No Pain, No Gain is a Lie!
Increase Your Performance by Being in the Ease and Flow
You know that feeling of your best performance? That moment when everything is aligned, you are focused, and performing at your absolute best, you are in your power? That is the moment of ease and flow! That is when performing seems natural and easy.
We have been told over and over again that you have to work hard, push hard, and that important things will come with great difficulty and exertion. But that is a lie created by our Saboteurs, even, despite what many people think, in physical exercise. This lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where your brain only allows you to see what fits its pre-existing belief system.
I’m not talking about putting in effort. Effort and grit, perseverance and resilience are necessary to make progress. This is also completely different to avoiding a challenge. The sensation of avoidance or procrastination is unpleasant and very different from ease and flow. If you think important accomplishments come only with great exertion and difficulty, your mind won’t even see or believe that the easier path to those accomplishments is right in front of you.
Find another path around or through the obstacle.
Think about how the challenge can be a gift or an opportunity?
Take these examples. If you’re frustrated that you have to keep pushing someone hard, constantly, to get some work out of him. Stop. Ask yourself how it could be easier. Maybe you need to spend more time with him getting him excited and motivated about the outcome, so he becomes more self-directed. Maybe you need to step back and train him a little on things he can’t do well so he won’t be so resistant. Or maybe he’s just wrong for the job and you need someone else. Just don’t keep pushing hard.
Let’s be clear that I am speaking of everyday leadership, not the kind of leadership that may be needed in a life or death situation.
This allows you to shift from a Push to a Pull as well, avoiding the depletion of your willpower, allowing you to be more efficient and successful throughout your day, in control of your day, and have greater balance in your life.
The push is led by negative emotions like stress, and fear of failure. These drain your reservoir of willpower causing great consequences because it spills over into other things you are dealing with. For example, if in the morning you use your willpower to push yourself to do what you consider to be lots of unpleasant tasks at work, you might deplete your willpower reservoir by noon, and, as a consequence be unable to control your emotions or be patient with colleagues in an afternoon meeting. You may not be as resilient or recovering as quickly from the stress over a failure later that day.
The pull is led by your Sage, which pulls you into action based on positive emotions like empathy, curiosity, wonder, creativity, passion or compelling vision. This pull of the sage is gripping and doesn’t require willpower to keep going. It’s easier and it flows naturally.
So today when something feels difficult stop pushing so hard. Instead pause and ask yourself:
“What is making it so difficult?”
Find the sage alternative with more ease and flow to it. As you find yourself pushing yourself or others with negative emotions stop and shift to Pull. Use curiosity, empathy, innovation to inject something positive into the situation and turn it into something you want to do. Keep your reservoir of willpower full so you can draw on it to be more patient with others or handle the unexpected challenges that are thrown your way, or to recover more quickly from a stressful situation.
If you are curious about these concepts and those of the Saboteurs and the Sage, reach out and let’s talk! I will be putting together more programs shortly.
This newsletter is inspired by the concepts of Positive Intelligence, or PQ, by Shirzad Chamine.