The Effectiveness Myth
Do you believe in personal effectiveness?
Have you noticed how we seem to be surrounded these days by books, seminars and gurus telling us how to be more effective?
If you've ever been asked, or asked yourself, the following kinds of questions:
Do you need to improve your personal effectiveness?
How effective are you at work?
Perhaps you feel effective in some areas and not others?
Then you've been touched by the "Effectiveness Myth". In fact, that's probably why you're reading this now!
Just suppose, for a moment...
What if, we each create the life we have, moment by moment? What if, through the way you respond to what happens, you influence the next moment. And through the way you filter your experience (based on your beliefs about the world, and about yourself) you create your own individual "reality". For example:
- by engaging thinking patterns that are unhelpful and limiting
"I can't do this", "I'm hopeless at that", "Here we go again..." - by allowing some emotions and not others
- by believing yourself to be worthwhile, lovable, and valuable only under certain conditions (and behaving as if that were true)
- by dismissing experiences that don't fit your idea of yourself:
"it's a fluke", "lucky he doesn't know the real me", "this old thing" - by filling your life with patterns of behaviour that keep you from the "more to life" that you really want
All of these are very effective ways of creating particular results and consequences. But are they the results you want?
(Perhaps they're all you believe you deserve. For sure, many women are busy satisfying other peoples' agendas - parents, partners, managers, colleagues, the media ... the list seems endless. Everybody's got an opinion.)
So what's the myth of personal effectiveness?
It's that you need to become more effective (and you therefore need
self-development, hard work, the latest guru's system, spiritual enlightenment, to do what your boss says, etc, etc in order to do so.)
You don't.
What's really true is that you are already being effective, every moment of every day, creating the results you have now.
When you say "I want to be more effective" what you mean is: "I want different results."
(You may already be able to feel the subtle shift in energy created by this change of focus.)
This is why when I say that you can have the better life you desire, I mean it.
What happens when, instead of asking: "How can I be more effective?", you ask: "What results do I want?"