Natural Actions and Behaviors, Do They Change?
What are some of your natural actions? Short tempered, poor listening, procrastination, or so many more. What do others say, or what is your self-assessment?
Your life is full of habits that you’ve built.
Evolution of Your Actions
Do you believe that you are fairly smart? It may be that you’ve learned to believe that you are. People have given you feedback that you are, or they have quickly bought into your ideas, repetitively, across time.
What about something opposite. Do you believe you don’t have enough skill in a particular area? Maybe you’re convinced that you make poor choices or are not good at math?
Are your behaviors, attitude, or skills the result of something that comes naturally, or is there some form of development across time?
Certainly, we may point to athletic skills or even IQ as an indicator of what we might call talent. It’s true we all have some of this in certain areas.
Largely though, much of your workplace or social behavior is the result of some development across time. You may label it as good or bad, but it is often developed.
Have some of your actions changed? Should they?
Professional Development
Lots of professional people participate in training.
Training on communication skills, harmful conflict reducing techniques, leadership skills, and so much more.
Is this training effective?
Hopefully, the answer is, yes.
Yet, it is still conditioned by each individual’s receptivity to the training and by the repetitive actions that guide future behavior. In other words, did they put something new into practice and keep practicing it?
Changing Behaviors
There may be blind change. We change and follow a new path or behavior because someone said so and we’ve agreed to do it.
There is also what we may call, desired change. This represents change which is often the result of at least one of two factors.
First, we’ve experienced something unpleasant or uncomfortable, we haven’t liked the outcome, so we want to change.
Second, perhaps we have observed or experienced something we like or admire and as a result, we want to change. This is exactly why leaders should be good role models.
Natural Actions
Do you believe your behaviors are the same today as when you were ten years old? What about when you were fifteen? Or, if you are older, size things up across five or ten-year spans, have you changed some of your behaviors?
In the workplace, much of your behavior, confidence level, or interpersonal skills are developed. It may seem that you are doing what comes naturally, but actually you’re often doing things based on what you’ve learned and put into regular practice.
The commitment to become a better version of you, depends mostly on you.
-DEG
Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSPTM), and corporate trainer. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.
