Be careful of your thoughts………

As the proverb goes, be careful of your thoughts as they can ultimately lead to defining your outcomes so it seems. So, following this through to an end point, does this mean that if we can understand how people think then we should be able to have a good idea of how they will ultimately perform in a task or role? Certainly, the proverb above would suggest that. Thoughts lead to words, then actions which in turn become habits, ultimately defining our character.

Certainly, if we look at our own habits they drive our daily routine and ritual, in our home life and at work too; how we view that routine and ritual and its effect on giving us the results we desire is down to us as individuals in terms of how we view success. It would be fair to assume that good habits and practices should lead to better outcomes, which ultimately can be referred to as good performance and results, just as much as its reasonable assume that bad habits have the opposite effect. Should it be then that for us to have a better view on an individual’s performance in the future we need to focus less on uncovering their behaviours and more on uncovering how they see themselves & the world around them, or to put it another way how they think?

Amy Morin a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do” offers a great insight in to this topic. The book suggests that as people we don’t spend much time “thinking about how we think”. It’s very much the case that we may at times reflect on how we behave but how often do we stop to think how our thoughts drove that behaviour, good or bad, in the first place?

Companies spend small fortunes on profiling tools as part of onboarding, recruitment and promotion processes to identify who may well be best skilled or best suited to a role or function. Predicting people’s behaviour in the workplace is the “alchemy” all companies wish to discover and would allow us to see into the future and witness the recruits of today become the most productive and engaged employees of tomorrow.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to predict how someone might “work out” in a role of course as part of a thorough process. We can all take a degree of comfort that all parties have done all they can to ensure a new appointment will be a success. The interview process should be as much about how someone has performed in the past as it should be about how their skills can help them in the future, however, when it comes to removing the layers to see what lies beneath, the narrative tends to be around behaviours and not thoughts.

Dr Shad Helmstetter who has written over 20 books on the area of personal development outlines the challenges of “self-talk” (or maybe for the purpose of this post we should refer to it as “self thought”) and its impact on outcomes in his book “What to say when you talk to yourself, the diagram below taken from that book shows clearly how our programming and therefore how we see the world takes a direct pathway via attitudes, feelings, actions and finally results.

In this modern world of work, there’s now an emphasis on company and personal values aligning. The need to integrate ideas and organizational change is seen as essential and people are expected to be able to adapt and embrace that change. Therefore, it makes sense for companies to spend time understanding about how people think and respond to a set of circumstances. In doing so they should be able to more accurately predict successful outcomes for employees and ultimately make people decisions that will have a positive impact on the overall success of an organisation.

 Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind, for the soul is dyed by the thought.

Marcus Aurelius