Awareness. Action. Automatic.
Awareness is the first component of becoming great at a skill or craft.
Once awareness is established, action is needed to intentionally practice and work on the skill or craft.
After taking consistent action to get better, the skill or craft becomes automatic.
There was an island called Without Sandals.
A budding salesperson from a nearby Town A visited the island and saw that no one at this island was wearing sandals. The salesperson went back to the town and concluded that there are no opportunities to sell any sandals because no one would wear them.
Another budding salesperson from a nearby Town B visits the island and makes the same initial observation that no one in the island was wearing sandals. The salesperson goes back to town and concludes that there is an abundance of opportunity to sell sandals in this island because everyone can wear them.
Your energy has immense power. What you put your energy into will create the results accordingly. Being aware of your energy, focusing the energy on your important goals and priorities, and taking utmost care of your energy is crucial to achieving success and getting the results you want.
The Law of Attraction is based on the belief that thoughts are a form of energy and that positive energy attracts success in all areas of life, including health, finances, and relationships. If your mindset is about positive energy and thoughts, it will lead towards positive results and vice versa.
As a salesperson, instead of focusing the energy on only your personal goals (earning high commission and getting a sale as quick as possible), if you focus your energy on actually helping the customers solve their problems and get what they want, the results can be phenomenal. As a manager, if your objective is only about achieving your personal goals above your team’s goals, then you will face continuous challenge. As a coach, if you want to achieve greater success as a team, you have to put the team’s goals ahead of your own. When the focus is on only your personal goals, your drive, motivation and energy will all follow accordingly and you might face more challenges along your path to success. When there is wholehearted focus on your customers’ goals and also your personal goals, the results can be remarkable.
When I approached the day with a single goal in mind and the right energy, I was able to achieve greater success. With a singular focus and making it a priority to helping my customers get what they want, I was amazed to see the overall results. What I focused my energy on completely changed the day and the results I got.
So what’s your energy focused on?
Growing up in a household or being in an environment where you get mostly or only positive feedback, you will expect that type of feedback in all areas of your personal and professional life. How helpful is the (mostly or only) positive feedback for the person receiving it in the long run? Is that positive feedback motivating the person or setting up expectations/beliefs that are not really assisting her or him? If only positive feedback is being given by a coach to an athlete/by a parent to a child/by a manager to an employee, then it can be more counterproductive than productive.
Constructive feedback is better for us. We need to know where we are good at and where we need to improve. When we get feedback of our strengths and improvement areas, we can allocate our time, energy, and focus accordingly. If we become tempted to create a perfect world of positive feedback from coaches to athletes, parents to children, and managers to employees, we are being in the fixed mindset. It’s important to adopt a growth mindset which “leads to a desire to learn and therefore a tendency to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, find lessons and inspiration in the success of others. As a result, they reach ever-higher levels of achievement” (Carol S. Dweckâs Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
How are you using the feedback you are getting?
With new adventures, everyday challenges, feedback from others, conversations between employees and managers, and many other moments in our daily experiences, it’s important to keep them in perspective.
Imagine a scenario of a manager giving an employee honest feedback. It’s tempting for the employee to expect all positive feedback from his/her supervisor and vice versa. Yet do we really grow from just positive adulations? If the employee uses the honest feedback to gain awareness of their strengths/improvement areas and then gathers new skills and knowledge, it’s actually much better in the long term for both the employee and the supervisor. On the other hand, if the employee does not have the proper perspective on the manager’s honest feedback, then he/she can feel down, angry, or even hurt by their words or behavior. The same goes when parents are giving honest feedback to their children, coaches talking to their players/teams, teachers talking to their students etc. It’s all about the perspective.
In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck says it’s tempting to create a world in which we’re perfect and we can choose partners, make friends, hire people who make us feel faultless. But think about it- do you want to never grow? Next time you’re tempted to surround yourself with worshippers, go to church. In the rest of your life, seek constructive criticism.
In Carol S. Dweck’s groundbreaking book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she talks about the research that Jim Collins and his team did on what made companies move from being good to being great. The five-year study showed that there were several factors that distinguished the thriving companies from the others. In Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, he states that the one distinguisher that was absolutely key was the type of leader who in every case led the company into greatness. “They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers – that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.”
Carol states that these leaders have the growth mindset and believe in human development. They are constantly trying to improve themselves and surround themselves with the most able people they can find, they look squarely at their own mistakes and deficiencies, and they ask frankly what skills they and the company will need in the future.
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