Sometimes we just know in our bones that the situation we are heading into will go pear shaped somehow. We are not sure exactly what will happen, but something will. And we are not being pessimistic – long experience has revealed a pattern that we are wise to pay attention to. Maybe you can identify a situation like that in your work or personal life. One of the indicators is that we come out the other side of the experience with one or more of the following:
- Surprise – even though we anticipated it may not go well, the situation still caught us off guard.
- Buttons pushed – we find ourselves more emotional/reactive than we would like to be.
- Lost ground – we didn’t stand up for ourselves, our principles or our boundaries in the way we would like to.
- Hindsight – we walk away with a head full of “I wish I’d thought to say…” and other insights.
In these situations we can take a leaf out of the athletes play book, and do some pre situation visualisation. Ideally, we’ll visualise a few different versions of the upcoming situation and work them through. Thinking in advance about our responses and options makes it much more likely that we will be able to respond the way we want to in the moment.
It’s a useful tactic in many situations. If you are a leader it makes an enormous difference to how you ‘show up’ especially in moments of pressure that count. Next time we’ll look at some tactics for visualising effectively.
