Author: Andrew John Harrison Page 20 of 32
Leadership Advocate and Co-Founder of the Goldzone Group. I help leaders to master the new rules of leadership for the new economy. Over the past 30 years, I have visited more than 500 cities in 54 countries to explore, learn from, and help many of the world's leading companies, leaders, and luminaries in science, technology, health, finance, and entrepreneurship.
Have you ever made a mistake and felt the sting of dread, shame, and disapproval a split-second later, followed by a critical inner voice that judged and found fault with what you had done?
Both the feeling and the voice are manifestations of what is known as your “Inner Critic.” This article explores what is an Inner Critic, how it works, where it came from, and how to free oneself once and for all of this sabotaging mechanism.
Let’s explore the definition in more detail:
INNER:
- Situated inside, further in, or internal.
- Spiritual, mental, or emotional.
- Private and not expressed or discernible.
CRITIC:
- A person who disapproves and expresses their unfavorable view of something.
- A person who judges and evaluates or analyzes literary or artistic works, dramatic or musical performances.
- A person who tends too readily to make trivial, or harsh judgments; faultfinder.
INNER-CRITIC:
- Internal, private voice that disapproves, judges, evaluates, and finds fault saying that he or she is bad, wrong, inadequate, worthless, guilty, and not good enough.
If you are like most people, your feelings about criticism range from mild dislike to strong dislike to outright hatred of both the criticism and the person giving it.
The purpose of this article is to discuss the subject of shame, its impact on your life and outline steps to release the feeling of shame and the effects these feelings create.
First, let’s look at some definitions:
SHAME: A strong negative emotion that combines feelings of dishonor, unworthiness, and embarrassment.
GUILT: An awareness of having done wrong accompanied by feelings of shame and regret.
REGRET: To feel sorry and sad about something previously done or said that now appears wrong, mistaken, or hurtful to others.
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Most people can relate to being in the zone: Whatever you are doing is flowing easily and you feel like you are beyond space and time — pure magic. Then out of nowhere you are jolted out of the zone. The magic is gone. Your feelings shift from focused spontaneity to annoyance, irritation and possibly anger.
How does this happen? How can you go from being in the zone one moment to being angry the next?
This does not happen on its own. Someone did something that caused the magic-zone you were in to disappear. We call these incidents Anti-Magic, or Anti-Magic Moments.
Here is a short definition:
| Anti-Magic Moment | Anti-Magic Moments are any incidents, upsets or behaviors that are anti-magic (i.e. create an environment that is not safe, harmonious or happy), or actions that are in violation of the company’s stated policies, values, and procedures and interfere with productivity, orderliness and the ability to do your job well. |
These Anti-Magic incidents cause a lot disharmony in relationships, especially on teams of people working closely together. You could say that Anti-Magic works directly against synergy and is opposing the team’s stated purpose and direction.
Research has shown that Anti-Magic incidents are not chance occurrences, they are usually deliberate and sometimes unconscious behaviors of people who are working against you.
Surprised?
These people are more common than you think. Driven by competition, resentment and jealousy, Anti-Magic is used as a weapon to “bring you down to earth”, “put you in your place” or outright dominate you.
People who struggle to get in the zone, can (but not always) become jealous, and in order to feel better about themselves, sabotage you from your in-the-zone-moment.
Another example is the friendly colleague who is competing with you for a promotion or “top employee” award. If they feel they can’t beat you in an outright competition, sabotage will do. And if you confront them about this, they will say something like “Oh, I am sorry, I didn’t mean to do it.”
This is very costly to a businesses bottom line and can explain why some companies and teams only achieve a fraction of their true potential and seem to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!”
Now that you are aware of Anti-Magic Moments, and the next time you jolt out of the zone, look for who did what.
What would happen to your overall results if you had a system to identify Anti-Magic and to correct it, thus preventing it from happening repeatedly? More about that in a future article.
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In this article, you will discover the language of
emotion, where they come from and why
emotion drives everything.
Love, anger, hate, fear. These are examples of emotions. Most people spend their time chasing emotions they want and avoiding emotions they don’t want. The trouble with living this way is that the emotions you are chasing seem to run away faster than you can catch them – and the emotions you are avoiding (or running from) seem to follow you wherever you go!
Many people have issues around commitment. This is probably because of the loss of freedom that goes along with committing to something, or someone.
Think about it. If you commit to something, what happens? Right after you make the commitment, everything that is the opposite comes up to challenge your commitment. If you commit to stop using profanities in public… the next time you are in public something will happen that will seduce you to want to use a profanity.
Then you think, “What does it matter anyway?” or I will “just do it this one time.” Then before you know it, your commitment is worthless and you find yourself back at square one.
This is why so many people have difficulty following through on their commitments. It is so easy to make the commitment when you are feeling good and are thinking about the theory of it, and another matter altogether to do it. The doing part takes emotional energy that was not needed when you first made the commitment. It is the emotional energy or the emotional aspect of the commitment that carries you through the difficult times as your commitment is challenged.
If you commit to something because you were threatened in the moment, then when you take the threat away, the commitment goes with it. If you get swept up in the emotion of a moment and make a commitment, then when the momentary emotional drive is gone (for example in a meeting, or a company conference where everyone is excited about making a goal, objective or ideal happen) the commitment goes with it.
Spiritual Commitment
The best type of commitment and the most long-lasting are the ones that move you, so you emotionally commit. Then there is no going back. Your emotional energy going in the positive direction of what the essence of the commitment is all about, along with the spiritual reason behind it, will have you unwavering. Typically, a spiritual level commitment involves connecting with the higher purpose of the commitment. This usually involves the “greatest good for the greatest number of people.”
Overcommitment
If you commit to too many things without taking the time to emotionally and spiritually commit to seeing them through, then you will end up overestimating what you can reasonably achieve. You will also make more commitments than you can keep.
Good As Gold
The key is to “make your word as good as gold,” which means that you make small commitments – and keep them – before committing to huge, big and overwhelming commitments. By making and keeping small commitments you build trust with yourself. Plus others will also trust you more.
And this trust is the essence of building lasting relationships and is the key to success as a leader.
***
Below is a quote from a book by William H. Murray. It’s an old one but relevant to this subject:
Until One Is Committed
William H. Murray (from his book “The Scottish Himalayan Expedition”)
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
With the world embroiled in a global recession for the first time since the 1940’s, a lot of what we had accepted as “the way things are” has been turned upside down. Sure, there have been recessions in most regions, however it has been over 60 years since we had a global recession.
One thing a lot of people had taken for granted was that we could keep on expanding forever. This caused a bubble from over expansion when prices lost touch with fundamentals and in the end, turned out to be unsustainable.
Greed drove markets to higher and higher levels, and now that things have crashed back to earth, fear has driven (and continues to drive) markets lower and lower to such a level that we have, once again, lost touch with the fundamentals.
As you can see, we have swung between these two extremes that are driven by emotions at opposite ends of the spectrum.
One of the key components to getting into “The Zone” and staying there is understanding and mastering Cause & Effect.
There is a lot to this subject and it is a bit technical. However, master this and you are sure to experience a transformation in your results!
What is Cause & Effect? Everything that happens is an Effect that was Caused by something. Nothing occurs without something else Causing it to happen. For example, a glass that was sitting on the table does not fall onto the floor by itself. A person walking by may bump the table, Causing the glass to fall off the table, onto the floor, and breaking into pieces.