Let´s think about a daily situation. We are driving and suddenly we do some manoeuvre which annoys another driver. Inmediatly, he/she blows the horn and insults us. We have two possible reactions: replying in the same way, insulting and believing that it´s the other driver´s fault. His/her answer is not going to be kind… and the vicious circle begins, both drivers start an endless argument. We will only get a huge anger, stress and nerves. The second reaction would be assuming that our behaviour wasn´t appropriate and kindly excusing it. Most likely, the reaction of the driver will be playing down its importance and both will try to find the best solution.
Often, we´ll meet people asking themselves: Why do things never run well for me? Why can´t I develope my career?...and their answer usually is “…I´m so unlucky” or “…people are so foolish that they cannot see how much I can contribute”. Looking for similarities with the situation from the first paragraph is easy to identify the first reaction with the kind of person mentioned above.
For multiple reasons, things not always happen as we want or expect from the begining. In this situation demotivation, discouragement and low performance appear. We start feeling we are offered an unfair treatment, which will drive us to the vicious circle again. We are part of a ring where our low profile will impede our boss to find on us what they expect to, our contribution to the day by day, and it curbs our professional growth. To face it, we reply with more dejection until the situation becomes unbearable and the relationship is broken. Very often in this case, we blame at the others.
The other way to do the things is not believing that everything we do is right, that we never get wrong, or that the company doesn´t appreciate us enough. We must distrust ourselves, our behaviours, our job, and find the way to improve everyday. If still, our contribution is not taken into consideration and our career development is being curbed we have to analyse why and repare it. In this scenario the change comes from inside. We should give many reasons to led the others into trusting us. And if after this, the things are not in favour, we must keep the optimism not letting the discouragement beat our capacity and show the symptoms of the ´destruction´circle. Nobody will say that we haven´t worked hard, fighted and over all, we will be sure everything in our hand was done.
In this way will happen the second option shown in the example at the beggining of this article, and things will follow the right way. We will see that if we make a mistake we can rectify, that we can learn from mistakes and that `difficult´ moments many times depend of us.
Summarazing, I would reconmend everyone to think if we are in or out the vicious circle of behaviours.
