Identify the Causes of Failure

After exploring the ABC of Success, it’s logical to look at the different causes of failure. If you know what these behaviours are, you will recognize them in yourself and be able to take remedial action.

Recognize Your Triggers

If you think about occasions when anger was your response to a particular situation, you can usually rewind and find the trigger that caused you to lose control. This will often have been an interruption of some sort, or a situation where your courtesy has not been recognized.

• One of your children wanted you to do something or was simply seeking attention while you were busy.

• A colleague wandered into your office to say something of little importance just when you were in the middle of a final calculation.

• Someone’s mobile phone rang when you were in the middle of making an important presentation, putting you off your stride.

• Someone edged their way in ahead of you in a traffic jam and didn’t acknowledge that you had let them in.

Keep Control

By the time you realize that you have lost control, it’s too late. Furthermore, you are probably already berating yourself for an inappropriate response and you become angry with yourself too. Use the A of the ABC of Success – awareness – to help you to understand that anger will not help you to deal with any situation. The energy behind anger is always negative and invariably breaks down relationships instead of building on them. It’s difficult to come back from an angry outburst – the memory of the anger will linger long after the emotion has passed.

Avoid Pointing the Finger of Blame

You should always ask yourself whether you are taking full responsibility for your part in whatever you are attempting to blame on someone else. Pointing the finger of blame stops you from paying attention to your role in causing the lack of clarity. It also prevents you acknowledging that others have played a role in bringing a project to a positive conclusion. Use awareness to lead you to an understanding of whether you’ve communicated your expectations clearly. You can only do this if you are prepared to take full responsibility for the quality of your communication.

Take Responsibility

Laying the blame on others leads you away from taking responsibility for a problem. If you are late for a meeting and excuse yourself by blaming heavy traffic, you will be missing the point. The lesson to be learned is that traffic can be unpredictable, so if you have an important meeting, take responsibility for getting to it by getting up earlier.

Techniques to Practise

Practise communicating your decisions clearly. Imagine a situation where you need to be decisive and convincing. Act out possible responses with a friend.

Then imagine that you want to: refuse to work at the weekend; ask your doctor for a second opinion; turn down an invitation to dinner; ask your assistant to work overtime; deliver some tough news to your team. Put yourself in their shoes.

• Find six different ways to communicate this decision clearly and politely.

• Decide what you want and the reason for it. One good reason is better than half a dozen weak justifications.

• Read through your list of reasons and decide whether they are convincing or need more work.

• Practise expressing your reasons out aloud.

Avoid Making Complaints

This final cause of failure is one of the biggest time and energy wasters. It rarely helps you to achieve your goals, and is of no use at all if all you are doing is moaning about something that has already happened. Familiar topics include the weather, traffic, taxes, public transport, queues, speed cameras, poor service, the postal system, television programmes, and the government. It’s useful to realize that complaining usually has its origins in the sense of frustration that arises when something is not done to your standards, or when your expectations haven’t been met. If you haven’t received the service you expected, for example, when you’ve booked a hotel room for a night, there could be a wide range of reasons for the hotel’s failure to meet your expectations. It could be because your expectations were too high, your request was lost, your hotel room was double booked, or you were not specific about wanting, say, a non-smoking room.

• Don’t complain about things, such as the weather, that you can’t change.

• Even if you think you might change a situation, for example by complaining about poor service, you must remain calm throughout.

Always remember that when you complain about something that has already happened or that you can’t alter, you’re arguing with reality and can only ever lose.

5 Minute Fix

When you feel yourself becoming angry, take some time to chill out.

• If you can, remove yourself from the scene of your anger.

• Take a few deep breaths.

• Mentally count backwards in thirteens from 100.

Taking Responsibility

When you blame others for their lack of input or understanding, it leads you down the slippery slope of frustration, which can then cause you to lose control and become angry. How much responsibility are you taking for this situation? Taking full responsibility when things go wrong will help you to learn more about yourself and others.

• Double check whether whatever is thought to be causing a problem is really doing so.

• Ask yourself what your input to the situation is.

• Seek common ground before tackling anything unacceptable.

• Stick to the point and don’t rake up past problems.

• Think about whether there have been any occasions when you did the thing that you are now blaming someone else for and see if this is why you are so sensitive.

Case Study: Defeating Your Objectives

Daniel had worked hard to save for a luxury holiday for his family and he wanted to chill out and have a great time away from his job. He was so anxious about having a great time that he was constantly on edge and almost looking for reasons to complain about every aspect of the holiday. Because he was looking for faults, he encountered lots of little problems and things that weren’t quite right. He complained throughout the first day and, that evening, as he was about to complain about the poor service at dinner, he looked around at his family’s glum faces and realized that he was spoiling the holiday for everyone. He decided that he could live with the minor niggles and the rest of the holiday was a big success.

• By realizing in time that his complaints weren’t going to improve anything Daniel ensured that everyone enjoyed the holiday.

• He arrived back at work relaxed and refreshed and ready for the challenges of his job.

• He used this learning experience from the holiday in his job, and focused on what was good within the workplace and no longer complained about the small stuff.