Maintaining 'state' and behaviour

Never before in business, especially in the current climate, has it been more important than ever to maintain a decent 'state' or 'level of behaviour'. With numerous external forces that contribute to our successes and in some cases our business failure, those outcomes do affect us as individuals as we accrue the feelings associated with both ends of the spectrum.

Motivation and Drive

You may have experienced recently a business success and the emotion that it brings - excitement, pleasure, satisfaction - aswell as the extra 'motivation and drive' that business deals bring. On the other hand, stress, disappointment, de-motivation and multiple other 'states' occur sometimes when things don't go as planned.

Forgetting skills

Having spoken to a client of mine recently, a recruitment sales Director who had enjoyed huge success over the last 10 years, a high earner who had got to the stage where 'business came to him' and as a result he had become a reactive business developer as opposed to a continually proactive business developer, it was evident that the language he was using to describe his situation gave a description of how he was feeling about his circumstances. Feeling demotivated, lacking in interest in the business, overwhelmed at how things had got to the stage they had we concluded rapidly that the problem was easy to diagnose. Having not had to 'do the basics' (i.E make phone calls to businesses) for a number of years he had simply 'forgot' or 'unlearned' the proactive behaviours that got him to where he was in the first 4-5 years of his career.

Think about it like this. If you have a skill that you don't use, what happens to it? It goes away, becomes less potent and lies dormant. The mechanics of that skill and the sequencing of what needs to happen are still within the person but in this case the physical actioning of the skill had not been put into practice for a number of years and this had resulted in a counter-productive feeling/state/behaviour being attached to this function.

Assigning a 'preferred' state to the task

The client knows what to do - the mechanics of picking up a phone, dialling and communicating - and by working with me, we used a technique to re-design the behavioural strategy for the task of telephone calling which resulted in a preferred feeling associated with the task. As a result, the function is now able to be undertaken easily without any counter-productive feelings/state attached to it and the client is working like he did 5, 6, 7 years ago with the same zest and enthusiasm that got him to where he was.

In times like these, if there was a tool out there that could change the way you think about certain tasks in business or in life in general, what is it you'd like to change, knowing that if you did that, you'd get a different result!