Change Your Results - It's All In The Labels You Use

I confess, in the 1970s one of my favourite songs was sung by Neil Diamond. Every clip the song played on the radiocommunication I wailed along with him "I AM I CRIED…" It spoke to what was churning in me at that phase in my life, uncertainness over who I actually was, looking for a voice.

I didn't give much idea to it beyond that. And I didn't give much idea to the phrase 'I am" and all the ways it showed up in day-to-day speech, for many years.

Then along came self-actualization courses, growing programs, personal development gurus. Each of these offered new ways of standing in presence of a mirror, nonliteral or literal, and learning techniques to switch ego perception. To change the words that follow the "I am…" of personal personal identity in order to offer me new opportunities, possibilities, and options for my present identity and future life.

I've loved immersing myself in every single 1 of them. But frankly, I'm always taking in tools and techniques so I can take them to my clients, and those peculiar tools often required hours, years and even hebdomads of attention. Not easy to interpret into a treatment with a client.

This past week, one of my busy, overworked clients looked me dead in the oculus and said fiercely and militantly "I'm rotten at managing."

We were discussing the mediocre public presentation of one of his new hires; a immature adult female with small work experience who was having a difficult clip acquisition how to follow through on duty assignments he gave her. He was tense and defeated and angry at her for needing repeated clip and attending from him. He wanted a good fighting and it might as well be with me. She was making him 'work' at managing, and he expected I was going to as well.

So I asked, "Do you intend you've tried to manage, with mediocre results, or you can't be bothered to try?"

He paused. Well, let's name it a pause. He took a deep breath and said "I am …" and I interrupted him before he finished the sentence.

I pulled out the large guns – the mortar of consulting and coaching, the well aimed human dynamo tool ... Actually, Iodine slipped in under his microwave radar - I interrupted him.

"A portion of me…"

I spoke it right over his voice and he stopped without finishing the sentence.

"What?"

I repeated it. "A portion of me…"

"A portion of me, what?"

"Reword that sentence - Type A portion of me is icky at managing."

He sat there facing me, in silence, letting the words and their deductions settle down in.

"You can hang on to that label, and do yourself right. Or you can acknowledge it's only a portion of you and unfastened up the human race of options." I offered.

That simple alteration in diction gave him a choice. He could take between different worlds and take a firm stand that 'all of him' was icky at something, and be darned proud of it. Or he could declare that his attempt had been lacking. Or that some part of himself might be rotten. But that last 1 left a whole batch of himself that mightiness have got never actually been given a opportunity to demo what it might make by manner of managing.

And he sat there in the choice. He'd hired me to assist him acquire new results. And in that minute he was faced with the fact that the consequences he was getting were owed to the personal identity he was fiercely and proudly holding onto. Being icky at managing meant the solution would have got to come up from elsewhere, not him. His adviser was going to have got to work out this enormous, insurmountable job for him!

"Try it," I said. "A portion of me…"

"A portion of me doesn't desire to pass all the clip managing takes. It's distracting me from getting material done."

He changed the issue itself right then and there. And by shifting his certainty and identity, the challenge melted away, the guns were rolled back, the conflict melted out of existence.

"OK. Sol allow me demo you a simple, efficient manner to walk her done the duty assignment that volition acquire her on path and acquire you up a degree in managing."

And he did. And I did. And she did. And a portion of him is.

What about you?

© 2007 Linda Feinholz.