Recently, we had a familiar face in the office co-hosting a much anticipated webinar with George Myers. Being a partner for several years at the institute before leaving in 2009, Hugh Blane has since become an expert in mindset training, spearheading Claris Consulting as its president. These two experts teamed up to show how many of the well-known frameworks championed by the institute can be employed to catalyze the benefits one finds in Mastering Your Mindset.
Behavior Styles Are the Tip of the Iceberg
Developed by Effectiveness Institute, Behavior Styles uses the metaphor of an iceberg to identify critical differences between behavior and personality. The entire iceberg represents our personality, the portion above the waterline reflecting our observable behaviors—where conscious choices can be made to change behavior (i.e., “rotate your iceberg”). At the institute, we tend to focus on the impact one’s behaviors might have on other people. The actions we can take to improve our relationships take place in the observable realm: what we see people do and how we choose to respond.
There are countless outward shifts we can make to improve interpersonal communications (such as subtle modifications to the ways we email people), but what stops most people from making successful long-term change to their behavior resides in their mindset. In a way, mindset dwells just below the peel of the water. It informs and colors much of what we do above the surface. Mastering mindset demands that we examine what lies beneath, revealing submerged truths that powerfully shape the ways our behaviors ultimately manifest.
Mindset is a mental attitude or perspective that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of situations. We can make a deliberate change to any given behavior in hopes of improving an outcome, but mindset is going to linger in the subconscious, influencing the more subtle aspects of those outward behaviors. Consider a time when someone complimented your outfit, but it felt less like an affirmation and more like a calculated behavior stemming from an ulterior motive. Their mindset suggested something deeper about their outward behavior.
We each have habits that are not serving us (or others) very well. Uncovering these requires some introspection (guidance from experienced coaches helps).
[Read “Do You Pass the Smile Test?”]
Mindset Training Brings Long-term Change
Changes in mindset become new patterns, preferences, or inclinations. They create a new natural resting place from which our behaviors flow. Improve your mindset and it will become that much easier to make proper use of Behavior Styles or any of the other behavior-centric techniques utilized at Effectiveness Institute. This is what we mean by the Relationship 360.
During this webinar, George and Hugh cover a lot of ground in their one-hour discussion, but they center the Relationship 360 around the following aims:
- Cultivating a “playing to win” versus a “playing not to lose” way of viewing the world.
- Enabling employees to willingly raise the bar on their own performance.
- Fostering a deeper commitment to individual, team, and organizational learning.
- Expanding change and growth.
- Increasing levels of courage, humility, and discipline.
- Broadening success, in regards to human flourishing and personal satisfaction.
Highlights
“You can be successful all day long, but if you are successful and at home you’re really dissatisfied, and you don’t have a sense of well-being, and you’re not healthy, you’re dead in the water. It’s going to catch up with you.”
“In the absence of context and information, people will guess negatively 92% of the time. So that means, even with our own behavior, we guess negatively about ourselves.”
“Mindset is something I train every day.”
“I realized it was not in my clients’ best interest. So, I replaced a five-letter word—money—with another five-letter word, which was value. And I believe that if you create exquisite value for someone, money is going to follow. There’s a law of reciprocity.”
“There are triggers. If you can eliminate the trigger, then the likelihood that you’re going to do something goes down.”