Welcome to 🍏Lunch N Learn with Lindsay🍏 Issue 191. It’s a busy day for me today tapping out email follow ups to all the fabulous EA and PAs who visited me at last week’s PA Show in London. The Show was a great opportunity to catch up with existing clients, our Business Friends and, of course, new clients who wanted more info on our offerings. We can’t wait to support even more of you with our premium training and to grow our alumni of #trulyexceptional EA and PA professionals across the world! Take a look at the Your Excellency Stand from the PA Show below. I ensured I had a vibrant vase of daffodils on the table – superb brand colours and welcoming in the Spring!  These gorgeous flowers reminded me of a blog post I wrote some time ago for Wearethecity and which I’m resurrecting here. It’s a gorgeous blue-sky day here at Your Excellency and I hope wherever you are today, the Spring sunshine makes an appearance! Yay! Spring is officially upon us! My garden looks gorgeous with daffodils adding a splash of colour and psychologically the day feels longer when I can leave for work in the morning and arrive home in the evening in daylight rather than the dark, cold, grey of Winter.  I don’t know about you but there is certainly more of a spring in my step when I pull the bedroom curtains in the morning to be greeted by blue skies and the promise of sunshine. My “head” is in a good place to set me up for the day. My resulting “internal dialogue” is positive and I know that holding certain beliefs to be true will most definitely “put a spring in my step”.  Internal dialogues are conversations and chatter going on in your mind. Sometimes the dialogue can be pretty unhelpful – we can hold beliefs and thoughts that can limit or stop us from doing things. These are what we call “limiting beliefs”.  Henry Ford famously said “If you believe you can or believe you cannot do something, either way you are likely to be right”. It’s true – by saying you “can’t” do something you are already setting yourself up to not do it!  It’s important to notice when you’ve got an internal dialogue going on. Take control of that dialogue – as if we have a giant personal remote control in hand to control the voices. We can pause the voices, we can turn down the volume and, more importantly, we can “reprogramme” these voices. We can reprogramme the limiting beliefs to something much more useful – we can presuppose something to be true and hold “enabling beliefs” that will enable us and help us to achieve things and to put that spring back into our step.  Enabling beliefs can be inspirational, powerful and motivational – they can help us “unlock” our thinking and be curious about a situation so we can get a different perspective. We can hold a belief to be true in certain situations to help us and others – to enable us to move forward and achieve our objectives, goals and outcomes.  We can experiment with our own thinking and this can give us flexibility in our feelings and behaviours. At times when we feel stuck or confused with various situations we are faced with we can hold an enabling belief.  The following are just a handful of enabling beliefs, two with corresponding narrative to their potential use and others for you to think about yourself.  “If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got”  If something isn’t working and you are doing the “same old thing” over and over again you will get the same result. By doing something differently it might give you a different (and maybe better) result. By seizing an opportunity to try things in a different way you are opening up all sorts of possibilities – and if you don’t try things in a different way, how will you know what you are missing out on?  This is where knowledge sharing and networking comes into greatest effect. You can learn from others by sharing knowledge and best practice. In the interactive world of the world wide web, there are some amazing resources out there – all available at the touch of a button on your laptop. Resources (such as our Your Excellency blog page here) can be inspirational sources of information and a catalyst for putting into practice this enabling belief.  “There is no such thing as failure, only feedback”  Many of you will have a formal appraisal process at your organisations. Recognise that feedback is crucial to your overall success and high quality feedback is given for your own career progression.  Those voices in our head may receive certain feedback with a response along the lines of “well, you failed there didn’t you!”. Sound familiar? This is not a particularly useful internal dialogue to have.  By holding the belief that “there is no such thing as failure, only feedback” will open up more opportunities and possibilities for you to learn from feedback. So, the project you’ve worked on may not have gone as well as you liked or hoped – so what can you learn from it? Knowing what you now know, in hindsight, what could you have done differently? If you were to run a similar project again, what could you do more of? Less of? What will you replicate? What will you do the same? What will you do differently?  And here are some other enabling beliefs for you to think about. Use them to put that spring back in your step – and as ever, feel free to share your feedback and comments with me!  “Choice is better than no choice”  “If one person can do something then anyone can”  “The person with the most flexibility in thinking and behaviour has the most influence over any interaction”  “I am in charge of my mind and therefore my results” |
