Congruence and Personal Success: Mental Strength Tip #160

In order to progress in our human development we must take time to ask questions and contemplate various topics of personal growth, such “Do I exhibit congruence in my thoughts, words and action?”, which is exactly the intention of these virtual personal coaching sessions.

Personal success is achieved through the disciplined execution of a fully established personal development plan and must include self-congruence.

These virtual personal coaching sessions are to assist you in your self-improvement, personal growth and personal development and gain perspective on congruence.

It is intended to create self-empowerment and inspire you to take action so and become aware of your congruence so that you can reach your personal goals and personal success.

Each week, I take a personal growth topic, in this case congruence, and give an overview about it.  Then I’ll continue by asking a series of mental strength questions.  I’ll wrap-up with a summary and some final thoughts.

Take your time with this topic, carefully consider your responses to the questions and write them down.  Personal growth is not supposed to be easy, it takes courage to face yourself.  But when you develop the courage and mental strength to do actually this, you will be building confidence.

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Objective of this Mental Strength Tip on Congruence

To help you understand the critical role congruence plays in your success.

Let’s Get Started:

Congruence means “the state achieved by coming together, the state of agreement”. The Latin congruere means to come together, agree. As an abstract term, congruence means similarity between objects.

I use it when describing communications styles, to build awareness around the importance of the communications messages that your body language and use of voice can add to the words.

As human beings, one of the survival behaviors we have learned is to act as human lie detectors. We scan each other for sincerity, to see if we can trust the messages we are receiving. We know if people aren’t being congruent and therefore treat them with suspicion.

We also know if we are being incongruent ourselves.

We can therefore consider congruence as being in rapport with ourselves and others.  When this happens people perceive us as being sincere, genuine, transparent, authentic and real.

However, achieving this degree of internal and external consistency is not easy.  It requires us significant amounts of self-awareness, self-acceptance and courage.

Self-awareness to really understand our core values and principles; self-acceptance to be honest enough to accept ourselves for who we are and courage to stand up for our values and beliefs.

So, take some time to think about your core values and consciously choose to be congruent every day.

As Dr Seuss, the highly creative children’ author says “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

Questions to Uncover Beliefs about Congruence:

• Is there a relationship between what someone believes and the action they take?
• How do a person’s philosophies impact their level of personal success?
• What percentage of the population’s behavior is congruent with what they profess to want or do?

Unsupportive Beliefs about Congruence:

• Doing the best you can is enough to succeed.
• Being congruent is easy.
• It’s impossible to be congruent.

Mental Strength Beliefs about Congruence:

• Being congruent is simple bit not easy.
• Being congruent is impossible without clarity.
• Being congruent must be monitored every day.

Outrageous Questions:

• Are your thoughts, actions and beliefs congruent with the size and scope of your vision?
• Is it impossible to be congruent or just impossible for you?
• Is your vision clear enough to know what actions to be congruent with?

Reflective Questions:

• Does your current level of congruency make you more of a visionary or a daydreamer?
• How often do you allow thoughts of self-delusion to seep into your self-evaluation?
• At what percentage of your behavioral capacity have you been performing in the last 90 days?

Mental Strength Coaching:

The more we study what it takes to be successful, effective and feel fulfilled, the clearer it becomes that our personal congruence is paramount. Often what holds us back is not our lack of ability or skill, but ourselves. If we have visions or plans of what we want our lives to be, but feel incongruent at an unconscious level, we will probably stop ourselves from doing the things that are necessary to reach those visions or plans.

Most of us occasionally have emotional reactions or responses that get in our way and we might have fears that keep us from taking appropriate actions. Feeling intimidated, jealous, self-righteous, and insecure or that only we have the answers and no-one else can help us are a few of the emotions that can interfere with the direction or path we have chosen for ourselves.

Sometimes this is easier to see in others. You may have a guess about what stops some of your fellow competitors, artists or business associates from working well with you or others or their own craft. We can all benefit greatly from noticing this in ourselves as well.

Final Thought

People often say that they want the ‘good life’ and will sacrifice to get it. If sacrificing means to you sometimes doing things that are difficult, or that you’re unsure of doing, that’s probably often necessary to be successful at anything.

However, if you think you have to ignore and deny large parts of your values to have success, you’d better reconsider. We experience this often in highly successful people whose career is everything and is what defines them. Some people sacrifice their marriages or relationships with their children or their physical health in the name of success.

If you really don’t value those people and activities, then you might be able to ignore them and remain congruent. If you do value those people and activities, working harder or spending more time and effort to be successful in an area that violates those values will always leave you less fulfilled and less satisfied than you might want to be. You will also be performing at a level below your highest potential as these incongruences will hold you back like an anchor does a boat.

Get started today on learning how being in congruence can help you reach your goals by requesting your Introductory Consultation by going HERE.