Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus. Part of coaching performance with athletes, executives, and organizations, is you certainly want to talk about all the positive stuff, and the positive thinking, and all these great things that are going to help you perform better. However, let’s talk about the interferences that get in the way.
I know one thing, especially from an organizational standpoint, that gets in the way of performance is complaining. Yes, complaining at work, and I’m guilty of it. I realized years ago that complaining only weakens me in my performance, in my attitude, and in my focus.
Years ago, I was part of a professional organization, and I remember going to these meetings, and talking to other colleagues about what was wrong with the organization, and this was bad, and I can’t believe they’re doing this, and I just kept complaining.
Guess what? I did nothing about it. I was part of the problem because I wasn’t willing to take action to make the organization better, at least not what I thought could make it better. I would just complain, and complain, and complain. Unfortunately, that led to a bad attitude on my part, and that’s not what a leader is about.
Now as I look into these organizations and talk to the different employees, complaining tends to be the new norm in communication, is complain about what somebody else is doing wrong instead of taking responsibility for what I can do.
Now, do you want to make your co-workers aware of what’s going on? Of course, but do you have a solution? Do you have a plan for improvement? I believe in this day and age with social media and everything, it’s we like something, we don’t like something, it’s just pushed off and we complain about it. Guess what? We don’t do anything about it.
Complaining weakens you in your performance. Let’s start talking about either don’t complain, or do something about it. That’s kind of my new rule for myself. If I find myself complaining about something, I better have a solution that I am going to do something about it. If not, can’t complain, so that’s a rule that I set forth.
With executives and teams, they also need to have that same rule, because complaining is a weak form of communication. We can stop complaining and now start doing and taking action, we can perform for success.