How Successful Executives Have Shed the High School Albatross

27/05

I once posted an article about the triad of thoughts that many people carry with them upon graduation from High School. Those three are:

  1. I’m not good enough
  2. Everyone else is better looking, smarter or more popular
  3. I’m the only one who thinks/feels this way

The original article is here:

www.yournaturaledge.com/2016/05/03/the-high-school-albatross-that-successful-executives-must-shed

But how can we shed these thoughts that are often deeply ingrained, partly because so many of us experience one or more of them?

  • First is that since you have read the article and are reading this one, you are now more aware of the source of these kinds of thinking. Knowing they come from where? from High School? come on that was years and years ago. If those thoughts come into awareness now, those thoughts become suspect.
  • Second is that we are now able, because of this greater awareness around it all, to smile, shake our head and maybe even laugh out loud. The very idea of having these ideas still doing their damage after all these years is both sad and hilarious. Laughing at those thoughts takes the stuffing out of them. They lose power over us.
  • Third, we are now, because of this and the prior article, more deliberate in watching our thoughts. When we watch/notice our thoughts we retain choice about whether to believe or to discount them. Becoming more aware of our thoughts gives us back the steering wheel of our lives. We regain the ability to choose our way along. Ever come across a person who just seems to know who and what they are. They seem to, somehow, know the right thing to do, for them. This noticing of our thoughts provides us that option, the option to choose to do the right thing for ourselves. Powerful.
  • An unusual and very different way to deal with the voice within that does not serve is explained in the article here:

www.yournaturaledge.com/2016/05/16/a-counter-intuitive-way-to-implode-your-internal-critic

How do successful Executives shed the High School albatross? They catch those old stories and choose to treat them as what they are, silly old beliefs of the teenager we once were. Have fun

Joseph Seiler MCC