Discover the Satisfaction of Seeing How It All Fits Together. Part 7 in the Personal Power series

The effort you put into overcoming your self sabotage increases your personal power. If you allow the self sabotage mechanism to win, you feed it - which improves its inner strength and decreases yours. So whenever you just know you should do something, that's a great opportunity to increase your personal power. Take it!

When you understand the circumstances that led to something happening, you increase your personal power and decrease any suffering. Genuine knowing means you appreciate the often mistaken logic behind the situation, which decreases any negative emotions. To understand the background is to change your life, acceptance becomes easier and such emotions may even disappear.

Improve your Negotiation Skills
An article in The Economist of 2008/05/01 reported a series of experiments by Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois. The researchers reported on a study of more than 150 MBA novice negotiators to measure the different effectiveness of different negotiation strategies. The two competing approaches were empathizing, connecting with the other party's feelings, and perspective-taking, understanding the context, the perspective from which your antagonist comes. See http://www.economist.com/node/11288484

The findings? Understanding rather than empathy was the secret of success. "In terms of an individual gain, the perspective-taking recruiters did far better - pushing the empathetic recruiters into last place."

The conclusion: "Even with one negotiator having perspective-taking abilities, it can produce a better overall outcome for both sides. You want to understand what the other side's interests are, but you do not want to sacrifice your own interests."

Understand the Background
This strongly implies that the effort to gain real knowledge of the background can change your life. It also indicates that understanding the genesis will decrease the sway ensuing negative emotions may hold for you. The secret of success is to see that authentic knowledge decreases any emotionality, and helps you regain control over your life.

It also suggests that there's usually some sense to be found behind the event. The sense may have been highly perverted, but it is generally somewhere to be found. Some even say that things happen for a reason.

Genuine understanding will enable you to see the flaw in someone's rationale for their part in the sequence of events. But beware of condemnation. Any decision that they're wrong, that it shouldn't have happened, will alienate them. You'll inhibit your chances of avoiding a recurrence.

Decrease the Emotionality
Louise, a client, once arrived for a session crying about something that was stressing her. Yet as soon as we had explored the reasons for her stress, and she understood why she was stressed, her tears dried up and she became her usual sunny self.

Negative emotions severely impact your personal power. When you increase your understanding, you give yourself more options, more control over the situation.

So invest the energy to improve your context, which reduces your suffering and makes you wiser. You can change your life with the resultant increase in personal power.

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought
"Small minds have always lashed out at what they don't understand. There are those who create . . . and those who tear down."

- Dan Brown, American author, songwriter, pianist.