To Recap.

Training Your Mind for Success Step 1

Remember learning to drive?  Remember "keep your eyes mainly down the road and not at what is right in front of the car"?  It seemed confusing to me.  The driving instructor reminded me several times by asking "where are you looking?". 

I learned that if you try to drive by looking at what is right in front of the car then you drive erratically.  When, on the other hand, you drive by looking far down the road then you drive smoothly and greatly increase your chances getting to your destination. 

Life and business follow the same rule.  Both smooth out and become less erratic when you keep your eyes down the road.  In driving, looking down the road not only smoothed out your driving, it also calmed your mind.  When you are focused on what is right in front of the car you can get caught up in anxiety producing and repetitive internal conversations like "I’m too close to the center line (adjust), I’m too close to the curb (adjust), I’m too close to the car in front of me (adjust), I’m driving too slow (adjust)." 

The increasing adjustments and readjustments consume your conscious mind and you become aware that you have no idea what is coming at you.  Fear and clenching take over.  When you look down the road, you naturally stay between the lines, maintain proper spacing and know what’s coming.  You calm down and learn to enjoy driving. 

Having goals, in life and business, is the equivalent to looking down the road in driving. They help you drive more smoothly and with less stress and anxiety. When I was sixteen years old and got my drivers license I had an exciting destination to which I really wanted to drive.  It was my girlfriends house.  She was pretty much all I could think about.  Between my house and hers were candy stores, ball fields, sporting good stores, electronics stores and all manner of things which could distract me.  They didn’t because I had an exciting goal that kept my eyes down the road and my heart set on my destination.  In life and business it means everything to have an exciting goal.

Step 1 to Training Your Mind for Success is to give yourself the gift of a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG). 

A BHAG or high level goal creates a high level mindset.  A high level mindset keeps your eyes down the road and helps you avoid distractions and indulgences.  Many authors I’ve read argue that the best goals are other-oriented goals, that the best companies are those with goals bigger than themselves.  ActionCOACH’s BHAG is "World Abundance through Business Re-Education" . My personal BHAG is to help add ten-thousand jobs to our local economy by the end of February 2014. What’s yours?

Training Your Mind for Success Step 2

Try and think of the steps required to tie your shoes.  Most of us can’t do this without resorting to actually tying our shoes.  The knowledge and physical movements necessary to tie our shoes are stored in our subconscious mind.  We tie our shoes without consciously thinking about it – the behavior is practically invisible to our conscious mind. This is true for much of our behavior, not just tying our shoes or driving. 

Our actions and responses are largely driven by habits stored in our sub conscious mind.  This is our mental context.  To improve our results we must change our behavior, to change our behavior we must improve our mindset. 

It’s not just physical, emotional patterns are also stored in our sub-conscious minds and are a major part of our autopilot’s programming.

Buzz Kill

What if our autopilot / habitual responses aren’t very helpful to us?  What if they, in fact, sabotage us?

I was my own buzz killer.  I was really good at it too.  I spent ten years of my life being the angry man.  Friends and coworkers even bought me the "Grumpy" shirt – with the line on it "Hasn’t smiled in 37 years."  I wore it.  Proudly.  Really.  I was in the software and computer business then.   Computer users and business leaders were constantly, to my mind, screwing things up or making very stupid decisions.  The things they did, I thought, constantly made me angry.  I became very critical of people in general. 

It was, I thought to myself every day, a "moron-athon out there."  I was angry at having to put up with all of it.  I regularly spent two or three hours every evening sitting angrily at my desk while I bitterly went over the idiotic things I had endured that day.  This led to a bunch of unhealthy behaviors.

One day I was listening to a couple of people tell me about the fun they had the previous evening.  I had, I realized, spent the previous evening being angry at these very two people.  They had been out having fun while I was sitting home stewing in anger because of them, or so I thought.  It was somehow their fault that I was having the opposite of fun.

That’s when I had a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious).  They hadn’t, I realized, decided I should sit angry at home.  That was my choice.  It began dawning on me that they didn’t chose for me to be angry either.  Everything I was blaming on others was my own choice.  Yuck.  I chose, back then, to be angry at many things, I chose to go over and over these things in my mind.  I had a well developed habit of reacting angrily.  There are, I began to realize, an infinite number of reasons to be angry.  I was tired, though, of spending my time, my life, feeling angry.  I wanted to have some fun.  I was going to have to learn how to make a different choice.

Step 2 to training your mind for success is to accept responsibility for your mental context – your mindset.  Accepting responsibility means changing a few simple words in your thinking and speaking habits.  You can no longer say or think, for example,;

• That  (he, she, it or they make) makes me angry
• That upsets me
• That makes me sad

Those words are, after all, lies.  Nothing and no one can reach inside your head and flip our angry switch.  Only we have that power.  If you change your language to recognize this reality you take power and responsibility over your own mindset.  Now you get to say;

• I choose to get angry at that (him, her, it or them)
• I choose to get upset about that
• I choose to feel sad about that

Once you accept responsibility for your state of mind, well, then you get to do something about it.

Training Your Mind for Success Step 3

Tiny – Even Silly Things Make Huge Differences.

I had, for whatever reason, and the reasons don’t even matter, programmed my autopilot to view many things negatively.  I wasn’t having much fun and it wasn’t leading to great success either.  I worried that this was just the way I was – but I refused to accept that conclusion.  I became determined to figure out how to change me.  I had to face a bunch of things I had heard before and at which I had sneered.  There were  some that I had thought were stupid that I might have to try. I just didn’t believe that something trivial and ridiculous that I felt foolish doing could be of any help in lifting my heavy negative mindset.  I wasn’t going to accept staying the way I was, though, so I gritted my teeth and gave something a try. 

I had, if you remember him from Saturday Night Live, Stuart Smalley’s opinion of talking to myself using goofy "self – affirmations".  A dumb-ass, moronic idea, I snorted at the very thought.  Really successful people I knew, however, were suggesting it was key.  With great doubt and feeling foolish I decided to try it.  Since I knew, quite well, that there were infinite reasons to feel angry I wondered if there might also be infinite reasons to feel joy.  Given the choice of spending more of my life feeling angry or more of it feeling joy – I chose joy.  Duh.  The affirmation I decided I would say out loud to myself, once or twice a day, would be "I am in a state of joy."  So I said it, out loud.  It didn’t seem to work.

It was just so dumb I couldn’t take it seriously.  I chuckled at the lameness of it and my own dorky-ness in saying it. Then I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror.  That made me mad.  I was smiling.  Laughing even.  The damn thing had put a smile on my face.  Finding myself mad that the the dumb thing had, after all,  worked – well I smiled bigger.  I laughed at myself.  Me doing a ridiculous affirmation was funny.  I had to face the truth.   I was, for a moment, in a state of joy.  I was pissed off, embarrassed and delighted all at the same time.  Something of which I had made fun ( I had even purchased the Stuart Smalley book) might actually work.  So I kept talking nonsense to myself.  Out loud.  More than once a day.

It took a while but people began reacting differently to me.  I realized how far I had come when, at a networking meeting, someone actually said to me "you always seem like you are up to something with that smile on your face."  I was no longer the angry man.  It was a joy to hear.

Step 3 to Training Your Mind for Success is to use a tiny, silly habit to start building your successful mindset.

Talking to yourself, out loud, a couple of times a day is an example of a "tiny habit".  "Tiny habits" are a powerful system for leading yourself to a happier, richer and more successful life.  It take you a few seconds to say something out loud to yourself and it won’t cost you anything.  Next we will look at systemizing “Tiny Habits”.

Habits of the Truly Successful – You should be committed to adopting these too!

Other habits that truly successful people have are the habit of self development and the habit of looking down the road and planning.

Consider giving these habits a try yourself.  Get a plan for your business in place at our upcoming GrowthCLUB workshop.  The next one is March 30th.  Click here for more information on GrowthCLUB.

Improve your business skills at our fun business BootCAMP (April 10).  Click here for more information on our BootCAMP.

Your Unreasonable Friend,

Dennis

copyright@DennisWillis 2011,2012 Business Coach Ohio

Last week in step 1 we discussed that in order to program our autopilot for success we need a high level goal.  I also shared my high level goal with you.   You’ll have to let us know if you came up with one that makes your heart leap.

Training Your Mind for Success: Step 2

I ran into a mental context this past Friday that was, at least, if not pleasant, instructive.

con·text

n.

1. The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning.

2. The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting

Anger and blame and then, more of both.  This guy was mad. It was somebody’s fault.  Not his. No, not his.  Somebody made him mad.

That kind of thinking takes place in a common mental context.  One in which  other people have the power to make a person angry. 

Fuming, blaming and criticizing the other person’s behavior with clenched jaws, this guy did not want to hear my questions.

“How much of your life do you want to spend angry?”  He just blinked at me.  “No one,” I told him, “can actually make you angry. You have to choose it.  If you say ‘he makes me mad,’ then I say you are lying.  If you say ‘I got mad about  what he is doing, then I think you are telling the truth.  Why are you choosing to spend your life angry?”

There was a shift in his mental context.  It made sense to him.  “You’re right, I’m choosing to be angry.”  We had, for a little while, a more constructive conversation.  Even more instructively, it didn’t last long.

Just as through repetition we’ve taught our mental autopilot how to drive a car for us  (see “You Should Be Committed” part 1) we’ve also taught our mental autopilot how to think for us.  Just as we have driving habits, we have thinking habits.

In this case his conscious mind chose to think differently for a few minutes and then his autopilot, his thinking habit if you will, kicked back in and he became too upset to talk further.

I observed this with regretful eyes because I spent 10 years of my life doing the same thing.   I was the angry man.  It was so easily justifiable, so clear – even.  So stupid, really. 

I figured out, eventually, that the people I was angry at were enjoying themselves, while I was home gnashing my teeth – for years.  The only thing I accomplished was diminishing my own life and that of my loved ones.  Now and then, I still find myself visiting victim land but I’m no longer a permanent resident vying for a leadership position. 

Its not that life is giving me fewer opportunities to be angry.  The universe hasn’t started running the way I think it should.  There are the same infinite number or reasons to be angry now as there were back then.  I just realized that there are also an infinite number of reasons to feel joyful too.  Then I asked myself how much time do I want to spend feeling angry versus feeling joyful.  Duh. 

I also got to wondering what choosing to be angry does for me.  Eventually I realized I use it to avoid looking in the mirror -  to avoid looking closely at my own behavior.  It is far easier to blame pretty much anything or anyone else.  What scared me, accepting responsibility, turns out to be a great source of joy.  Really.  This continues to be a big surprise to me.

Choosing to blame negative feelings or unhappy life circumstances on others is victim thinking.  We all know a professional victim or two.  It is not a successful thinking habit.  I suspect most of us are, at least, amateurs at it at various times in our life.  Really successful people don’t do it.

Training Your Mind for Success

Step 1 is to give yourself a high level goal.

Step 2 is to accept responsibility for your mental context – your mindset – and hold yourself accountable for improving it every day for the rest of your life.

till·er/?til?r/

Noun:

1. A horizontal bar fitted to the head of a boat’s rudder post and used for steering.
2. An implement or machine for breaking up soil; a plow or cultivator.

This is where you put your hand on the tiller and begin steering.  Your mindset is your tiller.  The wind and the currents will carry you somewhere.  They may do so anyway.  They will certainly try.  Not to mention the economy, family and friends, the news or a host of other forces that will gladly steer your life if you choose to let them. 

Will you choose to let them?  Or, will you choose your own course?

"Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!"

Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (1801-1870). Aboard Hartford, Farragut entered Mobile Bay, Alabama, 5 August 1864, in two columns, with armored monitors leading and a fleet of wooden ships following. When the lead monitor Tecumseh was demolished by a mine, the wooden ship Brooklyn stopped, and the line drifted in confusion toward Fort Morgan. As disaster seemed imminent, Farragut gave the orders embodied by these famous words. He swung his own ship clear and headed across the mines, which failed to explode. The fleet followed and anchored above the forts, which, now isolated, surrendered one by one. The torpedoes to which Farragut and his contemporaries referred would today be described as tethered mines.
[Hearn, Chester G. Admiral David Glasgow Farragut: The Civil War Years. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988): 263-265. According to the book by Admiral Farragut's son, The Life of David Glasgow Farragut, First Admiral of the United States Navy, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1879), pages 416-417, Admiral Farragut said "Damn the torpedoes! Four bells! Captain Crayton, go ahead! Joucett, full speed!"] from http://www.history.navy.mil/trivia/trivia02.htm

One ship destroyed in front of him, another frozen in fear, drifting towards disaster Farragut had a few excuses available for not going forward.  His mindset didn’t lead him to accept them.  His mindset steered him to take another path, one that led him to the results he wanted.  The mindset comes first, then the actions, then the results.  Are you willing to take ownership of your mindset?  Will you own your own ship?

My high level goal, my Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), is to help add 10,000 jobs to our area’s economy over the next two years.  I need quite a mindset to achieve this objective.  There are a couple of torpedoes to be damned along the way.  How will I strengthen my mindset to match this task?

To be committed is to do what is necessary to get your autopilot on board with the commitment every day.  Doing this in a way that you will stick to and continue is the key. 

You and I should be committed.  Next we’ll look at some “insignificant” ways to make significant changes on a daily basis.  Stay tuned.

Consider strengthening your commitment to run a successful and profitable business by attending one of our upcoming workshops.

Business BootCAMP starts February 27th.

Business GrowthCLUB March 30th

Your unreasonable friend,

Dennis

216-965-9129

copyright@DennisWillis 2011,2012 Business Coach Ohio

Not being a mind reader I’ve thought and thought about what those words and  tone actually meant.  He said that, because being an unreasonable friend, I was pushing him to change a thinking habit.

The thinking habit he has wanted to change is the one where he criticizes himself very harshly when he doesn’t do something perfectly.  He will even verbalize it as “I’m such an idiot” or “I’m terrible at that” or “I really screwed that up – as usual” or “I’m just not good enough”.

You may recognize that the line “I’ve been trying to change this for 40 years” is yet another self criticism.  I pointed this out and he responded that “NO, it’s just a fact.”

Facts are not really facts.  Einstein taught us that everything is relative.  Post Einstein-ian physics has taught us the universe is a very very weird place where things exist and don’t exist at the same time.  Where we are all, at this very moment, hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour while we think we are sitting still and reading (or writing!).  And we are not even sitting on the chair we that we think, it is a fact, that we are sitting on.  We are actually floating above it upon nuclear forces.  We think it’s a fact that we and the chair are solid things when we and the chair are mostly empty space.   Facts are arguably opinions about which we have feelings.

The common example we all know is; “the glass is half empty” vs. “the glass is half full”.  While both of these statements are logically equivalent they have very different effects on us when we think them.  One has us focusing on what we don’t have and one on what we do have.  One has us feeling sad about what we don’t have and one has us feeling grateful about what we do have.  There are deeper levels than this but consider how you want to feel.

Just recently a very talented, successful and well loved singer drank herself to death.  You may know who I mean.  If not, I’m sure you can think of a similar case.  I’m guessing she chose to think in a way that left her feeling angry, frustrated and sad.  I’m guessing she drank to numb the ensuing pain.   Choosing to think this way seems to know no boundaries, economic or otherwise.

Thinking habits do not change easily.  Habits are well trained neural networks that are part of our sub-conscious mind.  Consciously realizing we have a habit we wish to change does not make the neural network go away.  It is a thinking muscle, if you will, that must be consciously retrained until we have the habit that we want.  This process takes time and discipline.  You have to “hear” in your mind the response generated by your sub-conscious and then consciously replace it with the thought-response you want.  Saying it out loud – thereby getting in one repetition of the new habit will reinforce the new sub-c0nscious thought-response you are trying to create – helping make it a habit.

This can be slow and detailed work.  My favorite phrase here is “slow down to speed up.”  The more you slow down and catch your thinking and change it the faster the replacement becomes habit.  Most of us think because we’ve learned something or become consciously aware of a bad habit we will change it immediately. Then when the same bad habit shows up a few moments or days later we get frustrated that what we learned didn’t stick.  Then we criticize ourselves and, often, give up.  Because we didn’t learn it the first time we stoop to bad mouthing ourselves and quitting.

So the most important word is forgive.  We simply must understand and forgive ourselves.  Understanding the nature of changing a habit helps us not have unrealistic expectations of ourselves.  Forgiving ourselves for continuing a behavior we know we don’t want gives us the permission and encouragement to keep working at changing it. 

NASA learned it takes about 30 days of continuous reinforcement to rewrite a strong neural network.  With intermittent reinforcement it takes longer.  Forgiving yourself and consciously rewriting the thought until you have the new habit simply takes as long as it takes.  Getting mad at yourself and beating yourself up – just kills you.  Forgiving yourself and not rewriting the thought is another way of dying.  You have to to both, forgive yourself and make the conscious effort to rewrite the thought.

If you are not growing you are dying.  Create the lifelong habit of growing your thinking and all the moments of your life become opportunities to become a stronger you.

To my friend – you should think “I am so happy to learn, now, how to make changes I have wanted to make for 40 years.”  Forgive yourself for not getting it perfectly right every time and keep making the effort.  It is the effort that makes you strong.

Your unreasonable friend,

Dennis

Are you a business owner or leader that wants better results?  Here is a flyer for my upcoming workshop; GrowthCLUB.

copyright@DennisWillis 2011,2012 Business Coach Ohio

The “things are so bad…” conversation. Yesterday, this well educated and scarily smart business owner leaned closer over the table and whispered, “I think the real unemployment rate in Cleveland is probably over twenty percent.”  He went on to real off a bunch of facts and brutal realities about our area.  He capped it off with, of course, “Lebron really hurt this area.”

Boomtown. I was born in Cleveland and grew up in Elyria.  My father owned a construction company.  He moved us to Elyria in the early 60’s because it was booming.  For a year or two Elyria was the fastest growing city in the entire country.  Northeast Ohio was booming.  People were moving here from everywhere. 

We were at the top then.  We were making cars and steel and tires and machine parts and a whole bunch of other stuff and selling it everywhere.  Cash was being pumped into our region and people were following it.  Houses and schools and malls were being built and jobs were plentiful. 

Are we at the bottom now?  There were some down times between then and now.  The original oil crisis had lines at gas stations we’ve never seen again.  The original financial crisis had the savings and loan collapse and our government bail out plastered on the front pages.  Some say it is worse now.  Some think we are heading for a double dip. 

Boom then bust then?  So what did I say that stopped my friend and changed the nature of the conversation.  “Things come in cycles don’t they?”, I asked.  “You are saying we are at the bottom of the cycle right?  Well, what comes next?”  He brightened up a bit and asked, “So you’re saying we’ve got nowhere to go but up?”

We are in this together.  Belief is one thing action is another.  He sent me an email later on asking me for ideas on how we can help each other make money.  Now we’re talking! 

Action.  Don’t get your hopes up – get into action.  Positive attitude and positive thinking are important.  Positive action is necessary.  What are you willing to do?  Jim Rohn said, “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”  Ghandi said “be the change you want to see in the world.”  How can we be better – each of us has to work on ourselves – then we all become better.

Opportunity.  Here is just one little idea.  Positive cash flow is needed in our area.  Let’s focus on just that.  Companies that sell products and services outside Northeast Ohio bring cash into Northeast Ohio.  Let’s identify these companies and find them some referrals.  If you own such a company tell us about yourself so the rest of us can help you find business.  I just now created a Facebook page for this purpose.  It is http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Refer-NEO/122978311079105?filter=1. Click now  and type in a sentence and a link to your website.  Take just this little action.  Let’s see what we can do together.

Better.  No matter how good we are – we can always be better.  I’m part of an organization dedicated to that belief.  What we’re learning from doing that with 10,000 business every week is available to you too.  Contact me (denniswillis@actioncoach.com).  Here is a link to a few videos of business owners of various size businesses who are succeeding at getting better results http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=actioncoach+testimonial&aq=0.

copyright@DennisWillis 2011,2012 Business Coach Ohio

Fear is an ancient protector of our very skin from physical threat.  An ancient savior that has become a crippling nuisance when we need, for example, to speak publicly.  Fear has become a brain cramp when we try to talk to someone we find attractive.  It’s become a liability in our professional lives preventing us from picking up a phone to call a prospect.  It is as if fear has caused the phone to weigh ten thousand pounds.

Perhaps, in our bones, we still carry the old knowing that standing out in the crowd can attract a watching predator or a that approaching a potential mate can attract a violent competitor.  Odds are pretty slim, today, that you’ll be eaten or beaten for letting your light shine bright.  Few, however, do.

To shine you must relax your grip on fear.  Simple.  Really.  I’m serious.

It is a simple thing to start running fear out of your life.  You accept the fact that you use thoughts to drive up your fear.  You become aware of when you have such thoughts.  You replace them with other thoughts.  Repeat until fear is at a useful level.

Fire yourself up instead of beating yourself up. Negative thoughts are self demolition and work hand in hand with fear.  We lead our self to self – paralysis with this one-two punch combination.  Negative thoughts leave you feeling more vulnerable to potential predators and competitors.

The good news, you deal with your own negativity the same way you deal with your own fear.  Positive, courageous thoughts grow positive and courageous lives for ourselves.  Start listening to yourself.  Start upgrading your thoughts.  Start choosing to feel joyful instead of fearful.

Start talking to yourself positively.  Stop talking to yourself negatively and fearfully.  Here’s how.

1) Planned self talk.
2) Planned self listening.
3) Planned pattern interruption.

Now, here are the details.

1) Planned self talk.

Say good things to yourself out loud at least twice a day.   Listen to yourself and repeat so that you believe them.  Come up with a list of 20 things to say.  You must start them with “I am.”
Say things like:
I am in a state of joy.
I am happy.  OR  I am in the process of becoming happy.

2) Planned self listening.

Listen to your thoughts and write down the negative and fearful ones.
Categorize them.  Below are three links to articles on categorizing negative and fearful thinking. Create challenges and/or replacements.  Suggestions on how to do this are also in the articles below.

3) Planned pattern interruption.

Catch yourself talking yourself down or scaring yourself.  Stop yourself.  Substitute your challenges or replacements and feel better.Catch yourself saying to yourself “I’m horrible at  ____________” and simply think (and say) “I have an opportunity to be better at ____________.”

A simple process.  Now you have a simple choice.  To live in fear or joy.  I hope you pick the latter and start talking yourself up.

Articles
http://www.dbsalliance.org/site/PageServer?pagename=empower_negativethinkingWS
http://els4kids.blogspot.com/2008/12/automatic-negative-thoughts-ants-ideas.html
http://www.byui.edu/CounselingCenter/Stress%20Management/Challenging%20Distorted%20Thinking.htm

copyright@DennisWillis 2011,2012 Business Coach Ohio