Taking Auto-Self Actions Now:
High Leverage Do's and Don’t's for Involuntary Activities

Topic highlights:                    

▪ Four Key Things to Do to Sustain Success

▪ Three Key Things to Avoid to Sustain Success

Self-help doesn't work well, but noticing some of the auto-self characteristics described at this website and attempting to make a change can launch you down the path to peak performance. If you falter, seek help.

Four Key Things to Do to Sustain Success

1.  Cross the chasm to the new auto-self performance Pinnacle: Explicitly recognize the auto-self and understand some of its properties. Practice noticing and working with the auto-self until it becomes "natural" (i.e., an auto-context). This is the key step that opens a vast new world of performance-improvement possibilities.

2.  Discover the characteristics of your auto-self – guide others to do the same: Conduct or commission leadership performance surveys. Leverage auto-self strengths and transform auto-self weaknesses as indicated by the survey results.

3.  Unpack and test auto-contexts periodically and reconstruct them as needed: You should do this for your business culture, for shared behaviors in the culture, and for individual attitudes about people or aspects of the business. Hopefully, you are in the process of doing this now for performance improvement.

4.  Recognize and manage competing priorities and the Comfort Imperative: At the very least, you should notice whether your thinking-self is executing your success priorities or whether competing comfort priorities are prevailing. If your comfort priorities are undermining your success priorities, your best path to success is to find a way to counteract the errant comfort priorities. You probably will need help to do this. You should also notice when others are failing because of misaligned comfort priorities and provide help. The starting point however is to learn to notice competing priorities.

Three Key Things to Avoid to Sustain Success

1.  Avoid evasion gimmicks: Be ever vigilant for when you fail to notice you are failing.

2.  Avoid the ogre blunder:  When providing corrective feedback, make sure the people you want to change focus on their undesired behaviors, not yours.

3.  Avoid the unfair fight: Don't try to change your auto-self by overpowering the Comfort Imperative with your thinking-self. When self-help fails to improve common or shared auto-self issues, attend an experiential workshop. When self-help fails to transform personal undesired auto-behaviors, retain an expert coach.

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