How Self-Talk Shapes Leadership & Goals

All right, well we are close enough. We're a couple minutes after those of you that got here on time. We've had enough wait. So thank you everyone for joining. We are going to get up and started on our monthly session for Beyond Limitss.

If you have anybody that's having any difficulty, you have a friend, relative coworker, anybody that's trying to log into this session and they have difficulties, please send a message to either Richard or Annand they will do what they can to help them get logged in. We also have our digital workbook, so if you don't have a copy of that, you can send a message through the chat if you'd like your chat messages to be seen by everybody, don't forget to check that blue box above your text field or you can type in everyone and direct those messages so that we can all see it. Of course, if you want to send something directly to one of us on the panel, go right ahead. There's also the option to use the q and at the bottom of your screen, so if you have any direct questions, you're welcome to place those in there and myself and the other panelists will do our best to address those during the session. If we miss one, we will email you afterwards.

So without further ado, we are going to go ahead and get up and running again. This is our monthly Beyond Limitss session. And if you've not been to these before, I'll start with an introduction of myself. My name is Kevin Sp, I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute and we do these sessions every month. My goal and my endeavor here at The Pacific Institute is to help us grow and reach and impact as many companies as we possibly can.

So if you've not done work with us before, this session itself is designed to be an opportunity for us to put leaders together, to put business owners, to put executives in a setting like this and allow us an opportunity to share some insights about the curriculum that we preach and teach. We want to relate that to the current events that are going on in your world. Whether that's things that are going on with the market, whether that's things that are going on with employee trends, we want to try to tie that to what's going on in your world. To tie that to our curriculum, it's obviously a networking event. We're expecting north of a hundred folks to be joining today and it's an opportunity to see who engages with us and how, as well as learn a little bit more about what we do and then it's certainly a chance for us to strengthen our relationship, our relationship with some of you that are existing clients, a relationship with some of you who may become clients in the future, and certainly an opportunity to engage with those of you that have never worked with us before.

So let's see if we can get that chat working. Let's start with a little bit of practice and I'm going to put a question up on the screen and just ask what brought you here today? What are you hoping to gain from this session here on Friday, January 10th, 2025? We can put those answers in the chat. What brought you here today?

I want to make sure we can see those chat answers coming through, which is good. I, ah, excellent. So we've got some invitations coming through, some goal-setting for some folks, looking at aligning some teams, few folks emailed in advance saying they were looking to try to connect culture to some of the things they're doing. I see some options that say personal growth. I love the answer of improving my self-talk because that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today, improving some leadership skills.

So excellence, I appreciate everybody putting your answers in there. We're going to be doing that a lot today. So it really helps with the energy if you continue to participate. Thanks so much for doing that now and in the future. As you can see from all these different answers that are coming in, lots of folks are coming to us for lots of different reasons and that's okay because we have accessible tools that we apply for everyday ordinary humans for all sorts of different reasons.

If you've not worked with The Pacific Institute before, I want to share some of our core beliefs. So we believe that we elevate at the core, the very deepest level of change the human brain to the individual thoughts and beliefs that drive behavior. We believe that there's a lot going on between this right ear and that left ear and we want to try to organize that as much as we possibly can and then simplify it. So we apply everyday accessible cognitive science to help ordinary humans, people like those of us that are in this room here today to access, revise

and live more successful internal narratives. But that's our endeavor. Now we do that based on a core belief that comes from our founder Lou T over 50 years ago. And that is all meaningful and lasting. Change starts on the inside and it works its way out.

Big changes that are going to happen anywhere, any place are going to start with some one making some changes in themselves. So when we focus on growth, we focus on the growth for the individual first, and then when that individual can start seeing and actualizing some positive changes and positive benefits in their life, then that permeates out to their team. So we move from me to we, when we can transform ourselves, we can positively impact those around us and our version of Valhalla, what we're hoping for is we can go from me to we to us so we can move from individual effectiveness to team effectiveness to organizational effectiveness. 'cause once the team transforms, we have the opportunity to pursue goals collectively and collaboratively within the group. Now if you've been to some of these sessions before, first and foremost, thank you for coming back.

But I'll go through just a quick recap, uh, of some of the things that we've covered and if this is the first time through, uh, this is kind of something that we believe about driving results. So we believe that there's leverage in our ability to generate a positive impact and a result in our business. If you're a leader, a manager, an owner, an executive results are important. They're they're, they're your bottom line and there's different results for different reasons. But all of them are going to be predicated on the strategy that you put in place.

And this is the time of year when everybody sits down and they do their strategy meetings and they talk about what they're going to do over the balance of this year and they hope that they can get enough leverage off that strategy to drive the kind of results that they want. Now in order for a strategy to work, it's predicated on human beings doing something, they've gotta do a thing. So we call that behavior. Those behaviors are going to be doing whatever it takes to drive the elements of your strategy that are going to lead towards success. And if you have control over that behavior and everyone does the things that they're supposed to do all the time towards the strategy, you get an awful lot of results coming from that.

And we know from science and psychology that all of behavior comes from our beliefs. So we act in accordance with our beliefs. We don't do things that we don't believe in. And as a result of that, our behavior is directly impacted by the thoughts that run through our head. Those beliefs.

If we control those beliefs and those beliefs are such that yes these behaviors will work, you get a lot of strategy because those beliefs will drive the right behaviors if those behaviors support the strategy. It's only intuitive that the results are going to go up. Like every coin though, there is a flip side to that. So on the other side of the coin is if you don't have a positive belief or you believe that maybe not all of the behaviors are necessary or maybe they're not necessary for you all the time, then you don't engage in those behaviors, you don't engage in strategy and it drives the results down. So what we want to have control over as leaders is how do we have control over that beliefs?

And we believe that the greatest leverage for success lies in aligning beliefs with strategy. And where does that start? It starts with self-talk. You haven't heard self-talk before. It's the conversation that's going on in our head.

We'll get into some details about that. But we are constantly having a conversation that goes on in our head. We are talking to ourselves 24 hours a day and those thoughts become our beliefs. So what that looks like in action is this. You might've seen this gentleman before.

JFK back in the sixties made a very famous speech, his man on the moon speech. He talked about how were going to put a man on the moon before the turn of the decade. So were going to do this before 1970. And in his endeavor to do so, he was trying to cast a vision for the entire country of what were capable of. Not only are we sending a man in space, we're going to go to the moon, walk on the darn thing and come back safe and alive.

So JFK went to the facilities in NASA to tour ahead of time. He goes to the NASA facility because he wants to see the shuttle and the capsule and the rocket and he wants to meet everybody that works there. And if you know anything about JFK, you know that he used to love to glad hand his way through facilities. So he'd go to a factory and shake everybody's hand meet them and he'd say, hi, I'm Jack Kennedy, I'm the president of the United States. What do you do here?

So he's doing this through his time in Houston and he sees somebody who's working diligently, like really diligently, you know that look when somebody's really engaged in the work that they're doing. So he goes and he introduces himself and he says, what do you do here? I'm the president. And the response from the individual that he, that he saw working so diligently was Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon.

And he proceeded to detail all of the things that he was going to do as an individual to help fulfill that belief of putting a man on the moon the way his president had instructed him. The interesting part about the story is that he was not having a conversation with an astronaut and he was not having a conversation with a scientist. He wasn't talking to one of the engineers, he wasn't even talking to one of the managers. The individual he was talking to picked up his tools and went back to work after the discussion to clean the rest of the floors 'cause he was having a conversation with one of the janitors. But the belief was so strong throughout the us, throughout nasa, throughout that organization that everybody there believed that they were playing a part in putting a man on the moon.

Those are the very same people were in that very same building when the Apollo almost 13 disaster happened, right? We know that it went wrong, but they were able to put their heads together, work collectively at his team. And it was individuals like that that had a belief that every American that goes up into space comes right back down safely. And you have to have belief through and through the organization for that to be true. So my question for those that are in the organization is do you have a man on the moon speech ready for your teams and your organizations?

Do you have a belief? So what is one belief or one value that's driving the work that you do? Put your answers in the chat, but what's one belief or value that drives work that you do? The way that our janitor said, I'm helping put a man on the moon. Let's see some of those answers coming through in the chat.

Ooh, these are good. Helping to reach people, uh, reach financial security. Ooh, that's strong. I like that. Worked with a wastewater company recently and they said, I'm keeping my neighborhood and community clean.

My work makes a difference. We provide the best customer service, we're making a difference. Excellent. And these are the types of things that drive our actions. These are the types of things that when we don't feel well or we don't quite have the same motivation.

If we have that belief of I'm putting a man on the moon and we take it seriously, that's something that's really going to guide our actions to make sure we do our job as well as we can. Not some of the time and not most of the time but all of the time. 'cause that's what it takes to do great big things like putting men on the moon. What we believe is this culture is the collective self-talk of your organization. I'm going to say that one more time.

Culture is the collective self-talk of your organization. So we believe at the foundation of culture starts with self-talk. So beliefs of the organization, they build the foundation that everything's built on and all of those beliefs, all that self-talk is comprised of all the people in the organization communicating with themselves. Now as I mentioned before, we've got a lot going on in our head. We've got roughly science says 50 to 70,000 thoughts per day.

And I want to be clear that those thoughts come in the form of a sentence. This is our self-taught. So if anybody here watching just thought to themselves, that doesn't sound like a real statistic, that's one of 'em. And you've got 69,999 more thoughts to go and they all pile up. And the one that becomes the strongest, it's like you're putting weights on a scale which everyone becomes the strongest, becomes your belief.

Now everybody in the organization has their own beliefs, which means every single person has 70,000 thoughts a day running through their head depending on the size of your organization and the quality of your math. That's going to get to a really big number of thoughts. And all of those build the beliefs. So those individual self-talks, they, they form the collective belief of the team or the organization. Now the culture itself is going to be shaped by how people talk to themselves and to each other about their work, about their purpose, about the things that they're doing.

And then when every single member of the team aligns their self-talk with the organizational goals, culture becomes a really powerful enabler. This is how we do things around here. Doesn't become an inhibitor. That actually becomes an enabler when the self-talk is positive like that and when the foundation is strong like that. So my question one more to put in the chat is in one or two words, how would you describe your team's culture?

The first part of that question is in just one or two words, how would you describe your team's culture? And then what role do you think that self-talk plays in

that in the chat? How would you describe your team's culture in one or two words? I love the first answer that went in the chat. It says supportive but we're going to see a bevy of different answers. We're going to see some that sound good, we're going to see some that sound maybe not as good, some that maybe seem uplifting and some that maybe seem to be holding us back.

Some that seem to be leaning towards our goals and some that seem to be pushing against them. Some of the answers here is self-talk is what's normal for us. I love what Cheryl put in there. Uh, cohesive and positive collaborative. There's lots of different options for this and if you're happy with your culture then you're setting goals to maintain it.

And if you're unhappy with it, we're going to talk about how we can interrupt it. So now when we think some funny answers coming in here, when we uh, when we think about driving these results, as we mentioned before, strategy needs, behaviors, those come from beliefs. And as we mentioned in that last slide, those beliefs, those come from the foundation of what everybody is thinking. So all of those folks having those long 50 to 70,000 conversations in their head every day, they're building out your culture. And that culture is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of self-talk conversations.

And when you can control those within the culture and people are saying things like, I'm helping put a man on the moon instead of I pick up garbage or mop floors, you get a totally different level of of leverage because then you can control the beliefs at their root cause. The self-talk, the words to change the behavior, to guide the strategy, to elevate the results. So when you think about your organization's strategies, what kind of beliefs do you think would be needed to support the behaviors? What sort of beliefs do you think are necessary in your organization so that when people need to do the thing, they actually do the thing every time? What kind of beliefs do you think are necessary?

Let's see some answers in the chat. Uh, these are excellent. Richard leads with a belief in our ability to achieve the results. That's a pretty darn good one. A belief that your efforts do in fact make a difference would be a positive and uplifting belief that would probably help drive 'cause our janitor certainly believed that his efforts made a difference.

He believed very likely that if he was able to keep the trash off the floors and the water off the ground and everything clean and tidy, the engineers and the astronauts, they could do their job. Everybody has to be able to see that alignment in those beliefs to support the behaviors. Let's take that one step further. I mentioned before this is a line directly from our curriculum. Our thoughts accumulate to become our, if were in a workshop, I'd ask you to fill in the blank, but the answer is beliefs.

Our thoughts accumulate to become our beliefs. The ones that we have the most frequently. Like I said before, it's like that scale. The more weights that you put on that scale and those weights are your thoughts, those beliefs, the stronger they get. Now with that, our thoughts, they turn into those beliefs, those guide our behaviors, that turns into our results, those results, we have a conversation with ourself about them and that reshapes our beliefs and it turns right back into those thoughts.

So this is what we call a cycle. This is our self-talk cycle that's reaffirming our behaviors and our actions and our beliefs. Now self-talk is either going to reinforce or challenge the beliefs that guide your actions. So when you have those conversations in your head, you've got two choices. Those conversations can be negative, they can naysay, they can pull you away from your goals.

They can be the things that say we don't have enough resources to do that. We haven't been trained for that. We don't have enough talent for that. We can't compete with the big companies like that. We're too small to do that.

That's the critic that lives inside your head. On the other side of the coin of the critic is the coach. That's the one that we hope you can listen to more frequently. That's the one that tells you that if it's something that you don't know how to do, it's only because you don't know how to do it yet that's the one that tells you what you're capable of. That's the one that's guiding you towards your goals.

It's pushing you towards the right behaviors that support the strategy. So we believe that happens in a chain. We call this the belief behavior result chain. And we want to try to break that chain when we can. So we're going to go through a little workbook activity

here in just a moment. If you don't have a copy of the workbook yet, you'll see a version of that that I just placed in the chat and you can download it. But we're going to be going through this five step process and then it starts with defining the goal. Then we want to identify the key behaviors that are necessary. We want to examine the current beliefs that are supporting the behavior.

We want to explore the self-talk that reinforces these beliefs. And then from there we make adjustments as needed. 'cause if the self-talk itself is not reinforcing the belief, then we want to change the self-talk so that we can change the result and we have total control in our ability to do that. So those workbooks are accessible here. You'll see on the first page of that there's the five guidelines of the belief behavior result chain.

And what I'm going to give everybody some opportunity to do is to spend about a minute or two on each page. So starting with the first page of your workbook, that has an opportunity to fill in a blank. That's page number three. So if you go to the third page of your PDF workbook, you'll see on there that this is where you start by writing down a goal. The current strategy, and this is something for yourself, your team, or your organization.

This could be something like increasing client retention, improving sales performance, launching a new product, anything along those lines that makes sense. So think of something, take the next 30 to 60 seconds or so here to think of a strategy or a goal that you have for your group or for your organization. Go ahead and put that in the in your workbook. We'll move on in about a minute. And if you're comfortable, we would love it if you copied your answer and shared it in the chat so we can see what some of those goals for 2025 look like.

What Type of goals are we going to see? Is it increasing sales? Implementing a cross training program for our team? Thank you Ruby for putting an answer in there. Changing people's quality of life, man, these are some good goals.

I like this. Give everybody a chance to put a goal in there. Ooh, comprehensive and effective reports. I like. There are some wonderful answers going through the chat.

Those of you that are putting the chat to everyone, thank you for doing so. If you're accidentally sending it to just the panelist, we'll instruct you to send it to the group. Ooh, Florence, I love that. Double the impact of our business by reaching more people. Excellent.

So as we move along from here, we want to go to the next step of that change. So the first thing we want to do is we want to identify the goal. We want to identify the strategy, we want to identify what it is that we're looking to do for us, our team, our company, that type of thing. From there we need to move down the chain a little bit further and from there we want to start thinking about the behaviors that are needed for that strategy to be successful. So in the next box there I want you to write, what actions do you think your team needs to take?

Like what needs, what is the thing that needs to be done? In order for the ditch to be dug, you actually have to dig the ditch. So an example might be increase increasing client retention, which isn't an action, but building stronger relationships, scheduling regular check-in, resolving issues faster, that is so what you want to put in that box. There is some example behaviors that you think would be necessary or what actions would be necessary for that goal to be accomplished. Go ahead and put those in the box.

I'll give you about a minute or 90 seconds or so to fill those in.

Just like last time, if you do put your answer in your chat, if you're comfortable, copy that, uh, from your workbook and put the answer in the chat for the group to see. Take a peek over the chat, see if there's any sample behaviors going in there. It's more networking meetings to attend. For those of you that work in sales, is it creating more digital content? For those of you that are in marketing, Is it Scheduling the follow ups, going to the meetings, whatever the quote thing is, what has to be done?

All right, I am going to move on to the next portion of that. By all means, if I'm moving too quickly, this is an activity I would very much encourage you to go back and do these workbooks. You can use them over and over and over. So this is an activity that you can do as much as you'd like. Lots of behaviors that are needed to accomplish goals.

But moving on to the third part of that, uh, that chain that we're talking about here. You go to the next page of your workbook, you can see that there's an opportunity for you to fill in the blanks there for you can reflect on the beliefs that are either supporting or holding back the behaviors, the actual belief because the beliefs are really powerful and as we mentioned before, beliefs, they actually drive how consistently we take an action. So for instance, if you believe that your team has the skills and capacity to build stronger relationships, or do you think perhaps that maybe that your team that that maybe your clients don't even value those relationships. So write down any beliefs that you have, whether they're helpful or whether they're unhelpful. So it might sound like a positive belief is, you know, our team excels at building rapport with clients.

Great at that. And the negative version might be, you know, our clients are mostly price driven anyway, so the extra effort's not going to, one of those is a coach, one of 'em is a critic. So what are the beliefs around those behaviors that you need to take place? Is the belief like our janitor had, that we're putting a man on the moon and that all of my actions are going to help make sure that we have a man on the moon someday? Or is it I'm just picking up garbage, I don't have to get it every time.

What are the possible beliefs? Knew that the action you needed to take was brushing your teeth every day. Is the belief I do this every single time no matter what. Or is it the negative belief that it won't really make much of a difference? I go to the dentist anyway.

Once you put it in the workbook, if you can copy those into the chat, we'd love to see those beliefs. See what some of those beliefs and commitments are. This is great. See, we're committed to doing good work and serving the public. I like that as a belief.

Some of you might realize that you have some positive and some negative beliefs around the exact same behavior. That's okay too. Remember we have 50 to 70,000 thoughts running through our head. They don't always necessarily agree with one another. Sometimes We have a little bit of an argument that's running through our mind.

Ah, Anita says, don't rock the boat, just keep your head down. Staff are passionate and care about helping their clients. Pretty Easy to identify which one feels like a coach and which one feels like a client, right? Or like a coach. And which one feels like a critic coach is hopefully the voice that you're hearing the most frequently.

As we move on from there and we start to understand what our beliefs are, then we want to think to ourselves, okay, we have this belief, this is what we're thinking. What does it sound like? What does the conversation sound like that we're having with ourself around that belief? What is this specific self-talk that's reinforcing these beliefs? Because it could be positive and encouraging and encouraging you to take a consistent action or it might be creating some doubt or some hesitation.

So if you take those beliefs even one step further, what does it sound like? What does the conversation you're having with yourself in your head sound like? Is it every interaction I have with a client builds trust? On the other hand, if you think that they're price driven like we believed in the last slide, you might think, you know what? It doesn't matter what I say, they're just going to choose the cheapest option.

Anyway, think about what the conversation sounds like, put those answers into your workbook and then copy 'em over to the chat for us to see. Ooh, Cheryl came in with a good manufacturing example. My belief is I'm building this product. My belief is this product I built is cleaning the air. And love this.

Feel the fear, but speak up and do it anyway. I love that. Don't wait to be not scared, just do it scared. Some additional examples down here at the bottom, Every interaction I have builds trust or they just buy on price. Anyway, the final step of this is to determine are you happy with what you've written so far in these last four pages?

Are you pleased with what you see? Do you want to reinforce the self-talk that you're already having? Are those good conversations? If those 50 to 70,000 conversations that were happening in your head, were all stand, we're all fans in the stands at a football game, are they all encouraging you to go, team go? Or are they shouting boo and they saying awful negative things?

Are you giving yourself home field advantage with the conversation in your mind or are you receiving a bunch of nay saying comments, thoughts? So here's where you make adjustments. You consider what adjustments you could make to your self-talk so that it can align with your beliefs and the behaviors that are actually needed. So instead of saying that my clients only care about price and then having behaviors that reinforce that, which certainly keep you from doing the right thing each and every time. Instead, you might want to modify that and say, my clients appreciate my personalized service and my efforts do make a difference.

And think about the difference in your behavior if you really believed that they appreciate that and that your efforts make a difference. And by just a small shift in that self-talk, because when we think with our words, we generate our pictures in our mind and those drive us towards our actions so we can reinforce those beliefs that drive the right behaviors.

So an example adjustment might be my attention to my clients needs builds loyalty and retention. Even in a competitive market. Even in a competitive market, my attention to client needs builds loyalty and retention. But take a second here, we'll take one more minute to write in those workbooks. Think about any adjustments, look at the other pages, see if there's something you don't like and how might you adjust that self-talk so that it made the behavior seem like it was really the next likely course of action.

And the answers in the chat here are great, ask for help, it's okay not to know everything. Love that. All right, taking a quick peek over the chat here. Looks like folks are putting things into their workbook. Here's another opportunity for us to put a little information in the chat.

And again, you can come back to this PDF, you can use this over and over and over because there's lots of beliefs, lots of behaviors, lots of self-talk going on. Let's put some answers in the chat. Let's see what we've got from the folks that are here in the room. So based on this exercise, based on what we're talking about, what do you think is one belief you think needs to be strengthened or adjusted to align with your team strategy? Knowing that we get leverage from those beliefs from our culture and those support the behaviors and those support the strategy and that drives the result.

What's a belief that you think needs to be strengthened or maybe changed so that you can drive the action in your organization that you want? I like this. This customer helps us to continue, continue, innovate and get best, better area uplifting, very positive. I want to give folks a chance to put some answers in the chat there. Ooh, I like that last one that got put in there by lolly.

The resources available to us are sufficient to meet our goal. I love that we have enough already. That's a strong belief. A lot of times we have beliefs when folks don't believe that their actions make a difference. They don't drive innovation, they don't drive ingenuity, they don't drive what we want.

We oftentimes here at TPI refer to those individuals, it just passengers on the bus. They're, they're there, they're kind of doing what they have to do, but they're not making any noise. They're not driving anything. And when we talk to HR professionals all the time, they're constantly telling us we don't have the resources, we don't have the resources. And the argument that we oftentimes make is because beliefs drive us from doing the right behaviors all the time and sometimes prevent us from doing what we're supposed to do every time.

Oftentimes some of those passengers on the bus, if we change their beliefs, we could get a lot of ingenuity and a lot more out of them because when their beliefs are that their efforts make a difference, it changes everything. That's why janitors who believe that they're putting a man on the moon do really, really good work and have an infectious type of mindset and self-talk that works its way through all cultures. So I want to talk about a couple different ways that you can apply your self-talk to leadership. Here's a few examples. So let's say you wanted to try to improve the confidence behind a project or a behavior.

You're going to want to start with some self-talk for that. And that's important because leaders, when they demonstrate self-confidence, it reassures the team, it fosters trust. Positive self-talk in this area can turn uncertainty into opportunities. So what might that sound like if you're trying to instill more confidence as a leader? It might sound something along the lines of I'm capable of handling changes with composure and clarity or it might sound like I trust my experience

and my intuition to guide me to the right decision. If you like the sound of any of these, just uh, scan the QR code at the end and we'll get you a copy of the slide so you can read through. I would recommend modifying them so they sound like your self-talk. These sound a little bit more like me. You might want to apply some effort towards focus.

You might want to try to adjust your self-talk around focus. Because focus self-talks, it helps leaders avoid distractions and model intentionality. We'll talk more about that in a second. But when you model that intentionality, it encourages the teams to follow suit and the rest of the organization as well. So what might that sound like if you were going to try to adjust your self-talk for focus?

I prioritize what matters to achieve meaningful results. Very focused. I'm fully present in each task meeting and interaction very focused. You may want to apply some self-talk around the areas of action and problem solving. You got some stuff to do and action oriented self-talk.

It keeps leaders forward thinking, solution driven. It inspires teams to act decisively with purpose. And if you're trying to improve your self-talk in those types of areas, it might sound something like every challenge is an opportunity to grow and to innovate. Or it might sound like I take decisive steps towards progress even when the path is not clear. It sounds brave.

And one other area is you might want to apply that towards empathy and team alignment. 'cause empowering self-talk focused on empathy builds stronger relationships. It fosters a culture of collaboration and in that culture of collaboration it fosters more positive self-talk. So if you want to try to apply that, it might sound like I lead with empathy and I understand that every team member has unique strengths. My leadership helps my team achieve their best individually and collectively we talk about assuming positive intent a lot and self-talk helps lead to that one more location in the workbooks there for you to put some uh, some options or put some answers.

What do you think is one empowering self-talk statement that you could adopt to guide your leadership team this year? If you're not part of a leadership team, then what's one that you could adopt to guide yourself? And I'd love to see some of these answers in the chat. There's a few examples that are on the page there. I remain calm and resourceful under pressure.

I bring out the best in my team by leading with clarity and empathy. We've seen some really good ones in the chat already, but let's see some additional answers that go in the chat for what empowering self-talk is going to sound like for you this year. You have a moment to see a few chat answers come in there. I take bold actions that align with our mission and vision. I love that.

Ooh, I like Cheryl's. We know that fail is just the first attempt in learning what a great acronym. FAIL. First attempt in learning is an acronym for fail. I love that Cheryl Richard says we are the team that achieves our our lofty goals.

Love it. Yeah, there's a good point in here about using those I am statements about what we're going to become. Bobby says it's about we not me. Love that. Really good examples.

In the interest of time, we're going to move a little bit further forward, but I would really encourage you to take this type of an exercise back to your teams and find out what self-talk empowers them because everybody has a different version of self-talk and you might be saying the same basic thing, but two different people are going to say it two different ways and it's important to put it in your own language. Now going back to the topic of modeling positive self-talk. This is really important because we see other people exhibit their self-talk all the time because sometimes our self-talk is so strong we open up our mouth and we let it out. So if you're like me and you talk to yourself aloud a lot, those that are around you hear your self-talk. But the thing is, it's not just about staying positive, that's not the only thing.

It's about aligning your internal dialogue with the actual goals.

It's about actually aligning the talk itself with the goals that you have and then modeling that. Because when you model the intentional self-talk, you create a ripple effect that impacts the team and the entire organization. They can see resilience, they can see focus, they can see purpose. So I love this quote from James Baldwin, it's applied towards children. It says children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

If you have children, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now I believe that we could substitute two words in the statement is still true. And I believe that we could substitute the word employees and leaders and make this statement. Employees have never been very good at listening to their leaders or managers, but they've never failed to imitate them. So if you as a leader are exhibiting negative self-talk and talking about the problems, we don't have the resources, we're too small.

That's not what we're cut out for. We tried that before and it didn't work. We're not one of the big guys yet that type of self-talk gets imitated by your team. And when your team imitates that and they model that, it starts to create a culture of negativity. And that's exactly what we're trying to avoid.

So the strongest way that you can do that is to model positive self-talk, correct others when you hear them talking negatively because there's no room for a critic and there's plenty of room for a coach. So to recap some of the stuff that we talked about, our thoughts, they accumulate to become our beliefs, 70,000 of them a day. The strongest one, the one that weighs the most. That's what becomes our belief and we lean into it. That drives our behavior, that drives our results.

And then we have a little conversation with ourself about it and that reinforces those thoughts, beliefs, behaviors and results. And we want to try to break that chain when we can and we can do that with our self-talk, but only if we use our self-talk as a coach instead of as a critic. So to start driving results, start by shaping beliefs, right to drive results, begin with your own and we can help with that. We have a four step process that we use to help modify beliefs for individuals, teams, and organizations. And it starts by doing an assessment.

We use science to determine what type of beliefs you actually have and we want to get those concrete and understand where you are. So we know what we can do moving forward. We'll align with your team to create a roadmap to make sure that we can work towards those goals, aligning all those self-talk and all those behaviors that are needed. And then we apply our practical tools, our everyday cognitive science to the individual or to the organization. And then from there we want to build a model to sustain because it's one thing to just change your beliefs for a little while, but you want to sustain that belief because you don't want to be the person that only believes a different way for a little bit of time before we reverting back to your old comfort zones.

So we want to make sure that we work to sustain whenever we can. One opportunity for you to do that is if you've not experienced any of our curriculum before or if you've experienced our curriculum live but have not done it virtually, we have an upcoming offer to join our Invent Your Future Professional session. This is going to be starting on January 21st. This is a 100% virtual session. So you'll be logging in on a Zoom session like this.

This is actually a webinar, but this one will be a Zoom. So you'll be able to participate and converse. This is where you're going to get access to our proven mindset tools that we've been using for the last 53 years. It gives you a collaborative learning environment and it gives you 24 access to our materials because we're going to give you six months of access to the digital materials that you can go back through. This is starting on the 21st.

It'll run through the middle of February. We meet twice a week for uh, we meet for two hours in our sessions. And anybody who's attending today, if you click on that QR code, if you scan that with your phone, your camera, that'll bring you to the page. Anybody who's attending today gets a $400 discount to that upcoming session. So we really appreciate you logging in, spending an hour with us.

Our way of saying thank you for that is if you use that code, capital B, capital L 400 BL 400 will get you a $400 discount on that upcoming session. We've got about a half a dozen open seats, so we look forward to seeing some folks joining us for that upcoming session. If you have any questions, we're going to be sending out a survey shortly. One other thing that we'd like to talk about is I'm going to ask my other panelist here, Richard, our CEO at The Pacific Institute to explain a new series that we are going to be launching called The Recovery Point. So Richard, it is all yours.

Thank you Kevin. And hello everybody. Great job today, Kevin, as always. Um, so this is an opportunity for you. This is a free opportunity, but you can only qualify for this if you've ever failed at something.

Um, if you've never failed at something really. But if you have what we're doing, we have a whole unit where we focus on our failure and we don't do that to feel badly about ourselves. We do that why? To look how we've recovered. Um, humans have a tendency to go through their successes really quickly.

Oh that was no big deal. I mean it was me, but all the other, you know, that sort of thing. Um, but our failures every time. Let me just ask you all to close your eyes for 30 seconds and think about a failure that really hurts. One that maybe was your fault, maybe wasn't.

Maybe um, you had something to do with it but other people did too. Ideally it's one where you weren't able to do this thing to fail privately. People watched it happen. Um, I personally have a bunch of those and an enormous one from recent history ham. And um, what I want you to do now is imagine how it is that you've recovered from that failure.

What did you do after the thing happened in the moments after, in the hours after and the days and the weeks after? And now looking back on that, assuming it's far enough away that you have, you're no longer in acute failure. If you allow, are you better for it? I bet you are. I bet in worse, maybe in some ways too, but you always gain something and we're trying to make that point.

So the recovery point is a video series with me. It's a one-on-one interview with me where I walk you through a failure of your choice. It is recorded for the world to see. So in order to qualify, you need to have a failure. You need to be able to talk about it, you need to be able to talk about the emotions at the time, and you need to have reflected a little bit on the ways in which you've recovered and what it is that you're grateful for.

It doesn't have to be that every failure is all bunch of gratitude, but we always grow from these things and we're trying to emphasize that it's about a 20 minute interview. Uh, it is recorded and it will be published online for the internet to see. Um, so you have to be comfortable with all that. If you are, um, can we put a link into the chat as to where folks can go to, uh, register for a quick call with me just to learn more about it? Not to actually do it.

Uh, we can probably put that in the chat, but we will absolutely put it in the follow up email that we send out After. Thank you so much. Perfect. So hope to hear from many of you and look forward to interviewing you. And because we operate as a team here, you'll see that we do have the link to recovery point that's made its way into the chat.

So thank you very much Mark Anthony for putting that there. Speaking of, thank you, thank you Richard for sharing that with us. And thank you everybody for being here today. If you'd like to stay engaged with us and I sincerely hope that you do, I will see you again next month. Remember, we do this as a monthly series.

My one request is, if you've been coming to this regularly, please bring somebody with you. Bring somebody along. I challenge everybody who's here today. Bring a friend next time. See if we can get twice as many people here next time.

We'll challenge your friend to do that afterwards. But here's how you stay engaged. You want to give us some feedback. You can scan that QR code. If you want a copy of the slides, go ahead and scan that QR code.

If you'd like to explore our coaching consulting options, learning any little bit more about our core curriculum, please scan that QR code any way that you'd like to engage with us. Please scan that QR code. This is your opportunity to work with us moving forward. I'm going to go ahead and leave both screens up and bounce back and forth just a little bit. So if those of you that are trying to get access to the, uh, to the IYF Pro can do.

So we're going to stay on today for any additional questions. I'm keeping an eye on the chat so if anybody has any questions, please feel free to put those in the chat. Otherwise, we are finished with our presentation for today. You get the next five minutes to go enjoy your Friday. Thank you everybody for being here and for your participation in the chat.

And thank you Richard, for sharing with us about recovery points.