Leadership Blog

No one can affect your thoughts on a situation or event, unless you let them…

So now we are to the “How?” question. If the problems and obstacles are there to help separate the tenacious competitors from the casual competitors, how do we own the right mindset?

1. Check the mindset

When you are in the middle of a battle, pause and ask yourself “what am I thinking about this situation?”. It seems silly to ask you to do this – but the purpose of the exercise is to give you momentary pause to “check your thoughts”. It will interrupt your thinking about the situation and allow you to think about your thinking. What am I thinking? Are they the right thoughts?

2. Keep the sled light

Keeping the sled “light” means I don’t pile other events on my sled. The times that I have the most trouble with my “mental game” is when I find myself connecting unrelated events. I have an obstacle or fail to meet an intended result and I, immediately, start to fight thoughts that tie every other failure in my life to this situation. This situation is THIS situation. If the thoughts attempt to spiral you into rehearsing of all previous failures and short comings, try to arrest the process – STOP THE RUN AWAY SLED!!!!

IF (and it’s a big if) you discover through looking at the situation that there are some bad patterns or choices that do connect some dots – then work to identify the pattern. That’s it – Identify the pattern and work to correct that pattern. Your “lot in life” is not to ALWAYS be the losing sled. Start owning the mindset that you can win – even if you’ve never won before – there is always a first!

3. Evolve

If you remember, the Evolve stage is where we look at the lessons learned, understand the needed course corrections and immediately work to implement the changes into our daily running. John C Maxwell has an incredible book called Failing Forward and it is, absolutely, recommended reading. One of the take-aways from this book is that when people fail – they usually forget the lesson that they should have learned and hold onto the emotional pain of the failure. He goes on to counsel that we should forget the emotional hit from the failure and work to remember what the failure will teach us. This has led to an internal mantra for me that echoes – “Learn the lesson – forget the pain”

This doesn’t mean that we don’t remember the hit – we just don’t allow it to become emotional baggage that weighs us down – remember point # 2 – keep the sled light! I am a firm believer in pain being one of the chief teachers in life – we want to avoid the pain – so we don’t do whatever action caused us the pain last time. It doesn’t mean we choose not to race again – it means we improve – we get better and we try not to make the same mistake twice.

4. The Champion’s mindset

What would the top competitors be thinking in this same situation? In order to change the outcome – we have to change our action. In order to change our actions – we have to change our thoughts and beliefs.

Consistently asking yourself, “What would the best leaders think and do in this situation?” can lead you to an elevated thinking, action and outcome.

But the first step is to take ownership of this area (your thoughts are your thoughts) and a thought cannot be removed – it can only be replaced with another thought. Whether that thought is good or whether that thought is self-defeating is up to you.

Choose with me to “Own” the winning mindset today!

What makes one team quit, only seems to inspire another…

Another excerpt from that same interchange that we started in yesterday’s blog (Joe is continuing the conversation with Michael):

“One year on the trail, we had a blizzard come in. I couldn’t even see to the front of my team dogs. I stopped them and created places where they could at least have some break from the blowing snow, and then I did what my father had taught me. I knelt down in the snow and I faced the storm.”

“You didn’t turn your back to the storm?” Michael inquired.

“No! Joe responded emphatically, “You must turn your face to the storm. In this position, it causes the snow to blow around you and pile up behind you. It forms a mound that you can then dig into and create a shelter. You can hollow it out, like a miniature igloo, and last for a couple of days.

“If you turn your back to the storms, you will be covered and most likely die. But facing the storms creates a place of refuge.

What do you teach business people? Don’t you teach people some of these things?”

My mind immediately went to a large framed picture that I had heard hangs in the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company. The sign reads,

“PROBLEMS ARE MONEY. SOLVE THE PROBLEMS, AND YOU GET THE MONEY.”

I rode the rest of the night with my weight on the left runner. I was drenched and half frozen but thankful for Joe’s support in bolstering the mindset that I could overcome what seemed to be relentless and overwhelming problems.

I thought often over the next 30 miles about Lance Mackey. He had gone through throat cancer, had a good chunk of his throat cut out, had lost part of his saliva glands and had to carry a water bottle just to keep his throat moist. Only three years later, in the 2007 race, he went 200 miles on a broken runner and WON!

This year in the Iditarod storms were predicted to hit the trail hard. One of the mushers remarked that he hoped it to be true. He said the strength of his team was to run in impossible conditions that would make other teams quit. Conditions of a severe blowing wind pushing the temperature to -50 F below would give him a competitive edge.

Can we learn to own that mentality? That problems and adversity only serve to differentiate the weak from the strong – that we need to “face the storm” if we are to survive…

There are many storms in business that we are facing right now. Embrace that they will only serve to separate you from the competition and that it is only on difficult ground that are reputations are made and our respect earned.

Problems are not problems – problems are opportunities disguised as discouragement.

Run the race – Face it down – Overcome!

We’ll start this week a little late – it’s been a day of travel, re-connection, and synergy with my partners in Leadership at Giant Impact. A great group with great hearts who’s “Burled Arch” is to Impact the hearts and minds of leaders. The day is ending in Augusta, Georgia as I finalize preparations for tomorrow’s session.

On my heart tonight and for this week is the next logical step from last week – meaning that, inevitably, at some of the checkpoint times when we ‘E-valuate’ we’re going to fall short. There will be times when the path is difficult and we’ll need to handle obstacles or the performance didn’t deliver desired results and we’ll process the failure.

Iditarod Leadership is written in Business Fiction or Business Parable style and is meant to convey business truths that I’ve learned over the years through events that occur as a business consultant is on an Alaskan adventure, where he learns to mush a team of dogs. He and fellow executives end their journey by competing in a 3 day race and one chapter deals with this topic of challenges, problems, and obstacles. To get us started for the week I thought I would throw in a teaser and give an excerpt from and exchange in the book between the main character (Michael) and his mushing guide (Joe):

The second day proved to be some of the most challenging of my life. Problems and personal adversity seem to be lurking around every corner. Sometimes I feel like it is trite to use the phrase, “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” and yet I’m finding myself using that to keep me moving forward.We went through over Gus Pass and down through Rondy Falls. Rondy Falls is a steep descent that has several drop downs. There could not have been a worse position to be running than last going through Rondy Falls. The other sleds in front of us – all with Novice mushers had proven to be brutal on the condition of the trail. The steep decent had caused everyone to stand on their brakes hard and caused ruts in the snow and ice that were 8 – 10″ deep in places. On the last step down a hinge on my break came loose, throwing my right runner against the wall of the rut. My stomach twisted as I heard a crack.

As soon as was safe, I parked the team to look at the damage. My right runner was broken.

I felt like I was the guy on the side walk that had just been drenched by a car driving through a puddle as the snow started to alternate into a miserable freezing rain.

How do they do it? How do they make 1100 miles? I’m struggling after 2 days – they last 10 days over worse terrain.

Did I really expect this to be easy and sail through this without having challenges?

Did my early win exempt me from any of this?

Just as I was teetering on throwing in the towel, Joe stepped in.

“So what?”

“What do you mean so what?” I shot back.

“So what? – it’s cold – it’s hard – you broke a runner – so what?” Joe said as if it was insignificant. “You teach people about business, right? Aren’t their problems in business”

“We have a saying out here that frustration comes from your expectations. If you expected to run a race and be problem free – you’re going to be frustrated. This is how racing is – this is how life is – you face problems.”

The question is more about our perspectives and our will to persevere and we’ll unpack both this week.