Tag Archives: behaviour

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Everybody is Important

Leave a comment

The last few days I have been musing about leadership.  Todays post is in the same vein, but with a bit of a twist. How others percieve you becomes the foundation of who you are to them.

On the positive side, if you are viewed as warm and friendly, thoughtful and knowledgable, kind, empathetic, easy to understand, motivated and successful, (to name just a few of the critical life skills) it is likely you will be able to exercise your earned power to a greater degree.

These skills are not only valued in leaders, but in fact serve everyone well with helping achieve their goals.  The key to their practice though, is the ability to be liked.  Arogant and conceited delivery can override personal effectiveness.

Everyone is Important

Embrace the thought “everyone is important” as a singular personal value and always behave according to that concept.  If everything you do is founded on this belief, by default you respect everyone and this permeates your behaviour.  Others will feel it clearly.

So whether you desire others to think of you as a leader or just want to use your own earned power to its best effect, start with an underlying mantra embedded in everything you do that will send others a clear single that you value them.

Leveraging this basic underlying default value as the drive of all your behaviours, that is good communication, empathy, self awareness, etc, will just be all the more powerful.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Self Awareness/ Confidence and Arrogance

Leave a comment

The ability to focus on yourself separate from the environment and other individuals, is the basic concept underlying the emotional intelligence attribute of self awareness.

Typically this requires an internal belief in the abilitiy to rely on yourself and your judgement.  You believe and trust in yourself.

Combined these behavioural traits can appear to others as an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions (i.e., arrogance)

Avoiding the Arrogance Label

While confidence and self awareness are powerful personal attributes, valued and invaluable tools for you to achieve your personal goals, being percieved as arrogant is something to avoid.

The ability to be both self aware and confident in a way that is not percieved as arrogant requires concious effort.  By default these behaviours can send the wrong message.

As you travel down the road of winning friends and influencing others (to quote Dale Carnegie) make sure you use your sensitivity to balance the way you are percieved.

That is, use your self awareness of others reactions toward you to influnce and change those reactions.  Manage your personal behaviours in a way that those you are interracting with like.

This is not a natural or unconcious approach.  Be fully aware of how you are behaving, constantly judge how others percieve it and change as needed to get the desired reaction.

 

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Your Behaviour

Leave a comment

When asked how you act in response to a given situation or stimulus (i.e., your behaviour) it is probably not difficult for you to respond.  Not only can you describe your actions, but your intent as well.

Other also have an opinion about your behaviour and intent.  Your views and others, both can be subjective to a large degree and may differ.  In truth, often differ.

How are you viewed?

Perception is reality.  What others believe about your behavior is fact.  Their beliefs influence all thier interractions with you.  Your own considerations mean little.

If you are a devious liar in practice, but are viewd by others as someone trustworthy and honest, your opportunity to deceive and succeed is enormous.  This is how a “conperson” (aka conman) operates.

It has been said when truth is blurred by lies and misinformation, perception becomes reality and all is lost.  This is a real danger we all face.

Others perceptions may be founded on lies and misinformation, yet it is a very powerful driver of how they may respond to you.  Respect, trust and support can be earned but largely this must be done based on how you are percieved, rather than what you think.

I am me

The intersection of what you are and what people think you are is within your control.  Believing good sense will prevail and people will perceive your behaviour accurately is naive.

Using self awareness to understand what others think of you and then use that knowledge to shape thier perceptions to what you want them to be, is much more practical.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Immaturity

Leave a comment

Germaine Greer, noted Australian born scholar and femminist said “You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.”. Wow, someone who understands me.

This quote is quite witty given the definition of immaturity “, that is “behaviour that is appropriate to someone younger.  The definition implies age overcomes immaturity.

Ms. Grier is thinking, age does not necessarily equal mature behaviour.   Passing from youth to middle or old age is not the defining variable relative to immature behaviour.

Immaturity and Experience

As you age you collect experience.  With greater experiential knowledge underpinning your behaviour, it is logical to expect more consistent and effective behaviour.

Of course if one ignores the lessons of experience this would not neccessarily be the case.  Hence, the logic behind the Grier quotation.

The passing of youth can reasonably be expected to be accompanied by the wisdom of age.  However, the ability to effectively leverage your experience through mature behaviour does depend on a few other variables.

Age and Expectation

While it is reasonable to assume our behaviour will improve with age, the zeal and exuberance of youth can carry forward to a late age.  This is not necessarily detrimental.

As I often note in my posts, balance is the key.  Matching your behaviour to expectations while still endulging your inner child is possible.

The key is to avoid surprise or disaffection by creating a perception of the level of maturity your audience expects without ignoring your own inner needs.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

More behavioural thoughts

Leave a comment

Does the reason you behaved in a specific way mitigate the impacts of that behaviour?  Is personal accountablity tanamount to resonsibility or do external factors weigh in?

An example would be a murderer  who was deemed not accountable for their actions.  In these cases, many cultures are sympathetic making allowances for what is terrifically bad behaviour.

The consequences might become psychiatric rehabilitation, forgiveness and reintegration into society.  Or the killer might recieve the death penalty.

Alternatively they may be caged for a long time to protect them from others and or rehabilitate them.  These actions resulting from this murderous behaviour vary, and are principally determined based on motivation.

Pure Personal Accountability

If the determining factor for consequences was soley based on personal accountablity, the reactions to a persons specific behaviour would probably be more consistent,

That is, a killer made the decision to kill, (other factors are irrelevant) the behaviour is theirs and theirs alone).  The contextual and external reasons for the behaviour do not mitigate it.

 You made me do it

The question is, can any factors, ( for example hunger, torture, ridicule, greed), drive your behaviour or are action decisions yours alone to make.

A interesting personal test of this can be tried the next time you are angry.  Simply start with the internal question – Why am I angry?  Usually you will be able to quickly think of the prime causes.

Most likely it will be something like he/she made me mad, or a scenario or circumstances.  These will rarely include; “I chose to be angry or I decided anger was appropriate in this case to address the things that were occurring.”

Part two of this self examination is the question, if I did not choose to be angry, is this acceptable.  Are not my emotions, thoughts and deeds mine to control?

For me, this is a rhetorical question.  The answer is an emphatic yes.  So, I try to learn from this and vow to myself, next time I will conciously decide if I want to be angry.  Owning my actions is so much more satisfying than not.

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Do you care

Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered why you behave the way you do?  This is not a simple topic with a multitude of variables driving your actions and motivations.

Today’s post I explore how desires (what you want, what you really, really want) affects behaviour?   Desire or wants occur on an emotional level.

Where does it come from?

Things you want are almost exclusively associated with things you care about.  If you don’t care whether rock and roll is playing on your radio you probably won’t want to buy tickets to a rock concert.

Other variables might influence you to buy concert tickets (e.g., going with a friend or an opportunity to win a prize) but you typically need to care about a topic to want to participate.

Shaping Behaviour

A key underlying driver of behaviour is how invested you are in a topic.  The more you care, the stronger the reaction, that is your desire to achieve and excel.

Obligatory Sports Analogy

If you are a rabid soccer fan you are far more likely to want your team to succeed.  The casual fan enjoys the play but is no where near as invested in the outcome as the enthusiastic fan.

If you are a player and winning really matters to you (you care a lot about the result) your playing behaviour is likely to be aggressive and highly competitive.

If exercise is your what you want, the result can be far less relevant, even irrelevant. Your play will usually match your level of emotional investment.

Knowledge Influencing Action

The next time you are aggressively pursuing something, think about your motivations.  Why do you care?  This approach can help you define a successful strategy to achieve your goal.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Behaving Badly

Leave a comment

Expecting people will practice respectful behaviour toward others is a standard for all societies and cultures.  The challenge, of course, is defining what respectful behaviour is.

To a large extent bad behaviour is in the eyes of the beholder, that is the recipient of the actions.  Difficulties arise because the categorization of the behaviour as bad or acceptable can be largely subjective.

Acceptable Behaviour

Putting the subjective aspects aside there is generally consensus on really bad behaviour, although most of these are extreme. Even the extremes have exceptions though.  For example:

  • violence perpetrated against others or even self flagellation is considered unacceptable
  • full nudity (although not so much at a nudist colony)
  • shouting (except for emergencies when getting attention is practical and accepted)

Extreme examples aside, the following have a very subjective component;

  • not listening, ignoring others, disregarding others needs.  (this is subjective in that one person may feel ignoredor disregarded well another would think nothing of the sort)
  • insults ( one persons insult may be anothers compliment)
  • disreputable appearance ( a beauty to me might be an ugly duckling to you

Meeting Expectations

Ultimately others judge your behaviour when it meets their expectations.  When it does not you may be labled as rude, disrespectful, arrogant and so on.

The resolution to this dilema is the practice of self awareness.  Using a variety of skills to sense others expectations and act accordingly.  The usually results in your being held in high esteem.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Manipulation

Leave a comment

Manipulation is mainly considered to have a negative connotation.
One online definition I found states  ” the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way”.

I would argue, unsucessfully so far, that if your manipulation is clever (but not unscrupulous) it is not bad nor a behaviour to be avoided but rather, used in the right context (cleverly) it can be helpful.

Motivation, goals and manipulation

All human behaviour is motivated by something.  In a circular argument I would say even “no reason” is a reason.  The motivation is explained by the goal being sought.

If manipulation is the tool employed to achieve the goal you are motivated toward, I see nothing wrong with that, provided it is not done unscrupulously.  Clever, is the byword and my hat is off to clever people.  Good for you.

Manipulation or Influencing

Whether your base behaviour is to cleverly manipulate or influence an outcome, I postulate that all human behaviours contain some element of these practices.

That is, everything a person does is motivated, it is directed toward goal achievement and manipulation or influencing is required to try and achieve it, always.

Even if the result is not the original  goal (and often we don’t even conciously know what that was) some form of manipulative or influential behaviours will have been employed.

My days are filled with manipulative behaviour, of the clever sort, and I am proud of it.

 

 

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Determining the best course

Leave a comment

Today a collegue and I had an interesting philisophical discussion about how things should be done.  Is there a right way and a wrong way?

If the outcomes are good does it matter how they were arrived at?  The challenge is, arguably there are  grey answers to these questions.

Consider Basic Behaviours

Most would agree to take another humans life is wrong, however; taking anothers life in defense of your own or accidentally contributing to a loss of life seem to logically mitigate the seriousness or even if it is wrong.

So, the basic statement “Taking anothers life is wrong” could have many qualifiers making the ultimate conclusion of wrong or right not so clear.

Group or Organizational Behaviour

It probably seems logical for groups to practise clear and open communication.  For there to be rules or at very least guidelines outlining accountabilities and responsibilities.

For multi layered structures (i.e., heirarchical) it seems obvious documented organizational structure is of great value. But, like the murder example, what seems obvious might not be.

Unstructed cultures, where anyone can do anything can exist and be intentional.  Clear guidelines, responsiblities, even unambigous communication might not fit with this culture.

And the answer is

What is the key to success is not declaring what is right or wrong, but rather as a group or team collaberatively determining the culture and then fitting the behaviour standards to conform with that culture, in a fully supportive manner.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Communication Maturity

Leave a comment

The maturity theme continues.

Todays focus is on humans most critical skill.  Whether living your life to the fullest, striving to be best or just seeking basic satisfaction, communication underlies everything you do.

Communication is simply the providing or recieving of information.  There are a multitude of ways to exchange information (i.e., communicate).  My blog, of course, is an outstanding example of this.

Of course once sent or recieved the information must be processed, always the tricky part.  Whether in an  individual or organizational context, the processing (which includes filtering) is most impacted by both parties maturity levels.

What is Communication Maturity.

One person tells a story to another.  They understand the information they have shared and check with the reciever “Got that”, “Yup” is the affirmative response.

Oh if it were really so simple.  In this example the receiver certainly got information, that was confirmed, but was it what the sender intended.?  Who knows?

Interpretation of information can be influenced by your personal filters, bias and most of all experience.  Maturity is all about experience and when applied as objectively as possible to information exchanges it can increase the likelihood of consensus understanding.

Consensus does not mean agreement rather common understanding.  For mature dialogue that is the goal.  A key attribute of successful  exchanges is understanding not agreement. This is the ultimate goal.

It is far more important that all parties view the base information the same way even if they don’t agree.  Without exception this leads to better outcomes.

Developing conversational maturity takes time (you need experience afterall) but it also take focus and effort. Experience is of little value if not applied.