Archive for August, 2009
Communication: Reacting or Responding?
This time I thought we’d have a look at the topic of communication and how we can try and manage our rash instinctive reactions before we respond – this applies to verbal communication and written communication – especially email – I’ll discuss email communication in a future post.
One of the questions we need to ask ourselves just before we respond to something someone sends us or something someone says to us is this:
Am I reacting or responding?
You see all too often we “react” rather than “respond” – there can be a key difference.
Reacting is emotionally driven – usually someone says something or writes something and we let fly, we feel that emotion well up inside and it drives us into a state where we usually end up over-reacting, all too often 15 minutes later when we calm down we start to think more rational and wonder if perhaps we did over react.
You see that explosive emotional reaction is driven from your beliefs or fears, something said has struck a chord that you feel has reflected on your identity, standards or abilities, and your fight/flight response kicks in and the adrenalin drives your over passionate response.
This all seems very justfied at the time, but like I said earlier we often realise afterwards there probably was another way we could have handled it – we could have responded rather than reacted.
So whats the difference? Well, if before we let fly we take a minute to check in and see if we are reacting or responding and calm ourselves down a little, take a deep breath and decide to get clarification of what they mean – perhaps it is a simple misunderstanding.
A response will always be calmer, more considered and in the end you will come across as far stronger and more sure of yourself than any mad outrage. After all its only your body you are putting under excess strain in that situation.
Someone who can stay calm, get clarification and set the record straight in a calm but firm way is a far healthier, constructive and respected person.
Now, this is going to be a little hard for some of you to accept but you see the simple fact is this – no one can ever really upset you, our emotions are a process we do to ourselves, it’s how we process and take on board what someone else has said or done.
The first step though is to stay in control, not let what someone else has done or said upset us more than it should, because all too often we do get upset or annoyed far out of proportion to the “crime” so to speak.
Yes, people do and say horrible things, its always happened, always will. One of the most stupid sayings ever is the one we all learnt at school “Sticks and Stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me” – like thats true!
Words are powerful, words people say to us, and also the words we say to ourselves….we need to be careful with words…
Just because someone says something though does not mean it’s true, something someone does, does not mean they have considered how you would feel and gone ahead regardless, most of the time people don’t think at all they just do on autopilot.
We can be different though, and we can be healthier and have far less stress if we develop the habit of staying calm, looking for clarification, collecting the facts and then responding.
“What makes you say that or think that?” is often a good response to something to hold your position before you react and change gear down a notch or two from reacting to responding.
Have fun with it, get curious about why you react the way you do sometimes.
Mark Rhodes
What will people think of me?
“Limiting Beliefs” are beliefs we have about ourselves, other people or the world in general that dictate how we approach things.
For most of us in addition to our Limiting Beliefs we also have one of them that dominates our thoughts, not usually in the form of the belief but more in the form of what the belief means to our lifes.
You need to uncover your dominant thought, you’ll probably realise it before the end of this article, or you’ll notice it in the next day or two.
It’s the thought that occurs most of the time, most often in the form of a question we keep asking ourselves over and over, trying to get an answer or some internal assurance that everything will be OK.
If you’ve not yet realised what yours is, here are some of the ones my clients have shared with me over the years:
When will I have enough money?
How am I going to meet all the bills this month?
What will they think?
What will people think of me?
Am I going to be ok?
What else is going to go wrong?
and so many others.
What we need to understand firstly is what is our dominant thought? Once we know that we need to ask ourselves what the Belief is behind that, quite simply by asking ourselves:
“What must I believe in order to keep thinking this?”
Ideas will come up and one will feel more true than the others.
For example a client who recently had the dominant thought of “What will people think of me?” realised they must believe they are not good enough. This in turn obviously leads us to the realisation that it’s not really about what other people think, but this statement comes to mind because we ourselves are afraid we might not be good enough.
Once you get to what you believe or “must believe” in order to have that thought you need to realise firstly it is not reality it is just a belief or way of thinking.
The next step is to start to breakdown this belief and that can be done in many ways two of which are:
(1) Make a list of all the reasons why this belief is not true, write down all the arguments, reasons and evidence in your life that actually disprove the belief. So often our beliefs are generalised statements that get out of hand over time and affect what we notice in the world.
(2) Another way is to use the “I can’t Virus” questions from the free eBook available on this site here
Once we have started to break down the belief come up with a new dominating thought that aknowledges the old one but is an empowering thought that you can start to think of instead, one that points you in the right direction.
You need the persistance and discipline that everytime you notice the old thought coming up you say the new one 5 times or more.
Mark Rhodes
Why your online photo may not look right…
I always found myself saying that my photo’s never look like me, and yet everyone else says they do! This was confusing until one day….
I can’t remember where I heard this or where I read this but what I discovered was that inside us we hold a mental picture of what we look like. When we see ourselves in a photograph often it doesn’t quite look right because the photograph and the image don’t match exactly – why?
Well our faces are not 100% symmetrical and we only ever see our own face in a mirror or reflection which is swapped left to right, whereas everyone else see’s us in a normal alignment that matches the photograph.
I think there is some truth in this, certainly for me, as I have often found I like my picture more when I open it in some image software and then flip the image so it is a mirror image and therefore must match my internal picture of myself better.
I’d be interested in others thoughts on this, maybe take a picture you are not sure about and flip it and see if it appeals more.
Mark Rhodes
Why people don’t set big enough Goals
Why most people don’t set big enough Goals and why we should set big Goals rather than just set a little Goal and hope it turns into big success.
Mark Rhodes
Eddie returns to his Birthplace
As Eddie our Cocker Spaniel Puppy approaches his first birthday we have decided to take him back to meet his mum next weekend.
It seems like only yesterday he looked like this:
Eddie at 6 Weeks Old
Mark Rhodes
Why no Confidence?
At the end of a recent event a few people asked me why I didn’t mention confidence as a specific subject. Actually we did because we covered Beliefs in great detail, let me explain…
So, what is confidence?
It’s basically how certain we feel about something, be that ourselves in a given situation or an outcome etc.
At the end of the day confidence is a word to describe how we feel about something which comes from whether we have overall limiting beliefs about ourselves or the activity in question, or if we have overall empowering beliefs.
Remove limiting beliefs, build up empowering beliefs, and what do you have? Confidence.
Our “confidence” also forms our Comfort Zone which is also defined by the limiting beliefs we have, our empowering beliefs and our Values.
If you’ve not attended an event or been part of a coaching program with me then a great place to find out more about getting more understanding on Limiting Beliefs and Confidence is in the Free eBook you can download from this website .
Mark Rhodes
