OH! Magazine - Australian Version August 2016

(Performance Coaching) GREG SELLAR MAKING CRAZY WORK Greg Sellar explores three mentalities that may be holding you back. he truth is, we’re all a little bit crazy. Not ‘zany’, I mean barmy, bonkers and nuts. Usually we can keep it under control, but sometimes it can feel like we’re just one mental slap away from flipping out! T We typically talk to ourselves at a rate of 300 words per minute, but this skyrockets to 1,000 words when we’re under stress. That verbal diarrhoea can significantly impact success, but it’s understandable considering the pace that the world is changing. If we follow Moore’s Law, expect technology to evolve 10,000 times more than its current capabilities in the next 15 years! So if we’re feeling pressured now with family, work and life, how are we going to cope in the future? As the pressure grows to keep pace, our mindset starts to buckle and if it goes unchecked it can be paralysing. This paralysis shows in any number of ways – stress, dysfunctional relationships, disproportionate work/life balance, and mental or physical illness. Tim Burton once said, 'One person’s insanity is another person’s reality'. I think most of us have come to accept the often irrational and emotionally charged thoughts that dominate our mindsets as ‘normal’ or the ‘truth’, but they’re not. When the pressure is on, we can draw the worst conclusions and suffer unhealthy thinking, but your thinking is like a computer. The incorrect stories and crazy fears we succumb to, act as the virus that corrupts our software, slows down our operating system and interferes with us installing new apps. So how do we reverse our own special version of crazy? Our most-widely used 20 AUGUST 2016 (OH! MAGAZINE) (and incorrect) solution is to endlessly reinforce positive thinking mantras via motivational quotes and positive affirmations. You know the type – they're all over Instagram, Twitter and ‘Falsebook’ and they tell you things like: 'Mistakes are proof you’re trying' and 'Yesterday, you said tomorrow'. Unfortunately, they’re just words and on their own they won’t work. This is because your thinking is only as good as the action it inspires. So here are five simple things to remember when your ‘crazy’ feels like it's taking hold: 1. Every negative thought and emotion has a positive intention that motivates it. Anxiety spurs action, fear seeks security and frustration is searching for calm. We need to reframe our situation to find the positive in every negative. 2. It’s probably more of a champagne problem than it is a catastrophe. Sometimes it helps to put your ‘problem’ on a catastrophe scale from 1 to 10. If one was ‘regrettable’ (e.g. you left the meat out of the freezer) and 10 was a ‘catastrophe’ (e.g. death), you’ll probably find your huge problem is really only in the lower half of the scale. You need to keep things in perspective. 3. Remember, most unhelpful thinking stems back to our pre-historic days and our fight or flight response. We experienced fear as a function of the limbic brain to tell us that danger was imminent. We don’t have woolly mammoths chasing us these days, so our fear and anxiety gets redirected to what we consider threats to our self. It pays to face up to fear rather than run from it. Our fear is often irrational and unwarranted in context to the stimulus. 4. What you pay attention to, you get more of. In the 1960s, George Miller wrote the book Chunks of Attention, noting on average, we can only pay attention to seven things at any one time. Our job then is to pay attention to things that will accelerate us. If it’s the reverse, we only find more negative things to add to our woe. 5. Seth Godin said 'We can’t change what’s happened, but we can change what happens next'. Your direct action from this very point onwards can negate or rectify anything that has happened in the past. It’s a choice you need to make, so make that choice to look forward rather than back. Whilst our personal idiosyncrasies can be held in great affection, we need to keep watch over them. Making our own little ‘crazy’ work for us as unique personality traits is ideal, but when they detract from our goals and the vision of our ideal future, we need to check our thinking and redirect our behaviours accordingly. To learn more about this topic or to engage Greg as a keynote speaker at your next event, contact Greg via teamlifehack.com YOU CAN CONTACT GREG VIA: Web: gregsellar.com Facebook: greg.sellar Twitter: @gregsellar Instagram: @gregsellar

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