How do you map yourself?

Grant Leboff: Brian, we’re talking about ‘Self Mapping’ and of course, if you’re going to self-map, one of the things is having some sort of self-awareness or else you can’t do it. So how do you start the process of self-mapping self?

Brian Mayne In both the book and the workshop we go through a lot of questions that cause people to think more deeply about themselves, and that’s what raises awareness. Sometimes we achieve it through coaching, if I’m working one-to-one with senior figures in an organisation. We run the self-mapping program for different organisations, particularly for their leadership, and a key hallmark now of leadership is self-awareness, but it really comes through questioning. Whether it’s you questioning yourself or somebody else, like a coach, questioning you to make you think deeper and to consider things that would be there in your mind but not at the surface level, but sitting at a deeper often unconscious level.

Grant Leboff: In this questioning process, how does that manifest itself to be a positive experience? The reason why I say that is because I mixed with a lot of business leaders just in my work, and there is quite a fine line between questioning, which is a healthy type of questioning, – which is important – and then questioning which just leads to a lot of self doubt. It might lead to self-awareness too, rather than self belief… how do you make sure that it’s a positive experience rather than a negative one?

Brian Mayne: What the questioning does is that it brings up old beliefs. This is because when we form a belief – and many will be formed in childhood – we don’t actually realise we are forming the belief, but we’ve accepted something as being true. All a belief is, is a thought about yourself or life that you have accepted as being true and because you’ve accepted it. It means that you no longer think about it, so it sits at a deeper level of your mind. The questioning brings it to the surface and sometimes, what comes to the surface is not a positive belief about what you can do, it’s a limiting belief about something that you have accepted that you can’t do. The reality is, that often, the belief is just an opinion that you accepted, not even your own. Very often it’s the opinion of somebody else that you’ve accepted.

Through the questioning process, not only does the belief come to the surface but then you help the people to see that it’s not based on substance, it was based in somebody’s opinion – may be 20 years ago – and yet the person still carries it like baggage, but it is limiting their success. Once you bring it to the surface and you start to question; Where did you get it from? Was it your idea? Is it really based in reality or is it just an opinion you formed and you’ve held onto for all these years, and as you do that, you dissipate its power. As you collapse the limiting belief that allows the person’s full potential to shine through, so you turn the negative into a positive.

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