image courtesy of shutterstock.com
My intention with each of these posts is that you’re challenged to interrupt the noise and routine in your life, just for a moment, to think more deeply about what really matters in life… your relationship with yourself and with others in your professional and personal life.
Action Summary
- Own up to areas in your life where your apprehension is holding you back from achieving the results and/or relationships you seek
- Tune into your mindset – do you have a fixed or growth mindset?
- Turn apprehension into action
The WHY:
What’s holding you back? What are you apprehensive about? Sometimes you may not even be consciously aware that you are apprehensive about anything, and yet you know that you’re just not experiencing the level of success you seek in either your personal or professional life.
Look to your actions and look to your results.
What areas of your life roles are you not achieving the results you would like? Once you’ve identified these areas, look to your actions to see what you are currently doing and more importantly, what you’re not currently doing that would help you move closer toward achieving the results you would like to achieve.
This gets you to the heart of what you may be consciously or sub-consciously apprehensive about.
The key then is to tune into your inner voice to better understand what’s causing the apprehension.
Researcher Carol Dweck’s work into fixed and growth mindsets1 can be helpful when tuning into your inner thoughts. Look for any fixed mindset statements you might be telling yourself about areas of your life where you’re being a bit apprehensive. A fixed mindset would be suggesting to you that you’re not competent enough, or don’t deserve something, or that even trying would result in failure.
What are you saying to yourself about the situations you may be apprehensive about? Work on fixing your internal script. Challenge yourself to discover ways to build your competence or to put your competence into actions that will at least give you a better chance to succeed.
When you work on your inner voice it gives you a better chance to work on fixing the actions you need to develop the confidence required for self-trust, the courage required to trust others and the combined competence and character required to earn others’ trust.
Let me finish today’s message with this quote from Lucius Seneca who said:
“There are more things to alarm us than to harm us; and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.”
My best to you for now and remember when you intentionally improve the life of others in your professional and personal relationships, you set up the power of reciprocity … what you give out, you get back.
