Feeling Rotten? How to manage your Contamination Narrative

Until last Saturday, most of us hadn”t even known there was such a thing as a ‘contamination narrative’ but writing in The Irish Times, Maureen Gaffney put her finger on Ireland’s very irregular pulse and told us how to make the patient better.

A narrative is how we view and tell our story of what is happening to us. As a nation that has suffered a major blow to its sense of self, we may be drawn to divide our story of ourselves as before and after the traumatic dam burst of bad news. Gaffney warns that if we construct that narrative as the negative turning point in our lives, we can become trapped in a spiral of negative self-talk.

By contrast, if we start to look at the collapse of the Celtic Tiger as the time we made changes in how we run our lives so that we not only coped but found some form of http://www.phpaide.com/demos/ContactForm/ success, then this is a redemptive narrative.

The same is true of how we look at the change in the business landscape. Is it all bad? Or are there opportunities there in those huge shifts in consumer behaviour, in people’s evaluation of our value proposition, in the changing competitive landscape?

Mental Toughness*

People who see change as a potential opportunity rather than a threat show one of the traits of mental toughness. They build their toughness muscle on the back of difficult situations. Mentally tough people take a positive approach to new challenges, in general, feel in control of their lives and approach change with a sense of commitment and confidence.

So the four traits of mentally tough people are:

• Challenge: Whether you see a challenge as a problem or opportunity.
• Control: Do you feel in control of your emotions and of your life?
• Commitment: Are you a sticker or do you give up easily or become distracted?
• Confidence: Does your self-belief help you to complete tasks successfully?

The good news is you can build and develop all of these characteristics, once you become more self- aware. The question for you is: how mentally tough are you?

*Cariona Neary is licensed to administer the MTQ48 Mental Toughness Questionnaire.