 The Trend Work-out: flex your muscles to train your inner trend researcher. In the following months I, trend intern Sanne, will be your trend fitness instructor and give you tips and tricks on practicing trend research. Read more and get started right away! Now you might not know how to get started or are in doubt if you're doing the exercises in the right way. In that case: keep reading and follow this series of blog posts. In the next couple of months I will carry out a sample of the exercises and give tips and tricks on how you can do them too! The book and workbook both consist of six chapters: rewind, framework, scan, analyse, apply and forward. This week we’ll start with chapter one: Rewind. In this chapter you will find exercises about e.g. your time orientation and what skills are important if you want to research trends. This week I will carry out the following exercise: WHAT IS YOUR TIME PERSPECTIVE? [Question 1.1 found on page 7 and 8 of your workbook] First advice I would like to give you: read every page with attention so you don't miss out the information you need to answer the questions. On page 18 to 20 in your textbook you will find more information regarding time perspectives. This will give you extra help to define your spot on the line in this first exercise. Choose your position How to choose your position? Well, I have asked myself: what time perspective matches me best? I started thinking about how I work, how I act in social activities and so on and came to the conclusion that my orientation is somewhere between present and future. How about you?  Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory test If you are having a hard time reflecting on your time orientation, a tool that could help you is the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory test on www.thetimeparadox.com (placed on the left side of the webpage). It takes about ten minutes to do the test and you can spend as much time as you want to read about the outcomes and the different time perspectives types. The test will give you more insights on your personality linked to the different time orientations. Test results and experience I couldn’t give you advise if I didn’t do the test myself. The test shows your results in points and in the chart below you can see in red what the ideal scores are (according to Zimbardo). I've added my personal score in yellow on the chart. As you can see, I scored really high on past positive and present hedonism, medium on future and low on present fatalistic and past-negative.  Unfortunately the results are not personalised so you have to read the explanation of the time orientations to understand your specific outcomes. The test made me think about my behaviour and question myself. Do I indeed act like this and why did I score so low on the other time perspectives? Besides doing this test to get more information to answer the question in the workbook, it can also work as a reflection of yourself that could help you describe and explain yourself better in what you feel, want or need. Now let’s go back to the assignment: if you see yourself in more than one orientation, in which one do you see yourself the most? Then lean more towards that one. Your explanation could be a couple of the descriptions that you feel are the most relevant. You can read my explanation int he picture below.  TIME & TRENDS You might wonder: why is this exercise useful for trend research? It helps you to see what your perspective is on time and what kind of a trend researcher you are. It will influence the way you look at trends and how you execute your research. So be aware of your time orientation when you start doing trend research. I hope this post helped you out. Please let me know if there is something you miss or an exercise you would like to me to carry out. Have a great day and let’s do this again next week!
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