Leading the Way: Building Resilience in Leadership

Alrighty, well, let's go ahead and get up and running. Welcome everybody to our Monthly Beyond Limitss executive briefing. Anna's going to keep putting that in the chat, so we'll bring that up regularly. But today we are going to be focusing on our session called Leading the Way, building Resilience in Leadership. And one of the things that we believe wholeheartedly is that, uh, resilience is a really big important part about leadership.

And what we want to try to do is focus on that topic today here during Beyond Limitss. Now, if you've not been to a Beyond Limits session before, this is our monthly executive briefing series. And what we do during these sessions, our goal is to be able to get leaders to together in a room like this, to be able to share insights from TPIs core curriculum. And we want to try to tie that to relevant events. So we want to try to tie this to things that are going on in your world that are important to you.

And we want to be able to facilitate these types of discussions, tie contemporary challenges to the core curriculum that we've been focusing on for 53 years. We also want to use this as a networking opportunity. There's a lot of people here. Again, we're going to have north of a hundred individuals today. So there's a lot of good conversations that start from a discussion like this.

We want to promote The Pacific Institute. If you've worked with us before, thank you so much for coming back. It's great to see you. And if you've not done any work with us before, thank you so much for sharing time on a Friday with us. But what we'll do for the balance of our time today is spend a little bit of time sharing some of the key concepts that we cover here at The Pacific Institute.

There's going to be a workbook to follow along with along the way, we do encourage questions, so if you do have any questions along the way, Annand Mark, Anthony and John Outland are going to be helping me monitor the chat for a variety of different questions. So if anything comes up and it's on your mind, put that question in the chat. Even if we don't get a chance to answer it in the chat, we'll send you an email later to follow up. So we do keep track of all of those. Does anybody have any questions before we get up and running?

Outstanding. Well, let's go ahead and get our day started. First things first, I want to just prompt everybody with a little bit of a question to think about. We're going to come back to this topic several times throughout the day today, but what do you think successful people think about most of the time? Just kind of let that worm around in your brain for a little bit.

What do successful people think about most of the time? And while we're doing that, lemme get a quick introduction. If you've not met me before, my name is Kevin spent, I am the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute, and I am passionate about guiding people through sessions like this. My biggest passion in life really is helping leaders unlock potential. I am a firm believer in the power of resilience and grit and persistence.

And the goal today for the next 55 minutes is to share some of our beliefs around the concept of resilience with you, The Pacific Institute at its core. Lemme explain a little bit about who we are. Pacific Institute is all about making changes. We elevate you from the core. So what we mean by that is the deepest level of change.

Your human brain right here, between your right ear and your left ear, those individual thoughts, those beliefs, those things that drive behavior. Now, from there, we apply that with just everyday accessible cognitive science so that we can help ordinary humans like yourselves, access, revise, and live more successful internal narratives. What does that really mean? Our founder made this quote 53 years ago, Lou Ty said, all meaningful and lasting change. It starts on the inside and it works its way out.

And most people that have gone through big changes understand that it really did start on the inside and worked its way out. And if you've been able to make change happen in your workplace or your family around others, you've seen and experienced what it's like to go from feeling that lasting change on the inside and working its way out to your team or to your family. Because from there, we can transform ourselves and positively impact those that are around us. And from there, that infection in a positive way can go one step larger all the way out to that organization. So we move from me to we to us, and that's how we can transform our team and collaboratively, collaboratively pursue goals for the collective group.

So I'm going to go back to that question that I put up before and ask, what do you think most successful people focus on most of the time? In fact, we're going to run a poll on this with, these are your options. Lemme go ahead and launch that one for, you should have the option up on your screen here to select from the poll options. So what do you think successful people think about most of the time? Do they think about problems and challenges that they face?

Do they think about the rocks in the road that are in front of 'em? Do they think about solutions and opportunities? Or do they think about something else? If you do put something else, I'd love to see what your answer is in the chat, but I'm going to give everybody here about 30 seconds to kind of think about their answer for this one, is it number one, the challenges they face? Is it number two solutions and opportunities?

Or are they thinking about something else? Are they thinking about their fantasy football roster? Some of you might be thinking about your fantasy football roster. All right, I'm not going to put the answers up to this poll just yet. We're going to come back to this one in just a second.

Does anybody need any additional time to put their poll answer in, wave your hand at the camera if you need more time? Excellent. I'm waving it myself. We're going to come back to that one here in just a little bit. Next part of this is I want to ask everybody what you see.

Put it in the chat. What do you see? You don't see anything. You're not looking at anything yet. I'm about to show you something.

So let's see in the chat. What are you looking at? No wrong answers. I might poke fun at some of them, but there are no wrong answers. First answer in says a rabbit, rabbit, lots of rabbits.

If your camera is on and you see a rabbit wave at me, tell me those rabbit people. Uh, I see a duck. I just see Tracy said she saw a duck. How many people here see a duck? How many people just did what John Outland did and turned their head sideways like, I don't know.

Dunno, it kind of depends on what we see. So how do we know what this is that we're looking at here? I'll make it a little easier for you now. What is, it becomes a lot easier to see what it is if we change the perspective. This is a lot like what we talked about last time.

I love that Bill. Put the answer in there that it's boast. We're going to contest that in just a second, but it becomes very easy when we label it. If I tell you that it's a duck and I call it a duck, and you read the words duck with your mind, and we know that words, they trigger pictures. So we know that that word duck makes us think about duck.

And we see that we start to feel a little bit of what's called cognitive dissonance when we see the word rabbit over there. Now, some of you're going to say it's not the same image. I don't believe you. So fine. I'll show you both of them simultaneously.

This is a rabbit and a duck. I just flipped it sideways. Now, the interesting part of it is I want you to look at those images and you can easily see that it can be a rabbit on one hand, it can be a duck on the other. But here's the challenge. I want you to try to see if you can look at one of them and make it both a rabbit and a duck at the same time.

See if it can be a quacking bunny. Make this even harder for yourself. Cover one eye. Try to cover up the rabbit. So cover one eye like you're a pirate.

Cover up the rabbit and read the word duck. Look at the duck only. Now, while you're looking at that, it looks exactly like a duck. Doesn't, it makes perfect sense. There's no dissonance at all.

But turn that into a rabbit with your eyes and watch as it goes back and forth between rabbit and duck. It's just going to keep bouncing back and forth. One minute, it's a rabbit, one minute it's a duck. But your brain refuses to accept that it can be both things at the exact same time. You'd be crazy if you saw both things at the same time in the same way.

So much like with multitasking, we're not really good at doing things at the same time. We're really good at doing one thing after another. This level of cognitive dissonance that we're talking about here, this is just your brain's way of saying something can't be two things at once. You can't be tall and short at the same time. You can't be old and young at the same time.

You can't be black and white at the same time. So this level of dissonance, because if this image with both black and white at the same time, you wouldn't see anything. So we need that level of dissonance. Our brain relies on that. But if we can only think about one thing at a time, and we know that we have 70,000 thoughts per day that run through our mind and we move towards the ones that are the strongest, what do we think those most successful people focused on most of the time?

Because if they were thinking about the positive things, the good things, that's what they're oriented towards. So let's go ahead and take a look at our poll results. Let's see how we did everybody able to see what our, uh, our poll results are. There looks like the overwhelming majority of you, 92% of you all came up with the same answer, which was solutions and opportunities. Congratulations.

This means there's a lot of successful people in this room because there was a massive study that was done by the University of Pennsylvania back in the eighties and nineties. Anybody ever heard about the study that was done by UPenn?

It was a 22 year long study that was titled, what Do Successful People Think About? And quite literally over a 22 year period of time, over 350,000 participants all received phone calls periodically that said, what are you thinking about right now? And they had people on the other end. These poor telemarketers had to write down the answers. And after 22 years of gathering data, what they came to was the exact same solution that the people in this group came to.

The successful people, they think about the things that are on their mind that are not the problems, not the rocks in the roads, not their fantasy football roster. They think about goals, solutions, possibilities. They were focused on another way of saying what they want and how to get it. Not all the things that got in the way of what they wanted and their ability to get what they wanted and what they could do. They accepted the fact that there were some problems along the way, but they spent most of their time thinking about what they wanted and how they were going to go and get it.

And as a result of that, that became their north star. That became their guiding star because we move towards what we think about. And the strongest picture in our mind that comes from those words is the one that we orient towards. Now, if we're persistent and resilient, the endeavor to go after those goals is even easier. So I'm going to play a quick video for us here.

This is a snippet from one of our programs. This is from a program called Invent Your Future. It's a professional program that we have, uh, been using for the last four or five years. This is a little bit of a snippet to show you what some of our learning looks like. Please write any questions that you might have in the chat about this.

Persistence and resilience are oftentimes thought of as two sides of the same coin. They are different aspects of our mindset, but both have a great deal to do with how we meet the obstacles that show up in our day-to-Day living. Persistence can be thought of as our give up ratio, sometimes called grit. It's a measure of how long it takes to give up on something because the obstacles have gotten the better of us. How many obstacles does it take for us to give up on a project or a goal?

Do we set our minds to keep pushing through to accomplishment, or do we throw up our hands and walk away when the challenges start to pile up? For example, say your typical root home is an unexpected minefield of roadblocks. A way around it all might not be immediately clear to you. You could be in an unfamiliar area or completely unaware of alternate roots, but that wouldn't stop you would it? You would figure out how to get home as you went along.

You would stop to ask for help, dig out a map, check your GPS or smartphone app, and one way or another, you would reach your goal of getting home. The same is true of any goal you set in life at work, in your career, anywhere. You don't have to know exactly how you're going to achieve it at the time you set the goal. In fact, if you expand your goals beyond what you know how to make happen, and if you hold a picture of the end result you want vividly in your mind refusing to give up until you achieve it, you set a powerful process in motion that will help you find the way to your goal. Now, that doesn't mean that we ignore the warning signs of obstacles in our path, the rocks in the road that get in our way, what it does is give us the opportunity to plan ahead for obstacles we might meet.

Then we have solutions at hand to go over, under or around those rocks that pop up. Resiliency on the other hand, is our ability to bounce back after a loss or a failure. When we get knocked down, do we stay down or do we pick ourselves up, brush off the dust and start again? If we have a growth mindset, the belief that we can continuously grow and change, then we easily see the so-called defeat as a new opportunity to grow and learn. We grab the wheel and chart a new course to get where we want to go.

So resilience has a lot to do with how engaged we are in the goals we've set for ourselves, our teams or our organizations. And persistence is the fuel we use to get us where we want to go. I always like that one because it gives a real clear breakdown, two sides of the same coin, that persistence and resilience. Now in your book, there's going to be some roads, uh, some locations where you can put some notes, things like this in your, in your workbook. I will be sending the option at the end of our day today, we'll put up a QR code where you have a chance to get a copy of these slides so any of the information that you see on the slides,

just know it's headed your way if you stand that QR code at the end. So persistence, that's just another way of saying it, right? And I really like that it was described as your give up ratio question is how long does it take for you to give up on a goal or a task? How much can you take before you throw your hands in the air and say, I'm all done. And then there's resilience.

That's your ability to bounce back after a failure or a defeat and see it as an opportunity to grow. If you've ever listened to any of the audio books or read anything by Brian Tracy, you'll hear him talk about resilience as being like a rubber ball and you want to just bounce right back up. And we preach a lot of that here at TPI and talking about your ability to bounce back up. The most successful people out there, if they get knocked down, they bounce right back up like a kid's rubber ball. Unfortunately, a lot of us and a lot of folks out there when they go down, it's like a medicine ball.

It's just thump and then they just stay and they never come back up. So part of what that resilience and persistence is all about is building the fortitude to be able to bounce back up regularly. Because if success lives up here and you end up down here, the goal is to get back there as fast as possible, as frequently as possible and make that your comfort zone. So resilience is really about how engaged you are. And we talk about employee engagement all of the time, and that's one of the things that as you're building that employee engagement, you're building resilience, going along with it because it's how engaged are they?

How likely are they to bounce back to the task at hand? And then persistence, that's just the fuel. Cars don't go anywhere without fuel. So that's just what drives it forward. So still kind of the same basic idea, but thinking about it in two different ways thinks about how long are you going to go and what's it going to take to bounce back.

Now when you can apply persistence and resilience and you can make that your north star and you make that what you think about most frequently in your head, great things can happen. And this has been proven over time. So we're going to go over a couple of stories. I'm going to tell you three stories about my good friend Thomas Edison. Some of these are stories you might have heard before and other ones might be new to you.

At the end of each story, I'm going to give you an actionable tip, something that we preach and teach here at The Pacific Institute that you can take home and use right away. So you're going to walk away with three free tips that you can use. I normally do something silly here and I say, raise your hand if you've heard of this person, but I'm going to skip that joke because everybody's heard of Thomas Edison. If you haven't, we're under light bulbs, so you should probably look him up. Thomas Edison was the person that invented the light bulb, and Thomas Edison did this in the late 1880s.

So it's been a little while. What was not known about Thomas Edison is that he was actually a famous inventor before the light bulb. Most people think this guy sat in a room all by himself, clearly by a candlelight and invented the light bulb. And then everybody said, wow, this Edison guy, what a crazy good inventor. Edison had already was already employing about 15,000 Americans at the time that he invented the light bulb.

It was a known fact that he was working on this thing. They were writing articles about how he was trying to get this, this indoor candle is what they were calling it beforehand. Anybody know how many tries or what the lore says, the number of tries it took for Edison to build the light bulb or to invent the light bulb? How many tries it took? There's a lore and there's a fact.

They're both big numbers. I like that. John Outland led with 50,000. So the lore says 10,000 studies when they go back and do it says it was really about a thousand over about a five or six year period of time. So about halfway through that, when it was known that he was working on this light bulb, and there have been thousands of failures at this time, a reporter from a newspaper came and they wanted to write a story, and the reporter was interviewing him about his endeavor to build this light bulb thing.

And he asked him the question. He said, Mr. Edison, you've failed on this hundreds and hundreds of times. You've got all these other inventions that you could spend your time working on. Why do you continue working on this light bulb thing if you've failed so many times?

Why don't you just go work on some of the other things? And Edison's response, some of you may have heard this before, was one of the most forward thinking things you could ever imagine. Edison looked right at that person and he said, you don't understand the way the world works. I haven't failed at all. I've successfully identified thousands of ways that don't work on my way to discovering the one that does.

So Edison's belief was he was going to find a solution, and every one of those failures was not a failure. It wasn't a mistake. It was, I'm glad I tried that. I'll never try it again. I'll just write notes and not make that same mistake twice.

Just like if you were in that video and you were driving to get home and you decide you're going to drive the way home and there's cones, you go, that's all right. I'll go another way. But something has gone awry. There's a fire truck in the way. You wouldn't change your goal and just go, well, I guess I'm sleeping in my car from now on.

You'd figure out a way home. Even when you met those failures along the way, you'd say, ah, well, I know not to go that way because there's a cone in the road. And I know not to go that way because there's a fire truck. And I know not to go that way because

there's a train crossing. But eventually just like the person in the video and just like Edison would invent, eventually you'll get to where your goal if you apply that level of persistence. So my question is, and this will go in your workbooks, let's take a minute to work on those workbooks here. You can open up those now and you'll see that on the second page there's an opportunity to write in what you believe. We're not going to take a ton of time, so this is going to be an activity that you'll start now and very likely finish later.

But what I'm going to encourage you to do is in that top box, write down, what do you think Edison was focused on when he was inventing that light bulb? What do you think his north star was when he was working on that light bulb? After you've jotted that down, it's a personal reflection opportunity below. Write down a time when you faced a challenge and kept going, think about what you focused on. Now again, you probably won't have time to get through that second activity.

That's something I encourage you to take home with you this weekend. But take some time to fill in those two pages there and we'll play a little bit of music while we wait. Since these are digital workbooks, I would love it if somebody would copy and paste their answer to what they thought Edison focused on and put it in the chat when they're done. All right, so I know I didn't give you a ton of time to write there, but hopefully you had a chance to write, Anne, what you thought Edison focused on the most. This is something I really encourage.

This is part of, uh, a process that really helps build persistence and resilience over time, is to just write down a time when you faced a challenge and kept going because that is you going to your playbook of understanding. You've been through hard things before. You can go back and you can learn from yourself and how you've worked through things in the past. Taking the opportunity to write that down in a journal or a workbook like this, crystallizes that for you and allows you to really take stock of some of the success you've had in the past and the fortitude that you've demonstrated. So what we really think is what Edison was thinking about was his primary focus was on the light bulb in the persistence on experimentation.

He knew he was going to get there, but when he first started, he wasn't even close. So he was going to have to do a lot of experimenting. He was going to have to drive down the wrong road, hundreds if not thousands of times before he figured out that there was a path. But with that type of approach and understanding that every time he took a step that didn't get him where he wanted to go, that was okay because that then blocked that wrong pathway moving forward. Then you can constantly focus on the positives.

So those of you that said the end result, I think I saw Marcella put that in the chat. Absolutely. He focused on that. So how do you apply that? If you want to turn that into an actionable tip, the next page in your workbook has that, it's going to be page number three, but it says, reframe those setbacks as learning steps.

You can be upset and frustrated that you drove down the wrong road and there was a cone in the way. Or you can look at that as an opportunity to learn this way. Doesn't work today, I've gotta do something else. So when you're facing a challenge, consider writing down some insights about what you learned from the setback. What did I learn?

I learned that going down this road doesn't work. I learned that at this time of day I can't take that path. I learned that I get really frustrated that there's any number of learning insights that can happen from any setback, but don't allow a setback to take place without learning something. So write it down. The other thing that you can do is write down a change that you'd like to implement moving forward.

So when that type of a situation happens again, so if we're sticking with our road home and we're writing down the things that we've learned,

what's one change you're going to implement moving forward? I'm not going to go down that path at that time of day because there's a train crossing and you've learned and you can move forward from that. The purpose of this is to reinforce resilience, help develop a mindset where setbacks are part of the learning process, not the end. And I love that setbacks are part of the learning process and not the end result. Anybody here have a child in their life that's not yet capable of walking?

We're going to say under one year they have a goal, a really strong one. They want to be a B head just like you. They want on two feet, they want to walk around and they are going to experience immense amounts of failure along the way, and they are not going to view those as failures. They're going to view those as temporary setbacks to work around because they have a goal of walking and they're going to keep testing and experimenting and trying until they figure it out. And then a few years later, they're going to go through the exact same process when they learn how to ride a bike.

Because if it matters enough, they'll deal with the setbacks along the way. Story number two. So in the 1880s, he did in fact invent that light bulb, and that did catapult him to even greater levels of fame, making him one of the largest employers of Americans by the 19 teens. So in 1914, he had several factories throughout the country, predominantly in the northeast. His biggest factory was in New Jersey.

And in 1914, that factory burnt to the ground entirely. It represented about one third of all of Edison's work, research progress prop, uh, projects. Everything that he was working on burnt to the ground. It was $7 million in damage. And if you adjusted that for inflation in today's dollars, it's about $250 million.

So imagine a $750 million company suddenly experiencing 250 million. And it's not like they could go to the digital files when things burnt up in 1914, that was that there were no backups. He could have viewed that as a terrible devastating loss. He could have said, end of business, things are not going well. Forget this, I've been successful for the past 30 years.

I shall retire. But while the flames were still burning, the smoke hadn't even officially cleared. He first sent his son and he said, go get your mother. We'll never see a site like this again. He sent his son to bring his wife to just go watch the fire because we're never going to get to see his spectacle like this.

And then he was overheard saying to his wife and son, as they watched everything burn up, he said, thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start with fresh ideas. So instead of lamenting that a third of his money, a third of his ideas, a third of his research, all of that was gone. He was able to look past the immediate problem and say, you know what? Some of those were bad ideas, let's just wipe 'em out and start over.

Anyway, if it was a good idea before, it'll be a good ideagain, we'll come up with it, but we won't be locked into the past with any of those bad ideas. So he rebuilt that factory. In fact, it was fully functional within 12 months, which if you can imagine, getting a factory back on its feet in 12 months in 1914 shows just how strong that replacement picture of getting that thing back up and built again was for one Thomas Edison. So in your workbooks, same activity as last time. This is going to be on page number four.

What do you think he was thinking about when he learned about the factory fire when he first saw that? What do you think was running through his mind when he sent his son? Go get your mother. We'll never see a spectacle like this. Or what led to him saying, thank goodness all of our mistakes were burnt up.

So again, let's take another 60, 90 seconds here. After you filled that in, you'll see there's a second question. Think of a time when you faced a setback and what did you do to focus and what did you focus on and moving forward, where did you keep your focus when you had your version of a factory fire? It'll take a minute or two here and we'll come right back to that. You are having a hard time thinking of a time.

It might prompt you to think about March of 2020 where a lot

of our businesses experienced our own version of a factory fire with the onset of covid. So again, in the interest of time, uh, would love to see any of the answers in the chat. I'm going to give everybody a little bit more time than I did on the last one. What do we suppose Mr. Edison might've been thinking about when he learned of the factory fire and that he was about to lose a third of all of his stuff?

John says he found a silver lining. Oh, I love that when life gives you lemonade. Make lemonade. He was roasting marshmallows over that fire. I, I love that.

All the things he could do differently better when he rebuilt his factory, right? Anybody ever have damage to like their yard? There was a storm or a flood or something happened, and when you rebuilt your yard, you're like, wow, gosh, I, this looks so much better. It kind of stunk before it didn't take good care of this. Or if you decide to repaint a room, then suddenly you start filling it with new furniture, new artwork, new other stuff.

Starting fresh isn't such a bad thing all the time. There's a lot of things from the past that here at TPI, we call that locking onto. And when you can lock onto something like that, you lock out other possibilities. You've locked onto all the good ideas. Were in the factory and now they're gone.

You're locking out the possibility that better ideas are coming up soon, process improvements, better factory layout. Bill's got good stuff. I like this. So I encourage you to spend some time on your own later today or this weekend thinking about that Second question, how did you really react? If you did react the way that Thomas Edison did?

Chances are following covid or whatever your setback was, things went pretty well. You got back on your feet quickly and you were able to look at some of the positive things instead of lamenting the problem or just throwing your hands in the air and saying, oh, well, it's a total loss. So what did you really think about? You focused on how to rebuild instead of what was lost, just focused on what was happening next, not what was happening, because that's what successful leaders do, right? Successful leaders think about possibilities even in times of crisis.

I mentioned this in one of the other briefings. I used to live right next door to a restaurant when Covid started right next door. And that restaurant boomed during Covid. They were doing okay, but they had a growth mindset. They looked at it like it was Thomas Edison and they started figuring out how to do food delivery where they didn't before mobile margaritas suddenly became a thing here in San Diego.

When you think about possibilities in the midst of a setback, there is growth that comes from that and that can be trained over time. So the actionable tip for how you can do that is find opportunities in unexpected events. This restaurant would've never delivered margaritas. They wouldn't have done food delivery in any way, shape or form if it wasn't for covid. So find an opportunity in an unexpected event, and it's going to happen.

Plans are going to be disrupted. It happens all the time. Whether it's driving home from work or headed somewhere on vacation. I've gotta drive to Los Angeles this weekend. I can guarantee you my plans will be disrupted by traffic.

So ask yourself, what might this opportunity reveal? Maybe just maybe when I'm sucking that traffic on the way to Los Angeles, I'll pay attention that it reveals an opportunity to drive off the side of the road and show my kids something they haven't seen before. But encourage looking at setbacks as an opportunity to reset or just see things differently. Okay, we can't go that way anymore. We can't do that thing anymore.

We can stop on our tracks and wait, or we can use our Raz to release energy and creativity to come up with solutions. And what this will do is it creates an environment where change is embraced and building up, uh, adaptability is part of what happens in the team. It becomes an organic process, and the expectation is we are going to fail. We are going to hit setbacks. That is part of the process. 1000 tries later, we will have a light bulb that's our North star.

So I encourage you to spend some time with that. One last story for Thomas Edison.

Thomas Edison was ingrained with this type of a mindset from his mother. Thomas. Edison's father wasn't around too much. He was a factory worker. So he was raised by his mother.

Now, back in the 18, what it would've been seventies, when he was growing up, when he was a little boy, you went to school in a schoolhouse, you walked to school, K through 12 was all in the same building. And Thomas Edison goes walking off to school at five years old. On his first day for the equivalent of kindergarten, mom sends him off to school. He comes home with a note like an hour after she sends him to school. That note was handed to a child who can't read, so he doesn't know what's on it.

So he comes home and he hands a note to his mother, and on the note, she opens it up in tears, start streaming down her face. On the note it reads, your son is a genius. This school is too small for him, and we don't have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself, and not so many words. We don't know how to handle this genius.

It's your problem. Go figure it out. Now, for somebody who'd never educated a child before, let alone a genius, that's a pretty big undertaking for her. Mm-Hmm. So what she had to do, she had no choice but to apply a lot of trial and error.

She would try to do this to see if it would help him learn. And if that wasn't quite the right thing and it wasn't challenging, and it would. So there was a lot of trial and error. Let's try this, let's try that. But the constant mindset, the constant mantra was big things are coming for this genius kid.

Even if we don't have the teachers, the kid's a genius. I've gotta help him become exactly that. So he goes on to do his great things right? He invents the light bulb, he bounces back after his factory fire. And in the 1920s or thirties, his mother passes away and Thomas Edison goes home to his childhood home and he is going through his mother's old things.

And lo and behold, he comes across the letter, the actual letter that he went home. The only difference is now he's an adult and he can read the letter. And this time tears starts streaming down his face. Because for the first time in his entire life, he discovered that what was written on the letter was not what his mother had told him was written on the letter. In actuality, what was written on the letter said, your son is mentally deficient.

We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled. I get goosebumps every time I talk about that one. So the mindset could have been conveyed, you're not going to be much. There's not a whole lot in the way of schools that's going to be able to help you.

Let's set a nice low bar. Now, if you think about the actions that took place from his mother, educating him as mentally deficient or a genius, what did she do that was different? There was a ton of trial and error. She had to figure it out. And all of it rested on the mindset of we're going to figure this out because there's no other option.

All other roads are closed, but this one is open. If she had shared with him, you're not supposed to do much, you're not going to end up as much. These failures are absolutely where you're supposed to be. We would've had a light bulb. It just wouldn't have been invented by him then it might've been a little bit later.

But all that fortitude, all that mental toughness, that perseverance, that resilience that was ingrained in him was ingrained from a young age because all of his education was trial and error. Imagine how many times it took for her to teach him math or reading or science. There must have been a ton of failure. But the ultimate goal was in the back of his mind, I'm a genius. I'm going to learn this stuff.

I'm going to figure it out. And that changed his entire orientation. And with that different orientation was a level of fortitude. Was he took an IQ test? No, he wasn't a genius.

Hey, he was slightly smarter than others. The point being not having this information or having this information is drastically going to change the outcome if you focus on that as your end point. But if you have a different belief and a different replacement picture, and it's that of my team is built to be successful, my kid is a genius, how you interact with them, how you operate and how they succeed is going to be drastically different. So one more workbook opportunity. This one will be page number six.

What do you think were the beliefs of Thomas Edison and his mother? What do you think they held onto? What beliefs do you think they locked onto as their north star, as they faced adversity? Thinking about things like reading might've been hard, math might've been hard, comprehension might've been hard. All of school might've been kind of hard.

Take a minute to think about those. There's a prompt for a secondary question down below that as well. Take about 90 seconds or so here.

I love seeing the answers. Coming into the chat here, few folks have answered what they think Edison and his mother might've thought about. A couple of the answers are setbacks, our step ups to bigger and better things. I love that Bobby John says, focus on what you can control, attitude and effort. That was a refrigerator magnet.

I'd buy it. All righty. Again, another one. That's a really good exercise that I very much encourage. Just spend 10 minutes on each of those second questions that you saw in each one of these Thomas Edison prompts in your workbook.

Spend a little bit of time on that last question, especially that last one here. Consider a belief that shaped your actions either negative or positively. And this can go back a long ways and this belief can be tied to a million different things. But if you really think about, let's take a belief that was told to a lot of us growing up. You'll never do anything in life without a college degree.

And I bet you there's some real successful people on this call that have never sniffed a college and never will, right? We all know that there are certain famous folks that didn't graduate to college that have done huge things in their life, but if they let a belief like that shape them, we'd be without the greatness. So what did they really think about? What was he focused on? Edison and his mother held onto belief that empowered him.

It was an empowering belief versus a limiting belief, a limitless versus limited beliefs. So even when reality suggested otherwise, he holds onto the belief that he's a genius. Reality suggests otherwise that math is hard. It's simply because it's not being taught right. Something else has gone awry.

We'll figure out another way to learn it. If he doesn't work by counting nuts and bolts, then maybe he'll do better counting trees. There's some way that we'll work because the end point is, my kid is a genius. I'm a genius. I'm destined for great things.

And since you can't hold onto both beliefs at the same time in all these situations, you can't hold onto both beliefs. If mom was locked onto, my son is mentally deficient, that means she's locking out the possibilities that he can do more and be great. But instead, she opted to focus on the belief that my son can do anything. He's destined for great things. He is a genius.

And as a result, his actions, her actions exactly reflected that thought. So what you can do to instill that yourself is tip loosely generically. Build long-term positive beliefs. How do you do that when there's a challenge and a setback? Not if we live in reality when there's a challenge or a setback.

Check with your family members or check with your team. What's a strength that they demonstrated in that situation, right? He was having a hard time with math, you couldn't figure out, but what was the strength that he demonstrated? I was good at this part of it. How can I apply that in the next way of teaching?

He was having struggle, uh, struggles reading. Well, I can understand some of the words, at least we could learn from that. But what are the strengths demonstrated? And how do you use that strength in other areas? If anybody doesn't know how to figure out what their strengths are, please get in touch with us.

We'll be happy to show you some tools that you can use to figure out your strengths. And we never used the word weaknesses. So we'll say improvement areas. The goal reinforced self beliefs that helped create team culture focused on strengths and growth and increasing resilience over time. By the time he was failing on that light bulb, do you think it was foreign to him that what he'd tried for weeks and weeks and weeks didn't work?

No. So that's probably what it was like when he tried to learn how to read. And you think when the factory fire burnt down

and he had all these other problems, he was focused on, oh, he is not going to get any further. Absolutely not. Because he'd always had that focus point of knowing there's another way around this. This isn't the end point. So when you can develop persistence and when you can develop resilience for yourself and your team and you impact others, then you have the ability to start having leverage if you're a leader.

Leverage is really important because what I mean by that is leverage for results. And that's ultimately what we're looking for is what do we want to do to pull the lever that creates results for us? And for most of us, especially if you're a business leader, that starts with strategy. You want to apply a good strategy, you follow the strategy, we're going to get the results right? Like go to a good school, things will go well.

But there's only so much leverage you get off of that strategy because it's predicated on human behavior. No strategy out there doesn't involve human beings doing the thing to get the strategy implemented. So more important than the strategy or the behaviors, what stuff needs to be done right? And that's another leverage point. And if that behavior supports the strategy, you can pull on that lever pretty hard and get things done.

There's one lever that's even bigger though the lever that drives our behavior is what comes from our beliefs. So we don't do anything that we don't believe we can do. And our beliefs have everything to do with what our behavior is. And they get a lot of leverage off of those beliefs. Big beliefs drive the behaviors that support the strategy that lead to the end result.

That's one side of the coin. That's great. If you have big open beliefs, my son is a genius, I will invent this light bulb. All of our mistakes were burnt up and we'll move forward. You're going to have different positive behavior that moves you towards an ultimate strategy.

However, if you start off with small beliefs, limited beliefs, I'm mentally deficient. I've already failed three times on this light bulb uhoh, the factory burned down. Smaller beliefs yield lesser behaviors that do not support the strategy and they pull your results downward. So if you're trying to drive results up, yes, have a good strategy. But the most important thing is beliefs in the individuals that are going to drive the behavior to support that strategy.

And when you can do that, when you have control over those beliefs, you have it at different stages. So what we believe is you can develop beliefs in a four step process, right? We always want to start with an assessment. Everything we do at The Pacific Institute begins with an assessment. It's a baseline, right?

If you went to the, if you went with a personal trainer and you wanted to lose weight, you're going to need a tool to know how much weight you're losing. And that's going to be a scale. We have our version of scales. We have partnerships with companies like Human Synergistics. We've got some tools that we've created.

This is our opportunity to get a baseline for our clients and the individuals that we work with. And from there we can look to align with the leadership of the organization. We tailor our approach. So we make a customized package based on what we've discovered in that assessment. So generic solutions for generic problems, customizable solutions for individual problems.

From there we can engage. We use our core curriculum. We translate, like we've mentioned before, we translate cognitive science into practical tools, things that you can use to elevate individual and organizational performance. And when we're able to do that, when we can assess and we can align and we can engage and we can start to measure the results that are coming on the other side of that, the only step left in the process from there is to sustain. We want to sustain that process as much as we can.

Once we get that new factory built and it's got all the right beliefs in it, we want to keep it running as long as possible. 'cause while we can recover from the fire, we want to avoid it if we can. So we want to be able to assess, align, engage, and sustain. And that's what an ongoing relationship with us looks like. When you can do that, you can step through our process of unblocking yourself, revising and removing beliefs, narratives, and expectations that are able to hold you back.

You're able to unlock the abilities of others to do the same, right? And empower them to pass it on. And when they can pass along what you've passed along to them, it makes it to that final tier, which is unsticking groups, empowering everyone to move forward without friction. Moving in the same direction here at The Pacific Institute, you'll see it on our website within image. We just call that rowing in the same direction.

And when everybody's rowing in the same direction, you get a lot of momentum and it's really hard to stop the ship. So first and foremost, make sure you're pointed in the right direction. Second, get everybody rowing in that same direction. So where do we go from here? Very last page

of your workbook is one more opportunity for you to write down some thoughts and some notes. So when you do that, at the end of the day today, I would encourage you to write down a few thoughts. The University of Waterloo has done a study that says human beings, and I'm pretty sure I'm presenting only to humans today. Human beings will forget 40 to 60% of new information presented to them if they don't put it to use in their daily lives within the first 24 to 48 hours. So I got good news for you.

You have the weekend to do that. I got bad news for you. If you wait till Monday, you're going to forget a good 40 to 60% of what we talked about. So if you heard some things today, whether it was one of the stories or one of the tips or something, I encourage you to try to put it to use within your life as soon as you can. There's another study that shows that how quickly a person takes action on a new idea or goal is directly related to whether or not they'll take action on a goal at all.

So the faster you take actions on goals is directly related to whether or not you take action on goals at all. So if you learn something today and you want to put it to use, my challenge to you is see if you can put it to use today and if not today, definitely this weekend. But where do we go from here? You've got some choices, so you can choose to see it as a rabbit or a duck. You get to choose what success point is for you.

Your first choice is do you want to engage with us? You've got three different ways that you can do that. If you have a smartphone, you can take it out now you can scan what's on your screen. That's going to open up the opportunities to engage with us. We are also going to put a link for that exact same survey in the chat here in just a second.

And because Anna is so on top of things, everybody here has an email waiting in their inbox right now that has a link to the survey as well. And in that you have the opportunity to get a copy of today's slides. You have an opportunity to participate in a free organizational beliefs survey that we are doing. We are offering that to the first five people that complete that. So it's not a race, but if you're person number six, we're probably going to tell you have to wait a little bit.

So we are offering that belief survey to the first five individuals. We are also going to give you the opportunity to connect with us, whether that's scheduling a meeting or booking a time to speak with us or what have you. And then it's an opportunity for feedback. We are back on the first Friday of every month. We absolutely cherish the feedback that we receive.

We always, we always say that all feedback is a gift. Sometimes you want to return the gift, but we do believe that all feedback is a gift. So if you liked what we had to say, if you sort of liked what we had to say or if you hated what we had to say, we would love to hear from you. With that said, we have eight remaining minutes and I'm going to save that time for any questions or comments that anybody might have if you do not have any questions or comments. Thank you very much for sharing. 52 minutes with me on the first Friday of November.

We will be back on December 6th, which is going to be our next Beyond Limitss presentation. We also have a separate briefing that's coming up in the middle of this month that is specifically designed for individuals who are in the financial services world. So if you happen to be a financial planner or advisor wealth manager, stay tuned. You'll be seeing some information about an event we are doing two weeks from today. Otherwise, we are going to stick around for questions, comments, concerns.

Thank you everybody for sharing your time on a Friday with us. If you need anything, stick around. If not, I really hope to see you next month.