He had been talking at length about improving his business but he seemed to be quite hesitant about actually doing something about it. Eventually, I asked why he hadn’t really started on it, and asked for an honest answer. He said he was very doubtful as to whether he could pull it off.
We did an experiment, just listing down the factors that would make his business grow. It totaled over 30 factors, but when rating his competence and access to resources in every single one of those factors, he rated them above 7 out of 10.
So what was stopping him?
He had a desire to move toward that goal, but was being held back by the belief that he could not do it, in spite of the fact that he was competent to do it. Fortunately, in NLP, there is a process known as the Belief Change Technique. It is a powerful process, and when I get the chance, I’ll post it in WorldOfNLP.com.
Beliefs are powerful. We know this from our own experience, we know this from medical science. Most, however, don’t know how to change beliefs and that is the reason why we don’t do much about it. Left to fate, old beliefs especially those you are not aware of will leap out and sabotage even the most successful of people.
You may read lots of self-help books. You might be a proponent of the law of attraction. You might be a personal development junkie. But it begs the question: why am I not successful?
Here are a few questions for you to clarify your thinking a little bit.
Whose benchmark of success are you choosing? In many cases, someone else’s idea of success, no matter how appealing, may not be suitable for you.
Does your idea of achievement of success require you to ‘do’ things? A lot of the time, we get caught up in ‘doing’ so that we can ‘be’. Very often, it is the core of the person that determines their actions: behaviors themselves don’t necessary equate to the person. You can do all the things Steve Jobs or Bill Gates do, but ultimately it is their beliefs, perspective on life, values and experience that makes them who they are.
Have you taken action to test the extent of success? Like they say – think big but start by creating small successes. If you’re an armchair self-help person, you’ll be a little disappointed. It’s like wanting to brush your teeth by thinking about the philosophy of brushing instead of actually reaching results.
Personality is one of the invisible factors in human relationships I always talk about. In most cases, we’re not aware of this and understand personality merely as traits.
However, traits can always be present when the need calls for it. For instance, you might be at the workplace that needs you to be serious and logical even though by nature you are a fun loving person. Traits are often stronger and more dominant as a result of habituation and skill training.
Type, on the other hand will be different. According to many different sources, our personality development begins in the womb and stabilizes at the age of around 14 years. Personality Type, therefore, refers to the personality component of you that is unchanging.
The only way to access this is to take an MBTI personality test and ensure that you are in a relaxed mental environment. This is important because if you are under pressure (in legal terms, ‘duress’), it can significantly change your behavior. That doesn’t measure your core personality – it merely measures the effect of the environmental pressure.
By taking the test, you get a chance to know yourself from a psychological point of view and the facets of accommodation you need to make in order to adapt better in the workplace and live a more energized and fulfilling life.
“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
~Colin Powell
Problems, problems, problems. It seems that people are obsessed with problems and don’t know how to solve them. They complain about the problem. In reality, as Colin Powell says, it is a way to build a positive relationship with those around you, in spite of the problems.
Surely problems can also be used in order to create bonding between people. Very often, the problems might also be you. If someone trusts you enough to tell you that you are causing the problem, stop looking so vainly at yourself. Sometimes, one has to look beyond the obvious and consider the intention behind what has been said. If you learn to hold the belief that every behavior has a positive intent, then it’s going to be easier for you to listen not just from the head, but also from the heart. photo credit: US Army Africa
Has it ever occurred to you that people seldom tell you how good their life is? the only people I know who are truly satisfied with their life are those who have gone through lots of personal trials that have affected them, and they learn to be grateful for what they have.
I recently heard of a young lady who was having some trouble with dealing with her emotions. She had a quick temper and this caused her boyfriend to decide to leave her. At this point, she felt upset and emotionally betrayed and of course, there were a few men who came into her life but she never accepted them because she was still nursing this pain.
For most people, the fastest way to self-help would be to take the difficult moment as a way to sharpen ourselves and strengthen us. She didn’t learn how to appreciate her significant other, and it would have been difficult if she believed that she was betrayed. Consequently, the fastest way to deal with such a situation is to run away.
Oddly enough, this is a pattern of behavior which does not bode well for future development of relationships!
In fact, I’d suggest that you don’t expect to have a life without difficulty. Rather, welcome the difficulty and take it on as a challenge you have to face to bring yourself to the next level of personal fulfillment.
So a number of people have asked me about personality tests and whether they are useful. Here’s some tips to bear in mind if you have never taken a personality test yourself. photo credit: Kevin Steinhardt
Don’t take a test that is unvalidated. You need to know the source of your test and make sure it’s credible. But beyond the test, you need to know that your administrator can give you added value. For instance, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) can be useful, but not all administrators are made equal.
Be prepared to be honest with yourself. A lot of times when I conduct personality assessments, people don’t take their test results seriously. In fact, many would tend to think of it as just an ‘interesting thing’ rather than something that can improve the quality of their life. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator does provide quite a fair bit of insight not just on an overall scale (which I used to believe it did) but it continues to improve the impact of the tool through the numerous research papers that espouse its use.
Use it for self-improvement. Understanding your results and charting a direction based on what you know are two totally different things. A decent personality test such as the MBTI can reveal so much about you that you have overlooked, that it could literally be life changing. The only difference is that you have to be serious about making plans to move yourself toward the desired direction.
For more information about the MBTI, just place your questions in the comments below and I’ll answer them. If you are keen on taking the test, fill it in the comments box (but it will not be published) and I will contact you to conduct and debrief the test for you.
A training participant once approached me and said that his life was in a big mess and just did not know where to start. I had three questions for him:
Is it important enough to change?
Is it beneficial enough to change?
Do you have the right resources to change?
He was slightly taken aback where these three questions were concerned because a while he felt it was important to change, and logically thought it was beneficial to change, he was a little disturbed to discover that he still did not take any action.
It’s true that you can find a change beneficial and yet not change because there’s something even more beneficial that keeps you the same!
This is often known as secondary gain in psychotherapeutic circles – having a positive payoff for a negative behavior.
The problem with this is that it continues to go in vicious cycles that control the other parts of your life. For instance, you have an argument with your spouse at home, it translates into performance issues in the workplace, and the feedback will affect you adversely, emotionally. What do you think happens when you go back home?
I’ve seen a number of people who are unaware of these vicious cycles in their life. What they start to do is moan and blame others and this turns into a disempowering cycle of self-pity. They will never be able to get out of this mess because they missed the fundamental thing required for them to turn their life around.
If your life is in a mess, it’s probably likely that you have to begin on a journey of introspection. Yes, it may hurt to realize that what has happened comes as a lack of understanding of who you are and that you may have been contributing to the problems on your own.
Spiritual health, in my opinion, is one of the main aspects of a human being’s natural cycle of development. After you are done with your studies, you would usually start a career. But it has never been emphasized that one should actually educate one’s spirit.
Spirituality is defined this way by Wikipedia:
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or immaterial reality;an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live”.
from Wikipedia, Helix Nebula aka "The Eye Of God"
From a human development standpoint it really is about meaning, purpose and values. So the next question I’d ask is: are we spiritually healthy? In many cases, few people seek the pathway to fulfillment simply because they are constantly embattled by things that are non-spiritual in nature. The ability for them to step out of it, however seems as likely as a drug addict with cravings for that drug.
I think a simple way of considering our spiritual health is this:
Do I know what purpose I serve in this world? If you are clear on this question, then almost everything you do will have your own moral compass. Every choice and decision you make will be based on this benchmark. Even in regular life, when you think of things that are not effective for living, for instance, procrastinating, you might be able to better assess this through the connection you have with your own personal vision and goals.
Am I expanding my capacity to love? This is an interesting proposition: that when an individual expands his or her capacity to love others beyond oneself, that the ultimate sensation of happiness comes. By extrapolation it might mean that one thing to help us realize spiritual health would be to increase our ability and capacity for love, even in the face of hatred and hostility.
Do I find myself in a position to help others? The biggest concern so far for most people is that they are never in a position to contribute. Their main worry is “if I can’t help myself, how can I help others?” Unfortunately, this is based on the mindset of scarcity, and a clear indicator of spiritual weakness. People who selflessly help others because they have plenty of money are not really deemed as saints and angels anyway! Conversely, if you work with contribution as a priority in spite of your limitations, the very act of sacrifice makes for a richer sense of the spiritual self.
I often like to tell the story of how one day I was in a cab driving down the Central Expressway (CTE). The driver was so engrossed in talking to me about the bad traffic situation in Singapore that he made this claim: “All women are bad drivers. They cause all accidents.” No sooner had he mentioned this, there was an accident up ahead that involved a woman.
Conversely, there was a situation where a friend of mine (female) drove to my place to pick me up and I was pleasantly surprised to note that she was really good at handling the car. As we drove down the same expressway, it turned out that there was a big jam due to an accident. She made this claim: “Taxi drivers in Singapore are the biggest cause of traffic accidents, and they are getting worse.”
Hmm.
Difference of opinion, or the failure to look at the other person’s perspective?
Very simply put, there are many sides to an opinion. If you think you are always right, think again. I strongly believe that a lot of the arguments we have are unnecessary simply because we fail to understand the other person’s point of view.
A senior manager came up to me once and told me that the “youngsters nowadays” are difficult to train and not willing to take on hardships.
A young engineer recently came up to me and told me that “the more elderly they are the less cooperative they are”.
Hmm… so much for standing in each other’s shoes and getting an understanding for each other. I believe that we fail to recognize the merits of each individual we meet with to the point where it is easy to make assumptions about the other person. I was once taught by Dr. Richard Bandler, the founder of NLP, to consider if I ever thought I was wrong about something. It dawned on me that this teaches me to look at a different perspective. Often, not always, I have a judgement and opinion, and do my best to look at the question and its conventional answer from a different angle, so that I can generate something even more useful. But I always do my best to acknowledge that the perfect answer may not exist, and I have of course, had some of my ideas proven wrong many times. This is why I prefer not to take sides in an argument because both sides often are valid. But as human beings we frequently do not know how to hold more than one possible answer in our heads. It’s as though life were like math, that 1 + 1 must always equal to 2.
But we know life is far more complex than that, and requires a bit more patience and attention. After all, we seldom spend enough time learning about our life, when there are many interesting and beautiful wisdoms to consider. Perhaps it’s time for use to acknowledge that the generation gap is more than just a age difference, but is universal: it is the gap we generated due to our own experiences and memories and biases. Let’s learn how to bridge them by being curious about another person’s perspective, and discover something interesting that we may never have thought of.
So… I’m almost certain that you’ve been struck senseless by Steve Jobs’ flurry of innovations beginning with the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPad.
There’s a lot to say about genius, and although I have not yet met Steve Jobs myself, I think there’s a certain kind of drive in the man that enables him to push himself forward so much.
If you have not watched this, watch it. If you have watched it, I suggest that you watch again, and turn on the transcription. Where you are in your life today is probably a result of the meanings you establish in your mind. Do you think of failure as terrible, as a way to learn new things, or as something not worth considering? Each of the ways you think of them can define your future.
photo credit: HikingArtist.com
