Developing new thinking skills to improve your personal performance, is like learning to ride a bike!
Can you remember or imagine teaching a youngster to ride a bike for the first time?
Think of the various stages:
- taking the stabilisers off,
- walking behind them steadying the wobbles,
- skint knees from falling off and sobbing “this is too hard!”,
- eventually making it 1 metre, then a fall, then 3 metres then crying “this is too hard.”
- a few weeks later they go 5 metres, then 15 metres then keep going …success….
- now they are cycling like crazy shouting “this is easy” “I can cycle!”
- Each time they fell off they got up again, each time they got better and better. Their performance improved until they achieved the vision of being able to cycle unassisted.
You might be thinking – How is this relevant to your own personal development or that of your team?
Very relevant. I believe the ability to ride a bike comes from constant improvement in learning performance which is founded on the 3 key basic elements of attitude:
DESIRE– comes from seeing older relatives or friends cycling, generating the desire to do the same.
BELIEF– They have the belief that they can, although sometimes this is challenged with negative thinking or inner conversations which creep in after each fall.
EXPECTATION– comes from using their imagination to “see” it achieved in the future.
If you are open to the thinking that “all performance is due to the quality of our thinking” then these tips can assist improving thinking and therefore performance.
Creating Desire
Generate a strong emotive force to act by identifying the benefits that will come to you as a result of having achieved action.
Creating Desire Exercise
T
hink in an open-minded creative way about the positive benefits of the outcome.
Make a list of the benefits.
Attach images to identify strongly with the benefits.
Create an affirmation around the benefits in a positive, personal and present tense format.
Building Belief- Changing language
Think of the youngster falling off the bike, what do they say?
“I can’t do this!” or “This is too hard” or “This is impossible!”
Think of this great Henry Ford quote opposite-
Decide to change the negative language of “I cannot do this” with a more positive “I can do this”
replace “This is impossible” with “this is possible” or “I believe I can do this”
Remember that with just two small changes impossible becomes possible.
IM POSSIBLE
Whether you are changing your language around learning to ride a bike or improving your skills in your profession-
Remember, if you think you can, you can.
Changing language Exercise:
Write out 10 negative words or phrases they use on one side of a page, on the other side challenge them to think and write down 10 more positive alternatives.
Commit to using these more positive alternatives for a month and see the improvement in attitude and performance.
The benefit of these two tools is that once you focus on the building desire and practise changing your language from negative to more positive you will see the improvements and never forget how to do it.
I
t’s as easy as riding a bike!
and it Just works!
