How to achieve a spectacular 2019
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“If today were the last day of your life, would you want to do what you are about to do today?”
2019 is here and we’re already two weeks in. Another 12 months has flown by. It seems that no matter who you are, each year goes by faster than the one before. Each year you promise yourself that you’ll do the things to reach you full potential next year. But how much of those actions do you really take on a consistent basis, so much so that they become embedded in your psyche. You are the only person stopping you from getting to your full potential. So as we approach the end of 2018, you should ask yourself:
What actions did I do to improve myself in 2018 and what do I need to do now to become the best version of myself in 2019?
Why is asking this question important? Because reflecting on what’s passed is the best way to identify lessons learnt, write them down, and make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes. If you don’t do anything different, then nothing changes. You’ll just end up letting 2019 pass in the same way as 2018. Before you know it, 2020 is upon us and we’re having the exact same conversation. Yes, self improvement takes time; it is the accumulation of of many little actions that you practice consistently. But while you need to pace yourself, you always need to ramp up your velocity. The sad reality of life is:
You have both plenty of time and not enough time, all at the same time.
So to help you ramp up your velocity, I’m condensing the key truths that I have learnt from everything that I’ve experimented with (self improvement wise) over the last two years. It’s the not end of my self improvement journey (I don’t think it ever ends) but it’s a good point to take stock.
TRUTH 1 - IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Henry Ford famously said “… whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right…” Until I started on my self improvement journey, I had only had a surface level idea about what this means. However, from all the books that I’ve read, all the TED talks that I’ve watched, I realised that everything comes down to you and your mindset.
As Eckhart Tolle mentions in his book “The Power of NOW”, how you are vibrating internally, attracts things of an equal vibration. If you are giving off negative vibes, you attract negative (relative to your perception) events.
Now this sounds like hocus pocus rubbish but think about it scientifically. Our minds are designed to look for things that we focus on. Just like when you’ve bought a new car, suddenly, everyone else seems to have the same type of car. The same thing happens to a new suit or shirt. This is an underlying principle of life. Therefore, if you’ve had a negative event and you focus on it (over and over again) then for the rest of the day, all you will experience will seem to be only negative events. But the reality is, good events happened in between but you just chose not to notice.
Similarly, if you are in a meeting where you feel like you have the least power or you feel like you don’t deserve to be there. Your mind will then look for all the subtle cues to support that perception, from the CEO not responding to one of your comments to the CFO turning his back on you. You mind takes all of these as evidence that you don’t deserve to be there. But in reality, the CEO was just thinking about the comment you made and hadn’t had the chance to respond and the CFO was just turning to look at the presentation while you were talking. You brain grabs these subtle cues to support your misperception, which is then reinforced, and all of a sudden, like a run away train, you are in this downwards spiral of shortness of breath, difficulty talking, and brain not functioning.
So what’s the action. Well it’s simple. As silly as this sounds, change the mindset that you are telling yourself. Before the meeting, and during the meeting, in your head, just repeat that you deserve to be in the room. You are there because someone thought it worthy for you to be there. Nothing more to prove. And if the negative misperceptions come back in, then per our previous blogs, do the following:
Count. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Do the Vagas nerves breathing exercise.
Reinforce in your head that you deserve to be there.
What do you do if the negative thoughts hit in the middle of your presentation? You can’t stop to count. Well, just like the action to leave a good impression in an interview, just do what a normal human would do. Just call it for what it is:
“I’m sorry. I’m a little nervous. Let me try that part again.”
TRUTH 2 - NOBODY REMEMBERS YOUR MISTAKES
Nobody remembers your mistakes except you. And if you did make a mistake, it’s never as bad as what your mind has made it out to be. Eleanor Roosevelt famously said “… You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do…”
This is so true and it’s a very polite way of saying GET OVER YOURSELF! Everyone else has their own problems to deal with and their own goals to achieve. Your mistakes mean nothing in their eyes, that is if you’ve even made a mistake. I apologised to my boss last week for a presentation I made in which I said the word “orgasm of data points” instead of “organism of data points”. The Board members laughed but all week in my head, I felt like I made a massive error. When I apologised to my boss, he struggled to recall that moment, and when he did, he said he thought that was my deliberate way of re-energising the room after three hours of facts and figures. This would’ve been a very smart of looking at it except I told him that I said it by accident.
So what’s the action from here? Well, my experiences and this blog won’t necessarily convince you. But set up a routine where you get your own evidence that this is true.
Each time you think you’ve made a mistake, record it in a journal and reflect on it.
Give it a week then reach out to someone else who was in the meeting for their take.
Compare the feedback you got with your own reflections. You’ll likely see a massive contrast.
Then decide what action you can take to not make the same mistake again in your own mind.
Over time, with enough feedback, you’ll see what I see and your own evidence will hopefully convince of this truth. Why don’t I drone on about this? Well as Dale Carnegie rightly points out:
A person convinced against their will, is of the same opinion still.
TRUTH 3 - SMILE, BREATHE, EYE CONTACT
When ever you converse with someone (even strangers or the barista at the coffee shop), always do the following:
Make eye contact - pick an eye, and lock on it while you’re talking. Don’t shift between left and right because that’ll make you look shifty. And definitely don’t stare between the eyes.
Smile - it brightens their day and it brightens your day. That’s why smiling is one of the emotions almost all babies are born with.
Breathe - it sounds silly but taking a few deep breaths or even just being conscious of your breathing can calm your nerves.
Want to appear more confident and feel more confident, no matter where you are. Then smile, breathe, and make eye contact. It’ll brighten up the other person’s day too. Even if it’s only for a millisecond. It would’ve been worth it.
Plus, if you smile at someone and they don’t reciprocate, they are being rude, not you.
TRUTH 4 - DO THE WORK - SELF IMPROVEMENT IS AN ADVENTURE
Yes, self improvement is hard. Yes, it requires you to do things outside of your comfort zone. But who set the boundaries of the zone to begin with? You did. Why did you set the boundaries there? Based on what your parents told you, based on one or two events in your life. Is your life that cheap that you limit yourself based on one or two events? Are you a clone of your parents? Where did they get their boundaries from? From their parents. Are you such a clone that where your parents have not dared to push further that you should stop there too? How do you know you can’t do something if you don’t give it a go?
There are countless TED talks out there about people who push just a little bit out of their boundaries and found that what they’ve put up with all their lives up to that point have been false. Don’t believe me, go back to the home page and watch one of our favourite TED talks “What I learnt from 100 days of rejection”.
But the key is pushing out just a little bit at a time, and over time, you will look back and realise just how much you’ve improved. There are TED talks, books, blogs on almost every aspect of your life that you want to improve. Stop reading a whole bunch of books, hoping that their content will magically seep into your brain. Read one book, read one blog. Apply the action. It’ll be clumsy and feel scary at first. But do it anyway. Refine it to suit your personality. Keep doing it until it becomes natural. Then move onto the next thing.
If you strike out with your action and it didn’t go according to plan. That’s OK. Why? Because nobody cares and nobody will remember it except you. What do you do when that happens? Reset your mind. Learn from it and iterate.
CONCLUDING ACTION
So if you’ve struggled in 2018, take heart from the four truths above. You can’t reach your full potential, if you don’t try. If you’re too scared to try, then take heart from the fact that if you make a mistake, nobody cares. If you can’t take the first step, realise that you are the only person standing in your way. And if all of that is too much then start with the basics. SMILE, BREATHE, EYE CONTACT.
MyCorporateDiary will be taking a short break over the holiday period. During this time, we are building something really big to help you break your introvert bonds. So until 2019, enjoy the holiday period, wherever you may be and start the journey with the small actions that help you to reach your fill potential.
Blog Photo by Bruno Cervera on Unsplash
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