Belief in yourself is one of the cornerstones of self-esteem. In order to function well in our home or work environment we need healthy levels of self-belief and self-esteem. If you believe you are worthwhile and capable in a range of situations, then your behaviours reflect those thoughts and beliefs and hey presto, you seem able to cope with whatever comes your way. If your thinking starts to throw up negative self-messages, then this influences how you feel about yourself and pushes you into a pathway of declining self-esteem. So, your thoughts have a profound influence on how you feel and how you think and has a direct relationship with your behaviour, which can in turn feed back into the system. It would seem then that we have thinking, feeling and behaviour, all connected and all going on at the same time and it might be a matter of optimal balance that keeps us in a zone of positive self-worth and imbalance that throws things out of whack.
Every experience we encounter, every positive exchange with clients, every deal made, every lost sale is a culmination or product of our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
Our thoughts, feelings and behaviour are in a constant state of flux. You pick up the phone, have a conversation with a business prospect and your thoughts and feelings are impacted. There’s a positive outcome and you feel one way. The outcome is negative and you feel another way. As such, our self-belief and self-esteem can oscillate (sometimes quite widely) from one minute to the next. Some event or thought influences your thinking and knocks you off balance, your feelings take a dive then the whole world shifts. The thoughts that were supporting a positive self-belief evaporate everything takes a hit.
So, in order to restore balance and perhaps find a way to maintain a stronger, more stable self-belief, its vital to know more about “how you choose to think” or “how you choose to allow your thinking to be influenced”. If you can learn to adjust your response as negative events occur you can often prevent or minimise the impact on your self-belief and self-esteem. If thinking, feeling and behaviour are inextricably linked to influence your feelings of self-belief and self-esteem, having the ability to CONSCIOUSLY reinforce or positively change one of those factors can change the nature of your experience. Now that’s a skill worth practising isn’t it?
Here’s an exercise to help you learn a bit more about your thinking. Think of a time when you were in a great mood and then something happened to knock you off your perch...maybe you took some criticism, a project or deal fell through unexpectedly or maybe someone just didn’t notice that you did something terrific.
A. Write down how you THOUGHT about yourself when you were in the state of high self-esteem BEFORE the incident happened.
B. How did you FEEL at this time?
C. How did you ACT before the incident?
Now try to recreate the circumstances of the event and try to relive the situation that impacted on you
D. What were your THOUGHTS AFTER the event
E. What are your FEELINGS after the negative impact?
F. How was your BEHAVIOUR affected?
Take your answers to D,E and F and put them into the model diagram below (Diagram 1)
What does the diagram now show you about your response to the situation? Which seemed to come first, the thought, the feeling or the behaviour? This change cycle can be very useful in helping you to understand HOW you react and give you insights as to what you can do to make improvements.
On reflection, which of your responses COULD YOU CHANGE? Could you alter your thinking? Maybe you could have used humour to soften the event. Could you have changed your behaviour, e.g. said something in a different way, not sent that email or whatever...
Now think of one response that you could change and write it into the appropriate place in Diagram 2.
Reflect on this change and ask yourself how it might change the other factors in the diagram. Write in the other elements that are changed. Then consider how this affects your experience of the event now? Understanding more about how you process your experiences gives you the opportunity of positively influencing your response when
self-belief is challenged. The next time some adversity strikes, could you use this model of change to your advantage?
self-belief is challenged. The next time some adversity strikes, could you use this model of change to your advantage?
Remember, if your thinking and reactions can create low self-esteem your thinking and reactions can create high self-esteem. Once you understand how this works, the choice is yours.
Now you know something more about this mechanism, please think about how you can interact with others more responsibly as you may be having more of an impact that you first thought.
The Sales Controversy
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