You may have the MBA but if an internal critic constantly berates you, or you have feelings of self-doubt, low self-confidence, fears of rejection or other negative emotions your chances of success may be quite limited.

More and more executives are beginning to realize that the next frontier in maximizing their chances for success is to start focusing on building personal internal skills that go beyond the business training that they have already received.

To drive the point home, a metaphor to describe how negative emotions adversely affect personal and career performance is in order. As you know, when your car is not finely tuned it tends to work less efficiently and to break down more often thereby accumulating more downtime.

Similarly, having to deal with unwanted negative emotions has the same effect on one’s physical and emotional health and ultimately on one’s performance. The chronic wear and tear of these negative emotions is what I call stress.

We often think of stress as being caused by external circumstances. For instance, how often have you heard “ My boss just stresses me out”? In fact, the truth is that the origin of the stress is “all” internally generated. Yes, that’s right, “all internally generated”. One way to see this is to recognize that different individuals respond to “stressful circumstances” very differently.

Different responses to “stressful circumstances” are largely due to the fact that individuals perceive these situations differently based on conscious and/or unconscious beliefs that they may be projecting into the situation at hand.

A simple example will serve to illustrate this. Individual “A” fails to get a meeting with an important new client and immediately begins to berate himself for his poor performance. Individual “A” believes he is a failure if he doesn’t get buy in from every new client.

Individual “B” however may see the situation as follows: “Well it’s likely that this client isn’t ready for my services yet so I’ll try again in a couple of months”. Individual “B” believes that the failure to connect with the client is not a reflection on his competence rather an issue of timing.

The effect of the different beliefs on individuals “A” and “B” are as follows:

Individual “A” feels like a failure, his sense of self-esteem and self-confidence plummet. This can lead to preoccupation with future failures followed by anxiety and poor concentration. All this affects future performance and success. Ultimately, we have a self-fulfilling prophecy occurring i.e. “I believe I’m a failure, therefore I fail”.

Individual “B, on the other hand has moved on to the next client without any significant difficulty. He may in fact have thought about how he might creatively assess which clients are more likely to be receptive, thereby boosting his sense of confidence.

Hence the impact of negative emotions are clear. What’s important is that it is unnecessary, yes unnecessary for anyone to be the victim of such negativity.

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