Programming from other people

Sometimes other people do it to us. We hear a lot of negative messages from others about our skills, knowledge, capabilities, aptitudes and behaviours. If we choose to accept them we start behaving as though these were true. We can choose to reject these messages and take action to ensure they are not true.

For instance, ‘Don’t give Sue anything that needs to be accurate, she’s hopeless at details.’ If you were Sue, how would you feel about this type of statement? You might prefer to be seen as being a reliable person who pays attention to details. If you accept the message you will start to ignore details – because everyone expects you to be hopeless. If you reject the message you will take extra care and, soon, people will forget the occasion when you were less accurate and only remember the many occasions when you produced good results.

As a manager this means that you must not only be conscious of the messages you give yourself and accept from others, but you must also be very careful not to programme your staff with limiting messages that will produce work of a lesser quality.

Programming is powerful – you can use it to feed positive messages to your team.

Check your language. How much of what you say to your team and about your team is positive? Are you programming people to fail? Try changing your focus and using language that gives people positive messages about what they can do, not negative messages about the likelihood of failure. People may not be aware of a change, or, if they are, they will not know what has changed.