The Three Laws of Performance, Steve Zaffron & Dave Logan

Zaffron and Logan suggest in their book that how we react to situations and perform arises from our perceptions and the language that we use.  I found this book an interesting read.  

The authors present 3 laws:

 1.      How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.

My actions relate to how I perceive the world, not the way it actually is.  There is value in recognizing that I see things through my own filters created from the sum total of my past experiences.

2.      How a situation occurs arises in language.

How a situation occurs to me comes from how I speak about it.  I need to be aware of my internal voice.  The authors describe how we have rackets which come with 4 elements:

• A persistent complaint
• A behaviour that comes with the complaint
• A payoff that I get for complaining
• A cost to me

When I recognize my rackets, I can begin to dismantle them.

3.      Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.

Incidents from the past live on as a prediction, giving me my default future. To create a future, I need a blank canvas to work from; i.e. not cluttered with the past.  First, I must identify my default future.  See that it isn’t inevitable or necessary but a construction of my language.

 What kind of future would:

• Inspire you to take action?
• Fulfil any concerns you might have?
• Be vibrant and compelling the moment you say it?

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