5 Ways of Letting Go of Behaviors Holding You Back

Want to let go of what's holding you back? There are plenty of ways to make it happen. Here are the 5 behaviors that may be holding you back and how to let go of them in order to do the work that matters most. 

1.Feeling Guilty: You know when your are feeling guilty? Its awful right? You have a sense that you can't connect and that you need to do more. You have this bad feeling about a relationship or a commitment and cant do anything about it. Instead: Reframe guilt. It is just a signal that you need to reinvest in how you are managing your role relationships, as a employee, wife, daughter, friend, colleague, or whatever may be. Instead of just 'feeling guilty', remember that you are in the process of renegotiating loyalties and defining the type of leader you want to be. Guilt can feel like a signal of disloyalty, when in fact it is a process of renegotiating loyalty.

2. People Pleasing. It is natural to want to fit in with what others say or want. However, people pleasing is a selfish act because it is all about making ourselves "feel better." Instead remember that people pleasing is fed by the ego and it wastes our time and energy from doing really important work in the world. The world needs your best, not your people pleasing. 

3. Choosing to be liked instead of respected. Choosing to be liked is easy, choosing to be respected can change everything. While sometimes respect and like ability are correlated, they aren't always. When you step into your power, while some people will stop 'liking you' when you value yourself differently, the same amount of people will come up and thank you for being bold, or doing something that others don’t like but you believe in. Being respected is a more empowering feeling than anything else, we all deserve it, we just need to create it for ourselves. 

4. Excessive Complaining: Yes, you know what I'm talking about. We all have times where we are upset and want to complain, vent, or just be angry. And it's healthy and normal, until it gets excessive. Complaining only keeps us in a negative cycle or pattern so we need to move resentment or frustration into a place of acceptance to do work that matters.  

5. Listening to advice from everyone. How many of you have friends and family that are FULL of advice…that makes NO sense? Your parents will tell you to stay in the same job forever or your friend tells you you're not cut out for something. Well, advice is only as relative as it is to the person. We have to choose what advice we listen to so we don't hold back from doing what we really want in the world and unleash our potential. 

 

Are there other ways you let go of behaviors holding you back? 

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What is good feedback?

Giving and receiving feedback is a critical skill for all leaders. Good feedback is the kind that makes you want to go back to work. It’s not the kind that feels brutal for three days or the kind that says you are the greatest thing in the world. It is specific and particular.
I, like many others, have had difficulty with both giving and receiving feedback in the past. But a conversation with Liz Lerman, choreographer and author of the Critical Response Process, helped me think differently.

She asks, “What puts us in the place to take the things we need to hear? A part of it is respecting the other person. And we also have to be in a place to get it. Feedback is all positive and all opinion. It’s the authentic truth of what is my experience of what you just did.”

I felt relieved from this perspective. Feedback felt much more productive for me when we take ownership to create conditions to be ready to hear it and interpret it as helping us be ‘right’ rather than proving we were ‘wrong.’

In your next feedback session, two tools you can use to improve feedback conversations are:

1)      Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, a four step facilitated dialogue originally designed to assist artists at the early stage of creation, now used widely. I have found it to transform these conversations!

2)      FeedForward designed by Marshall GoldSmith, where participants choose one behavior they would like to change and ask for feedforward, two specific suggestions for the future that might help them achieve a positive change in their selected behavior.