Between having the knowledge to do something and the behaviours to actually do the something, there is something you can neither see nor touch it, but it is so important!
You can call it Mindset, you can call it Fortitude, you can call it Grit and you can call it Mental Toughness – but, whatever you call it, it is an attitude.
Attitudes, like beliefs and values, are in the 80% of the Freudian personality iceberg that are invisible.
I started my career in personal development working with “disadvantaged youth” in the early eighties; young people who had the attitude that they were “good for nothing”, “born failures”, “unable to learn” and, essentially, destined for “a dead end”.
I didn’t know much about attitudinal change in those days but, despite having been born in the East-end of London and having attended a fairly typical “factory fodder” school (which I left with some fairly useless CSE’s), I had made it to university and got myself an honours degree in Chemical Engineering – and, if I could do it, anyone could do it!
I had a distinct advantage in my early work in that I came from “the same neck of the woods” as the participants and was, to my amazement, a kind of role model – I could speak their language and yet “knew about stuff”!
What I and my colleagues were doing wasn’t “rocket science”, we were providing “losers” with opportunities to “win”, to see that they were capable of much more than they thought – we were changing their attitude from “I really can’t do that” to “maybe I can do that”.
As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right”.
Whatever you want to become really good at depends on your ability to turn your attitude into actions; simply “thinking” you can do something doesn’t mean that the doing of the something comes overnight; it will need determination and trial & error, and that comes from having an “I can learn to do that” attitude, rather than a “that’s too difficult for me to learn” attitude.
When great guitarists, pianists, dancers, actors, presenters, etc., “burst onto the scene”, we do not see all the time, effort, and energy that they have put in to becoming the “latest phenomenon” in their discipline.
“Fake it till you make it”, is one option (although throwing yourself into the swimming pool without being able to swim can be dangerous); however, developing your Confidence to take up Challenges and your Control to achieve your Commitments, will help you turn your attitude into action!
I help people to develop their interpersonal skills, usually within a leadership or teamwork context. If you are looking to develop your leadership, I might be able to help. I’ve been doing this for 35 years; roughly three and half thousand days of seminars, workshops, conferences, coaching, offsites, etc. – put back-to-back that makes almost ten “full” years.