Be self focused to succeed - Success Series 2019 EP2

“Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.”

— Stephen Covey

We’re continuing our 2019 Success Series by giving you real actions from our Uninhibited Introvert Program to help you succeed in obtaining your new year’s resolutions and becoming the best version of yourself. Success in this next step is one of the most fundamental requirements. You will find that it challenges decades of social expectations that you have placed upon yourself. But turning it around is possible and the end result will pleasantly surprise you.

Once you have adopted the Growth Mindset from our previous post and opened your mind up to new new opportunities, the next step to becoming the Uninhibited Introvert is to FOCUS ON YOURSELF.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FOCUS ON YOURSELF

Focusing on yourself is not the same as being selfish nor is it being self centered (or narcissistic). Selfish and self centered implies that you care only about yourself or have little awareness of other people’s needs or emotions. Being selfish means you get what you want deliberately at the expense of others.

But a focus on yourself requires you to balance your awareness between what other people want and what you want. As introverts, we care deeply and we think deeply. My personal theory is that because we think so deeply, that is why we care so deeply. Over time, we find a comfortable set of behaviours that unfortunately places our focus on other people’s needs and wants at the expense of our own. We either become people pleasers, or we become that quiet and weird IT guy who struggles to hold a conversation.

To become uninhibited, we need to start elevating the priority of our own thoughts, ideas, needs, wants, desires, and emotions. They need to be of equal priority to other people’s needs, wants, and emotions. This is hard to do because we have to overcome decades of incorrect false beliefs and behaviours. We also have this false belief that we might stray too far and become selfish or self centered. The reality is, the in-balance of priorities between what you want and what other people want is so off kilter that there is no way that you can stray into selfish territory.

By balancing your priorities with other people’s, it gives you a new model from which to make decisions, which in turn provides you with self confidence. As we have found over the last 24 months through our own experiments, if you want to be seen as a confident person, then you need to first feel confident. Remember that…

Self confidence isn't not caring about what other people think. Self confidence is caring about what you think.

I have received many emails from readers on their experiences, often lamenting the fact that they feel like their ideas and concepts are not heard or treated with equal attention. Most times, the emails focus on maybe the tone they used, the words they used, or just the timing of when they injected their point. I have expressed the same issue to my mentor in the past. He gave me this one key insight, which I will never forget…

Until you believe in your own thinking, until YOU believe that your own opinions are valuable and what you have to say is worth listening to, then nothing else that you do is going to make a difference.

To succeed in your journey to becoming the best version of yourself, to go further in your career, to improve your relationships or dating life, or simply to live a more fulfilling life… you must start with putting your own priorities on an equal footing with other people’s priorities. It must start with you realising that what you want and need is as important as what other people want and need. Below, are simple actions you can take immediately to start balancing your priorities with that of others.

STOP BEING ADDICTED TO YES

Stop saying yes to requests that aren’t aligned with your priorities. Saying “no” to a colleague is socially difficult, but not wrong. What is wrong is if you prioritise your colleague’s needs above your own, leading you to spend extra hours finishing off both your work and their work. You’ll get credit for only one, and you run the risk of not delivering your own work on time or to the right quality. Saying “no” is difficult, so here are some simple alternatives that help to make it easier:

• Step 1 - Stall: Don't reply to a request straight away. Per what we've covered in previous blogs, replying straight away means that you are perceived as always available and therefore lowering the value people place on you. It also means you haven't had the time to think through the request, therefore you are more likely to react emotionally rather than rationally. The article also raises a good point that your actions train other people what to expect of us. So if you've established the expectation that you'll respond straight away and always say yes, then to change it, start by not replying immediately. Give it some time  (a few hours maybe), let the emotion subside, and then come up with a rational reply.

• Step 2 - Given an alternative: This makes perfect sense. If you don't want to be perceived as a jerk and still want to appear helpful, then offer the requestor an alternative. The key here is to offer a viable alternative not an excuse. People can see through excuses (the dog ate my homework) but alternatives are genuinely helpful (I can't do it this weekend but I am free on the weekend after OR have you checked with Bob?).

• Step 3 - Accept you have a choice: You can actually say no. You are not obligated to say yes no matter the circumstances. Importantly, a request for you to do something is not a binary construct. Think of yes and no as two extreme ends of the range of answers you can provide. This is where stalling your response helps you to think rationally through the range of answers available to you.

• Step 4 - It gets easier: Practice, practice, and more practice. Malcolm Gladwell says that you need to practice 10,000 hours at something before being proficient at it. You probably don't need to say no 10,000 times before you get comfortable with it but the more you do it the easier it gets. Maybe practice it on the charity collectors who stop you on the street and ask you to handover credit card details. Importantly, as we've discussed, the more you say no, the less available you become, and the more likely you are to increase in value.

• Step 5 - You can't please everyone: Some people will feel offended when you say no. But in all honesty, if you've said yes to them many times and the one time you said no, they feel offended then maybe they're not the kind of people you want to keep around. It's OK if some people are offended because as one colleague puts it "...some people are just jerks". This we will discuss in more detail for a future blog from a new contributor.

STOP REJECTING YOURSELF

When something good happens, do you have a tendency to think something bad will follow? Do you have trouble receiving compliments? When someone says that you’ve done a great job or thanks you wholeheartedly for something that you’ve done, do you feel uncomfortable? Instead of saying just “thank you” or “no trouble”, do you then add a whole bunch of illogical statements to try to reduce the level of effort you went to?

You might think you are just being modest (again that is what you think social norms dictate right?) but these little instances are simply symptoms of the deeply rooted issue that you are rejecting yourself. When you achieve a major milestone or did a wonderful job, it can’t possibly be because of your efforts, thinking, and insights. When something good happens in your life, it must be a trick and something bad must be waiting around the corner? That something bad might happen years down the track, but you have no trouble linking the bad event to the good event.

I used to struggle with this. In fact, my own mother struggled with this and it was only when I started on my journey of self improvement did I realise what she was doing. As I documented in the blog post “Stop rejecting yourself”, I finally saw the extent of the problem and realised that I was doing the exact same thing. Maybe not to the same extent, but I had the same problem.

So starting from today, when something good happens to you, just enjoy the moment. I promise you, there isn’t something bad waiting around the corner. When you pick up $2 on the street and put it in your pocket, there isn’t a bogeyman waiting around the corner to take $20 from your bank account.

When your boss, colleague gives you great feedback on a job well done, just say “thank you”. Don’t add any false modesty to it. Just say thank you and enjoy it. You can give credit to those who helped you along the way, but also recognise that if you hadn’t asked for help, they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to put their input to use.

INVEST IN YOURSELF

Want to be seen as more confident? Want to feel more confident? Then start investing some money in making yourself feel good and more knowledgeable. As I documented in the blog post “Getting the right returns on your investment”, the following actions you take will make you feel better about yourself and genuinely help you to achieve massive improvements in your life:

• Get a professional photo done for your CV or for your Linkedin profile. One that isn't cropped from your family photo where you were wearing a stained white polo top, with messy hair. A professional photo will set you back around AUD $300 but I guarantee, it's worth every dollar when potential employers look at your profile on Linkedin. It’ll appear more complete, more professional, and you will be perceived as a higher value, reliable person. Heck, it’ll make you feel more confident when you look at your own LinkedIn profile.

• Invest in a professional course on how to communicate better, how to speak with confidence, how to articulate your points with clarity, and how to breathe so that you don't speak at a million miles an hour. This kind of course can set you back about AUD $700. But think about the exponential returns you’ll get in the way people see you, the way you write, or even the way you talk.

• Invest in a nice suit or dress. One that is tailored to you so that when you wear it, you feel more confident, and if you have to attend interviews, you will stand out. I don't mean a flashy white suit with white shoes. I mean a nice professionally tailored suit that is tailored to your body. It’ll not only raise your profile, but it’ll make you feel more confident and more powerful.

• Continue to learn. Set aside two or three books such as Influence or the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck to change your mindset. Don’t just read the books. Actually study them and apply them. Knowledge by itself doesn’t change your life. It is the application of knowledge that makes the biggest difference.

Blog photo by Moose Photos from Pexels