The back-story: the stuff from which many of us would like to escape...
Rule 1: You Can Do Anything, But You Can't Do Everything.
Rule 2: You Need To Be Before You Can Do Before You Can Have
Rule 3: If You Want Things To Be Better, You Need To Be Better
Rule 4: Do Less To Achieve More
Rule 5: WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get
You have the ability to choose your response, to choose what you see. It’s raining and awful weather, or it’s good for the garden. You’ve been made redundant and it’s the end of your career, or it’s a really good time to re-invent. Your book has been turned down 10 times or you’re now learning rapidly what a publisher really wants in a great book.
What you see. Is what you get. That’s perception: you are unique in being equipped as a human being to change your perception. You are not hard-wired. If someone is irritating you do not have to be irritated. If you had to be, you would be hard-wired, much as is a reptile. But you have 100s if not 1000s of choices. Decide to exercise more of them: to decide which would be best for the particular situation.
To avoid hard-wired or reptilian responses: take breaks. Regularly. And make sure they are both physical (go for a walk) and mental (take a data break: no e-mail, no reading... just let the brain rest for a while). Combining the two is of course, perfect. Watch your language. Your language is an ‘easy’ indicator of your thinking and how ‘conditioned’ or ‘hard-wired’ you have become. Watch out for labels (‘I’m not the sort of person to speak out in a meeting’), generalisations (‘I’m never given an opportunity’) or even false logic (‘I didn’t complete my degree so I’ll not be eligible for the graduate training scheme’).
Tim realised that he was now on his fourth sales job in five years and no change of company ever got him what he wanted. It dawned that maybe the common factor was him: maybe he needed to change. He was seeing problems and getting problems. Maybe he needed to see something different and he would get something different. WYSIWYG.
Read these statements each day;
» I can choose.
» The choice I make will affect what I get.
» When a situation does not proceed as I would wish, I can ask what does this say about me?
» I make the ‘real world’.
The Rules Of Life, free PDF download ; the amazon book.