Attitude

Feb 15 2012

Eighteen Most Common Self-Defeating Behaviors

Sometimes we can be our own worst enemy. It’s not that we can’t be successful and find fulfillment in life. It’s that we too easily sabotage our attempts to do so. Here are eighteen behaviors that can get the better of us and prevent us from thriving.

  • Procrastinating. If you’re always late on completing tasks, people will stop relying on you and begin resenting you.
  • Getting involved with the wrong people. If you continuously get involved with bad people, you’ll be the one who has to clean up the mess.
  • Saying “yes” when you want to say “no.” This results in burnout, loss of credibility and loss of respect from others and yourself.
  • Assuming others don’t want anything in return. It is human nature to almost always want something in return, even when people say they don’t. Thinking ahead about what others might want can save you problems in the future when they try to collect.
  • Playing it safe. The world is in a rapid state of change. Doing the same old thing over and over and expecting it to be good enough may turn out to be not so safe.
  • Always having to be right. This can create resentment and helps build a constituency of people who can’t wait to see you fail.
  • Focusing on what others are doing wrong. This is a demotivating habit.
  • Not learning from your mistakes. Successful people don’t make fewer mistakes than unsuccessful people, they just repeat fewer mistakes.
  • Talking when nobody’s listening. This leads you to think that what you’ve said is going to be done, when in fact it’s not. You will have to repeat the entire process at a later date.
  • Taking things too personally. When people take criticism too personally instead of seeing that it is about fixing a problem, the problem becomes larger and takes longer to fix.
  • Having unrealistic expectations. When you confuse what is reasonable with what is realistic you set yourself up to fail.
  • Trying to take care of everybody. In attempting to take care of everyone, no one — including you — will be satisfied.
  • Refusing to “play games.” Politics, schmoozing and small talk are all necessary in order to succeed. Putting them down because you do them poorly is costly.
  • Being envious of others. Teamwork is ruined when team members envy each other to the extent that they root against each other.
  • Quitting too soon. If you always quit, you’ll never succeed; if you always try, you’ll eventually succeed.
  • Letting fear run your life. If you let fear run your life, it might just run you out of your job.
  • Not moving on after a loss. When you spend more time mourning your losses than you do moving ahead, you can’t move ahead.
  • Not asking for what you need.If you don’t ask for what you need — whether it be for someone to help you do your job or for a promotion — you’re leaving it to other people’s imaginations.

Adapted from a list by Dr. Mark Goulston

Why is it so doggone easy to sabotage our plans and make life ineffectual? Comment here>>

By Jeff Vankooten • adaptation, Attitude, Behavior, Cognitive distortions, Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: ,

Feb 14 2012

Flash of a scabby fish knife

This was written by Calvin Seerveld, the uncle of my best friend. It’s a reminder to me of the power of small acts and the significance of work no matter how mundane. Heck, washing the dishes can be a sacred act…

My father is a seller of fish. We children know the business too having worked from childhood in the Great South Bay Fish Market, Patchogue, Long Island, New York, helping our father like a quiver full of arrows. It is a small store, and it smells like fish.

I remember a Thursday noon long ago when my Dad was selling a large carp to a prosperous woman and it was a battle to convince her that the carp, “is it fresh?”

It fairly bristled with freshness, had just come in, but the game was part of the sale. They had gone over it anatomically together: the eyes were bright, the gills were a good colour, the flesh was firm, the belly was even spare and solid, the tail showed not much waste, the price was right—Finally my Dad held up the fish behind the counter, “Beautiful, beautiful! Shall I clean it up?”

And as she grudgingly assented, ruefully admiring the way the bargain had been struck, she said, “My, you certainly didn’t miss your calling.”

She spoke the truth. My father is in full-time service for the Lord, prophet, priest and king in the fish business. And customers who come in the store sense it. Not that we always have the cheapest fish in town! Not that there are no mistakes on a busy Friday morning! Not that there is no sin! But this: that little Great South Bay Fish Market, my father and two employees, is not only a clean, honest place where you can buy quality fish at a reasonable price with a smile, but there is a spirit in the store, a spirit of laughter, of fun, of joy inside the buying and selling that strikes an observer pleasantly; and the strenuous week-long preparations in the back rooms for Friday fish-day are not a routine drudgery interrupted by “rest periods,” but again, a spirit seems to hallow the lowly work into a rich service, in which it is good to officiate.
Always in faith

When I watch my Dad’s hands, big beefy hands with broad stubby fingers each twice the thickness of mine, they could never play a piano; when I watch those hands delicately split the back of a mackerel or with a swift, true stroke fillet a flounder close to the bone, leaving all the meat together; when I know those hands dressed and peddled fish from the handlebars of a bicycle in the grim 1930?s, cut and sold fish year after year with never a vacation through fire and sickness, thieves and disasters, weariness, winter cold and hot muggy summers, twinkling at work without complaint, past temptations, struggling day in and day out to fix a just price, in weakness often but always in faith consecratedly cutting up fish before the face of the Lord: when I see that, I know God’s Grace can come down to a man’s hand and the flash of a scabby fish knife.

Reprinted in Comment, Winter 2000, by permission of the author.

By Jeff Vankooten • Attitude, creativity, Integrity, Meaning, work • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Feb 13 2012

The Lesson of the Moth

i was talking to a moth
the other evening.
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires.

why do you fellows
pull this stunt, i asked him,
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder.
have you no sense?

plenty of it he answered.
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement.
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while.
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll.
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty.
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter.
i do not agree with him
myself. i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself.

This is by Don Marquis and was used at a leader’s retreat I attended once. I’ve never forgotten it and thought I would share it here.

What do you want as much as that? Comment here>>

By Jeff Vankooten • Attitude • 1 • Tags: ,

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