Have you ever tried to change your own behavior?
Were you successful? Have you have tried to change other’s behavior? How’s that going for you and for them?
Today I’m laying down a challenge called the “Defying Gravity Leadership Series.” In my blog articles, I’m going to give you eight different empowerments that will help you not only change yourself, but support others to change their behaviors too!
I will give you 8 powerful brain hacks based on some of the most groundbreaking science of the mind out today….that allow you to use more of your brain for success (and help other people do the same).
The practices I teach have been used successfully by thousands of people that I have worked with, who have had amazing breakthroughs and wins with them.
You can choose to use one of them, or you can choose to use all eight. But I promise, if you practice these, you will have breakthroughs.
What is Behind our Behaviors Holding us Back?
The answer is emotional baggage sitting very happily in our limbic brain that has been recording emotions since the day you were born.
Before modern times, this brain was very essential for survival as it keeps vivid records of pleasure and pain that kept us ALIVE.
Well here’s the reality about that limbic brain and its recordings —we all have it.
Some of us have little tote bags, and some of us have a 747’s worth of luggage we’re pulling behind us.
That emotional baggage not only impacts our ability to change our own behavior, it also impacts our ability to change others behaviors.
Imagine yourself walking around in a grocery store – some people are smiling, some are frowning, some are nice to you, some are rude to you, some are helpful and some cannot be bothered to give you the time of day.
You success is contingent on your ability to control the limbic brain AND train it. Your limbic brain can be a puppy routinely making a mess all over your life OR you can place boundaries on it and train it to be house-broken.
The good news about emotional baggage and the ‘human’ part of the mind – which by the way is what distinguishes us from a lot of other creatures – is the fact that you can change your entire mind if you practice things that help you build new and stronger synapses.
The Mastery is in the practice.
That is how you can completely reform your mind and how someone can relearn to talk and walk after a stroke.
I will gift you the 8 Empowerments you will need to let go of your emotional baggage and train your limbic brain to ‘heel’ so that you can begin to make positive changes in your life and in the lives of others. You can change your own behavior and help others do the same. You can teach an old dog new tricks. Our brains are elastic.
Are you ready to start playing with and growing the abilities of your mind to support your success and the success of everyone in your workplace? These simple practices will change your life AND you cannot become a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do without practicing….Make sure you read all the way to the end because for my Elite Leaders, I have given you a bonus enhancement to the practice I am teaching here.
SO IT IS 100% ESSENTIAL YOU PRACTICE EVERY DAY FOR EVEN 60 SECONDS TO TRAIN YOUR BRAIN!
EMPOWERMENT 1: Know Your Views & Perceptions (or they control you and what you see).
Here’s a good question for you, what color dress am I wearing?
•Grey? Dark grey? Charcoal?
•Anyone see blue?
•Some of you are seeing blue and some of you are seeing slate.
•Do you remember the argument over the color of a dress that went viral?
Guess what? Everyone was right. Here’s the reason why.
Every single one of us has a highly evolved brain that has trained us to see what only our brain can see. It’s unique. It’s a signature.
But, the truth is we each have a color we see based on our past life experiences and how our brain was formed to see color.
I can go through and have 50 different answers for what color this dress I’m wearing is in the picture.
And, if we analyzed how your brain perceives color and how your eyes work, you’re probably all correct with what you’re seeing. There is no correct color of the dress I’m wearing—it’s only how you perceive it based on how you learned your colors.
But guess what? If you can only see what you personally perceive, and if you multiply this by how many people are reading this blog, we’d have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of variations of a view.
We have evolved, very carefully and very specifically, in how we are as human beings.
What this means is, whatever we perceive drives our actions, which in turn, drives our outcomes.
Those outcomes then train our brain to look for only data that then reinforces the existing view we have of something and we get to where we can only see that which reinforces the view and exclude any other data that makes our view untrue.
That is why in politics facts don’t matter for many people.
Think for a moment about that.
We can only see what reinforces our view.
So, if you’re sitting in a room with a team in your organization and you have a lot of dissension going on, you need to remember every single one of them has different colored sunglasses on.
………And, none of the views are wrong, they are just seeing that way.
My Boss (or employees) is an Idiot
Drum roll please…..
Empowerment Practice No. 1 is simple
Anywhere you are stuck in your life—anywhere you have a breakdown in your job, your work or with someone—your number one empowerment is to define what your views are around that situation.
I’d like to share a story. In a class of mine there was a man who worked in a facilities department that had huge amounts of breakdowns in performance—they weren’t meeting goals, metrics, and having all sorts of problems.
He told me, “My boss is an idiot.” And I said, “Okay, your boss is an idiot!” He replies, “That’s why everything’s bad. It’ll never be good. My boss is an idiot.”
My replay back is as follow….“So here is your homework. For one week, every time you see your boss you tell yourself “my boss has something important to tell me.” And just listen for that when he talks to you. Let go of your view and ignore the voice that has all the emotions of thinking he is an idiot and he is wasting your time and you need to stay away from him.
At the next class a week later, everybody wanted to know how it went, right?
Everybody loves an idiot boss story – we all have one!
What happened with the idiot boss?
When I asked, he laughed and said, “I had the best, most productive week with him EVER.”
What changed?
His limbic brain was in fight and flight mode. This guy is an idiot. Stay away. Run from the tiger that is also called my boss. In reality, the boss is not a tiger and most of the time, there is no life or death struggle (I can teach you how to handle that later)…
So the power of this empowerment practice to retrain your brain is that…if you can identify the view that is causing you to have issues with someone…you can change your actions around that person. You can shift and once you shift and hold – the other person can try as much as they want – but they naturally over time shift with you. You are no longer doing the ‘texas-two-step’ together and you stop firing off and responding on that limbic brain emotional baggage that you allowed that person to give you.
In this real life story, not only did the facilities worker shift his and change his own behavior to produce a more positive outcome, he shifted the boss’s behavior because, suddenly, he wasn’t interacting with the boss like he was an idiot.
Double empowerment bonus here!
BONUS: Finding the Unifying View
If you work in a team, anytime you get stuck and people have lots of different viewpoints, you can find what’s called the unifying view where do you all see things similarly and where to you see them differently.
Document them and write them down so everyone feels like their views have been heard and acknowledged.
The unifying view is the big thing you can all agree on and work towards.
Some of the greatest politicians and change-makers in societies were golden at that skill. They would say, “Yeah, we’re fighting about these find points, but the big view is we all agree we should ‘End Poverty.’ Let’s agree to work on that.”
You can do the same exact thing in your workplace—find a unifying view you can all agree on and work for it and sometimes it is o.k. to agree to disagree on other things.
Having trouble getting people to come to a decision? I am sure we can put our heads together and find you a solution.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
Now you’re ready to move on and read: Empowerment 2 – Practice Daily Discomfort.
You will learn how to use discomfort to train your brain to embrace change, innovate, and help your employees do the same.
