Understand Your Behaviour

What lies between us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

—What lies between us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Depending on your experiences as you grew from childhood to adulthood, you will have learned the basics of right and wrong and will know how you like to be treated and how to treat others.

Hold on to Being Right

The traditional advice that you should treat people as you would like them to treat you doesn’t take individual differences into account – race, beliefs and religion, gender, age. You need to treat others with an understanding of how they expect to be treated. Holding on to the belief that you are right leaves very little room for arriving at an understanding of another person’s point of view. You need to be able to suspend the judgments you might have rushed to make in the past, and to recognize that the needs of others may vary. When you hold on to being right, even when the evidence is against you, you will miss important learning opportunities. You may be closed to the truth because it has been put forward by a colleague towards whom you feel very competitive. Your resentment towards that person will probably stop you from performing at your best, and from tapping in to your creativity. Being able to accept the truth and to forgive others when you feel that they have wronged or slighted you is a very powerful tool that will enable you to live in the present and to stay focused on your strengths.

Discovering What Makes You Tick

Being able to unravel how and why you behave the way you do from moment to moment will help you to understand what makes you tick. Consider the way in which you interact with your friends, family, and work colleagues.

• Line up your thoughts and feelings and ensure that they match up with how you are behaving – this is more about what you do and say and matching your body language.

• You will know when you are being authentic, as you will feel comfortable with the message you are delivering because it is your truth.

• You will know when you are not being authentic because you feel awkward. You may not be able to maintain eye contact and will probably fidget more.

Techniques to Practise

If you frequently find yourself in confrontational or disappointing situations, it’s helpful to try analyzing your interactions so that you can understand how and why you behaved and felt the way you did.

Take a sheet of paper and divide in into two equal columns. In one column, write down what you felt about a specific situation, and in the other, write down what you thought about it. Try not to confuse the two categories and be as accurate as possible.

• Once you know what triggered these situations you will be better at controlling them next time.

• Look at what you thought at the time and compare it with what you think now.

• Try to identify what viewpoint made you feel so negative.

• Think about what this means about you to you – not what it might mean about you to other people.

Tip

Practise forgiveness to enable you to let go of any resentment or anger you may be holding on to in relation to your family, friends, or work colleagues.

Understand Your Conditioned Responses

From birth onwards you have had constant input from your parents, family members, teachers, colleagues, the media, and numerous other influences. These have all played a huge role in shaping you. Ask yourself how you became who you are today. The answer to this question is simple – your conditioning or upbringing. Most children grow up thinking that their future and its possibilities are limitless. By the time they reach adulthood, few still have a strong self-image and self-esteem. Along the way, the negative effects of being told “You’re clumsy”, “Who do you think you are?”, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew”, “Don’t be so pathetic”, “Don’t be so stupid”, and other similar things have taken their toll. We end up so conditioned into believing that things aren’t possible that we no longer even try to achieve what we may previously have thought was possible. We need to find the key to unlock our belief in ourselves.

Don’t Use Your Past as an Excuse

Many people use the story of their past as an excuse to repeat the same outcomes they have always had. They carry their stories with them through life, and everything they do is affected by their negative experiences.

• Do you use your story to justify why you are where you are, and why the quality of your life is as it is?

• Do you carry your parents’ story forward into your own life and use it as a reason for not achieving more success in your life?

Past failure doesn’t mean you’ll fail in the future. If you couldn’t draw as a child it doesn’t mean that you will carry that inability through life. The same is true of any talent with which you may have struggled while growing up.

Learn From It and Then Let It Go

You don’t have to keep repeating negative patterns of behaviour. If you think about the negative stories from your past as great lumps of lead that you are carrying around with you, you will see that they are weighing you down and impeding your progress through life. The longer you hold on to and re-tell those stories, the longer you’ll have to wait before you can move on. This does not mean that you should delete great memories from your past, but it does mean that you should think about some of the things that are preventing you from moving forward. You can learn from the experience and take positive steps to make different choices the next time opportunity knocks on your door.

Think Smart

Use the simple question “Is that really true?” to challenge all those things that you have been conditioned to believe about yourself.

A teacher or parent may have told you that you were tone deaf and couldn’t sing, or that you had no co-ordination and couldn’t dance. If these sorts of comments are preventing you from doing things that you used to enjoy, now is the time to ask “Is that really true?”