Revealing Your Best Behaviours

Recognising and being in control of our best behaviours is key to our performance, ensuring we consistently strive for success. Our change and leadership expert, Professor Damian Hughes, shares with us his thoughts for revealing your best behaviours and his tips to start engaging them to create a more positive mindset.

I’d like you to think about how you would describe yourself when performing at your very best; chances are that the words you would use to describe yourself at your best are all behaviours.

What are the key behaviours that you would be happy to define yourself with?

The reason we ask this question is this taps into an element of psychology that we refer to as the self-consistency theory.

Once you identify your best behaviours and you own and measure yourself against them you are naturally inclined to behave in a manner that is entirely consistent and congruent with them.

A simple example to illustrate this is when you complete a CV, if you are going for a new job, you write down your academic references, your previous experience, but the most important part is your best behaviours – you may describe yourself as passionate, enthusiastic, committed, driven and successful.

Later, when you arrive at the interview, the self-consistency theory will have taken over and you will have behaved in a manner that was entirely consistent with the behaviours you wrote on the form.

Try taking a moment to think about your CV and what are the words you use to describe yourself at your very best and ask yourself this simple question:

Are you behaving in a manner that is entirely consistent with those behaviours on a regular basis?

For more information on Professor Damian Hughes and our tailor-made leadership development programmes, click here, or contact our dedicated learning team at enquiries@raisethebar.co.uk or on 0203 137 7353.