Perform at your best. Have you considered how your language is affecting your performance? You need to be your own coach and motivational expert to perform at your best. Change the way you talk to yourself to achieve your goals.
Perform at Your Best
Have you given yourself a good listening to lately? Are the words you say to yourself and others helping your performance, or not. If not, challenge your language. By learning to challenge your language you create greater and increase the influence you have in achieving your goals and performing at your best in all aspects of life.
What do you say to yourself?
When I say language, I’m talking about what you say to others, and especially what you say to yourself. And the questions you ask yourself are particularly significant because the unconscious mind loves questions and will work on your behalf until it has found answers.
The Unconscious mind loves a question
However, the unconscious mind only does as it’s asked. If you ask yourself “why did the way I handled that go so badly?” this is what the unconscious mind will search for and what it will find – ie. all the things that went badly. Whereas if you ask yourself “what could I have done differently and how can I learn from this to perform at my best?” Then this is also what you will get. With these answers we are more likely to move forward by learning how to be more successful in the future.
To perform at Your Best, get in the right state rather than in a right state!
When we have awareness of the questions we’re asking ourselves, we can significantly influence our emotional state, and our state influences our reactions, our behaviour, and our performance. So choose questions that help you to be in the right state, rather than a right state.
Be careful not to thwart your performance by listening to your mental chatter
Ever think to yourself on the morning of an important event that you’re exhausted because you’ve been up since the crack of dawn preparing? So, the best you can expect is that the day won’t go well because you’re so tired, and you’ll probably underperform because you’re not thinking straight!
Stop, breathe, and let those thoughts pass.
Don’t take your thoughts too seriously
We have many thoughts a day and the key is not to get caught up in them, or to take all of them too seriously.
The idea of tiredness hindering performance is merely an innocent thought and nothing to worry about. Believe it or not, in terms of performance it might help. Or it might hurt. Or it might not have much impact at all. The thought of tiredness will fade away if you don’t pay attention to it, or try hard to fight it, or give it any airtime.
I don’t know about you, but I’m guessing that if you listen to the mental chatter in your head, it just gets louder, and pushes you to think, judge, and critique yourself, and to try to change ‘negative’ thoughts into ‘good’ ones.
There are no negative or positive thoughts
The truth is there are no negative or positive thoughts. There are just thoughts. But when we start to judge our thoughts, by thinking that some are good and some are bad, our thinking revs up, then the more our stomach churns, and we get stuck even further in our heads. And if we’re in our heads, we’re not ‘present’ or ‘in the moment’.
I used to get trapped in that way of thinking too. Until I realised that if I didn’t try so hard to control my insecure thoughts – they would pass quicker. So the answer is to do nothing!
Stop! Breathe! Let it pass. Surrender to the quiet. Surrender to the moment. Let it pass. I wonder what happens to your performance when you do that?
About Angela Watson:
Angela’s mission is to make empowering coaching principles and practices accessible to everyone, not just coaches. Angela has led academically and professionally accredited coach training programmes and has over a decade of experience in coaching, training and mentoring leaders. She is launching a website to take the empowering principles and practices of coaching into people’s homes, hobbies, and everyday interactions.
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