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14
July 2009 |
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| By being yourself,
you put something wonderful
in the world that was not there before.
Edwin Elliot |
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Accept everything about yourself--I mean
everything. You are you and that is the
beginning and the
end--no apologies, no regrets.
Clark Moustakas |
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The
world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our
senses to grow sharper.
John Keats |
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Be
Improvement-Oriented (Tip #3)
Hendrie Weisinger
It's
intrinsic. It is part of your nature. I'm speaking
about your desire to want to improve, to want to do better.
Vocational theorists and psychological research tell us that
people want to do their bests in tasks that are meaningful to
them. Use your own experience to validate this point.
For example, if
you love to play golf, I'm sure you do not need a pro to tell you
to play your best, although you will want the pro to tell you how
to play your best. If you love to cook, I'm sure you try to
make the dish as tasty as possible, although you may need a recipe
book and a few cooking lessons to satisfy your taste buds.
The problem is
that, for many of us, our desire to improve is stifled by the
criticisms we receive. Why? Because most of the
criticisms we receive (or give) place a strong emphasis on the
negatives (if you have a negative appraisal of criticism).
The criticized behavior is usually defined as irrevocable.
The recipient is told what he did, thus placing the action in the
past; any chance of change for the better is precluded.
Since there seems to be little chance for improvement, the
recipient, in order to protect his self-esteem, defends his
actions rather than looking for ways to improve. The
criticism loses its positive power.
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Furthermore, whether
or not one feels that people lack an inherent wish to improve, the
fact remains that a constant barrage of negative criticism will
undermine any recipient's confidence, making it difficult for her
to believe she can do the job. Interest is diminished.
Many educators and much educational research testify to the point
that negative criticism (emphasizing the negatives) given to a
child in a particular subject will not only turn her off to that
specific subject but will also turn her off to trying to master
and explore other areas.
Similarly, the
sales manager who, after observing three presentations of the new
sales recruit, only emphasizes the negatives of each of her
presentations, is doing a good job of convincing the new recruit
that she is in the wrong line of work. Her apathy will soon
become apparent and, of course, will draw more negative criticism
from her manager. This is a bit ironic considering the fact
that the history of criticism tells us that one of criticism's
most important functions is to help one improve.
Do you--and those
you work with--emphasize the negatives when it comes to
criticism? Just think about the last three times you were
the giver or the taker of criticism. If you find that the
negatives are continually emphasized, then you can help yourself,
those you work with, and your organization become more productive
by making your criticisms improvement-oriented.
Making criticism
improvement-oriented creates the mental set of using criticism as
a teaching and educational tool. The task becomes to figure
out, "How can she do it better? How can I help her
improve?" You begin to formulate specific ways in which
you can help the recipient. You become solution-oriented.
One way to make
criticism improvement-oriented is to move the criticism forward,
into the future. Emphasize what the recipient is doing or
can do, not what he did. Instead of telling your new
recruit, "You did a poor job in presenting the data,"
which is sure to prompt recipient defensiveness, try, "In
your next presentation, use better overheads to show the
data. It will help clarify your points."
The latter
improvement-oriented criticism not only offers a helpful action to
take but focuses on the fact that your new recruit is going to get
another chance; you communicate the confidence- building message,
"I trust you to succeed."
Change becomes
possible because you stress how the recipient can do it better
next time. And this lets the recipient feel secure in
knowing she will get another chance. She can also feel
confident because her critic believes she has the ability to do
the job. With this in mind, your trainee can begin to focus
her energy on improving her future performance rather than on
defending past results. Criticism becomes a put-up instead
of a put-down.
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This
empowering book helps readers take the sting out of
criticism--and transform it from a destructive, demoralizing
disaster into an energizing, educating experience that
builds relationships and increases individual and
organizational success. Using real-life scenarios and the
author's 21 tips to positive criticism, readers will learn
to: Think of criticism as a positive thing; Become
strategic criticizers and develop their skill in using the
power of positive criticism; Stay cool, calm, and collected
when giving or getting criticism; Criticize their
boss--without getting fired, and more. |
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Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week. |
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Eyes
Wide Open
tom walsh
"Smile!"
Something
happened to me recently that made me stop and
think. I was with the girls' basketball team
that I coach at a tournament in another town, and we
were staying in a hotel. It was morning, and
my mind was on that day's games, what we should do
and how we should play. I was in a great mood,
enjoying the tournament, enjoying the company of the
team, and thinking really hard about what we needed
to do if we hoped to win--or just to do really well.
I
was walking down the hallway to my room when I
passed a woman who was walking the other way.
I looked at her and said good morning, still deep in
thought. She looked at me and said, in a
commanding voice, "Smile!," as if I were
doing something wrong by walking down the hall
without a smile on my face.
I
really couldn't believe what I had heard. The
first thought that came to my mind was "She
really has no idea how I feel inside, and she wants
me to smile?" If you've ever coached and
you've been thinking deeply about strategies, you
know that that generally isn't smiling time.
My face doesn't naturally wear a smile when I'm
concentrating deeply, when I have a task or tasks in
mind that need to be accomplished. She had
seen me and made the immediate assumption that a
smile on my face would brighten my day, when the
simple fact was that my day was fine already.
Then
I started to think of all the people whose moods and
thoughts I "read" just by looking at
them. How many times have I been completely
wrong to think that someone was feeling down just
because the look on his or her face wasn't a happy
one, just because there was no smile to be
seen? How often might I have judged someone to
be in a sour or negative mood because I interpreted
the look on that person's face completely
incorrectly? And how often will I do so in the
future?
The
incident reminded me to be slow to judge what my
eyes see, to be slow to interpret visual stimuli and
their true meanings. It reminded me that no
matter how I see things, what I see is only a very
small part of reality, a tiny portion of who and
what a particular person is, and where that person
is in regards to mood and feelings. How often
have I seen a person with a big smile who was
hurting deeply inside (how often have I been
that person?)? How often have I seen someone
who looked angry who wasn't at all angry? This
has happened many times, so perhaps it's time for me
to stop judging what I see--what I think I
see--and just let things be as they are.
The
woman in the hotel seemed to think she could fix me
with a single word. She seemed to think that
my entire outlook, my mood, my perspective, could be
changed with a single word for her. I'd be
willing to bet that she never even considered that I
was having a very good day to begin with and that I
was enjoying myself, even if my face didn't show a
big smile.
Smiles
are great--I love to see them. But they're not
always necessary, or even appropriate. And
telling someone else to smile when that person isn't
in a smiling place in his or her life is simply
trying to push our version of how things should be
onto someone else--and we may be completely wrong in
our judgment of how to make things better for
someone else. |
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Matthew Fox
We must work on our souls, enlarging
and expanding them.
We do so by experiencing all of life--
the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and
pain.
Soul work requires paying attention to life,
to the laughter and the sorrow,
the enlightening and the
frightening,
the inspiring and the silly.
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Breaking the Habit of Negative
Thinking
Carol
James
One behavioral symptom of
stress is negative thinking or self-talk, which usually contains
self-defeating or self-diminishing statements. For example,
"I just know I'm going to fail." or "Things just
never work out right for me." or "I always get the short
end of the stick."
I've noticed that
negative self-chatter is pervasive with many people. One example
comes from a conversation I had a while back with a desperate
woman who somehow found my phone number. Negativity and depressive
beliefs dripped from her lips. No matter what I said, she insisted
that she had nothing to be happy about and that her heart had
closed.
I tried to help her see
that as long as she looked only at what was wrong with herself and
her life, she would continue to find more things wrong, and that
she could not get to happiness from where she now stood. But she
kept interrupting me to share more problems.
Amazingly, this woman
also told me how happy and successful she used to be, but she had
lost it all. It was clear to me that she had allowed the
conditions and circumstances of her life to determine her level of
happiness. As long as things went well, she was happy. But as soon
as circumstances changed, she lost her happiness. Yet try as I
might, I couldn't help her break through her wall of
self-defeating talk.
After thirty minutes of
trying to help her remember something – anything – that would
bring her a feeling of hope or happiness, I began feeling hopeless
myself when I was suddenly inspired to say, "This may be a
little thing, but when you hear a bird sing, does it bring you
joy?"
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Her response was
immediate: "That's not a small thing to me. I love to hear
birds sing."
"And hearing the
laughter of a child playing?" I countered. I could almost
hear the rush of relief (mine or hers?) that broke forth as she
shifted her perception. For the first time in our conversation she
stopped insisting that she had nothing to be happy about. In her
silence I could tell that my message had finally penetrated her
resistance.
I’ve found that
negative thinking derives from beliefs about ourselves that were
formulated long ago – about who we think we are and what we’re
capable of doing. In our early years, many of us had parents who
didn’t know how to be loving, nurturing or supportive, so we
learned from them how to criticize and judge ourselves. As a
result, we often treat ourselves exactly as we were treated as
children, scolding ourselves for being afraid or for making a
mistake and often taking on a distorted view of how things are
without ever questioning its validity.
But the past is ancient
history, gone, dead and buried (at least if you allow it to be),
and now it's time to treat yourself exactly as you've always
wanted to be treated. When you catch yourself beating yourself up,
remind yourself to be gentle and loving. After all, if you aren't
that way with yourself, how do you expect others to be that way
with you?
© Copyright Carol James
http://www.inspiredliving.com
Inspired Living empowers people to live an inspired life through a
chat list, newsletter, books, coaching, workshops and an extensive
library of motivating articles, stories and more.
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We've
been looking for a way to recommend many of the books
and movies that inspire us to live our lives more fully, and
Amazon
finally has provided it. Check out our new bookstore,
which is full
of inspirational and motivational material. We'd also
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visit
our feedback page
to make recommendations! |
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| I have a friend, a chemotherapy
nurse in a children's cancer ward, whose job it is to pry
for any available vein in an often emaciated arm to give
infusions of chemicals that sometimes last as long as
twelve hours and which are often quite discomforting to
the child. He is probably the greatest pain-giver
the children meet in their stay at the hospital.
Because he has worked so much with his own pain, his heart
is very open. He works with his responsibilities in
the hospital as a "laying on of hands with love and
acceptance." There is little in him that causes
him to withdraw, that reinforces the painfulness of the
experience for the children. He is a warm, open
space which encourages them to trust whatever they
feel. And it is he whom the children most often ask
for at the time they are dying. Although he is the
main pain-giver, he is also the main love-giver.
unattributed
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