Remember Your Successes

Posted on 3 November 2007

Further to my Blog this last week about trying to life coach my wife, or more accurately to use NLP on my wife; we had another interesting event yesterday. She had to attend an interview for a new job. The post in question is ideally suited to her skill set and is within the same hospital with people she knows so there wouldn’t be a huge upheaval with a major transition to deal with. Numerous people had told her that the interview was a formality and that she would be great in the new role. On top of that, she wasn’t too worried if she didn’t get offered the position because she liked where she already was. Finally, she interviews great, is highly thought of and has a wealth of experience.

 

So bearing in mind all of the above this was going to be a walk in the park, right? I’m not even going to bother saying wrong because I know you’re way ahead of me here. You would have thought she was going for an audience with the Pope whilst suffering from severe flatulence and a brief case or Tourettes syndrome such was her nervousness.

 

I didn’t get involved in a coaching capacity, I didn’t dare but I did try to do some of the husband rationalizing stuff. I told her that she’d only once not been offered a job that she’d interviewed for and that nerves weren’t really very useful. Ok I admit, not profound advice and not something I would have felt comfortable being paid for but it was free.  Needless to say it didn’t work, and further attempts to talk about the issue resulted in icy glares and stony silence.

 

The morning of the interview she was a bit jumpy to say the least. Think of Dustin Hoffman in The Marathon Man load him up with a triple espresso and then double it and you are there or thereabouts. Fortunately she didn’t have to wait long because she was being interviewed in the morning.

 

At lunchtime I got this phone call from an alien that had invaded my wife’s body. The voice sounded the same but the tone and inflection were completely different from earlier on that day. Mr Alien had screwed his assignment big time because he used this bubbly, fun and excited voice that had been removed about a week ago prior to her presentation. Or maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t an alien. Maybe she had actually enjoyed the interview, maybe she had blitzed it and maybe they had offered the job within 30 minutes of her leaving. Yep, that is indeed what had happened and the whole process had been great fun and highly enjoyable.

 

Maybe in a year or twos time when she next has an interview I will dare to mention this one and hope she’ll not get too anxious and maybe I’ll fail. Do you know why? Like most people and I include myself far too often than I would care to admit to anybody other than a lovely reader of my Blog, she has a great memory for her ‘failures’ and a poor memory for her (much more frequent) successes.

 

The super-successful in life and business forget their failures once they have extracted any valuable lessons from them so they aren’t repeated and move on. So when they think back they see and hear only success, they prime themselves to succeed and therefore that is exactly what happens most of the time. I’m not saying they don’t get nerves, of course they do, but they use them to spur them on and not to paralyze them which seems far more sensible and productive to me a mere life coach that used to feel sick at the thought of a sales presentation.

 

Do you dwell on your failures or celebrate your successes?

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