Ever thought ‘Bloody staff!’? Or ‘Oh God, it’s Monday’? Or ‘My job would be okay if it weren’t for ‘bloody customers’’? We have all had those days I am sure!
However, if you habitually phrase these things in the negative, slowly but surely they will become the things you don’t want them to be. If you make a point of negatively describing everything, funnily enough, that’s how you start to see it and, indeed, feel it. The negative perspective will become a negative reality. It’s like celestial osmosis. The negativity will literally manifest itself.
Conversely, when you make yourself reframe challenges in the positive – the previous recipient of the bloody staff, customers and Monday moniker can start to transform into the bloody brilliant staff, customer and Mondays that you always wanted them to be.
Actually on the staff bit I’d like to recommend Jacqui Mann’s ‘Bloody Staff’ website. It’s a membership site that will help you with all sorts of HR issues – we use them here – with the aim of turning bloody staff into bloody brilliant staff, and it’s a very worthy resource centre. Links below.
However, before I go entirely off track let’s get back to training your brain to think in the positive. I am talking about making sure you start – regardless of how you are feeling – to describe your team, Mondays or clients as AMAZING, GREAT, ESSENTIAL, BLINDING, even if you don’t feel it right now.
Train yourself to think in the positive, not the negative, and slowly but surely I can promise the transformation will begin. Because in this life the one and only thing we have control of is ourselves. And control of our terminology, our thinking and the conscious retraining and reframing in the positive can have transformational results in terms of productivity and relationships.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that every team member is going to be perfect, every client will be a dream and every Monday will be amazing – however if your present mind-set is that of the positive rather than the negative you are going to give them all the best conditions to be the best they can be.
It’s all in the set up. If you THINK something is going to be crappy – likelihood is, it will be. If you think something is going to be good then you treat it entirely differently.
It’s like working with so called problem children – if they are viewed as that from the start they live up to the label. But when they are given the opportunity of a fresh start, with no baggage nor reputation they find they can blossom – because they haven’t come with a negative label. You can do this very own re-labelling with all the negatives in your business.
It is a whole life attitude thing. You can choose to be negative. Or you can choose to be positive. I have no idea why anyone would choose to view life without a degree of a rose coloured tint? Why perceive things in grey? Why anticipate the crap? Why dread the Monday? Life is too short to expect and indeed receive the worst. When you could liberate yourself, and welcome the good, great and overwhelmingly positive that your business and life can become.
So have a think about which bits of your work or indeed life you look at with dread or negativity. And think what you can do to reframe them in the positive. And consciously frame them in a positive perspective, make yourself describe them and speak of them in the positive and just see how by shifting your perspective alone, you can shift how they manifest themselves. And all of a sudden your bloody staff have transformed themselves to bloody brilliant staff after all.
Have great week.