Last year, I embarked on my hundredth attempt to reinvent myself as a healthy-living person. I enrolled in a 28 day bootcamp-style challenge. One of the greatest things I took from the program was the concept of ‘slashing all your tires.’ Here’s the deal: if you were to see your car with one flat tire, you wouldn’t throw up your hands, declare the car inoperable and then go and slash the remaining 3 tires, would you? But when it comes to healthy eating, that’s exactly what we do. We eat a bad lunch, so then say ‘f*ck it’ and overeat at dinner. It got me thinking about how we can have the tendency to do that at work too. Something doesn’t go well and we can immediately start to create a story that says ‘that person doesn’t like me, I’m a failure, I can’t do this.’ Negative self-talk is the knife that slashes the ‘tires’ of our confidence, self-worth and self-esteem. If something didn’t go well, don’t slash yourself to pieces. Refocus your energy on the positives. It’s never as bad as our thoughts would make us believe.
#leadershiptruth
