Are you the CEO of your organization or is someone else in charge? How well do you know your Board of Directors? How many sit at the table?
I know it was the term CEO that threw you off, but stay with me here a moment longer because you ARE running a company! Just look at the company you keep. Look in a mirror, who do you see? The CEO? Good. Confused? Ok, I’ll stop with the riddles.
The company you run is you, and believe it or not, some of you even come with a full board sitting down full time, while others have found you derelict in your duties and fired you.
I know, you’re sitting there with your eyebrows furrowed and wondering what the hell this lady is talking about. Well, this should clear things up for you.
Have you ever wanted to achieve something so desperately that you could taste it? This ‘something’ was something you promised yourself that “this time” you would deliver and win! Then the unthinkable happened, you failed to deliver. It was just one more time that you didn’t get the job, or you froze when it was time to get up and talk, or the diet you started in the morning was history by lunch. More proof now that you are once and for all truly a loser. Another notch in the belt of failure. Let me ask you something, do you really think you’re a loser? If you answered yes, then you are WRONG and I am going to prove it to you.
Do you feel like your best efforts are sabotaged all the time? Well, you’re right, they are. That is the job of one of your Board members; to make sure you fail. Why? Because it is part of the history that you wrote for yourself or that others helped write over and over again. It is a core belief in your subconscious, and what you ‘BELIEVE’ about yourself will always come true.
It’s like this. If he ‘sees’ himself as fat, then every time he starts his new diet, he is bound to fail. It has to be, because your subconscious is there to MAKE SURE that the story of who you are stays true to the story. If you hate working out, every time you commit to exercising daily, you’ll stop in no time, and if you say you’re a messy person, every time you clean your room, it’ll be messy in no time. It is his Subconscious that is really directing events, not his Conscious voice.
Do you ever give yourself nicknames like you fat ugly piece of trash? Your subconscious does not judge if this is good or bad, true or false. You hear the same story over and over again and it finally becomes true. Your truth! It will stay that way until you do something to change it.
I’m sure you’ve heard a familiar voice inside your head say ‘you know you deserve a good meal after losing like this’, ‘You can stop exercising today, look how hard you worked yesterday’, why bother when I know that you’re too fat, too ugly, too dumb, too whatever”, in fact, after about 10 minutes of this scorn, you agree with the voice, and now you think you’ll never be able to achieve anything remarkable.
Do you know the voice or voices I’m talking about? I’m sure at one time or another you’ve met one or two of them. They are the members of your board and they govern your actions when you give them free rein.
Get to know your subconscious mind and the people sitting at the self-concept roundtable. His joy in life is dishing out healthy doses of doubt.
Sometimes it’s the same guy, I call him Monsieur Saboteur, and sometimes they switch, and she’s a very unpleasant woman, but her message usually has the same theme: “You will fail, don’t bother trying” etc. The voices become so loud that they override your own desires and longings until you say “Why bother?” You stop what you meant to do, they stand up and cheer, another job well done for them, and another failure for you… Surprise, surprise.
There are good news. It doesn’t have to end this way anymore. I can show you how to get rid of this self-destructive monster, fire your board members, and put you back in charge. Interested?
In Tim Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game, he calls the board members’ message interference. Interference can consist of obstacles such as fear, doubt, self-limiting concepts and assumptions that decide to come out and play when we are faced with challenges and changes.
Through my experience as a business and life coach, I discovered that people fear 3 things: Fear of success, Fear of failure and Fear of change.
To be successful, we must play our inner game if we are to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent us from accessing our full potential.” Tim’s formula for success looks like this: Yield = potential interference, P = pi. According to this formula , the performance can be improved by increasing the potential “p” or by decreasing the interference “i”.
Makes sense to me, but how do you increase the potential or decrease the interference?
The first thing we need to do is go in and find out which board member is resisting the desired outcome. What is your objection to the goal in question? What is your fear and how can we overcome it? This is called Consciousness.
Once we know the problem at hand, we can address it.
As a change agent and coach, I have worked with many people and organizations to help ease the transition of change and demonstrate how embracing ‘change’ can be an exciting opportunity and something to look forward to as well.
If Awareness is stage one, what is Stage 2? Well, Gallwey says, to play the inner game, choice and trust are the next two ingredients needed to beat interference and increase potential.
I also believe that the answers are within.
One of the phrases I’m famous for is “choose the life you want to live, instead of living by default”. This means don’t let life happen to you. Be in charge of who you are and where you want to go.
You can choose to be afraid or not to be afraid. You can choose to love or not. You can choose to be successful or not and you can choose to increase your potential and trust in yourself and your abilities. Honestly, all it takes is trust.
Are you ready to trust your abilities, choose the life you want, and watch your Potential skyrocket as you become aware of your Inner Game and play to win?
Gallwey’s Inner Game formula is excellent and a great place to start, but in my opinion there is still a STEP to go. That is reprogramming his hard drive (his subconscious mind) so that it stops blocking his choices and actually insists that he go where he wants. It is as easy to program “I am a winner” as it is to be a loser.
This requires a bit of effort on your part, but not as much as you might think and the result far outweighs any investment of time. Once you activate the power of your subconscious mind, you have the power of a guided missile working for you. NOTHING can get in the way and divert it.
How can you get this? However, in fact, this is one of those things that are simple, but not easy.
First, you need to go back inside and review your beliefs. You need to examine where each and every one of them came from and find the “story” behind them. Ask yourself, how do I know this? Who told me or did I learn this on my own. Who first told you that you were fat? Was it your grandparents? Your parents? to the boyfriend At some point in your life, this image got stuck in your subconscious and you have been repeating the story over and over again until it became your truth.
The way we act is often not of our own volition. Our beliefs come from the stories we have been told over and over again when we were children. In fact, their fears may not even be theirs but those of their mothers or grandparents. It is true. Think about it for a moment.
Why are you afraid of spiders? Are other people in your family afraid? Have you ever examined where your fears come from? Well, what we have to do is change the stories.
Our subconscious does NOT know the difference between truth and fantasy, so your job now is to rewrite your personal history. If he is overweight, then he will write in a book that his perfect weight is 135 pounds (be realistic). Visualize yourself with that weight and hold that vision in your mind every day for several minutes several times a day, especially when you are in a relaxed state, right when you wake up and when you go to bed. See yourself winning. BE THAT WINNER!
Keep writing in your journal over and over what your perfect weight is. Do this often. It takes about 12 weeks to break a habit, but you’ll notice in about a week (it took me 3 days) that you won’t be tempted by fattening foods. In fact, don’t be surprised if you don’t want to eat at all. You will no longer fight against yourself, but you have just hired a formidable ally who will do all the hard work for you. From now on, it’s Easy Breezy, as Covergirl likes to say.
This works for ANYTHING you want to change, be it smoking, self-esteem issues, even relationships.
As CEO, you have the right and position to rewrite your own personal history and now understand where your true power lies. You will love the ease with which it will change your life. Soon you will be the person you’ve always wanted to be, but didn’t know how.
