Take back control of your performance
Last week I allowed the business environment to ‘get to me’. In the face of a challenging sales scenario I looked to the future and saw black clouds. This perception affected my drive and I started to become despondent. The change in my mood in turn affected my behaviour and even my speech became slower and less decisive. This, of course, affected the response I got from people I do business with.
Have you noticed any change in your thinking, mood and behaviour? Perhaps you just experience an underlying tone of anxiety as you go about your business. The problem is, this change directly affects the way others feel around you and about you, creating a knock-on effect on all kinds of results. If you’re client-facing, their experience of you might affect their attitude towards your organisation.
What’s happening here?
This is why it is critical for every executive to understand what’s happening to them and get control of it. John Assaraf, in his book Having It All, says “We don’t see everything there is to see; we only see what we are conditioned to see.” What this means is that we interpret information coming to us through a very personal filter. And this filter is made up of what we believe about the world around us and the kinds of things we tell ourselves all day long.
Our perceptions of the world are unique to us, and we can either allow these perceptions to de-motivate us and affect our performance, or we can look at our beliefs and internal messages and understand how they control us.
How important is this?
John Assaraf goes on to say “We talk, act, and pretend out of the prejudices of our beliefs. As a result, our beliefs and habits affect our self-esteem, our relationships, our prosperity, our job performance, our mental and physical health, and even the way other people treat us, because people treat us exactly the way we see and treat ourselves.”
What can we do?
It is essential to our performance that we find the time to sit down on our own and think about what we truly believe about ourselves and others and link these beliefs to our present thinking, mood and behaviour. It is an awakening when we realise that a belief we developed many years ago is controlling our performance today, even if that belief is no longer relevant.
It is also important to realise that these beliefs are just thoughts that we have created in our own minds. They are an illusion. And as such, we are free to eliminate them and replace them with new beliefs that serve us today. This point is crucial – we all have the ability to control what goes on in our mind, and being able to do this on a constant basis is the secret of mental and emotional strength and ultimately, success in what we set out to accomplish.
Back to my story – I realised that my despondency was the result of a belief that I did not have control over my destiny. Changing this belief into a more empowering one meant that I was able to turn my mood around and become less stressed and more productive.
James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore
Tags: Performance Management, Personal Development, Self-management
