Training Eeyore to be more Tigger

Being a leader in a business – any business – impacts how people perceive you.

Your team members pay close - often unconscious – attention to your words and actions. When you overlook this, you lose the opportunity to model positive behaviours.

And behaviours cascade. And behaviours are contagious. And often our actions, our verbal cues betray the words coming out of our mouths.

Being you is key. Being aware of the cascade impact of our behaviours is crucial.

“55% of our message comes across in our body language/our actions, 38% in our tone of voice and just 7% in the words we use."

And scarily, we’re more likely to believe the non-verbal clues, not the words. So that's why we need to look at our day to day behaviours, the non verbal clues we are unconsciously conveying. It's why we need to consider our own mindset when we approach our working day.

But it often works against us. Most of our thoughts are automatic thoughts – and an untrained mind has 8:1 negativity bias - it produces 8 negative thoughts to every positive thought. Add in day-to-day stress, anxiety, different life traumas, the ever-reaching cascade impact of Covid and we're a big mess of negative thought patterns.

"Research has found that the average person has about?12,000 to 60,000?thoughts per day. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before."(National Science Foundation)

We also don’t pick our emotions - we let our emotions choose us. When we wake up feeling tired so we feel agitated and cross and a bit brain fried means that our emotions leak into the behaviours we present. We don't think too much about how we are feeling and what we can do about it. In general our emotions reflect our automatic thoughts and are in response to what happens to us and what we think about…so negative thoughts = negative emotions. And if we're operating 8:1 negativity bias, we're operating like Eeyore every day.

And then just to add another layer to the doom, we are creatures of our life experience, our environment…the stuff we have had to survive.

Our brains are brilliant at remembering the stuff we 'had' to survive. Imagine you were told you were pants at a sport because you didn’t catch that ball in PE or couldn’t do the times table in your head (in your face teacher who said we would never work without that skill) or if you were the one that fell asleep in the sack race at school and had a little snooze in the sun only to be woken up by the headmaster yanking you up and heaving you across the lawn with everyone having a right good laugh while you were mainly dreamily wondering whether your Sindy doll needed a new haircut (just me with the sack race trauma then?).

Imagine those stories then became the repetitive thoughts in your brains and so create the narrative by which you now operate; I can't ever do a sack race again being one of them (to be fair, it's not something I've needed to worry about too much). Imagine they then affect how you behave, how you operate in any given situation, how you approach different life events, work scenarios and your behaviours cascade and leak, create an impact, which affects the results we want to achieve.

We create the narrative in our brains because of what has happened to us in life – it’s also called survival instinct. It also protects us from ever doing a sack race again, and builds resilience.

What we don't often do is look at how we can change our fixed mindset into a performance mindset; we don't look at how we can train those pathways in our brains to find a different route. How we can control our emotions, our behaviours and look at a different impact.

Well the good news is that just like our bodies, we can trains our minds so they are not set on fixed behaviours or stuck in the same behavioural loops because of our life experiences. We can train our mindset to offset the negativity bias. We can change, adapt, build, grow and develop a performance mindset to help us in work, in life, in social situations.

We often look at training the hard skills in the workplace, but so very rarely do organisations look at building human skills into learning and talent pathways.

Training individuals; leaders, line managers, entry-level employees to develop their mindset, to build positive behaviour structures can increase sales, productivity, efficiency AND happiness in the workplace - helping people thrive.

So here's my plea for 2024; include Performance Mindset training in training your talent.

Oh - and use me to do it ; ).

Full disclosure, I can confirm, some pathways in our mindsets just aren't trainable - I will never be Tigger bouncing in a sack race.