The multiple Dimensions of Self – Success Thinking
As business coaches we are hired to make a business owner successful. This often also implies we have to make their key team members successful. Now most of that is based on providing the ‘How to’ of business strategies, combined with a model of accountability and the outsiders’ perspective. But long lasting permanent success is only achieved when the coach can change the success thinking of the business owner and his or her key employees. In other words, the business coach that has to operate with the concept ‘BE * DO (over time) = HAVE’ of his client, will have to change the ‘BE’ of his client. This means that the ‘BE’ of the owner has to change into a mindset of success creating thought patterns.
| Business coaches are paid to make their clients successful, and this is typically hard defined in increased profit and decreased amount of time needed to run the business. It is the measurable change in areas essential for success that ultimately create the extra money and time. Therefore, having a ‘BE’ model that only makes clients ‘feel good’ but does not create measurable success in life and business is insufficient for a business coach (and should be insufficient for any type of coach). This is why the Triple8 coaching model for BE was developed to coincide with the model for the ‘DO this in your business’ and why it is such a measurable, practical yet sometimes brutally honest concept. |
Let’s explore the challenge of having to create successful thinking that fits in this multi dimensional structure of how we order our thoughts.
There are multiple angles to take to cluster typical thought patterns. On top of that, there is the nature of how easy it is to change those thought patterns. For example, learning a new skill is typically much easier than changing someone’s value system.
Let’s start with exploring the multiple angles of thought patterns. We call these, the dimensions of SELF. First, there is someone’s ‘Character’, the core set of ingrained thought patterns and habits.
Are you stubborn? Friendly? Mean? Vicious? Meticulous? Driven? Sloppy? All these words describe characteristics of peoples’ character. And who would deny that these characteristics have a major impact on someone’s decisions and therefore actions in life?
Besides the Character, there is the matter of Health and Fitness. Let’s face it, if you are sick and have low energy, it is hard to grow a successful company.
And then, there is an even bigger factor: the Environment you are in. Isn’t it said that if you take the 5 people you hang out most with, your amount of success is an average of those 5… Every night wasting your living hours like a zombie in front of the TV isn’t helpful to get a fulfilled life either…
If for now, you are willing to assume that there another six main dimensions in determining someone’s character; that would give us 8 dimensions in total.
The 8 Dimensions of Character
Character, what is it?
A definition could be: “The aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of people and things”
One could say that you recognize somebody’s character by the wake they leave behind, just as that you can see the wake, the trail, of a fast moving boat. Just like when a boat makes a turn, you see the turn in the wake behind the boat. Does your character leave a straight impression? Or crooked?
As business coaches we teach our clients to ask the following question when they do reference checks for a potential new hire:
“What did mister or misses X, accomplish, AND how did he or she deal with people?” In other words: “What were the Results, and what were the Relationships?” (Relationships as in would they say ‘they were better off in their life knowing mister or misses ‘X’?) – this then followed by the question: “would you hire this person again?”
Think about it. If you have left a group that you spend time with, what would they say about you? Would they miss you? Or would they be relieved? Did people always feel at ease with you, ready to tell their secrets, or were they always guarded? Would they describe you as a positive force, or as someone whose presence was draining?
All these statements say something about your character. To get a better handle on it, let’s group these features and traits into eight dimensions:
- Able to connect with others and build trust
- The amount of orientation towards reality (Truth)
- To ability to get Results and Finish well
- Embracing the negative (problem solving)
- Orientation towards increase (Growth)
- Understanding of the transcendent
- The Body and Mind connection
- The Relationship with the Environment
Once we have done this, we can find out what makes a character ‘strong’ versus ‘weak’ in terms of having thought patterns that create lasting success.
Almost every year a politician hits the news-cycle with the following bad news scenario: They rose to power promising strong ethical and moral values, often even agitating against those that lack in those values. And then suddenly there is the arrest, and the news about prostitutes and drugs. Usually the politician tries to deny it at first, but ultimately the truth comes out.
How is this possible? How did this moral knight suddenly stumble and fall? Displaying behavior that seems to show that he or she was now above the law?
It is a character flaw. Something made this politician lose all touch with reality…
Two types of character flaws
There are two types of issues that weaken a character:
- First off, very low deserve levels in one or more of these six dimensions will ‘taint’ the reputation of anyone’s character. It is when you say that someone is ‘not to be trusted’ (low dimension 1), or ‘living in their own reality’ (low dimension 2), and so on. People that are described as ‘selfish’ are low on dimension 6 as they don’t care about anything beyond their own self interests. The flaws connected to these extreme low levels of deserve in any of these dimensions are easy to spot by asking about someone’s reputation.
- The second, harder to spot character flaw is the lack of character integrity. What this means is that there can be a lack of ‘balanced integration’ between the dimensions. The wake left behind by people who suffer from this is often a trail of failures, after initial successes. Think about the serial entrepreneur that you know, whose ventures all seem to sooner or later fail. Or the person that cannot seem to keep a steady relationship with someone and jumps from relationship to relationship. What is going on? Where the first type of character flaw was a very low deserve level in one or more of the six dimensions, in the second type of character flaw there is a mismatch between the dimensions. There is typically one or two very high scoring dimensions, but they will be sabotaged by a set of traits in a lower scoring character dimension. Some examples are someone that is over connecting and trusting (high level 1), but not seeing reality (low level 2) and thus putting their trust into something or someone that will never deliver. A second example is someone who focuses on results only (dimensions 3) at the costs of connection (dimension 1). A third example is someone who is always focused on ‘the higher Self’ and ‘we should love each other’ which is a transcendent focus only (6), with no connection with results (3) and reality (2).
Now that we know what can go wrong, let’s dive deeper into each individual dimension, to get a better understanding of it. After all, what you can measure, you can improve.
If you are interested in the system to actually measure these dimensions, contact your compound coach, or else renehollebrandse@midatlanticstrategicservices.com
Series 2 – “How to develop thought patterns” by Rene Hollebrandse