induced by his labouring efforts for breath. The result of his emphysema condition. A result of smoking for much of his adult life.

Such experiences changed me. I was young. At a young age, when impressionable minds grab hold of such unusual and mysterious family events. The net effect is that it has made me a bit weird about the notion of "dying well". For if we don't get on top of things when we can, then we pay a sorry price later. As not only do we end up being a burden to ourselves in future years, but we also unwittingly become a burden to our immediate family support members as they see us suffer. It's tragic, mostly because it's avoidable.

I think we can do something about that if we can get alongside people and walk with them for a season. They (and you and I) can steward these human bodies and live better family lives into the distant future if we so choose to educate ourselves and act upon that knowledge today. We all need good information, but then we need to act on that information.

Because to know and not to do, is not to know.

Living with a clear sense of self

"Have you ever considered that you may have missed your life"

In the post to follow I am going to make two assumptions. 1. that all people are responsible for the choices they make and 2. that these choices are meaningful and significant.

Many individuals experience a crisis of vocation and identity. Not just those Daniel J. Levinson  described in his "Seasons of A Man's Life" as being in their mid-life crisis. The biggest issue is that we can become alienated from ourselves.  We are not sure of our deepest desires and values. One part of us tells us that we have aptitude, promise and a distinctive role to play. But another darker thought lurks. The thought that in some telling way, we might have missed our own life. All of us can identify personal mistakes, unwise decisions and things we wish we had done differently. But can we achieve a stronger sense of personal integrity and authenticity in our day to day lives.

There are many interpretations of integrity in our contemporary world.  One notion I find more compelling than most is the suggestion that at personal level "integrity" exists when our 'internal' and 'external' conversations are aligned. A sense of sameness in our public and private worlds. Not that I endorse 'authenticity' in and of itself. It can be base and demeaning without a moral compass. But rather that the 'speed of life' has increased so much in many of our lives that we find our outer public world, has lost it's connection with our internal world. And more concerning is that our propensity for chronic 'busy-ness' has overtaken us to such an extent, that we do not understand how to hear our inner selves. Despite the dizzy array of labour saving devices and communication technologies we now have at our disposal, few have enabled us to live more principled, considered lives. Rather they seem to have plundered those few welcome opportunities we get to be by ourselves.

Neither is this issue unique to our time or culture. As Gordon MacDonald in his book "Ordering You Private World" wrote. The Irish author and famous playwright Oscar Wilde was an individual who paid scant attention to his private world until he was incarcerated. And for him, contemporary life was lived in the late 19th century. He reflected while in prison that...

"I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to cry aloud from the house-top. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul,  and I did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. (abridged 'prison writings')

Could it be that one of the great battlegrounds of our age is the private world of the individual. Many individuals shoulder massive responsibilities at home, at work, and within the local community. Are our worthwhile actions simply leaving us very, very tired. And perhaps like Wilde they may have become too public world oriented, ignoring the private side until it is almost too late. The question to pose is "Are you taking time regularly to order your inner life?"

Few people have had to wrestle with the pressures of a public world more than Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the famous aviator. And she jealously guarded her private world and wrote some insightful comments about it in her book "The  Gift From The Sea".

"I want first of all.... to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints - to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and inward man be one." I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God."

The message is to be aware of the potential collapse that follows when the inner world is ignored. And to have built some relational insurance against it. Many times we need someone to stand with us as we think through the issues of life.