In his first year of economics, he was introduced to the formal ideas behind business, capital, and labor, and how entrepreneurs combine these resources with monetary investments to produce and sell products and services to their clientele for the sole purpose of generating profits.
As simple as the concept of creating a successful business might sound, both failed and successful entrepreneurs acknowledge that the journey from an idea to a full-fledged enterprise is not an easy process.
Machinery and monetary capital outputs are not as dynamic as labor output. Putting the human functionalities of the mind, will, and emotions at the center of it all, as the performance of human resources can fluctuate a lot. Outcomes do not only depend on the cognitive and non-cognitive skills necessary for accomplishing a particular task in business but also on something beyond skills, namely the attitude of mind that is a product of a person’s belief systems.
For decades, the common practice for organizational leaders to tackle poor performance has been to enroll their teams in training. During these training sessions, the workforce is taught and trained based on whatever skills the human resource or line manager has determined to be necessary for their staff at that point in time. However, often enough, training usually only caters to specific human resource challenges which are synonymous with treating the symptoms instead of the actual underlying cause of the poor performance.
More often than not the cause of these performance problems is attributed to the need for more skills or discipline. But this fails to recognize that the worker is more than his work. Each worker has a life outside of the workplace that not only encompasses many factors influencing the private lives they navigate through daily but also the psychological layers upon which the data generated from their daily experiences is stacked.
In other words, when workers come into the workspace, the knowledge and skills they have acquired are stored in their minds upon the layers of positive and negative knowledge accumulated before that point. This amalgamation of how the bank of knowledge is perceived by its detainer is termed in the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Language as a Belief-system.
A belief system is the sum of beliefs that result from professional and personal experiences lived throughout a lifetime. It’s called a system because it becomes the ultimate processing parameter through which people make decisions. Like Dr. Myles Munroe once said, “We do not decide our future, we make decisions, and decisions decide our future.”
So how does a belief system impact performance? What are the three most ignored performance killers of the human force and how are they connected to those three?
In my years spent in the corporate world leading hundreds of people to achieve what some called “unbelievable targets”, I made it my mission to study the underlying factors that control human performance, which is nothing more than their eagerness and enthusiasm to commit and accomplish a task.
Those years of observation backed by profound psychological studies and the science of NLP along with my talent for speaking and empowering people led me to my current profession of speaker and coach.
I learned that regardless of the nature of human experiences, how people interpret and perceive what they go through, whether good or bad, will always lead to one of two paths. The first path is where they gain more confidence in what they do and in who they are, while the other path is where they come out with fear, self-doubt, and low self-esteem.
So an employee that comes to a workspace will either slowly build up their confidence in their particular role and become great at it, even possibly impacting other areas of their lives, or will come out of it in a fearful state and doubt themselves, which of course results in what we call poor performance.
The catch here however is that people enter the workspace with belief systems that have already been shaped by either past professional experiences or past private life occurrences. This phenomenon doesn’t apply to only the inception of the professional contract, but it is an ongoing process with which the worker shows up at work every day to perform their duty. It is also a parameter through which they interact with their teammates, determining who they choose to befriend in the workspace and what their level of intensity and self-motivation will be.
For instance, an employee that has subscribed to the belief system of not being enough due to past familial traumatic occurrences, such as verbal and corporal abuses, will also enter and operate in the workspace with a feeling of not being enough. Thus the work output they deliver will be tackled through a mind filter of ‘’ Not being good enough’’.
The reverse applies to high performers who believe that they are highly confident and can operate in any situation that they are thrown into because of the story they believe about themselves, which they have subscribed to at a certain point in their life due to their interpretation of the experiences they have gone through.
Fear, self-doubt, and low self-esteem are the 3 most overlooked causes of poor performance. To elaborate further on each of these performance killers, I will define each of them and elaborate further on how they are shaped and how they impact our lives.
A belief is a mature idea that grows into an affirmation that we auto-suggest to ourselves and that becomes our truth. Note that I say our truth, as it is not the objective reality. The source of any idea that can later grow into a belief is usually external. I for instance subscribed to a rather absurd belief that golf players are lazy people. I got that idea from a TV show. Another client of mine subscribed to the belief that she is good for nothing, and this stuck with her for 2 decades of her life simply because her mother wouldn’t stop saying that to her. So, ideas that later grow into a belief become such by either the intensity with which we experience them or simply by conditioning, which is nothing more than a constant repetition of this idea.
My client, for instance, was dealing with low self-esteem, which of course impacted her performance and because of it, she doubted herself a lot in professional decision-making and was afraid to engage in any form of activity or take any risks. So what are fear, self-doubt, and low self-esteem?
Fear.
Most of you reading this article have probably heard of this as being false evidence appearing real. I define fear as the emotional reaction which often puts you in the mode of fleeing or fighting. This is triggered by a memory that originates from a similar situation to the one we find ourselves in, which caused us emotional or physical pain.
Self-doubt
A paralyzing force characterized by indecisiveness and uncertainty, and that prevents us from taking the action necessary to accomplish a particular task.
Low Self-esteem:
Characterized by the person belittling, it’s a feeling of being unlovable, awkward, and incompetent, characterized by a total lack of confidence.
What these three performance killers have in common, as stipulated in the earlier paragraphs, is that they result from experiences. However, when experienced enough, an individual can choose to lead their lives as masters of confidence or as slaves of fear, self-doubt, and low self-esteem.
They choose the latter when they have failed repeatedly in attempting to perform a particular task at a professional or personal level.
It is important to note that most of the time, a lack of confidence in an area that represents our core values, can impact all other areas of our life.
So, next time, before we hire and train staff, business leaders, and HR managers, it is paramount that we take a step back and try to first understand what it is their belief system is. By doing so we can come to an understanding of how they view themselves. This will allow us to stop wasting resources attempting to cure symptoms and rather strike at the heart of the problem by focusing on the underlining issues.
My approach to alienating these three performance killers for good is coaching instead of training.
Training focuses on gaining or correcting cognitive skills in a particular field, whereas transformative coaching focuses on an entire transformation of the belief system of the individual, which then results in the person gaining greater confidence, and positively impacts all other areas of their life.
A coach is the one that will hold your hand to walk the journey with you to understand what makes you tick and what makes you flee. A coach can then help you build a new belief system that restores ultimate confidence in your life and consequently your profession.
At Sail Force Catalyst, our coaches can achieve this in one-on-one coaching or through a group coaching setting, by using techniques derived from directive communication psychology and Neuro-Linguistic programming.
In the part 2 of this article, we’ll elaborate further on how we conduct instant transformative coaching sessions conducive to maximum performance.