Now before anyone goes sprinting towards the cliff in despair, or at the very least, second guessing all their behaviors and itemizing dozens of things that you must work on, please read this section. Maybe twice.
First, we have all limiting and self-defeating behaviors. All of us.
Secondly, but equally important, is that we will work on these in a programmatic and mostly linear method. We are not going to tackle ten poorly serving behaviors and six negative attitudes at one time. We are going to eat this elephant one bit at a time.
To secure a starting point and craft an action plan, we must gauge the severity and frequency of each. It is highly likely that you will find several limiting and self-defeating behaviors that impact your success and happiness. It is also likely, upon going through the list of them again, you will find many that creep in from time to time.
At the end of each behavior and attitude description is a brief scoring guide that is designed to help you understand the impact that each one has on your life and to triage where to begin to work on improvement. There is also a consolidated grid at the end of this book.
The scoring is simple and straightforward. The two criteria are frequency and estimated impact.
Frequency:
Often – Does the behavior or attitude appear often or daily?
Occasionally – Does the behavior or attitude show up periodically or infrequently?
Never – You never display the behavior or attitude.
This will take some thought and reflection to see the true frequency that you display a particular attitude or behavior. We will often tend to underestimate this, and this is a great area to seek some honest feedback from someone close to us. Their view may vary quite a bit from our own view but is more likely to be accurate than our self-view.
Estimated Impact:
High – The behavior or attitude causes significant loss of opportunity, happiness, and success. You can look back and see how the behavior or attitude has had a big impact on your career, key relationships, or caused you anxiety and unneeded work.
Moderate – The attitude or behavior has caused you loss, but it was not severe. You regret the setback, but it was not significant.
Low – The consequences of the behavior or attitude have had very little impact or effect on you.
Looking at impact forces us to examine the cost of our actions and poorly managed attitudes. This is not particularly pleasant and often will dredge up some painful memory points. This analysis is not designed to send you to regression therapy, but it is important to clearly see the impact of these behaviors and attitudes and use this data to avoid future loss situations.
Impact of One
One of the easy temptations of reviewing self-limiting and self-defeating behaviors and associated beliefs and attitudes is to dismiss them quickly because they don’t happen much.
I had the opportunity to recently talk with a long-term customer and friend about some feedback he received about his facial expressions. He had received some feedback from one of his team members that his facial expression made him unapproachable.
But this was just from one team member out of a large group that he leads. Not significant and easy to dismiss. Not worth even a second thought.
Or is it?
First, for every piece of evidence that you are aware of, there are many more in which you are not aware. Simply meaning that for everyone that brings something to your attention, there are at least two or three more that have noticed it but chosen to not say anything. Maybe because your facial expressions made you appear unapproachable.
And if it impacts one person, is it worth the effort to change or modify the behavior? In all relationships and leadership roles the answer must be yes. If it becomes a potential disconnect with one other person, it will become limiting or defeating to you. The impact on one person is certainly worth a little extra reflection and thought.
Final Opening Thought and Encouragement
As with all human behavior changes, these movements will take time. Some will take a lot of time. Allow that and be gentle on yourself during the journey to changing yourself.
You will have setbacks. You will use some old, self-limiting habits, and you will scold yourself. Be as kind to yourself as you would to anyone else who is actively working on themselves. The setbacks are part of the process and improvement. Learn, try, succeed, fail, succeed again, fail less often. That is the adult human learning cycle.
