Many of you have heard me say, “Our thinking drives our behavior, which determines our results.” (Don’t make me say it again!) Yet, how often do we think about it in our daily lives? Are we consciously directing our thoughts throughout the day? If not, then we’re living on auto-pilot, doing what we’ve always done, because that’s what we’ve programmed ourselves to do. And, of course, we know where that leaves us. Right where we are, with the same results we’ve always gotten. To change the conditions and circumstances of our lives (our results) we can’t just change our behavior, we need to go back and change (improve) our thinking – for lasting change to take place.
This applies as much in our daily private lives as it does in our business lives. We have to determine ‘what we were thinking’ when, for example, we mindlessly ate that last piece of cake even though we say we’re “getting in shape,” just as much as we should be asking the members of our teams what they were thinking when they decided not to finish testing the software and put it into production…with a let’s just see what happens attitude. (Totally hypothetical I know… the software thing, I mean.) Usually, the answer is “I wasn’t thinking.” And that’s the key! To be effective in our personal improvement and professional development, we must be intentional. We must be consciously aware of our thinking and our behavior if we want to change/improve our results.
Studies show that we aren’t consciously aware of somewhere between 75% to 92% of our daily behavior. Our subconscious mind is simply replaying programs that we developed in our past – often when we had different priorities – never evaluating the results of those behaviors. (This is because ‘evaluation’ isn’t the job of the subconscious mind. That’s up to our conscious mind.)
Therefore, we need to be intentional – and engage our conscious mind – in evaluating the results of our behavior. We need to assess and evaluate what we were thinking when we decided to take action. In this way we can make conscious decisions to change our behavior because we desire different results in our lives.
