egyii blog

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

What do we mean by ‘downturn’? What do we mean by ‘economic crisis’?  

The meaning we attach to words such as these, and hence to events that happen to us, is a very personal thing.

I may see the ‘downturn’ as something absolutely devastating to me personally, to my finances and to the happiness of my family. My morale will be sure to be rock bottom. On the other hand, you may see the downturn as an opportunity to cut out bad spending habits and save more of your income.

Even if you lose your job, you may see it a great opportunity to re-evaluate your life and start afresh, even if from a lower income base.

The thing to realise is that we have a choice about what meaning we attach to events. We can choose to let the newspapers, our friends or our colleagues influence that meaning, or we can choose to be the masters of our meaning.

If today we allow the newspapers or our colleagues to influence how we see our situation, it is likely we will become depressed. And if we then influence our colleagues with our own depressing viewpoints, our group morale will suffer.

But if we stop and think for ourselves and ignore other people’s opinions, we can choose to interpret the situation in any way we like.

It’s simply not true that because companies are losing sales, we all have to be miserable. Companies losing sales is a fact. But what we do with this fact is just a creation we make in our own minds. We can choose to interpret this fact in a way that makes us feel OK about ourselves, our family, or the world in general.

So, my advice is: don’t get swept up in ‘group think’ which lets your morale sink. Don’t follow everyone else’s interpretation of events. Take control of your own mind and find ways to feel OK – whatever is happening in the world, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which, of course, is just someone’s interpretation.)

For leaders, stop a moment and look inward so as to harness your personal resources. Find a new, more positive way to view your company’s situation and help your people attach more useful meanings to the events that confront your organisation.

We are fast realising that self-management is a critical addition to skills enhancement, and if we can learn to tap into our own internal resources, we will be stronger, more confident and more likely to perform at our peak.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Yesterday I had a meltdown.

It started with me receiving a request to perform a series of computer tasks that I was unfamiliar with. Being a relative latecomer to the world of internet marketing, I panicked. I saw myself taking a whole day to accomplish what someone else might accomplish in half an hour.

The result was a series of mistakes that let to a waste of time and effort, until I stopped and looked inside, at my state of mind, rather than outside, at the task that confronted me.

I realised that my mistakes had nothing to do with ability and everything to do with my state of mind. And my state of mind was brought on by a belief which said ‘You’re no good at working with IT’.

I then asked the following questions:

Where does this belief originate from?

Where is the evidence to support this belief?

Where is the evidence to the contrary?

What will happen if I continue to hold this belief?

What  could happen if I believed the opposite?

In what way is this belief ridiculous?

What would be a better, more empowering belief to have?

The result of this analysis was not a new belief saying ‘You’re good at IT’, but one that said ‘You can do anything you put your mind to when you are calm’. It was my ability to manage my state that was the crucial empowering factor.

The result was that I finished the task in a short period of time thereafter with no mistakes, and actually felt elated as I was doing it.

There are many ways that we can change our state, from thinking about something different to exercising to doing a different task to talking to someone.

Whatever it is, there has never been a more appropriate time for executives today to look inward for the source of their frustrations, failure and fear, and to harness the tools of the mind to secure their future.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore