Leadership Beliefs & Shifting Perspectives

Thank you everyone for joining. We are going to get up and running. This is our Monthly Beyond Limitss executive briefing series and I'm thrilled to have everybody here joining us. This is my second time hosting this event, and as previously mentioned, there's going to be a little over a hundred of you joining today. So we appreciate you taking out your time on a Friday morning or afternoon to join with us.

If you have not attended before or if we've not met, my name is Kevin Spindt. I am the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute and we do this monthly session, uh, on the first Friday of every month. And our goal with this session is to be able to gather leaders like yourself. This is one heck of a network. If you look around, we've got a lot of c-suite individuals, we've got a lot of executives, we've got a lot of business owners.

Our goal is to get those folks like yourselves together into a room, share some of the insights, share some of our core curriculum, and how we apply that into some of the salient things that are going on in the world today. We want to be able to promote what we do and how we do it. We want to give you a chance to learn from others and share some experiences. We've got a lot of folks in here that have been involved and have worked with us as clients for a decade plus, and we have some folks that have never met us before. Either way, we're thrilled to have you here.

Thank you for sharing your morning with us. One of the things that we want to do is be able to provide a lot of engagement. And what we do in doing so is I want to share a little bit of The Pacific Institute's core principle. If you were here last time, please don't tune out for 90 seconds. I'm going to say it slightly differently.

But for those of you that have not been introduced to The Pacific Institute, our core principle comes from a quote for our, from our founder, Lu Lut over 53 years ago. All meaningful and lasting change. It starts on the inside and it works its way out. And that's our core belief. And what we mean by that is when you make those changes yourself, then you can start to impact those that are around you.

So the next tier of that moves from me to we. And when we transform ourselves, we can positively impact the people that are around us. Now, depending on how big your circle is, that might be your family, that might be your small team, that might be your small organization. But the next tier up from there, when you can make those transformations as a group, as a team, then you can collectively pursue goals as a collective group. So what we like to think about is we talk about that happening at an individual level.

We talk about change happening at a team level and an organizational level. And no matter what, when we're looking to make changes either for ourselves or our team or our entire organization, one fundamental, one fundamental fact remains true. And that's that it's going to start on the inside, it's going to start at the core, and it's going to work its way out. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So to get us up and running, to get us started, I'm going to have a little warmup activity for everyone.

This is an individual activity that you all get to do by yourselves. So take a look at this screen and what you can see here is a series of parking spaces, and there's one car that's covering these parking spaces and they're numbered. My question for you is, and you can put the answer in the chat if you have it, what parking space is covered by the parked car below? If you know the answer, put it in the chat. I'm looking at screens.

I don't see anybody smiling real big like they have the answer yet. Does anybody have the answer they can put in there? Seen a couple of answers pop in. How many people are looking at this and they say, I can't see it. I don't know what it's, I'm not sure yet.

How many people here think the answer is 11? 11? How many people here think the answer is eight? How many people are like Mark Anthony and say, I have no idea. The vast majority of people have a hard time with this. Now what if I told you that I gave this exact assignment to a group the other day and almost every single person in that group was able to get it right within just the first couple of seconds.

What if I also told you that that was a group of children that were all in the fourth and fifth grade? Would you believe me? What if I told you that I showed it to those children, those geniuses, but I showed 'em this. And the only difference was they were sitting on the other side of the table from you. So when they looked at it, they saw it from a slightly different perspective and they were able to see that When you see the number 86 and something's missing and you see 88, 89, 90, 91, a lot of you got it right?

87 is the number that's hiding under there. If you had just looked at it from a different perspective, you would've been able to be successful. And see, very obvious, the missing number between 86 and 88 is 87. Now, how many of you looked at that and when you first saw it, like, I have no idea, some random thing, it's jumping by two, it's jumping by 10. Are those children smarter than you?

Probably not. Did they have a different perspective that led them to success? Absolutely did. So that is our goal today. Our goal today is to try to take a look at some of the things that we're doing just a little bit differently because maybe if we look at it from a different angle, we can be successful and that's what we're going to try to accomplish today.

Now, perspective is something that we talk about at The Pacific Institute a lot. How many people here are parents? How many people here have children? Doesn't matter what age. When I talk about perspective, anybody who's a parent knows what I'm talking about.

Because before you had children, you had a perspective about nine 30 to 10:00 PM in the evening. That's drastically different than the perspective you have about that same time of day. So when things change, our perspectives change with it. We had a couple of comics here that point this out. Imagine you're looking at this thing on the ground.

Which one of these little cartoon individuals is correct? Is it a six or is it a nine that they're looking at? It's purely perspective. How about these guys? Is that an M or a W?

If I asked them to produce something and I paid them for their output and I need them to create things that all started with the letter they saw in front of them, one group would give me completely opposite answers from the other, but they'd have full conviction that they were right. So in The Pacific Institute, we talk about this, it's just blind spots. We've all heard about blind spots before. The very obvious things that are right in front of us that we can't see. It's those horse blinders.

They block on all the, they block out all the other possibilities. At The Pacific Institute, we talk about that as a principle called lock on lockout. Once you've locked onto one belief, your brain goes, well, that's the answer. And it starts to lock out all those other possible beliefs. When you first look at those parking spaces and you were like, well, there's a 66 or there's a 68, uh, there's an 88, it looks like there's a 90, I guess it's probably you locked out the possibility that you could have just looked at it the other way and it would've been really, really easy.

This is one of my all time favorite far side comics. You take a look at this one, you'll see that the gentleman on the left has found salvation. There's a boat let you look over on the right, and that gentleman has found salvation. There's land, but unless their goal objectively is just human companionships, they're both still kind of screwed. So it's all just perspective.

So what we want to talk about is how do we change our perspective? What happens? Sometimes things happen to change our perspective for us, like Covid, we're having children, we're getting a new job, but other times we have to change it on our own. So I want to do a little bit of an activity. I want to ask everybody just a little bit about what you believe.

So at this point, I'm going to ask you to open up those digital workbooks. And in your digital workbooks on page two is an opportunity for us to engage in our first activity of the day. And what we're going to do for that activity is I'd like you to fill in some things at the top of that list that you used to believe that maybe you no longer believe today. Now, that could very well be some fantasy things, but I want you to list, and you can see there's about four lines on the page at the top. List some things that you used to believe but maybe you just no longer believe today.

And then in the second box down below, put what made you change your belief. And then finally, I want you to go ahead and put, how did your actions or your behavior change once you had that new belief? So we're going to take about two minutes to fill in this chart, two or three minutes. I'll put a few extra prompts up on the screen.

And these can be all different types of beliefs, right? This can be the tooth fairy, this can be monsters in the closet or under the bed. This can be beliefs like you have to have a college degree to get a good job. Anything that you maybe used to believe perhaps you don't believe today. Now we have our chat open.

If we finish this exercise, I would love to see some of those answers copied and pasted into the chat to see what some of those things people used to believe are. I already stole the tooth fairy. All right, let's peek over that chat. Who's got something to add to the chat for us that they used to believe in? Oh, I love that your genes determine your health condition.

There's nothing you can do to change it. I'm not going to the gym. What's the point? It's already predestined. Work hard to achieve goals.

I love this. Getting older was not a good thing, Kim. I love that answer. That is wonderful. Right?

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of us on our music guys. So any additional ones? I want to give everybody just a chance to put a few things in the chat there, Barbara, that's such a great one. And thank you so much for sharing. Nick puts in there, I'm not the marrying type.

Ooh, I like that. All sorts of these old beliefs that have completely changed, right? I once believed that life fall is a set path and cannot be changed. Ah, predetermination. Tracy says, I used to believe that 60 is old, is not, is not Tracy, right?

Karen says, I cannot be a leader. And since I have met Karen and seen Karen lead, I know that is a past belief, right? Excellent examples. And all of these beliefs, if you go back and you look at that list and you were to think what made me change the belief? Did I make the decision to change my belief?

Did something happen to make me change the belief? Did somebody tell me something new? Did I learn a new fact? Lots of different things can come into changing our beliefs. Now, if you joined us last time you saw me put up this quote where I said, who do you always believe?

And this is a quote from Seth Gooden, people don't believe what you tell them and they rarely believe what you show them. And they usually believe what their friends tell them. But who do we always believe? We always believe what we tell ourselves. Always believe what they say themselves.

And as soon as you start to have that belief yourself and you create that truth, your actions are going to change with it. Another quote from our founder, Lou Ty says, we move towards and become like what we think about our present thoughts become our future. We become what we think about and as we move towards. So when we think about what we think about, what we think about and what we believe has a direct impact on our environment. So I want to tell a little bit of a story about that.

This story is called the Rosenthal Study. It's about the bloomers. This was a study done back in the 1960s by uh, Robert Rosenthal and the Nor Jacobson. Now they happen to be researchers at a little university in Massachusetts that you might have heard of called Harvard. And apparently they do some big research and big thinking at the uh, oldest university in the United States.

And they came all the way across the country to my coast. They came out to Californiand they wanted to do an IQ test on some students. So they found an elementary school that had 650 students in it. And what they did is they ran an IQ test on those students and they came back with some really exciting news on those 650 students. They had identified a marker in those students that they called make them a bloomer.

And what they meant by that is that these students were right on the cusp. They were right on the edge of making an academic improvement. Their IQ was where it was, but it was about to improve by quite a bit. And that was really exciting for anybody who's an educator because you're realizing, wow, they found a way to identify some people that are going to be doing better over time. So of course if you know anybody who's an educator, they would be excited about that.

Their expectations and their excitement, everything changed with it. And as a result, they went into that teaching year with increased attention for those students, enhanced patience for those students. They gave them more detailed feedback and they approached them with an overall higher level of interest.

And at the end of the school year, they wanted to study and they wanted to go back and review the students and determine did it work? What happened? Were these students actually bloomers? Did they really produce better results over just nine months? And here's what they found.

They were participating in class more, 20 to 30% more hand raises in participating in class. They were showing a greater interest in the subjects that they studied. Those that were only in interested in English before, were now paying attention to math and science and vice versa. They were paying more attention to the arts. And would you look at that?

Their grades went up, all of them saw an improvement in grades. Now this was all before they had the results that came back from the second IQ test they did just nine months later. And those results revealed that they were in fact, correct, that those students did improve by 12 to 19%. Now this the, this got the teachers really excited, this got everybody really excited. They wanted to know, tell me more about this Harvard study.

Tell me more about how you identified these magical bloomer students. Does anybody know how they managed to identify the students? Do you know about the test that they did? It was a really scientific test that they did. Problem was it was a ruse.

It had absolutely nothing to do with Harvard. And there wasn't actually any study that took place. They identified one in five students as a bloomer by pulling their name out of a hat. There was no special IQ test that was done. There was no Harvard research that was done.

The entire study was to determine what would happen if we just plain identified one in five students, 650 students in the school, 135 were identified as bloomers, and those bloomers showed an increase of 12 to 19% in their IQ over the course of the year. How in the heck did that happen? Anybody have any thoughts or suggestions about how that might have happened? You can put it in the chat. You can shout it out.

How in the world would that have been the case? The answer is what's known as the Rosenthal effect. Marcella put a beautiful answer in there. It's the correct one now. Now if you're looking at the chat, you're seeing great answers.

Belief, mindset, expectation, perspectives. They believed it. Power, belief. Those of you that are reading the title of this presentation, congratulations, you got the right answer. It had everything to do with their belief and their expectations.

Those very same teachers that were excited because they now knew that they had magic waiting on the other end, their students were going to be smarter. So what do you think they did with their level of teaching? Brought it up. They changed their expectations. Those one in five students were no longer just any old ding-dong that may or may not do well in my class.

This could be the next Einstein. So they're going to put a little extrattention to that student. If maybe they're not paying attention in class, they're going to show 'em a little bit more patience if maybe they're not focused or maybe they don't turn in their homework right, they're going to give 'em more detailed feedback because if they didn't do well and you know they're supposed to, you're probably going to want to give them more information about how that happens. Bottom line, they showed 'em more interest. They were fundamentally more interested in those students and as a result, they were able to see an improvement in those students.

The expectation went higher, the students lived up into it. If you've been through The Pacific Institute in the past, we call that a theory called it a Pygmalion, right? There's a problem that happened with this study though. It was great for the one in five students that had the higher expectations. Lemme tell you what happened with the rest of the story.

Just a couple years later, the mid sixties, uh, for Rosenthal and Jacobson, they were sued for doing this study because the other four out of five students did not get greater expectations. They did not get the increased attention, they did not get the extra patience. So in the same way that you can get higher beliefs and expectations and get better performance out of it, unfortunately there's the other side of that coin. So what we want to do is take a minute to first explore what is on the other side of that coin. So I'm going to ask you to go back to your workbooks, go to the third page.

And on this particular one, I'm going to ask you to do a little bit of reflection. And I just want you to reflect on your own beliefs, assumptions, and expectations. Now, this is with regards to your workplace, but you're more than welcome to put personal things. But I want you to list at least one beliefs and at least one assumption and at least one expectation that you might have involving your organization. And then when you fill those out, I want you to go to the bottom of the page and I want you to write down what it sounds like.

If there's a belief that is had in your organization and you feel it's limiting, I want you to write down what the quotes sound like. When the people in your organization say that, if that's a belief that's happening,

and I walk through your company break room, what are the quotes that I'm going to hear people saying that describe these limiting beliefs? So I'm going to give everybody about two minutes, we'll play a little bit of music to give you a chance on this one, try to get one belief assumption or expectation as many quotes match it just in case we have anybody late to join. There's another copy of the work. Look in the chat. Those of you that recognize the title of this song, realize that there's a belief in play.

Those of you that don't should know this song is titled Boys Don't Cry. All right? As you're getting closer to the end of your list there, if you're comfortable, I'd love to see what some of those quotes are. What does it sound like In your different workplaces? What does it sound like when there are limiting beliefs or assumptions or expectations?

The economy will affect our sales performance. Ah, yes, the belief that the economy is the problem. I like that one. What else? We're going to have to wait for 2025 to come for the, for the market to come back.

Anybody who works in real estate or banking that knows where interest rates are, you know, well, we can't do anything now. We just have to wait until interest rates approved. Very common belief. There's no way we can get all our work done and accomplish all our goals with less employees. Right?

Anna, put one of my favorite. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. So it turns out I don't have time for anything. Kim says, there's always a hidden agenda.

These are excellent examples. The way we did it yesterday still works. Yes, unfortunately, we're no longer riding around on horses and we have cell phones. So apparently new things do work. Here's some common ones that have come up in the past.

Uh, I really like that one from Rebecca. The board won't let us ah, that board, it's their fault. Here's some really common ones that have come up from the past, right? We've always done it this way. Or another version of that is it's too risky to change, right?

Our budget's tight. We couldn't afford that. We'd love to do that. We just don't have the money for something like that. Our competitors are too strong.

We couldn't keep up with them. There's no point in trying. That's the whole you're, you're running an Olympic race against you. Same bolts. Ah, I'm not going to win.

I'm not going to try. Why? I put myself through the pain. Our employees resist change. We should just do what we've always done.

These guys will never change. I love Tracy's because it even puts a time, we tried that once all the way back in 1987 and it didn't work then why would it work now? Right? We're not big enough to make any difference in the market. If you're looking at all the other screens that are smiling over on the other part of yours, you'll see a lot of people are nodding along as we've put these up, these are very, very common beliefs

that have come up in the past. And one of the things we want to do is we want to change those beliefs, right? If we know that we are limited and it doesn't work, and we learn from the Rosenthal study that if we're limit lists and we give ourselves less restrictions and we have better expectations and beliefs and assumptions, better results will follow. So let's do this. Let's take another couple minutes and let's fill out the next page in your workbook.

This is going to be page four of the workbook. We're just flipping the coin over to the other side. Now, I want you to really think about that Rosenthal study. I want to think about being a bloomer. What belief do you need to have for your employees to perform better?

What assumptions do you have to have about them to get the type of performance that you want? What expectations should you have to drive the type of performance that you want? Now, down below, this part can be a little bit harder, but what do the quotes sound like? And if they're not happening, what should they sound like? So let's take a little bit more time.

I'm going to give you another couple minutes to fill in that chart. Sometimes this is a little bit harder of a list to complete. Thank you to those of you that are already putting your limitless positive beliefs, assumptions, and expectations in the chat. Anna flipped her coin from, I don't have time to, I can create time to make a difference. Love that one.

Barb says, let's brainstorm to figure this out instead of, we'll never figure this out. Nick gives a good old fashioned three words. We got this. Excellent. My team members are bloomers.

I love that. And I be let, I bet Michelle flipped that coin into everyone will want to talk to me versus no one will want to. All right, let's see what some of those other ones are in the chat. Teamwork makes the dream work. I love it when they rhyme.

Impossible is not a word, Tracy. It's I'm possible, right? We have the talent to make it happen. Good one, Bobby. So here's some of the ones that have come up from groups in the past.

Keep putting these things in here. These are great, right? Change brings opportunity and we can embrace it. Boy, I bet that would've gone real well. Uh, let's say April or May of 2020, right?

Right about the time when Covid was first rocking everybody's world, investing in technology will give us a competitive edge bet that would've come in handy right before AI started making its boom last year. Like we can outperform our, outperform our competitors by focusing on our strengths. That is in stark contrast to we'll never be able to do that. We've got a problem with manufacturing. We have a problem with, we have a problem with our team's capable of adapting and thriving and new environments, which are pretty darn well if you're talking about a hybrid work environment.

No matter our size, we can lead the way in our industry. Now, I love my list. Over on the side, I'm seeing all sorts of different positive things that are coming in here. The best team wins, and we're the best team. I love that.

Instead of saying I can't, we ask, how can I? These are excellent beliefs. Let's do a little bit of an activity. Let's test. We've all been thinking about beliefs.

I'll give you 20 seconds starting now. How many triangles can you see in this image? Don't let the blurs in the background distract you.

How many triangles can you count? 10 seconds left. Three, two, and one. All right. You're welcome to keep counting, but officially, you are cheating if you're counting past this point. My question is, how many of you are able to look at this and see, show of hands, how many people saw five in there?

I saw that coming in the chat. I got five. Okay, how many of you were able to look at this and find six triangles? I forgot to mention, you only have to look in the black area. You don't have to find the letters.

How many of you found more like seven or eight triangles? Got a whole bunch. These are good. How many of you found zero triangles? Zero triangles.

Congratulations. If you found zero triangles, you got the right answer. There's not a single triangle in this picture. There's not one of them. Why are you such a jerk?

Kevin? Why do you always trick us? If you come to enough of these sessions, you know it's always just a bear trap. There's a trick waiting for you. But what really happened?

How was I able to trick you when you know that there's a trick coming? There are no triangles in this image. Who saw triangles? Be honest. I did.

I think I counted a thousand the first time I did this. Who's willing to tell me what happened? What did you do to create triangles where there simply aren't any? Because a triangle is a three-sided object. What happened?

We filled in the blanks, right? We filled in the blanks. Our brain did it for us. Our brain created those lines because we wanted to be successful. I told you, count as many as you can.

You have 20 seconds. I gave you the environment and I told you go be successful in it. And you found things that weren't even there. You created triangles. It didn't exist.

How many people, after they were done looking at the, the black space images on there, started looking at the other areas like The Pacific Institute logo or the letters on the screen and started getting real creative. Nick's hand goes up right away because that's energy and creativity that's created by us when we're looking to solve a problem. So when we look for something, we'll find it when it's not there. That's great. If you think about being limitless, that's terrible when you think about being limited, because those lines can represent boundaries or those lines can represent goals or the unattainable.

So we really want to be careful of what we're looking at and who we're paying attention to. Because oftentimes just like this, there's no stinking triangles. If I started this activity and without saying, do you see any triangles? I would say identify all the shapes on the screen. I wonder how many of you would say there's 11 triumphs.

So a lot of the environment, a lot of what the beliefs are change what we end up seeing in the long run. So when it comes to belief, what do we have to do? Well, if you watch Ted lasso, you just have to change your beliefs, right? It's super simple. Just write it on the wall.

And now everybody believes. But also if you watch Ted Lasso, you'll know that it's not just writing a word on the wall. You actually have to believe. Now, if we want to know how to create beliefs, then it's probably important that we know where beliefs come from. So I'm going to play a quick little video.

Anna's going to tell me if for any reason my audio doesn't work. But this is going to explain a little bit about where beliefs come from. Jot down any thoughts you have, feel free to put any questions in the chat. And this is going to take about four minutes. When we are young, we are incredibly impressionable because our personal history is short and our experiences so limited, we easily believe just about anything.

We are simply too young to know any better. Now that we are adults, we can dig a little deeper for a solid understanding of the power of our beliefs. What we need to know is that every action we take, large or small, is based upon our beliefs. We hold in our mind about that action, whatever those beliefs may be. Those actions we take are typically called our behaviors.

And our behaviors are learned. We aren't born with them. The belief comes first and then we behave. This is good news because it means that if we change the underlying belief, our behaviors automatically change. So in order to change what we do, we want to get to the root of what drives us to do or not do our beliefs first.

However, we need to understand how we got our beliefs in the first place. Here is a principle for you to remember our thoughts accumulate to become beliefs. Everything that has happened to us pretty much since were infants has been gathered up and stored in our brains on the subconscious level, comments that others have made that we gave sanction to conversations. We've had books, we've read movies

and television shows we watch everything has been saved and stored. As we go through these experiences, we then add the flavoring of our emotions about the experience. And we call that the truth for us physically. The brain builds neural pathways to each piece of information. And the more we think about something, the stronger those neural pathways become.

You see, our truth defines everything about us who we believe we are typically referred to as our self-worth and self-esteem. What we believe we can do, our self-efficacy, our beliefs about what we can make happen and where we believe we belong in the world, our truth defines what we expect out of ourselves and our surroundings. It defines our willingness to put ourselves out there as we build the social relationships that give our lives depth and breadth. And every time we think and act in accordance with our truth, those neural pathways are reinforced, making it easier for our brains to access them as we automatically react to similar situations. So remember, our thoughts accumulate to become beliefs and our beliefs directly affect the way we act.

But what if some of those beliefs are based on erroneous or incorrect information? What if some of those beliefs are based on someone else's opinion and not on actual fact? What if we've listened to the wrong thing given its sanction and then locked onto it? Is that possible? We want to be careful about who or what we to, because more often than not, what others say are opinions and not fact.

Once we accept an opinion, it becomes fact. And then that affects how we feel about ourselves, those around us and the decisions we make, we act in accordance with that truth, whether it is the real truth or not. Now because our beliefs have been learned, it also means that they can be unlearned and new beliefs put in their place. This is wonderful life changing news. And because we've just learned how we got our beliefs in the first place, we can be more conscientious and intentional about constructing our new beliefs.

Beliefs that can help us take greater control of ourselves, our decisions, our lives, and how we react to the situations we find ourselves in. Our new beliefs help us deal with stress and reinforce our persistence and resiliency in the face of obstacles so that we can thrive. So what beliefs do you have now that you'd like to change? What beliefs do you have that are based on what somebody else has told you? What beliefs do you have about how you're able to handle the stress of modern day living?

What beliefs do you have that are holding you back from living the life you want? Once we can honestly answer these questions, we will discover what we want to change and why. Give everybody just a chance to jot down any thoughts or notes that they might have. Feel free to put anything in the chat as far as questions. I'll do a little recap of that.

But some of our big takeaways there is really that our beliefs drive our behavior. Now, first and foremost, we still want to talk about where do those beliefs come from? They come from the thoughts that run through our head. Now, if you know the answer, if you've been through The Pacific Institute, wait 10 seconds before you answer if you haven't, how many thoughts per day answer in the chat, how many thoughts per day do you think are running through our head every single day of our life? How many thoughts per day?

And I don't mean data points, like that's blue, that's green, that's up, that's down. I mean full on thoughts like a sentence, like a belief thought like lots and lots of big numbers making their way in there. So we process about 11 and a half million data points all the time. At any given time, our brain is bringing in tons and tons of data points and we can't handle all of those. So we create these blind spots to keep them out, right?

And that happens with our thoughts too. We have more thoughts running through our head than we can actually handle. The answer is, science has shown that we have between 50 and 70,000 thoughts per day. And as you're having those thoughts, each one of 'em is forming a thought like maybe you just thought to yourself, no way that's true, Kevin. Well, that's one of 'em.

You get 69,999 more to go. There's a lot of thoughts that are going to be running through your head now. The ones that you hear the most frequently, the ones that are repeated the most, they start to impact your behavior. How many people right now at this exact moment have a song stuck in their head?

I do. I do. My daughter went through an Olivia Rodrigo concert, she played the album. I've got two songs stuck in my head, can't get rid of them. Those thoughts are running through my head on repeat.

What do you think that's doing to my behavior? You think it's a totally normal for a 45-year-old man to be listening to teenager punk music? Probably not. But it's changing my behavior because the thoughts are running through my head over and over, over again. Right now, as we get older and we think about these different thoughts, they come in from a million different places.

We've got TV and movies and cell phones and internet, and there's the people we spend our time with and our social groups and our arts and culture and all that big takeaway from the message. All of those thoughts, every single one of them, our thoughts do what they accumulate to become our beliefs. The more thoughts we have together, the more time we have the same thought, the more we repeat the same thought over and over, just like last time when we talked about that replacement picture, that becomes our belief. And what we do with those beliefs that we hear in our brains a lot is we start to give them something that's called sanction. We give sanction to that belief.

We say that's true, and then we act accordingly. Once that becomes the truth, we act according in accordance with that truth. I referenced the two very earlier. Well, you've got a six or a 7-year-old and they lose a tooth. Their behavior is going to be to present you with a tooth.

And many people have a special tooth fairy bag that it goes into and they place that under a pillow so that they can get, let's call it a dollar in the morning. If you're like me and you have a 13-year-old at home that has a slightly different belief structure but still has a molar or two to lose, it's a drastically different experience. His belief is no longer in the tooth fair. So he just rips the tooth out of his mouth at the dinner table, hands it to me and says, I want $5. His belief was different, therefore his action was different.

And this happens to us at all different levels When we're kids, we have all these different fantasies that we believe in and man, did they guide our behavior. How many people are dusting off elf on the shelf right now getting ready for a couple months from now? If you're smiling, it's because you know that there's a belief that will drive a behavior. How many of you have to check for monsters under the bed for your kids? Make sure that there's nothing in the closet and make sure that there's a nightlight on and check various different things.

I grew up in the same household my whole life. I was very fortunate I never had to move. Growing up as a kid, it was a small three bedroom, two bath house in Southern California. Single story, every inch of that house was carpeted except for one little patch of hardwood floor by the front door. Now in the eyes of a six or 7-year-old, that's the scariest place in the world.

'cause the floor is cold. And I promise you, even to this day, my behavior's still a little bit different because of how long I held a belief that I would simply be murdered by monsters if I set foot on that floor. Even today, I pick up my pace just a little when I walked through that room and my parents' house and they still live there. And that was 30 years ago. So when we give sanction to something, we change our beliefs.

When we change our beliefs, we act accordingly. We change our behavior. All of that comes from those thoughts that turn into beliefs that then drive behavior. It's not really different when we get older. We just have different things that influence us.

We're not maybe afraid of the dark as much, but there's all these other things that we are afraid of. How many people are afraid of the economy turning bad? We can't really control that anymore than you can control the monsters under your bed. There's a lot of things that we spend a lot of time worrying about and creating all these different beliefs that guide our behaviors that are coming from the outside. How many people are guiding their behavior based on what they saw on social media?

Ooh, Facebook ruined it. As we develop these new beliefs, we get to change our behavior with it. Now there's two ways that we can change a belief. We can be presented with a new fact. What's the other way?

What's the other way we can be presented? We can be presented with a fact or what's the opposite of a fact? Essentially it's an opinion. And more often than not, if you look at it objectively, how frequently are your beliefs based on facts versus opinions? And those opinions are that of another person.

When we talked about performance last time, I'm going to share a slide that we did before. Again, we know that at the base level of performance, there's talent. Hire talented people, right? Go get the good ones, put up LinkedIn postings, get the right type of individuals, have strict criteria, hire the best people we can. And when we get 'em into our organization, let's teach 'em how to do things.

Let's get their competency level up. Let's teach 'em skills. Let's make 'em smarter. And if you were in our last session, we talked about the fact that a lot of times companies stop right there, but they're not focusing on the top of that pyramid, which is really their mindset. It's going to guide whether or not they use those new learned skills or whether they take advantage of that God-given talent.

Because remember, they have those 70,000 thoughts that are running through their head every single day.

And all of those thoughts are going to turn into beliefs. And those beliefs are going to drive you in one of two directions. They're going to drive you in a limited way where you're going to create barriers that aren't there, or a limitless way where you're going to look past those barriers and see options in whichever thoughts and beliefs you have most frequently are the ones that are going to land. It's like making pathways in the snow. If you live someplace when it snows and you walk back to your car and you walk the same path over and over, it gets easier to walk that same path over and over because you've carved your way through it.

If that path is a limited belief, it's easy to stay in that. So let's talk about how we drive performance. How do we get leverage to get what we want out of people? If you are a business leader here, raise your hand if you want your results to go up. Those of you that didn't raise your hand, my wife is a physical therapist, we can work on that arm.

It's no big deal. Or you're lazy. 'cause everybody wants their results to go up, right? That's what we're shooting for. So what do we do as leaders?

When we want results, we tell people what to do. Change your behavior, go do the thing. Whatever the thing is, it doesn't matter your business, just go do the thing and you pull on that lever as hard as you can. Now, if this was a teeter totter and you pulled on that lever right there, that close to the fulcrum, would you get a lot of results? Not really, because you're asking people to do something.

So I got a better idea. Let's give 'em some strategy that don't make sense. We've got some strategy and some tactics. Let's apply that and let's pull on that lever and you'll get a little bit more. But if and only if they engage in those behaviors.

Now, does strategy guide behavior? Not really. Not really what guides behavior, beliefs. Beliefs are what guide the behavior. So if we want to focus on getting the most leverage that we can, we have to recognize that our beliefs, those thoughts that run through our head, that's the strongest lever that we can pull on.

And when we pull on that beliefs lever, we can pull it through the strategy to guide the behavior and that way we can stay in a positive motion towards the results that we want. And if you look at the top of the fulcrum, there's your mindset. If you look at this diagram, you're going to get the most leverage with mindset and beliefs. But as leaders, we have a tendency to fall on the trap of focusing on behavior and talent. They're really good.

I just can't get 'em to do what I want is a low amount of leverage. I can change their beliefs, I can control the mindset. That's the strongest lever that you have. If it's not there and those beliefs are negative, that same negative belief will go against your strategy and drive the wrong behavior. Raise your hand if you've heard of this person before.

Hey, everybody's heard of Oprah, right? Oprah has these amazing quotes. So I'll be quoting Oprah today because who would dare disagree with Oprah? Oprah says, you become what you believe. And I love that principle of you become what you believe.

So if you look at your workbooks and you want to know what you're going to become, take a look at the page three of your workbook. If all those things were really easy to fill out, that's where you're headed. That's where you're pointed. Look at page four of your workbook, if that's where you're pointed. You're doing really well on this test to make it easier for you.

You can skip all the way to the last page of your workbook. And if our technology work the way that it's supposed to, the answers that you filled in for what you believe will be filled in on the last page, if you printed it, it doesn't work, you'll have to write 'em in. But if it's a digital copy, you'll see those quotes at the top of the page and the quotes at the bottom of the page. How many people here filled out all five boxes on the top of the page but didn't fill out five boxes on the bottom of the page? It's okay.

We're naturally more negative than we are positive. But keep in mind that these are the beliefs of your organization. And I'm going to ask you a question to ask of yourself to think about throughout the day today, when you think about your own personal beliefs, assumptions, expectations, the quotes that are running through your mind, are your own personal beliefs driving you forward towards a limitless direction? Or are they limiting the potential? Then ask that exact same question of your organization because you might have a different mindset than your organization in one direction or the other.

So then ask yourself the question of your organization, are the beliefs of my company, my organization, my team? Are those beliefs driving growth or are those beliefs holding us back? And from there you can start to give yourself a little bit better understanding of which direction are we really leaning. If the mantra that you would hear on the caravan of employees you have is all the things in the orange and red boxes, chances are you're not driving the results, the direction that you want to go, that's okay. Because the good news is every one of those beliefs,

we can flip that coin. All you have to do is take the beliefs that are on the top of your list, replace it with the ones on the bottom, the bottom. Now if you have more on the bottom than you do on the top, congratulations, you can look at the top of that list and know what to listen for. Those are speed bumps and fair traps and bad things. But for the vast majority of organizations, what they recognize is there's an awful lot of negative chatter that's taking place that's creating limiting beliefs.

And we don't believe what people tell us. We don't believe what people show us, but we usually believe what our friends tell us. AKA, our coworkers a k, a gossip. And we always believe what we tell ourselves. And whatever we tell ourselves most frequently becomes our belief.

So what does this look like when we apply it to a business? Here's a client of ours, it's a The Pacific Institute client from a few years back. And this was a representation of an organization that had some limiting beliefs in 2008. And over the course of a five year period of time, they worked to improve those to limit this beliefs. They moved from that.

I can't, we're not able to. We tried it that way before and it didn't work to a we'll make time. We'll figure it out. We have the right people mentality. And here's what the bottom line results were.

This is the takeaway. This company didn't do bad as far as banks go. They made some money. They had revenue and book value and net income and assets and wealth management. How much did that improve when they changed their beliefs?

Revenue went up from 15, almost 16 million to almost 83 million. The book value went from 9 2 5 to 19, almost 20 million. Net income went from 2.1 million all the way up to 14 million assets. Assuming you think those are important. 440 million all the way up to 1.6 billion. And in wealth management, how much money we're actually handling in management going from nine, from 94 million to 1.1 billion.

These are massive numbers. This is a short period of time to see these types of improvements. But when you have a limitless mindset, there is no limit on what you can expect from the results. The key ones here, 420 increase, 420%, net increase, increase in revenue. Anybody hears a uh, A CFO?

You can nod your head if that's a good number, right? Over a thousand percent. Increase in in wealth management. All these numbers are skyrocket. So how do we do this?

How do we work on changing people's beliefs? This is our process. We've got a four step process we work through. It's quite simple. We assess, we figure out where you are.

Same way that you wrote down these beliefs on a piece of paper, that's the first starting point. You've got the beginning of an assessment taking place. We just go into far more detail to really find out what's going on with your culture, with your leadership, with your team. From there, we want to align. We need to base our, our approaches based on research.

We want to find out what certain objectives you're trying to accomplish. That might be sales, that might be customer retention, that might be employee retention or engagement. But we're going to help you get aligned. And then we have to engage. Human beings need an engagement, something like this on a larger scale.

But we're going to translate our mental technology into tools that you can actually use. Things that can be applied in your day-to-Day life. And then from there, our goal is to sustain. Just like when you go to the gym and you get in shape the way you want to, you don't cancel your gym membership. The goal is to keep that and sustain that.

And that's exactly what we want to do. We hope to engage with all of you in a way that we'd be able to sustain. For those of you that are just attending for these monthly sessions, here's how you can sustain with us in the future. 'cause as we work on our mindset and we change our beliefs, our future session next month. So not exactly one month from today, but the first Friday of next month, which is going to be October 4th, we're going to do another Beyond Limits session.

You're going to get a break from yours truly. And you're going to meet with one of my favorite people on planet Earth, Dr. Sarah Sarkis, who's going to be giving us a guest executive briefing. Sarah is joining us as a proprietor of her business and a therapist, but also as the director

of performance psychology at exos. And she's going to be taking us through a presentation called The Power Couple Behind Growth and Change, Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation. We see a couple faces on the screens that have had the pleasure of working with Dr. Sarkis before. I very much expect to see you there next month.

But she'll be talking about fostering self-awareness and equipping leaders with emotional intelligence, providing some self-regulation tools. And all in all, we are trying to design an immersive experiential opportunity as we are drawing near the end of our time today. I am hoping that some of the beliefs in the organization and some of the beliefs of the people that are attending today are changing to help with that process. We've got a QR code on the screen that you can scan and I believe Anna's going to go ahead and put a link in the chat here for us. We're asking that if you'd like a copy of today's slides, please go ahead and scan that and you'll be able to get a copy of today's slides.

If you'd like to have a free organizational beliefs survey where you can go into a little bit more depth into the types of questions that we ask today for your team or for your organization. Go ahead and check that box, we'll get that back to you. Please connect with us. There's an opportunity to join our Winners Circle Network where you can connect with us on a monthly basis. There's an opportunity to connect into my calendar if you'd like to schedule a one-on-one meeting.

And then finally, we want your feedback and we got 113 of you show up today. So we would love to hear feedback from each and every person about what you liked, what you didn't like, and what you might want to see in future sessions. 'cause we plan on being back on the first Friday of every month.