Habits Shape Your Performance

Habits, or what I refer to as patterns of behaviour, patterns for short, shape absolutely every aspect of our life. To become competent at unlearning habitual patterns, we first have to become aware of how habitual patterns influence your Performance outcomes.

All of our habits hold to a basic pattern that can be summarized in four simple steps, as follows:

1. Choice
2. Performance (outcome)
3. Interpretation (of performance)
4. Beliefs (and values)

Make A Choice

Performance is determined by our Choices. We make Choices, based on our Beliefs and values, and based on our Interpretation of past patterns of success, or failure. Our interpretation of past performance, desired or undesired, greatly influences our beliefs and choices which directly drive current and future performance outcomes.

I encourage you to use the Performance Track, see above, to reverse engineer some of your current or historic performance outcomes so you get a sense of how it can help you.

Before And After 2008

A simple example would involve reflecting on your current Performance (financial or otherwise) as it relates to choices, beliefs and interpretations that you experienced before the global economic recession of 2008, compared to after 2008.

Prior to 2008, it was a commonly held belief that economic markets might be or could be disrupted in one or two economic regions simultaneously, but never had anyone had an experience with global disruption other than the great depression. It therefore stands to reason that most people did not correctly interpret the first signs of a global economic meltdown because the potential was entirely outside of their life experience.

They did not believe that it was possible, so, why would they make choices to accommodate this new reality?

But, the global economic meltdown of 2008 did happen, and the majority of economists and politicians, along with a fair share of business leaders, still have not been able to correctly “interpret: feel, think, see or hear” the new reality – because it is so vastly different than what they have come to expect to “interpret: feel, think, see and hear”.

What They Didn’t Teach You

It turns out that the skill and capacity to accurately interpret our personal/business life is not a skill that was thought to be important enough to include in our curriculum at school, even if we were getting a PhD in anything but neuroscience, cognition or psychotherapy.

But, fast forward past 2008 and the skill and capacity to accurately interpret your personal/business life has become mission critical, as has the capacity to unlearn.

Learn To Unlearn

Unlearning, relearning and learning are quickly becoming the mission critical skill set in business. To accurately interpret your current reality you first have to learn the patterns that convinced you to interpret the world the way you did in the first place. Having figured that out, you can learn how to unlearn those patterns.

By way of a simple stepped process, reflect on the following:

When you were a toddler, it was your parents responsibility to teach you what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Your parents, in their desire to protect you and keep you safe, taught you to pay attention to those things that they believed were important.

1. What were your parents/extended family’s beliefs and interpretations/experiences around business, and how did that influence you?
2. What were your parents/extended family’s beliefs around sales, money and wealth?
3. What were their beliefs about how to achieve the combination of wealth and health? What were the “obvious” trade-offs, pitfalls and beliefs?

Are You A Rebel?

Which way did you go? Did you follow your parents lead directly, or did you rebel and do the exact opposite?

To start the process of unlearning, you first need to understand the patterns that contributed to your most fundamental learning: your beliefs/interpretations and expectations about business and life when you were too young to know what might work for you later in life.

Author : Tim Glover

Tim Glover is a Partner at Jump-Point, a strategic consulting firm that specializes in transformational change. Tim is also a former CFO & Senior Manager of three Fortune 500 companies and a skilled musician.