Date · Thursday, 7 May 2026, 09:00 CEST
Hosted by · WHO
Session page · UNOG learning
Speakers
- Sara Canna · Team Lead, Talent Acquisition and Management Unit, WHO Academy · Bio
- Alison Osborne · Learning and Development Professional, WHO · Bio
This session explores how habits shape the way we work under pressure, and how easily we can slip into reactive patterns in complex, fast-paced environments. When demands are high, habits such as over-preparing, constant busyness, or avoiding difficult conversations can take over, often reducing clarity, focus and effectiveness. Through a combination of reflection and practical insights, participants will learn how to recognise these patterns and understand the role they play in day-to-day work. The session introduces simple, evidence-informed approaches to building small, intentional habits that support better decision-making, energy management and sustained performance.
Key takeaways
- Under pressure, we don’t rise to our intentions. we fall to our habits. Awareness of your patterns is the necessary first step to changing them.
- Protective habits (people-pleasing, overthinking, over-preparing, seeking external validation) began as useful coping strategies. They are not weaknesses, but they may now be limiting your effectiveness, energy, and leadership.
- Habits follow a loop: cue → craving → response → reward. Understanding where you are in the loop gives you a point to intervene, either by reshaping the cue, redefining the reward, or inserting a pause before the response.
- Motivation follows action, not the other way around. Don’t wait to feel ready. Start with the smallest possible action and motivation catches up.
- Consistency beats intensity. A 1% daily improvement compounds dramatically over time. Tiny, repeated actions build momentum, and, crucially, they build a new identity: evidence that you can rely on yourself.
- Gratitude practiced consistently (3-4 times per day) quiets the amygdala, lowers cortisol, and gradually rewires the brain’s attentional bias from what is wrong toward what is possible.
- To anchor a new habit: attach it to something you already do, shrink it until failure is nearly impossible, make it sensory or rewarding, and prioritize consistency over intensity.
Sara Canna
Sara opened by naming the central problem: under pressure, we know what we should do, but we default to autopilot and reactive patterns instead. She introduced a gratitude exercise early in the session, participants rated their job satisfaction, listed three to five things they were grateful for at work, then rated again, to demonstrate in real time how gratitude shifts attentional bias. She explained the neuroscience behind it: gratitude suppresses amygdala activity (the brain’s threat-response centre), lowers cortisol, and boosts the neurotransmitters linked to wellbeing. Done consistently three to four times a day, it gradually rewires the brain to focus on what is possible rather than on what is wrong or lacking.
She also framed the root cause of reactive behavior: cognitive load. Modern work environments pile on constant information, rapid decisions, and competing priorities simultaneously, and the consequence is that we react on autopilot instead of responding intentionally. We lose the ability to see the big picture or to be in contact with ourselves.
Sara led two live brainstorming exercises asking participants to share habits that build calm and focus (meditation, yoga, nature, music), connection and joy (eating together, calling friends, dancing, travel), and courage and action (saying no, setting boundaries, speaking up, doing one small difficult thing). These exercises served a practical purpose: surfacing what already works, so participants can build on it rather than starting from scratch.
She closed with a concrete habit-building process: start with your “why” and the kind of person you want to become; anchor the new habit to something you already do; shrink it down to the point where failure is nearly impossible; make it sensory and rewarding; use visual reminders; speak to yourself with kindness rather than pressure; and above all, prioritize consistency over intensity. Her closing line was the session’s anchor: “Under pressure, we don’t rise to our intentions, we fall to our habits.”
Alison Osborne
Alison took the psychological and neuroscientific angle, explaining why protective habits become more rigid and automatic under stress rather than fading. She introduced the river-carving-a-ravine analogy: repeated thoughts and behaviors carve neural pathways that become the brain’s default route, the path of least resistance. The most common limiting habits, over-preparing, people-pleasing, seeking validation, comparing yourself to others, overthinking, are not character flaws. They are adaptations. At some point in life, each of them helped avoid shame, gain approval, or feel safe. The brain, designed to conserve energy and predict outcomes, keeps running what once worked. The problem is that these strategies now operate on outdated information, learned in environments that rewarded being quiet, getting things right, or not taking up too much space, conditions that may no longer apply.
The goal, Alison argued, is not to silence these protective parts but to acknowledge them and let a wiser, adult self take the wheel instead. She offered a practical reframe for when the voice pipes up: “Thank you for trying to keep me safe, but there is space for me here. I don’t need to earn my safety.” That way, you respond from presence rather than protection.
She then explained how habits work mechanically through the habit loop, cue, craving, response, reward, using exercise and food as accessible examples. Her most actionable insight: motivation follows action, not the other way around. You will not feel ready or motivated before you start; the feeling comes after. This is why small, consistent steps matter more than ambitious bursts of intensity. Tiny actions build momentum, create evidence of self-reliability, and compound into a changed identity over time. She shared her own story of building confidence as a public speaker, shaking visibly at her first meeting five years ago, going back again and again, until speaking to 500 people became manageable. She also offered tactical moves for specific habits: pausing before saying yes, using “I’ll get back to you” as a circuit-breaker, making decisions at 85% certainty rather than waiting for perfection, and reframing the “who am I to?” voice by asking instead: what have I got to offer?
Frameworks and models
| Name | What it stands for | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| The Habit Loop | Cue, Craving, Response, Reward | A behavioural cycle where a trigger activates a desire, which drives an action that produces a payoff, reinforcing the pattern. To build a new habit, engineer the cue and define a meaningful reward. To break an old one, insert a pause between cue and response |
| Tiny Habits Setup | Seven-step setup process for new habits: start with why, anchor to existing habit, shrink down, sensory and rewarding, visual reminders, kind self-talk, consistency over intensity | Use when building any new daily practice. The shrink-down step is the most violated; ambitious first versions usually fail |
| Gratitude Reset | Three to four daily 30-second gratitude pauses that lower cortisol, suppress amygdala activity, and shift attentional bias | The smallest possible career-development habit, with the largest underlying neuroscience. Anchor to existing routines (after morning coffee, after lunch, before closing the laptop) |
Resources
| Resource | What it is / What it’s for | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Atomic Habits, James Clear | A well-regarded book on habit formation and behavioral change; covers the habit loop, identity-based habits, and practical strategies for building and breaking patterns. Recommended in Q&A (NOT an official recommendation from the presenters). | https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits |
Last updated 2026-05-10.