We form our own reality from the BS stories we make up.
We’re conspiracy theorists and a huge ball of emotions.
Once you embrace that truth, it’s way easier to live your life.
Unless something is 1+1=2 it’s a story!
Let it go.
Example: Leader of a group asks a question. You answer it. The person across from you rolls their eyes. You think (one) that person doesn’t like me, (two) they don’t like what I’m saying and/or (three) something about me bothers them. Well, all you know is they rolled their eyes. That’s it. You filled in the rest of the information. They could have remembered something they didn’t do. Got a text from a sick kid. Had a client yell at them.
It’s all a story you created in your mind. That’s your reality now unless you address it with that person.
It’s only TRUE because you MADE IT TRUE!
Make sense?
Here is what you do to resolve the story and write a new ending:
You address that privately with them by saying, “The story in my head is that….” That’s it. That disarms them immediately because of how you led into the conversation.
That’s “Why Your Stories Are Holding Back From Career Success!”
Cheers!
PS: Want to clear out the BS stories that are holding you back? Contact me for coaching options (including a free 20 mins where I’ll help you solve your biggest challenge).
It was an honor to be on this fantastic podcast, Short Story Long. Chris “Drama” Pfaff was a star on the hit MTV Show, Rob & Big, and now has a VERY successful apparel and clothing line. His podcast is downloaded more than 500,000 times per month, making it one of the most popular ones on Apple Podcasts. You can listen to it here, watch the video above, and read the transcript below.
In the podcast on Short Story Long we discuss the following:
Why understanding your patterns creates massive business breakthroughs
How to eliminate your own blind spots and patterns that sabotage your success and your team’s success, and why it is the #1 way to maximize your performance and leadership over every else you can do
Why leadership training and development is broken and doesn’t work
Why your level of self-awareness is always higher than your social awareness, and that only 5% or less of people are high functioning on the self-awareness scale
How to build an extraordinary team with no money, and outflank your competition (even companies 5x or 10X bigger than you).
Why Google’s Project Aristotle is the secret to build a great team, holding effective brainstorming and elevating strategic thinking on a team- and company-level
Why psychological safety is the foundation for all great teams even though no one really does it other than Google (and how you can do it for free.)
And much more…
Jason Treu: At the end of the day, if we don’t have some accountability, you screwed.
Speaker 1: The hardest part is figuring out what you want to master.
Chris Pfaff: Just focus on your product.
Speaker 2: Can you tell somebody that they suck?
Chris Pfaff: You got to just go for it.
Speaker 3: This is exactly I want to do for a living.
Speaker 4: You can’t even tell somebody that their breath stick.
Chris Pfaff: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Short Story Long. We have a very special guest today. His name is Jason Treu. Jason, thanks for coming in.
Jason Treu: Hey, thanks for having me in the show today.
Chris Pfaff: Of course.
Jason Treu: Fun to fly out here today and …
Chris Pfaff: Did you fly out here just for this?
Jason Treu: I had some other things but …
Chris Pfaff: Yeah, we’ll say just for this.
Jason Treu: Just for this. Just for you.
Chris Pfaff: I feel special. Yeah.
Jason Treu: You’re so special.
Chris Pfaff: Yes. I’m really excited because you are an executive coach and I mean we’ll get into all of it, but I’m really interested in what you do and I think that for me, I’m 31 years old, I’ve had a business for close to 10 years now. I had always obviously heard about coaching and life coaching and executive coaching, all this different stuff and I will say that for a long time, I mean born and raised in Ohio, didn’t go to college and maybe my brain was a little turned off to these things, but I always thought it was just, I don’t know, not for me or didn’t really understand what it even was and whatever. It wasn’t until I actually did an interview with somebody who now is a really good friend of mine named Cavion who does a lot of life coaching type stuff.
Chris Pfaff: After his podcast, he said, “Hey man, that was so cool and there was so many people that listened to that. Let me give you a couple sessions for free.” I said, “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll answer whatever questions you asked me, I’ll listen to your advice.” I mean even just his perspective and his outside knowledge on my life and what I’m doing right and wrong was really, really useful and that …
“How can you increase strategic and innovative thinking company-wide?” This question from a former client of mine also goes to increasing problem-solving and how to hold an effective brainstorming session. I wanted to share the answer with you so that you can use it in your organization.
Most people go about attacking this challenge THE WRONG WAY. It gets them very little results. Done right, you can get massive ROI and game-changing results. And it costs very little do.
Question: Do you order the furniture for a house first or do you build the foundation?
If you have a crappy foundation, the whole house will fall down. You have to start at the foundation. Increasing strategic and creative thinking starts not in a conference room, but in the culture of the company and/or the team level.
Here is a blueprint for a plan I’ve done many times. You can use a version of this in your organization.
Here is a question I got from a person from Amazon on my book Social Wealth.He is asking what other things he could do to have more business success (that includes building better business relationships) The key is self-awareness through pattern recognition. Let me explain why.
Your level of self-awareness is either equal to or greater than your social awareness.
That means if you have low self-awareness your ability to lead and manage others will be very poor. Well, studies find that only 10% of people are actually self-aware. I believe that number is actually high.
I’m sharing our (abridged) conversation below.
Here is the key takeaway (if you don’t time to read the conversation):
Rapid behavioral change comes down to pattern recognition – connecting the pattern with the payoff.
Once you see a pattern, you then can figure out the best course of action(s). And your more committed to taking action because you realize you are not “broken.” You are not a bad person. You’ve just done something for so long it’s apart of who you are.
It’s about connecting your past history with your current behavior. Often times what benefitted you in the past no longer serves you now.
For example, if you grew up in a household of six kids and had to talk over others to be heard, it’s no wonder you are a poor listener. Your payoff was talking over others got mommy and daddy to listen to me. You learned that not listening benefitted you. But now not listening is hurting your productivity and leadership of your team so you have to change.
Obviously, listening is a key component of building great relationships. But you’ve got to make that linkage to create the behavioral change.
Here in lies the big challenge: If your self-awareness is low, you will miss-read the external patterns consistently even though you will believe the opposite.
Experience doesn’t change our brain’s wiring near as fast or as much as understanding the patterns that sabotage our success.
Nikolay: Thanks for the link to the team building game. Are there other Social Wealth Tools, Processes or Mindsets I need to know about?
Me:This is a good article. The article is from Harvard Business Review’s Januar 2018 on self- a
nd social-social awareness.
“In 10 separate investigations with nearly 5,000 participants, we examined what self-awareness really is, why we need it, and how we can increase it.
Our research revealed many surprising roadblocks, myths, and truths about what self-awareness is and what it takes to improve it. We’ve found that even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality: We estimate that only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.”
The biggest challenge to building relationships, personally and professionally, is our own blind spots and patterns that sabotage our success. Cultivating your own self-awareness is the single best thing you can do.
Nikolay: Thanks for the great article Jason. So building social skills is not only understanding other people but also understanding yourself on a deeper level. That also means self-awareness is key.
“Empathy is an important component of social cognition that contributes to our ability to understand and respond adaptively to others’ emotions, succeed in emotional communication, and promote prosocial behavior.”
It’s a key leadership and management skill set to master.
