The workshop · Professional development
The Micro Shift Method™ — at work
A 45-minute workshop with Sharon Templeton
Forty-five minutes with Sharon Templeton on why change that needs willpower never lasts — and what to do instead.
The workshop
The workshop is the part they'll talk about on the bus home.
Sharon Templeton founded Temple Day Spa thirteen years ago. In that time she's watched thousands of South Australians come through the door carrying something they couldn't put down, and she's learned a fair bit about what actually changes and what's just noise. That became The Micro Shift Method™.
Why willpower fails
It opens with something uncomfortable.
Everyone in the room has already tried to change something this year — stop checking email at night, take a real lunch break, stop saying yes at four o'clock on a Friday. It lasted about nine days. The story we tell ourselves is that we lack discipline, which is both untrue and the reason it keeps happening: if the problem is you, the solution is try harder, and trying harder is exactly what everyone has been doing for years.
The real reason is simpler. They were pushing against a pattern already running at full speed.
The method
So Sharon takes the team through the mechanism. Every pattern runs the same five steps, and those five steps are not equally strong — one of them is much closer to a real choice than it feels. That's the hinge. Find the hinge and you don't need willpower; you need a two-second decision in one specific place.
In forty-five minutes each person maps a pattern from their own working life, locates its hinge, and writes down one micro shift — small enough to be slightly embarrassing, available on their worst day, and anchored so it survives the week everything goes wrong. Then, together, the team agrees one thing they'll change as a group. Not a policy. Something they can just start doing.
What it is — and isn't
It isn't a lecture and it isn't therapy.
Nothing said in the room goes back to you as the employer, and we say that out loud at the start. Everyone takes home the Micro Shift Workbook and twelve months of the Temple Wellbeing App, so the day doesn't end when the bus does.