4 - Derailing Behaviours
Listen to the audio, then do the journaling activity below.
How many times in the last year have you experienced self-doubt?
A - once
B - to 100 times
C - up to a 1000 times or
D - too many times to even think about counting it.
The younger version of me, that jumped on the plane to Peru, would have answered the D to that question. Now, my answer is more like B, which might surprise you.
Perhaps you think because I'm here talking to you about self-doubt that I don't experience it anymore.
The reality is that I do. But the big difference is the amount of impact it has on me.
There is a chain of events that happens between the moment when you have the thought of self-doubt and when you enact the behaviour that it triggers.
During this adventure, you're going to learn how to stretch out that moment, because within that moment, there is a secret key. If you learn to turn that key, you learn to unlock yourself from that cycle of self-doubt.
Journal time…
Let's go back to some basic definitions to ensure we are all talking about the same thing.
Self-doubt is a mindset, a belief structure. It's not something built into our DNA. It is a learnt behaviour.
That mindset generates negative behaviours. In the Go-Getter's Compass, those behaviours are categorised as derailing behaviours.
Self-doubt in itself isn't a problem. It becomes a problem when it manifests in our behaviours and keeps us away from doing things that are important to us. It is a problem when it causes our performance to be less than our greatest.
In the Go-Getter's Compass, we work with the eight most common derailing behaviours. We will explore these in more detail on Day 10. Here are five that you may recognise:
Overwhelm
Procrastination
Second-Guessing
Distraction
Negative Self-Talk
For example, distraction is when you make yourself busy on tasks that are not aligned with your goal.
Most of us are familiar with negative self-talk. It can be the first wave response or it could come in a second wave.
My first wave derailer used to be to feel overwhelmed. Then, when once I felt overwhelmed, the negative self-talk would cut in and I would criticize myself for feeling overwhelmed.
A double-whammy guarantee that my performance would be less than par.
Your activity for today...
Looking at the list of derailing behaviours above, what are some experiences that spring to mind? That is, what are some moments when you have lived these behaviours?
Write them in your journal. See if you can come up with 10 different moments when you experienced these derailers. Add details of what happened in those moments. Bullet points will do for this activity.