| Are you living a mirrored life? |
|
|
 Too many people live to reflect like a mirror. Your life’s mirrors are people around you. Since childhood you tend to role model people in your immediate environment – parents, elder siblings, teachers, neighbours, friends, relatives, care givers and others with whom you relate often. They act like your mirrors and you tend to reflect their thoughts, feelings, values, beliefs, attitudes, and actions. In effect you are shaped largely by your environment in addition to the inherent hereditary factors. |
|
 What you see in your upbringing years is embedded in the theatre of your mind. What you hear or read is inscribed deep within the subconscious mind. You start experiencing life through your five senses. Your life experiences are nothing but sensory perceptions entirely based on what you see, hear or read. Every experience, is a learning and every learning makes you think. So you learn to think the way you get programmed by the people around. You learn to think, and you think to learn. |
| |
 Now, if you look around, since human evolution, only a few people perform better than the vast majority. Minority always rule majority. There is only one king, one Prime Minister, One Chief Minister, One Principal, One President, One Managing Director, few ministers, few Vice Presidents, few General Managers, few Professors and the like.
At the bottom of the pyramid you will find a lot many people – the majority. In any and every profession, there’s always a top performer, few good performers, lot of average performers and many poor performers.
This is despite similar backgrounds and qualifications. For example you have a top doctor, a good doctor, an average doctor and a poor doctor. This ability to perform varies from people to people across all professions and levels.
Why the majority of people despite good qualifications, fail to perform?
It’s how they have experienced their life! It’s what they have heard over and over again!
Behaviour is caught by watching and listening to people around and role modelling them. |
| |
We all have heard these comments: |
|
 You are not good, you can’t do it, you are good for nothing, you are a waste..
How many times to tell you? You better leave it to me!
You are a pain, you are weak, you are the problem, you don’t know how to talk, to write, listen, … the list continues
Since you are born, the adult world seems to focus a lot more on what you are not good at, focus on your weaknesses, focus on your failures, focus on your setbacks, focus on your mistakes, focus on your vulnerabilities, and life continues to condition you or program you on weakness fixing.
You get what you focus on!
You are likely to be under stress, since you are working on your weakness. Your insecurities increase, your confidence takes a beating resulting in frustration, rejection, loneliness, fear and more.
| |
So How to Turn Things Around for The Better? |
|
Weakness fixing prevents a problem but STRENGTH building speeds up success!
The scientific solution from renowned Psychologists and behavioural scientists are to “WORK ON YOUR STRENGTHS AND WORK AROUND YOUR WEAKNESSES”.
SUCCESS IS A JOURNEY, provided YOU WALK THE PATH OF STRENGTHS. The path of weaknesses slows you down since you are likely to experience failure and set-backs often. Too many people end up as victims of FQ – Failure Quotient since they experience more failures than success. So make a conscious switch from FQ focus to SQ focus where SQ = Success/Strength Quotient.
 To enhance SQ Focus, you must focus on Your Strengths, Other’s Strengths. You must understand what are Strengths and where do they come from
What are our Strengths from birth and how do we shape them for our betterment?
How do we learn to appreciate Strengths of oneself and that of the others?
Strengths are also what makes you use your vast reservoir of capabilities and competency leading to optimising your full potential. Everybody thinks, they understand strengths. Yes, they know the dictionary meaning of the word ‘strengths’, but rarely the Psychological depth of one’s innate STRENGTHS.
And the problem starts, when adults expect you to be good based on their strengths where they are good. ‘If I can do it, why can’t you’ syndrome. Imagine a parent who’s a teacher in Mathematics (with a high dose of Analytical Thinking ability), expecting one’s intuitive child (with a Lateral Thinking strength) to excel in Mathematics. That’s a parental expectation, but a challenge for the intuitive child. The child is likely to be under stress, since the focus is not on one’s strength, but on the weakness. Even if the child succeeds due to parental disciplining, the child is not likely to be happy doing it. This is where conditioning or programming happens against one’s likes, one’s strengths and one’s true potential
 ‘Love what you do’ is easier said than done due to this forced conditioning or programming by the adult world. So children as they grow up in enforced environments, end up as average performing students to start with and many continue to be average performing adults.
If you wish to be top or good performer, all that you need to do is simple. Take immediate steps to find out your CORE STRENGTHS - your HIDDEN POTENTIAL. Rectify the damage caused over the years in your upbringing by the people in the surrounding environment, unknowingly and unintentionally.
Results, results and results. The world is looking for people who perform and produce results. The foundations of result orientation or achievement, is firmly laid when we are still learning and yet to enter the adult world. When we are attending to our classes, our studies, our education, be it school, college or the universities, we are either getting our results right or not up to our expectations.
| |
How do we instill this result orientation in young minds, at the right time, before it is too late? |
|
It is better to assess and train the young mind right, at the earliest opportunity than to repair the adult. If you wish to get your people to perform and produce results, here is good news from the world of Behavioural sciences.
Each and every person learns and understands differently. Their minds are influenced differently by their heredity, their upbringing, and their environment. The ‘One-size fits all approach’ just does not work with respect to learning, intelligence and education.
So the best way is to start with the fundamentals. Learn and understand, as to how are they different from each other? What is the impact of such differences on learning and performance?
The First Step is to assess and know the person’s personality traits as researched by Carl Gustav Jung. Everyone’s mind processes information as Feelings, Ideas, Analysis and Action. Even though all of us do all the four, some of us are dominant in one and are likely to prefer that over the others. Your responsibility is to find out how your people are different in their mental processes.
The Second Step is to
assess and understand the emotional responses and inner motivation of each person. They too are different for different people due to environmental conditioning as per the extensive research of William Moulton Marston. Emotions and inner motivation are key factors that make or mar the educational outcomes. So it is time to assess and enable the growing minds to learn right and perform bright.
The Third Step is all about learning and thinking styles and extensive work is done by numerous scientists like David Kolb, Anthony Gregorc, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Neil Fleming, Kurt Levin and more. The teachers teaching style may or may not match the students learning style. If it does not match, then the student is likely to get frustrated as a learner. The children are not likely to do well unless one understands the route-cause of non-performance. So it is high time that one quickly assesses the preferred learning and thinking styles and works on learning methods that suit that specific style of the student. The same applies to a business leader dealing with his diverse team mates.
The Fourth Step is certainly about measuring the relative strength of the children’s multiple intelligence. Academic results are not a true reflection of one’s intelligence or competence. Howard Gardner talks about multiple dimensions of intelligence and it is important to find out where the strength is. Since all intelligences are interconnected, it is relatively easy to develop a plan to help improve the students’ learning orientation.
The Fifth Step is to understand the importance of balancing both the left and right brain intelligence as contributed by Daniel Goleman and others. There is an urgent need in this world to help develop emotional intelligence in our children along with the academic intelligence.
The Assessment World (www.theassessmentworld.com) is a sincere step forward in this direction to enable the deeply concerned or worried parents, teachers and students to learn of their true hidden potential. The development happens and begins with assessment. So, do take the first step right now. Success is a journey that starts with a single step in the right direction. Assess and provide the right direction at the right time and YOUR TIME IS NOW, not later.
|
