I find that black and white thinking sabotages our chances of success. For instance, you may have come to a decision that your boss is very strategic in his focus, so you always give big picture ideas, and never prepare for a time when he needs details. When you get scolded by your boss, rather than accept responsibility, you blame your boss for having two minds.
Blaming is easy.
Taking responsibility is hard.
It’s no wonder so few people actually succeed in real life.
It’s commonly known that the world is becoming more and more individualistic and generally, good teams are seldom seen. This is just a picture of a stadium, but it’s a representation of the playing field that a team goes on to determine whether it wins or loses.
It begins with the understanding of two different approaches. The first is the independent mindset, the second is the interdependent mindset.
In many cases, individuals who are brought up with the independent mindset think about themselves and consequences for them the majority of the time. Very often, people in this category are deemed as individualistic and uncooperative, and seldom have this intention of bringing out a win-win situation within a team.
Those who have been brought up in an interdependent environment (many Asian cultures experience this) on the other hand, experience things differently. Their decisions are often based on what the group decides to do. Hence, the amount of time spent on a collaborative effort tends to take a very long time.
It appears that people seem to prefer one over the other, when in reality, it is very difficult to justify a proper win-win for choosing one over the other. It is better to consider the benefits of flexibly being able to switch from one to the other when appropriate.
I recently encountered a trainee who had suggested in a class that training is a weapon used to control employees. He had an attitude that can be best described as “cancer” within his company. Fortunately, one of the surgeons happened to be one of his department members, who said that there’s nothing wrong with proper control, and absolute freedom is chaos. Yet another member in the audience suggested that the fact that this first trainee mentioned that “training is a weapon of control” itself is controlling. In many cases, such individualistic thinking exists and often requires a paradigm shift.
Building a solid team is not about getting people together for fun. It’s about getting people to go through difficult moments and still come out strong, if not stronger.
By learning to be independent and proactive, one can provide an interdependent arena for everyone to participate without having limiting thinking. The first participant I talked about eventually was fired for performance issues not related to the training. The second and third participant were eventually promoted – one within the company I trained, the other outside after he joined a new company.
It must mean that building a team is far more than being a body of people. It is about the maturity of thinking that an individual has to be able to command, connect and collaborate with others in a win-win fashion without having to give up individuality of choice. This wisdom can only come from post-event feedback that is received as a team. Everyone needs to take responsibility in order to move forward.
A client of mine just spoke to me with respect to goal achievement.
photo credit: HikingArtist.com
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.
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.
photo credit: Malin Helene
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.
Personal Development, Personality, Self Help | 
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“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
“Difficulties increase the nearer we approach the goal.”
~Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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
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:
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:
