Tag Archives: success formula

  • 20
    May 20
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Fear – Anxiety – Stress Simple Steps to Overcome Them

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I want to talk about fear today, and how to overcome it to feel happier and more in control. In this current global crisis, we are all at risk of being overwhelmed by fear, anxiety and stress.

Many of us are probably struggling with having to hand over control of our liberty and stay home, even as things are beginning to ease a little. It’s easy to buy into the opinions and directions of others, especially those who appear to back up their position with official-sounding evidence. But many of the posts on social media are by people who know only as much as we do, and are more speculation than truth.

Worrying about our own health and our loved ones, worrying about our businesses and the economic impact of the restrictions imposed on us while we ride out this pandemic, worrying about how long it will take to get back to normal – all this can very quickly impact on our mental health and make it harder to regain perspective.

It all feeds the fear.

Fear gets stronger the more we feed it, and skews our perception of reality. Fear is designed to keep us safe, but it can easily get out of control – if we let it.

But here’s the thing: fear is all in the mind.

Don’t give it headspace – don’t let fear live rent-free in your head!

 

Question how this will impact on you right now, but avoid worrying about the future. When we get bogged down with drama, we forget our own centre. Think about what you can do differently.

There are things we can do now, simple steps we can take that will put the brakes on rising anxiety, to strengthen ourselves and move away from feeling vulnerable by building resilience.

Resilience is a key factor in protecting and promoting good mental health. It is the quality of being able to deal with the ups and downs of life, and is based on emotional strength. Emotional strength, like physical strength, comes from exercising control over how we respond to pressure.

 

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

One of the most important things we can do to protect ourselves is to isolate ourselves from the discussion of the virus as well as from the virus itself. Move away from fear-inducing social media and endless news bulletins. You know it’s happening, and you know too, that with time, it will pass.

Be present in this moment. Pay attention to what is happening within you and around you right now. If you can, sit in the sunshine and breathe deeply. Right now you’re okay. Focus on that and let yourself sit with that thought for a moment.

By focussing on what we do have, and staying present, we can regain a sense of control over our lives.

The Comfort Zone

Brené Brown describes the comfort zone as ‘Where our uncertainty, scarcity and vulnerability are minimised—where we believe we’ll have access to enough love, food, talent, time, admiration. Where we feel we have some control.’

 

 

How we respond is always more powerful than our present circumstances. Parts of our lives right now are being decided by completely uncontrollable circumstances, yet there’s still so much that’s decided by our responses.

Remind yourself that the goal isn’t to get rid of all your painful thoughts, feelings, and life circumstances, because that’s always impossible. The goal is to change your response to them.

There are many tools to help with this. Apps such as Headspace, Pacifica, Calm, and Rain Sounds are useful in bringing a moment of calm to allow you to reset to a more positive frame of Gratitude mind.

 

Gratitude

Gratitude alone can transform your relationship to events in a really positive way. Moving towards gratitude is as simple as noticing the world around you. Listen to the birds, watch the clouds drifting across the sky, smell the different scents of the day. Breathe in, breathe out. One of my clients for example tries to find ten things to be grateful for, even before she gets out of bed in the morning – and twenty before breakfast on especially difficult days! (Having breakfast counts, with double points if you can eat it in the garden!)

Gratitude creates a powerful emotional and energetic signature akin to unconditional love, and creates a mindset of abundance and grace in place of scarcity and fear. Gratitude enables us to raise our energy and expands our emotional range for how we respond to challenges.

If you’re feeling grateful for something, you can’t feel bad – they can’t be in the same space together.

And by writing down all the things we feel grateful for becomes a powerful tool for the times we lose focus. So, by capturing the memories of things you can be grateful for at the end of the day as well, the mood you go to bed in will be the mood you get up in.

We all have bad days, but I can tell you that by paying attention to the good things, noticing them, acknowledging them, writing them down, in doing this – especially on the bad days – you will find your mood begins to lift immediately, and you feel more in control, more empowered, no longer a victim of circumstance.

Gratitude brings with it clarity of mind, enabling you to discern the truth from bluster and assess the facts. In this way, we take back our power and we rise stronger to face the challenges presented to us.

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

 

Fear is false appearing real. Once you take back control of your thoughts – by looking around you, at what you know to be true, by maintaining a gratitude list, journal or jar to gather up all the small bits and bobs that help you build trust with the world – you’ll be able to dismiss fearful thoughts more quickly. It’ll be like having a conversation with your fears:

‘Yes thank you for showing up and alerting me to the dangers as you see them; however, I have better information, and you can stand down this time. I do appreciate your being on guard though.’

Being able to rely on your own emotional strength and clarity of thought to assess things puts you back in a position of control, and reduces the sense of being overwhelmed by circumstance, because you know you’ll rise strong regardless.

 

 

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

 

 

  • 20
    Apr 20
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The Problem with Putting Success First

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A couple of weeks ago I shared a video of a TEDx talk on my Facebook page. I’ve used it in training workshops as well. You may already know it.

Shawn Achor is the well-respected bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage (2010) and Before Happiness (2013), and one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. His TEDx talk on ‘The happy secret to better work’ has been viewed over 13 million times.

The Old Way: Work Harder for Success

We are taught that to be successful, we need to do well at school, to work harder and longer hours for the things we want. When we push hard for things we will be successful, and thus happiness will follow as a kind of well-earned reward.

But every time we achieve something, get the grades, get the raise, get the girl / boy, the measure for success gets changed. Happiness is always on the other side of achieving these shifting goals.

Happiness gets pushed over the cognitive horizon: we keep chasing it by trying to achieve our goals. Yet by doing so, we undercut our emotional and mental well-being, as well as our chances of success and achievement.

The New Way: Positivity Leads to Success

Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash

 

We have discovered that our brains don’t work that way. We need to reverse the equation and put being happy first. When we are happy, when our mindset and mood are positive, we are more motivated, smarter and more successful.

Our brains do better in everything worthwhile and meaningful when we are in a positive state: we are more creative, engaged, enthusiastic, motivated, productive and resilient. We learn better, retain more, have greater clarity, make better decisions, and become more successful at achieving the things we want.

And we appreciate our successes more, leading to greater natural happiness, and more energy to take on the next challenge.

By being happy first, enjoying life and embracing stress as a challenge rather than a threat, our brains are able to work faster, better and more intelligently.

The Dopamine Advantage

Optimism boosts dopamine levels in our brains. Dopamine is known as the feel-good hormone: it makes us feel good about ourselves and others. It also switches on the learning centres in our brains, allowing us to adapt to the world in more creative ways. Dopamine is behind the greater successes that come as a result of being happy, optimistic, upbeat.

So how do we get more dopamine into our brains? How do we become happier if not through success first?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

 

Rewiring the Brain to Positivity

We can train our brains to become more positive. Shawn Achor suggests, as do many others, that we can retrain our brains in just two minutes a day over three weeks. It’s often said that it takes two weeks to break a habit, and two weeks to make one, but the truth is much wider than that, with 21 days at the lower end. But it’s a good place to start.

Look for three new things every day to be grateful for. After three weeks of actively watching out for things to feel good about, your brain will begin to retain a way of looking at the world that is more optimistic, seeking the positive first.

And if you write them down – perhaps keeping them in a Happiness or Gratitude Jar – you will set the new behaviour more quickly, and have the fun of rereading your notes every week or month.

Photo by Freshh Connection on Unsplash

 

Several companies and organisations do this, including some I’ve worked with, encouraging their staff to drop positive notes into a team jar, perhaps about their own successes, things they want to applaud in others, or things they are just pleased to observe around them. Each month, the notes are read out at a team meeting, cementing the dopamine effect into the daily work schedule. Happiness first equals greater success.

I’ve mentioned journaling in other posts, and this is another way of reliving positive experiences. Other ways of building up our happiness muscle is exercise, as it teaches the brain that our behaviour matters. Meditation creates a quiet space and an off switch for the cultural ADHD of multi-tasking and busy-ness.

Other ways include random acts of kindness, such as emailing a colleague to thank them or simply to acknowledge them for their input – focussing on process as much as outcome. Paying attention, noticing the good stuff. Consciously replacing a negative thought with a positive one; not indulging in put-downs, either as ‘banter’ or as negative self-talk. Actively seeking out opportunities to be kind to ourselves and others. These all encourage dopamine to flow through the brain, building our resilience and our creativity.

And these ripples of positivity create opportunities for greater success as a consequence.

 

  • 05
    Mar 20
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Intention + Attention – Anxiety = Success

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Let’s read that again:

Intention plus Attention (minus Anxiety) equals Success

This rather neat little formula is from a book called Gravitas by Caroline Goyder, on how to communicate with confidence, influence and authority. It’s worth a read (or a listen, if that’s your preference – good for long car journeys!)

 

What does it mean, though?

From the dictionary:

Intention: a thing intended; a course of action, an aim or plan; (‘she was full of good intentions’).

Attention: close or careful observing or listening; the action of dealing with or taking special care of someone or something (‘her business needed her attention’)

Anxiety: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome (‘he felt a surge of anxiety’)

Success: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose (‘the director had some success in restoring confidence’)

 

 

Photo: Danielle MacInness on Unsplash

Breaking it down

We know that to achieve our goals, we need to set our intention to that purpose. Just as a goal without a deadline stays a daydream, so too intentions without attention to anchor them often dissipate like morning mist, or New Year’s Resolutions!

Intention (focussing on the goal – a dream with a deadline)

together with

Attention (staying mindful of the moment attending to the here-now part of the goal),

but without

Anxiety (the small stuff that steals your energy and distracts you from your goal. Feel the fear, acknowledge it, and let it go. Pay attention to your goal regardless)

will result in

Success (achievement, growth, pushing back boundaries, widening the comfort zone, increasing your sense of personal power, self-belief made true)

 

First of all, you need to feel inspired. Being inspired to do something comes from within and will take you a lot further than motivation will. Motivation is externally driven and easier to lose, whereas inspiration feeds the dream and makes your brain tingle!

 

Photo: Greg Razorsky on Unsplash

 

Say you want to sell your car because a better one has caught your eye. This is your intention. But you keep putting off cleaning it, repairing it, taking the photos, because you get distracted. You need to bring your mind back to the reasons for wanting to sell it, for doing anything that you think is worthwhile, and pay attention to those reasons on a daily basis, so that you live with it, breathe it, even dream about it!

Think about all the reasons for selling your car, or losing weight, or creating a new habit, and why this is important to you. By paying attention, every day, constantly thinking, planning, checking, accounting, adjusting, and keeping the project uppermost in your mind, keeps your intentions aligned and keeps yourself accountable.

I find it useful to write out my goal and put a deadline to it (obviously) and then pin it up where I will see it – a sticky note on the edge of my laptop, kettle, fridge, bathroom mirror! And then check in with myself every day regarding my progress.

I also pay attention to all the nagging niggles and negative voices whispering in my head about why this will fail, why I can’t do it, why there’s no point trying, blah, blah, blah, and I acknowledge them. So I might say to myself, ‘yes, thank you for pointing that out, that’s useful information and I’m aware of it, but it doesn’t apply here.’ And let the anxiety go – it has no business getting in the way of you achieving the things you want for yourself.

 

Photo: Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

 

It helps to check in with yourself each day – I keep a journal – but you might meditate, or have a quiet moment with your morning coffee. Take time to remind yourself every day what you want to achieve, and why, and how you’ll feel when you achieve it. Note the anxieties you have as they crop up – don’t let them fester, but bring them out into the light and examine them. Why are they chirping in your ear? What is it that you feel you don’t deserve or can’t do?

When we examine our fears with compassion for ourselves, we often find that they are the lingering shadows of our past self. Perhaps they served a valuable purpose back then, but if they are getting in the way of what you want now or for your future self, this is an opportunity to let them go. They are not serving you if they are stopping you from feeling good about yourself.

 

Here is an example:

A friend of mine was given a team whose work she knew little about. Of course, she wanted the team members to see her management as a good thing, but more than that, she wanted to utilise their skills to ease the burden elsewhere. She had ideas but sensed their reluctance – some people had been doing their job the same way for years and were resistant to doing anything differently, or taking on more work.

So she listened to them, asked questions, took notes, offered opportunities they had previously missed out on, and put in quick win processes that brought immediate benefits to them all.

Without asking anything in return.

Gradually she shared her intentions to develop the team to a similar capacity as her other team, by which time they were willing to listen and more than half were keen to be part of her plans.

She kept to her intentions, stayed mindful of the bigger picture. She paid attention, always looking for ways to assist the team members develop both personally and professionally. She resisted their initial reluctance and negativity, going slowly but always towards her goal for the team. She kept faith with herself.

And she persevered.

Perseverance: the glue that binds it all together. The magic that transforms a dream into reality.

To success.

                                                       Photo: Bruce Mars on Unsplash

 

What do you want to achieve?

Intention + Attention – Anxiety = Success

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