Control Your Success, Control Your Mind

Your success is controlled by your thoughts.

Do you have control over your thoughts? Sadly, the vast majority of people don't.

The quality of the questions you ask yourself and the quality of your answers will dictate the degree of success and fulfillment in your life.

When something goes wrong or you are met with a challenge what thoughts immediately enter your mind? For many, many people they are de-energizing thoughts and questions that sound something like this:

• What's wrong with me?
• How come this always happens to me?
• Can I avoid being blamed for this?
• Why me?
• Why do I always/never ...?
• Am I good enough?"
• What if I'm not good enough?

De-energizing questions trap you where you are (or in your history), they  tend to be backward focused, defensive, dis-empowering.

If you find yourself guilty of regularly using a repertoire of questions similar to those above, then ...

Do this exercise

1. Grab a piece of paper right now!
2. Draw a line down the middle of the page and on the left-hand side write down all the benefits you get from this type of thinking.
3. Now on the right-hand side, write down all the damage that this type of thinking causes you.

So how are these questions serving you? Are these de-energizing questions helping you to move forward in life, toward achieving what you want?

To power-fill your life you need to focus on asking energizing questions. Energizing Questions sound like:

• What can I learn from this situation?
• What is the opportunity here for me?
• How can we all win from this?
• How can I get around this problem?
• What is the end-result I want?
• What will be the benefits if I ...?
• How can we best support each other to ...?

Energizing Questions are forward moving, forward focused ... they send you down a path of looking for solutions that are energizing and empowering.

They have a positive impact on your attitude, energy, feelings and performance.

If you are responsible for leading and/or influencing others then Energizing Questions are a very useful tool to add to your toolkit. They enable you to inspire people to focus on possibilities rather negativities.

Here are the principles in asking/developing great energizing questions (whether you are using them on yourself or on others):

• They are open-ended. Yes/No answers discourage thinking.
• They focus on where you are heading, not what went wrong. Yes, you can learn, indeed must learn, from your mistakes and errors, however give your primary focus to where you want to go
• They focus on the 'what' or the 'how' and not 'why'. Think back to the last time you were asked a 'why' question - "Why did you do that?" - did you get defensive, start to back-pedal? As soon as you are asked 'why' you tend to feel judged. Instead, ask questions like "Help to understand what lead up to you doing ...?", "How are you planning to ...?"; "What is the next step in ...?" "What do you want to ...?"

If you, or the people around you are, are not being as successful as you want, then Energizing Questions can be a great place for you to start to turn things around.

What you focus on is what you will receive, I promise!

Growth Opportunity

1. Identify the primary questions you ask of yourself and others - are they Energizing or De-Energizing Questions? 

2. Listen to the questions you hear others around you asking - are they Energizing or De-Energizing Questions? 

3. If they are focused on de-energizing what can you do to help yourself and others to shift your thinking toward more of what you do want, rather than what you don't want?