Positive thinking and professional success

by Staff Writer: Leadership and Competence Building | Aug 21, 2018

How to overcome limiting beliefs

This is a short focused online power coaching session for small groups to allow for inter action or can be extended for a wider corporate audience.

Learn how we hold ourselves back with unproductive negative messages and how to overcome them.

It’s always on your mind. You need to change. You need to start exercising more, lose that five kilos for your holiday bikini, start a blog, get active on LinkedIn, become more disciplined about managing your paperwork or prepare healthier meals. You always mean to, but never do.

There is a lot of self-help mythology about changing habits – some suggest that it takes 21-30 days to change a habit. This is actually largely unsubstantiated! Other studies say that it can take up to 254 days. The bottom line is there is no magical number that becomes a yardstick for success or failure.

Research from the American Psychological Association found long term abstract thinking plays a key role:

“High-level construals led to decreased preferences for immediate over delayed outcomes, greater physical endurance, stronger intentions to exert self-control, and less positive evaluations of temptations that undermine self-control”.

Translated into every day language “Dream Big” works.

However, we all struggle with seeming to be too big for our boots, by thinking up grand schemes and then becoming overwhelmed with our great ambitions. Inserting magical numbers only adds to self sabotaging thinking.

Research around self determination, tells us that people who want change for its own sake, are successful in achieving goals that endure. What people struggle with is finding a way to fit the “big dreams” into every day life to make them achievable over time. Motivation alone tends to run out of steam long-term and you won’t change your habit in a lasting way that sticks. This is why fad diets don’t work!

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” said Aristotle. People achieve this by changing the one thing that they can control – their daily behaviour.