“The leaves of brown come tumbling down in September in the rain”.

That line from that very popular song is so very apt just now. It’s that time of year again when the silly season is over, the kids are back in school and the morning traffic is bumper to bumper and it takes so much longer to get to work.

Therefore its back to the same ebb and flow. Is it time to make a change? So what can we as individuals change to enhance our own performance and those that we work and live with.

In this blog we will look briefly at how individuals interact with the world, their work colleagues, family, friends and the larger social circle.

Psychologists have long proposed the idea of individuals engaging in Distorted Thinking. Now look at the list below and do honestly ask yourself if you engage in any of the following:

All or Nothing Thinking: Look at everything in black or white.

Discount the positives: You see more negatives rather than positives.

Jump to Conclusions: Making up your mind without looking for the evidence or the facts.

Labelling: Attaching labels to self and to others even without really knowing them.

Magnification or Minimization: You always blow issues out of proportion or alternatively you dilute their importance.

Personalisation & Blame: You blame yourself for events that you were not fully responsible for or you blame others and ignore your own contribution to the problem.

Should Have/Could Have: You are critical of yourself or others with comments such as I could or should have.

Emotional Reasoning: You reason from how you feel, for example you may feel like not doing a particular task, so you defer it.

Overgeneralisation: Taking a single negative event and expecting it to be a permanent recurring feature of your life.

The Solution to these distortions may lie into:

Focus more on the positive, recognise your strengths and accomplishments, focus on success and what went right.

Look for the hard evidence behind your beliefs and assumptions.

Take an event in your life for what it is and don’t try to create something else.

Deal with facts and take the emotions off the table.

Be logical, take one step at a time in assimilating a situation or even take a step back.

Finally as Samuel Beckett wrote in ‘Worstward Ho’;

“Ever Tried ever Failed, No Matter, Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better”.