Continuing this series of articles on five attitudes that will change your style of leadership, business and life, here we will consider:
2. There are no faults, only feedback
3. People are NOT their behaviors
There is no failure, only feedback.
Remember that the attitude you manifest outwardly is the result of your inner state. You may want to think of your inner state as a feeling. Most of the time, our state is described by a ‘feeling’ word: angry, happy, joyful, accepted, guilty, peaceful, for example.
If you truly believe you are focusing on your target and line up correctly and yet you push the ball away or away from the target line. What is your job? Reprimand you for cutting or hooking? Bad move! Welcome the opportunity to learn what it was you did, because there will come a shot where you want to hook it or chop it around a tree. Excellent!
Learn from it, have fun learning something.
If it’s a constant problem for you… then you can choose, get instruction from a good pro to improve your technique, learn to realign yourself to compensate (not so well, but Gary Player had a peculiar swing to compensate for his clubs) or, very rarely, fix their sticks.
If you happen to go to a professional who immediately tells you that you need a new set of clubs, then go elsewhere; It may be true (you can always come back later), but an expensive driver doesn’t make a golfer.
Think of our car driving analogy: have you seen someone drive a Ferrari poorly and another drive a Toyota very well? Of course, it’s always worth checking your sticks for dings and dings, even Toyota breakdowns (yes, but less often than Ferraris!) I’m only too happy to take on the challenge.
People are not their behaviors.
There are some fundamental needs that drive our attitudinal behaviors. Here I would like to return to an aspect of motivation that can radically change behavior. There are some really big changes in someone’s life that result in a major shift in thinking and I’ll briefly discuss them here, then move on to the most commonly experienced change that changes behaviors.
Two great needs of the human being are the need for survival and the need for security. When an individual’s survival is at stake, his behavior will change drastically if necessary to ensure survival. The most compelling survival stories are those of women who found themselves able to lift trucks from their run over child. It threatens our survival and our fear comes into play. fear, unlike anger, is an emotion and a state that has a perfectly good chemical system at work in our body to trust. This does not mean irrational fear, fear that is unnecessary, like phobias, but fear that threatens survival. We have to keep this, just in case.
The second big need that can cause massive behavior change is security. If our security is threatened (extrapolate to survival), most people will fight to defend it. War is the classic example of this: when your homeland is invaded, your previous acceptance of the invader quickly dissipates and many people are willing to kill if necessary to protect their safety. For those of you who want to chide me on this, I can be absolutely certain that your own safety has never been threatened.
Human beings share a need to belong. We all have the desire to feel accepted and valued by our society (as in our social circle that extends for many to society in general). From early childhood, we have a built-in need for acceptance and connection with other humans: we are social animals. We want love and care from our parents, our friends, our family. We long to ‘fit in’ at school or at work with our peer group.
Without such acceptance and connection in our group, we will look for it elsewhere. For a few, they seek only that acceptance (it may seem strange to some of you, but on your own, your mind creates its own group) and sometimes even they do not accept it. For others, they will seek acceptance in other groups, like joining a golf club, for example, here you meet, socialize and play with people who share something with you… they play golf. If you take a quick tour of your closest friends and associates, you’ll find that there’s even more in common. This is why people join gangs, especially those who find little or no acceptance in their families. Staying in the gang becomes more and more important, and gangs, especially youth gangs, get a bad reputation in the larger society because they constantly cross the values of that larger society, throw themselves against it to form a stronger bond among the members. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it partially explains it. So, leaving a little aside, if you have children or family members who are members of a notorious gang, you can do something about it, and I don’t mean tell them! I mean show them that you care and accept them for who they are and their values. I digress, but some of these snippets have drastically changed people’s lives.
Our need to belong runs deep. Our understanding of this is important to developing our maturity as a person. You have your own needs for acceptance and connection. This includes your job and your golf. Not to be taken lightly, your needs are part of the reason you play golf. If you play poorly, your own sense of self-worth is affected: play too poorly and your friends may not want to play with you anymore, play too well and the same may be true. If connecting with your friends is important to you, you’ll play to keep up with the group.
Let me tell you about my group of squash friends. I play squash, not very well and not very well either. I play it for the social reasons I’ve suggested above and for exercise. I enjoy the game, it’s very different from golf and I hate going for a run so it suits me. After playing regularly every Sunday morning against Church for several years, I decided I was sick of being beaten in sets; I was worried that my friends would get tired of beating me easily; that it wasn’t enough competition to hold his position. interest. So I took some lessons from the pro club. Fantastic, raised my stamina levels much higher, lengthened my stride and strengthened my wrist game (didn’t help my golf swing by the way but dented it for a while!) We continued to play for a few weeks and then one by one , my friends couldn’t make it to our regular game. Just when he was starting to win! I was upset for a while, and quickly gained weight (compensation?) You see, it turned out that, far from my friends not being challenged enough by my game, they enjoyed it… I was that person they could beat on a regular basis. Oh good. Now I have new squash friends, who enjoy challenges and enjoy challenges and want to get better. As for the old group? Well, I too have a need to belong, to be accepted, to be connected, but I’m screwed if I’m going to sink to the level of playing a game of dice for someone else’s ego… maturity (?) with a little childishness just in case?
We have the need to belong, but we also have the need to maintain our ‘self worth’. If the two are in conflict, one will win over the other. When you allow others to dictate your self-esteem, you have just lost control of your destiny.
When you were younger, you were successful at something, possibly something related to sports. You did well and this helped you find a sense of ‘me’. This, in turn, helped him strengthen his own image. No doubt there were other activities that weakened his self-image. Those activities that increased his self-image are most likely things he remembers fondly and continues to do. Those who damaged his sense of self-image, he remembers less fondly, and probably won’t continue. If you do, you may have figured out why you’re not happy.
And therein lies the problem. If your peer group doesn’t accept you, doesn’t connect with you, this causes distress that will manifest in some behavior, usually negative behavior. The most problematic aspect of this is that it’s not about whether your peer group accepts you or connects with you. What matters is whether you perceive them to do so or not.
Your perception = your reality.
Copyright (c) 2008 GainMore Advantage