Dr. TC North, Co-author of Fearless Leaders on ColoradoBiz TV with Associate Editor Lisa Ryckman. Part 2: Becoming a mindset master. [Developing a success mindset]
Lisa Ryckman: Let’s talk about the second fearless leaders defining characteristic. Tell us about that.
Dr. North: The second one is mindset master. I love this one. This is pure performance psychology. It’s what I’ve been doing pretty much all of my life, starting with athletes and working now with business leaders.
So being a mindset master has three parts. The first part is: What do you do to prepare so that when you show up at an important event – whether that’s as a leader, a salesperson or a family member – if something is really important to you? Are you preparing your mind so that you show up with the right emotions? Do you need to be excited, do you need to be relaxed, do you need to be really happy, do you need to be laid back, mellow and just listen? You really have to know what those emotions are and you have to create them before you get there.
The second part is staying completely present in the moment. When you are present you have great presence. It’s one of the things that corporate leaders come to me a lot for. They say, “I want to learn greater presence,” which is, “How do I show up in a way that I’m authentic and believable and people just get me?” Presence is very infectious. All great leaders have great presence.
The third part is in the review. Creating a great success mindset involves learning from everything you did right and all of the mistakes.
Warren Buffett and Peyton Mannings’ secret success strategy
Lisa: You’ve written some very popular articles for us, and one of those being the Warren Buffet/Peyton Manning secret success strategy. Can you talk a little about that and how that relates to this?
Dr. North: I love the juxtaposition of those two characters because Peyton Manning is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time and Warren Buffet is probably the best stock investor of all time. The thing that they have in common is that they prepare at a level that is really different than other people. They do research and prepare at a different level. And the second thing is that they exploit opportunity in a different way. They see little things that other people don’t see. So they prepare differently and they can exploit opportunity at a much higher level.
Lisa: So can anyone learn how to do that or learn how to do it as well as they are capable of doing it? I mean not everyone is going to be a Peyton Manning or a Warren Buffet.
Dr. North: Yeah, I’d love to be able to pick stocks like Warren Buffett. You know, you can learn to do that in your area of expertise. So there are skills, any skill is learnable. In the book we actually talk about different ways to prepare and different preparation for the mind, body and emotions.
Lisa: Can you give us one insight into that, one skill that we might be able to learn to help us prepare better?
Accessing courage
Dr. North: You bet, and I‘m going to go back to a conversation we had earlier about our first fearless leaders characteristic – developing courage. Access a time in your life that you were courageous and that stimulates that neural network in your brain that’s connected to all the courageous memories.
So if you want to be more courageous going into something because it’s scary – like a salesperson, the biggest sales pitch they ever gave in their life, or a leader standing in front of their team during the down turn and saying, “I have to give layoffs,” which is a hard time for leaders. You access that courageous part of your mind, and you learn to access it, and you have certain memories you can access so that you get in that state of being courageous before you show up. You get in a success mindset.
