Your greatest strengths from your early life, may be your greatest barriers in your adult working life.
How do you know what these are? And how do you stop letting them drive you on autopilot? It's like seeing a glitch in the matrix.
When you're young, your survival system invents strategies to cope with things you can't control and are harmful to you... and these "coping behaviors" become part of your default operating system which run on autopilot to help you survive.
However, as time progresses, your circumstances change: you grow stronger, you build a balance sheet, you no longer need others to support you or train you... yet these old coping behaviors run on autopilot -- often without you really knowing it.
As your life evolves, your nervous system does not -- it assumes things stay the same
So deliberate and conscious Intervention is required to free yourself from behaviors which may be unnecessarily draining you today.
Here's how to detect old coping behaviors:
1. MENTAL: Something happens at work, and you just can't stop thinking about it: reviewing it in your head over and over, or feeling off balance and unsettled
2. PHYSICAL: You feel physically charged like a rush of blood to face, hyperfocused vision, tightness in chest, pit in stomach... a desire to shrink, or a desire to strike
3. Emotional feeling OUT OF SYNC with rational exploration -- sometimes you can say "I can see this is no big deal / it will be fine (rationally), but I still feel awful / annoyed / paralyzed"
It's an odd feeling when the "rational" and the "emotional" signal different messages. Which is correct? You can't quite bridge the two? Often, the harder you try to outthink it -- the stronger the seemingly irrational emotional becomes!!
STEP 1: Take notice of these odd moments. What happened right before you felt this way? What catalyzed this event?
STEP 2: What could your seemingly irrational emotional response be trying to protect you from? How would it be helping you cope in an earlier part of your life
STEP 3: Spend a week or two being "conscious" of this coping emotional program, which has been running on autopilot for years. Where does it activate? What purpose has it served historically?
STEP 4: Gain awareness of this mechanism in the moment. Pause, and decide to act in a new, intentional way, rather than reacting unconsciously upon this old impulse.
While this isn't the most straightforward exercise, it's the key to freeing yourself from energetically draining old coping patters -- which once served you brilliantly and helped you -- but are now no longer needed.
How can you simplify your reptilian brain's programming, and live more efferently, with a lighter disposition, and greater presence in the moment?
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