QUOTES & WISDOM
from the
TOP OF THE MIND

Recently, I watched an interview with my friend, Dean Minuto. Dean is an excellent speaker, coach, and trainer. In fact, he is a former Vistage Speaker of the Year, and has developed a process called “Yescalate” that is all about “getting people to yes,” and he goes around the world teaching this to others. During these interesting times, Dean is creating a series he calls, “Starting Different” where he interviews those people who he feels have made a difference in his life and are making a difference in the lives of others. I had the privilege of being the first person in the series.

Recently, Dean was interviewing Steven Robertson, who is a coach, as well as, an author who has written a book entitled, “The Aliens Among Us.” This is all about his work with young people, specifically Generation Z, which is the generation prior to the millennials. Steven has created several meaningful concepts to help this population, but the one that really caught my fancy was what he called a “Friendship GPS” where he shows these young people how to create and sustain friendships.

When I heard this, I thought, “Wow what a great concept! And how cool would it be if we had a GPS, not just for friendships, but for life!” In other words, a process that gives us new Information on where we are, where we want to go, and a turn by turn, step-by-step system for how to get there.

This is actually how I like to think about my “Life from the Top of the Mind” philosophy. It is designed to give us new information on what I call the “what,” the “why,” and the “how.” What is really happening that is keeping us from accessing our clarity, confidence, and creativity… why it is happening… and how can we successfully address these issues?

The “how” is where my GPS for Life concept (what I call a Guided Perspective Shift) comes in to play. In other words, given how much of our life experience depends on our perspective, and given how much of our perspective in the past has been created by our middle and lower brains, which tend to react more to negative events rather than positive ones, we will need to purposefully shift our perspective on life (especially the difficult situations and difficult people that we encounter) if we wish to create the life we want.

One way I help my clients, readers, and seminar participants become skilled at this life-changing process is in asking them to identify the qualities and characteristics that they would like to be able to access when dealing with difficult situations. Once they have completed their list (traditionally, they choose qualities such as confident, calm, authentic, kind, influential, etc.), we begin to examine the sort of beliefs or perspectives that will trigger these more purposeful ways of being. In other words, now that we know where we are and where we want to go, we can begin to determine the shifts in perspective that will get us there.

Of course, all of this requires that we are coming from the Top of the Mind, or the upper 80% of the brain…the neocortex… because this is where purposeful choices originate. Therefore, having a GPS, or Guided Perspective Shift that shows how to change our perspective is critical to success.

If this is something that you feel would be valuable to you and those in your organization, I suggest that you contact me. Let’s set up a time to give you and yours this GPS for life, because, until then, we may find ourselves making wrong turns and poor choices, clueless to the fact that we may be going down a dead-end street.