This will be an occasional series on the skills that you can learn and practice in order to achieve more success. A bit like a lottery ticket, victory isn’t guaranteed, but without it you can’t complain if you don’t win!
Successful people have certain habits in common, and these are all learnable skills rather than fixed inherited characteristics. Let’s look at what you can do to make yourself more successful at work:
Self discipline
More important than controlling anyone else is to take control of your own head. If you’re lazy or you put things off or you let fear or guilt control you then you’ll never get anywhere.
Most of your behaviour is controlled by the subconscious part of your brain, without you noticing, and it’s easy to believe that we can’t do anything about this. “I’m always late, that’s just how I am”. Clearly you are choosing to leave with not enough time, or to allow people to waylay you, or whatever, but you just aren’t aware of it so you think you can’t change, when of course you can.
Your subconscious can be out-foxed by your conscious brain – for example you can beat your tendency to put things off by saying to yourself “I’ll just do the first bit, that’s all”, which sounds way better than “I suppose I’d better get started on that horrible job that I hate…”
The biggest driver to get you to focus on the work to be done is to have clear and exciting goals in your life. You need a reason to do the work, otherwise you’ll drift. How do Olympic athletes get themselves out of bed to do the training? They think about the gold medal. So, what are the goals in your life?
The next habit is to have the right self-talk inside your head. Never think anything about yourself, because as soon as you say “I’m not good at…” then you won’t be. Change your self talk to things like “I always do the hardest job first”, “I’m good at concentrating”, “I find it easy to generate ideas”, and “I know the meeting is going to go really well”. Whatever you want, you can speak it into existence because you become what you think about.
Part of self discipline is to look after your body (which means getting some moderate exercise, and plenty of sleep) and your mind (which means feeding it by reading, and de-stressing yourself by getting some relaxation time, maybe outside, walking, exercise again).
Finally an odd one, but many people find meditation helpful for self discipline. In only 15 minutes a day you can get into a good meditation session, and (amongst many other benefits) I find that this gives an uncanny feeling of control of your inner thoughts – as if you now have an extra layer. There is not just the conscious mind (voice in your head) controlling your sub conscious, but also something above that, (still you!), controlling that voice in your head, so that you are able to choose what you think. At least give it a try.
skill 2 will follow at some point…...
PS – A gold Veyron won’t make you happy!
