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.
7. Make an action plan
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