Abhijit Bhattacharjee's Blog: bringing you updates and sharing knowledge, stories, tips and latest tools on leadership development, personal effectiveness and impact.
Showing posts with label Self Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self Development. Show all posts
Those of you who have raised children through teenage years will know how difficult it gets when a child suddenly starts thinking that she's no good and the entire world is arraigned against her. My 13-year old decided to go this way earlier this year. No amount of parental counselling, encouragement, coaxing and cajoling changed that. 'I can't do maths, I' am dumb, I hate PE......' The list was endless.
We decided to give up trying hard. No point in reminding her that only in the last term she was doing excellent in school and had so many friends!
When 'being unhappy' becomes a habit, reason doesn't work. I asked her to spend ten minutes with me one evening, on the assurance that I won't talk about her school or studies or her life. She did it - she found it funny as it appeared that two grown ups (she considers herself one) were doing silly things. This is what I asked her to do with me (this is a technique I picked up years ago during my NLP training!):
Start by rolling your eyes in a wide circle while keeping your head straight. First clockwise for two minutes, then counter-clockwise for another two minutes. Then follow up with moving your eyes in a horizontal figure eight pattern. As you do that make sure your eyes move up through the centre of the figure and down the sides. Go in one direction for two minutes, then in the other direction for two minutes. Make sure you keep your head straight and move only your eyes. We made her do it 2-3 times in a day whenever we spotted her about to go into her favourite state.
She must have found something amusing about this exercise because although she started doing it with some reluctance, after 2-3 days we could spot her sitting in her room and rolling her eyes all around. Before the end of the week, she began talking about her achievements in school, and her plans to excel in all the areas which she was 'hopeless' six days ago!
Explanation: For those of you who are curious as to how this seemingly 'silly' thing works, here is the simple theory behind this exercise. We all know that your state of mind (happy, sad, depressed, excited, etc) affects your posture (physiology - outward bodily manifestation that people see). When you are sad, you are looking down, or your shoulders drooping etc. Try looking up and stay that way when you are depressed! You get the point - it is also our physiology that influences the state of mind. If we can change one, we can change the other. Simple? Try it, and you'll see the difference!
We live in an age of options and choices. The more the merrier. Right from childhood, I grew up believing what I was told – ‘always make sure you keep all options open, whether it be what field choose to study or in your career’. Looking back over my career, some of my most successful moments came when I was pushed against the wall and had no choice left. Over fifteen years ago, having worked for a large charity in several countries, I decided to launch myself into consulting work. I spent days visualising and planning my career as a consultant which I knew I would love doing. However, when it came to taking action, I could not bring myself to take the plunge as the uncertainty of starting a consulting business on my own was too much of a risk. My reasonably comfortable job which brought an assured paycheque every month was a strong attraction, although I was trying to take gradual steps towards my launch. To leave my job I needed to make sure that I had obtained enough work for at least the first 8-12 months.
That moment, however – the day I would have enough work in my hand before quitting - remained elusive even after five years of planning. Meanwhile I changed job and started working for another organisation, in a position which brought me still bigger paycheque. The idea of consulting career was still lurking in the back of my mind. However, the right moment to quit and launch into a new career remained elusive for another year. Things then started to take a turn for the worse in my job. After a brief honeymoon period in the new organisation, I became increasingly frustrated with what I was doing. I did not quite like the working culture of the organisation, and my own performance on the job left both me and my employer dissatisfied. It soon came to a point where I knew it was pointless to continue there. I also realised I did not want to get back to the kind of job I was doing in the previous organisation. Further, I feared, having changed job only a year ago, putting myself back on the job market was hardly going to do my career a favour.
This is when my idea of launching my consulting business took a grip. I did not want to continue where I was working, I believed my chances of finding another interesting job were slim – if for nothing else, my relationship with my then employer meant that I would have difficulty even getting a good reference. In other words, I had burnt all my bridges – I could no longer rely on another employer to give me a paycheque every month.
It took me only another two weeks to quit my job. I still had no assignment in hand, had no idea where my first assignment would come from. I even did not have a business plan for my consulting business, but I knew whenever I would have one it would be great. It took another six to eight weeks before I registered my company, had a business plan, and had a loan for £ 40,000 from a bank – my consulting business was launched. I had no idea how I was going to repay the loan, but I knew I needed this to make sure that at least I didn’t have to worry about cash flow, and I also knew by then that I would make a good success of the consulting business.
Fortunately, I did not have to regret these decisions even once in the last eight years.
I have often wondered since then, what made me take this risk – with a family of three children to look after - when I could have continued to have a reasonably comfortable risk-free job, fetching me an assured income?
It lay in making the switch in my mind from having a goal of setting up a consulting business to making it a MUST – convincing myself that I had no other option except to set up a consulting business. I was not prepared to find myself or accept another job. I made my level of expectation a ‘MUST’.
As I think about it, I begin to realise that whatever I have achieved in my life has been the result of the level of acceptance I set for myself. I have ever only got what I was prepared to accept, not what I expected.
If success was all about setting positive and precise goals developed through visualisation, developing appropriate strategies and taking actions, couldn’t we all attain what we want? I could teach these principles and practical steps to thousands of people, but not everyone will act on these, and act consistently. You can wish for a thing, but you are only ready for it when you believe that you can achieve this. The state of mind must be belief, not simply hope or wish.
I have used the visualisation technique for several years now with hundreds of people in training and consulting work with clients, and have come across scores of sincere hard working people who would say that they find it hard to visualise, or the picture they see in their mind is not that bright and clear and inspiring. When we unearth the reasons, these generally boil down to some of the values or limiting beliefs they have. Some months ago I was coaching a consultant friend of mine who had set clear goals for his business, but it simply wasn’t moving fast enough. The consulting work he does involves quite a lot of travel away from home. Although he enjoys travelling and the kind of work he undertakes, we discovered as we dug deeper that his strong family values had actually made him sometimes unhappy with his work, although consciously he (in agreement with his wife) has always tried to ignore this conflict between his family values and work demands as unimportant. But somewhere in the back of his mind this did persist, and whenever his creative mind tried to visualise the future, his mind’s eye just refused to engage.
Values are like emotional hot buttons that drive our behaviour. They are what we value as important in our lives. All of us regard values like ‘success’, ‘freedom’, ‘security’, ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ very differently. And it is the way we internally rank these values that determine the kinds of choices we make, and the actions we take. Some might value material success over spiritual, while others might simply concentrate on their spiritual well-being. Once we identify the specific value(s) that drive us and acknowledge them, we can craft strategies that support these values, rather than strategies and values working in opposition to each other.
Beliefs fall into a different category, especially when these become self-limiting. When people don't believe a goal is possible (like passing the driving test, for example), they feel hopeless. And when people feel hopeless, they don't take the appropriate action. A person may also believe that a goal is possible for others to achieve, i.e., people can pass driving tests, but not possible for herself. When the person believes she doesn't have what it takes to succeed, you'll typically find a sense of helplessness. Contrarily, if one has empowering beliefs about what one can achieve, well.....anything is possible – remember, Mohammed Ali’s “I’m the Greatest” proclamation came years before he won the world title!
Self-limiting beliefs, sometimes based on a single experience or a casual remark, can hold one back for years. Almost everyone has had the experience of mastering a skill in an area where they thought they had no ability, and being quite surprised at themselves when they overcame the limiting belief.
Your Beliefs Are Acquired, Not Inborn:
The good news about beliefs is that all beliefs are learned. They can therefore be unlearned, especially if they are not helpful. When you came into the world, you had no beliefs at all - about yourself, your religion, your political party, other people, or the world in general. Just as you once shed your belief that Santa Claus or tooth fairy was real, you can shed any belief, or acquire new beliefs if you want to.
In my coaching work, I have been working with a gentleman (we will call him Jim) who has been, what I would call, a successful businessman. At sixty-six, he runs a family business, with a turnover of a slightly over a million pounds. On the surface, he is happy – he makes a decent living from his business which is managed by a Chief Executive and his team. But somewhere in his mind is a long unhappiness that his business wasn’t growing over the years. He has had his close circle of friends desert him as they grew their businesses and some of them became multi-millionaires. They grew up together, spent their youths together, set up business together, and went to the same golf clubs. Suddenly in the last ten years, Jim noticed he was getting cold shouldered by some of them as they had moved on to being friends with more successful, richer people.
Losing his friends and self-esteem, Jim invested all the time and finance he could master in his business in the past three years, wanting to expand his business. He has worked closely with his Chief Executive and management team to push for business growth and expansion. But nothing has really made much of a difference in their business – Jim’s company manufactures DIY tools for well known international brands. Competition has been stiff as manufacturing moved to Asia and Eastern Europe. Jim’s company has had to work harder and harder to stay where they were. He had no doubt that his management team had done all they could.
It turned out some of his friends have ridden on this wave of global change and moved their production to China, and that’s how they grew their business several-fold, while Jim saw that same change a block to his business. Jim did not want to take risks. He likes his management team because they run the business in the way he ran it for two decades, and they don’t take risks. Although Jim pushes them to expand, he subconsciously likes it when they come back with the explanation that times are difficult with competition from the emerging countries.
All his life Jim has valued safety and security, and avoided risks. Back in his teen years, he joined horse-riding and football. A couple of times he came home slightly injured. His loving mother who had his best in her heart always advised him not to do those risky sports. He will be no good in those.
In his later years, Jim would go to the skiing slopes of Swiss Alps and would spend his days there sipping wine, while his wife would be go skiing with their children.
Jim had managed his entire business with this single motto: don’t get hurt; don’t take risks so that you do not fail. Be safe!
Once he realised how a few childhood incidents had such a grip over him throughout his life, it was easy to make a change – the safety advice he got in childhood was no longer relevant to run his business. And one of the first things he has done in the past few months is to hire a dynamic CEO who is a risk-taker and has a proven track record of growing businesses he managed.
Changing Beliefs:
Negative beliefs can be changed easily through changing the internal dialogue that goes on in our mind constantly. There are seven easy steps in the process:
1.State the belief (‘I am hopeless in remembering names’).
2.Gather evidence: allow your ‘other self’ (our internal dialogue always has two personalities involved – usually ‘self’ and ‘the other voice’) to gather as much evidence based on experience and reality to counter the belief statement. ‘Don’t you remember any names?’ ‘Don’t you remember names of twenty of your friends’?
3.Seek Alternative Explanation: if the evidence in the second step wasn’t strong enough to disprove all the arguments (which confirm the belief that ‘I am hopeless’), are there alternative explanations – ‘I usually can’t remember the names when I meet people for a short time’.
4.What are the consequences (of having the belief)? Is that serious?
5.If the belief is still strong, ask the question: what is the use in holding this belief? Is there any positive value from holding this belief? If not, it’s better to change it.
6.What action can you take to improve the situation? Write them all down.
I am an Executive Coach and Strategy Consultant working with executives in all sectors, providing coaching and high-value consulting services on personal & professional development. Using my coaching and management skills, I help people achieve outstanding results. I am passionate about change - changing our own lives and making a lasting difference in the lives of everyone.
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