"Thoughts are things," as my friend Gale St. John likes to say. As a leader, it's critical to be aware and mindful of your thoughts, as they drive the results you get.
For example, I worked with an executive who runs a consulting firm, and is an excellent and highly in-demand speaker for professional groups. Speaking engagements would lead to more business, yet her firm’s financial results were disappointing. As we drilled down on the problem, I discovered that she had a drawer full of business cards from her speaking engagements—ones given her by audience members who said “call me.” She threw the cards in the drawer, and didn’t follow up. Going further in our coaching work, I learned that her core belief about “sales” is that it’s, in her words, “like prostitution.”
If you were like her, and believed selling your wares was prostitution, then you'd likely feel disengaged or discouraged at the prospect of doing it, and the resulting action would be, well, inaction, your sales would suffer, and negative financial results would be your outcome too. Bottom line, her core belief about sales was causing her own poor results, and it was going nowhere.
In short, what you believe leads to how you feel, both of which drive the actions you take (or avoid), which then are directly responsible for the results you get.
And it follows that when you replace your low-yield beliefs for higher-performing ones, the results you get must change with it, something I see every day in my work as an executive coach.
Frankly, that’s why I spend so much time in my book, in my coaching work, and here at the Recovering Leader talking about “self-awareness.” It’s not done as some form of mental gymnastics or psycho-strength training. It’s much more tangible than that. Your beliefs are at the helm, driving what you achieve.
Your “thoughts are things”—they create the future you are about to experience.
Your bottom line, then, will be happier when you make it a regular practice to review the positive, and negative, results you are getting, and ask yourself what are your beliefs that are driving them? How do they make you feel? What actions then are you taking / not taking as a result? What, then, needs changing?
Know yourself, and your employees, clients, investors, and other stakeholders will benefit.
David
