Written by Today we’ll be discussing, seven essential ways for leading change. When it comes to change, I’m actually going to take these from my book; Champion of Change, the Seven Instrumental Laws of Change. I actually wrote it back in 2018 when I had first started this journey.
When I had just quit my corporate job, running the Pricing department of a $2 billion company and things were going pretty well. But that change was pretty brutal. It was actually very difficult for me where I was wondering, did I make the right decision? As I went through that journey, I started reading and researching because I really do believe that you have to understand what it is that’s motivating you to be able to make different changes. And when we procrastinate, that is us dealing with certain fears that we are going through. I call these the seven C’s of Change or the seven C’s of Creation, and they’re broken into four steps. No matter what plan I put together, I will always tell you to start with mindset. You have to have the proper mindset.
Concept
Your concept is your vision, your plan. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish… your goals? Make sure that you’re writing out, understanding exactly what success looks like.
You don’t want to be someone who just says, I don’t like the way things are now. So I’m going to go ahead and change the way things are now. That could be based on just whatever was going on in your life that day. You may say, oh, that was a sign from God. And I’m not saying that it wasn’t, but I am saying that a lot of times we want to make sure that we attune our mind to make sure that we’re looking for the right thing.
Consciousness.
Our mind just doesn’t have the ability to focus on everything all the time. We get sensory overload. As a result, our mind is already designed to be able to focus on what we tell it is most important to us. An example would be you get a car and then all of a sudden you see the car everywhere.
That literally just happened to me. When you have a kid and there’s certain things you’re shopping for, you start seeing that all over the place. Where your mind was essentially ignoring all of that information, because it just felt like you weren’t interested. You gave it no clue that that was something that was important to you.
Now, when I’m at the grocery store with my kids, we look for completely different things. My kids are always looking for the toys and they find the most random things on the aisle, like colored straws. And, and I’m just like, what are we doing? Like, what is this that you want? And the truth is their mind is attuned differently than mine.
I’m looking for deals and sales. I’m trying to figure out what I want to get for dinner and what I need for their lunches, but they don’t care about any of that stuff. They’re just looking for toys and trinkets and things that they recognize. Which may coincidentally be on a cereal box, but it has nothing to do with the cereal that they want.
It’s just the toy that’s inside of the box is what they’ve been looking for. And we have to do the same thing ourselves.
Benefits of starting with mindset
When you start with mindset, when you get your concept under control, then that’s going to lead into your consciousness. Once you are focusing your mind on the goal that you want. The things that are most important to you, it is going to make it much easier for you to change. Otherwise, your mind is just saying, yeah, you, you said that you cared about that goal, but you, you haven’t really taken any action on it.
You haven’t really programmed anything to me. I’m just going to continue ignoring that. Which is the worst thing that can happen because you may miss your golden opportunity, because you didn’t take a few minutes to just map out exactly what success looks like. So that your mind is now saying, I’m looking for this.
I’m looking out for you. Let’s go and attack the world. The second stage in the next two concepts are going to be the stage of processes. Once you have the mindset, you got to do your part to make things as easy as possible to succeed. When we’re talking about finances, that may be as simple as just having the money automatically come out.
When you’re talking about other goals, it may look completely different. Where if you want to eat a certain way, you probably want to remove that food from your house.
Checks
The idea of step three, which is checks, make sure that you are setting yourself up for success. Our mind only has so many decisions that we can make in a day.
They call it decision fatigue. And if I just make it simple, where you get to make a hundred decisions in a day. Once you go over that number, it becomes really difficult. It’s why it’s very important, if you are in leadership to have your meetings first thing in the morning. Because you don’t want to overthink things to where if you have the meeting in the afternoon,
you may not make the same decision. There were tons of studies on this that I did cover in the book. And one of them is a judge. This judge was on the parole board. This judge would listen to people’s cases on whether they could leave jail early and go on probation. What was happening is if the judge saw you in the morning, he was more likely to grant probation than if he saw you late in the afternoon.
And when they were studying and they were looking through the data, they were like, okay, is he racist? Well, no. Does he have any sort of prejudice? Is it more men than women? Is it a age thing? And they couldn’t really find any correlation, except one thing was happening. As he was starting to fatigue mentally, what we all do is we just go back to whatever our previous default setting is.
And so for a judge, his safe place was leaving people in jail. It took a lot of mental energy to make the decision of whether this person is safe to reacclimate to society. For you and I, we do the same thing. When we make too many decisions in a day, we go back to whatever our previous habits were, which are the exact things that we’re trying to change.
If you wanted to eat healthier and then you made so many decisions during the day, then it’s more likely at the end of the day that you’ll eat unhealthy. And so you have to set yourself up by making as many things automated as possible. That way, you can focus on the most important decisions. Now, you will see across the board that a lot of people that are very famous, they wear the same clothes or the same suits every single day.
They eat the same food the same times of days, because these are now things they don’t have to think about. They don’t want to waste their thoughts on what most of us would consider unimportant. In the big scheme of things, not that deciding what food you eat, isn’t important. It is just not as important as the changes you want to make in your life.
That is why ultimately, if you don’t want to eat a certain thing, you should remove that thing from your house. Even if your kids love it, it doesn’t really matter. If you are trying to keep from eating it. You just want to set yourself up for success by having those checks in place, just to make sure, Hey, am I still in here?
Am I making sure things are automated? Am I making this as easy as possible?
Charge
The other thing that you’ll want to do is charge. And that short for your charge partner, which is like your accountability partner. Who are you going to put in charge of making sure that you stay on task? That you accomplish the goals that you have set for yourself.
You want to change something in your life? Who is it that you can say, this person gets me. They’re going to make sure that I don’t make any excuses and I accomplish my goal. Now, sometimes just having a charge partner is more than enough to gain the benefit. Where we meet someone at the gym, it’s more likely that we’ll go to the gym.
If we have a partner that we work with on certain projects, it’s more likely that we’re going to get our work done. It’s more likely if you are in a mastermind group, where you meet with people on a weekly or monthly basis, and you know, you have to check in with them. It’s more likely that you will do your part because you don’t want to have to stand in front of the group and explain why you fell short of your goal.
As long as you have someone that you can reach out to and say, look, just hold me accountable. I simply need you to ask me; did I do A, B, and C this week or this day, or this month? Whatever frequency makes the most sense for you. When we’re just in our head, it becomes very easy for us to explain to ourselves why today, wasn’t the day… and we’ll do it tomorrow.
But the problem is there is always a tomorrow and we don’t end up getting any traction. But if we set specific dates and specific times with specific people, it then gets rid of the excuses to where we set ourself up for success.
The third stage is our motivation. We have internal and external motivations. The fifth step is your catalyst and the sixth step is your character.
Catalyst
When we talk about your catalyst, it’s what got you started? What motivated you to take action? What is it that you said enough already, I am not doing this anymore. This is the last time I deal with this. What is that? That pushed you to the point of saying, I need to change this right now. This is what it took for me to say enough is enough.
Just keep writing each morning, each evening. Make sure it’s in the front of your mind. Your catalyst is this idea that I’m going to make the best decision today with the information I have. I’m not going to worry about the decision I made last week or last year or last decade. I’ll will just go ahead and make the best decision with the information I have today.
What I’m not going to do is, talk myself out of it by saying, well, that means you’re admitting that you wasted 10 years. That’s not true. You grew over those 10 years and your growth has changed who you are to the point that you are now ready to change something else in your life. Don’t allow yourself to keep making poor decisions once you know what the best decision is. You just simply make the best decision with the information that you have.
As you get more information, you should revisit your plan. This is what I wrote was important to me then. Is it still important to me? This is the degree I got and what I thought was important to me. Do I still want to work in that field? I don’t expect myself to get everything right, right away. I would equate it to a fog.
If you’re looking at a fog on the outside, there’s no way you can see what’s through the other side of the fog. What you have to do is take one step forward. And then you’ll notice the fog clears up that step forward. And as you keep walking through the fog, you notice it keeps getting a little bit clearer every step until you’re through the entire thing. You look back and you’re like, well, dang, the fog is still there. But as I walk through, my vision became clearer.
Character
The internal motivation is your character. This I would say is easily the most overlooked aspect of leading change. Your character, who you are on the inside, what you do when nobody is looking. You have to develop yourself internally as well. And dare I say, you may want to spend most of your time working internally on yourself.
The goals that we have set for ourself are directly tied to the person that we’re willing to become. If you want to make more money, who do you have to become to make more money? Also If you want to be a better parent, who do you have to become to be a better parent? If you want to be promoted, who do we have to become to be promoted?
Whether you want to read more or figure out something. Who do you have to become to accomplish those goals? Internally, your character, the thing that drives you are going to be your core values. For me, wisdom, compassion, love, family and freedom are my core values. As a result. I know it’s very important for me to make sure that I’m not sacrificing any one of these core values.
I know my character and what it is that satisfies me. Now, it took me a very long time to get here where I was sacrificing different parts of my life to accomplish something. And then I would be like, but I feel so empty inside. Why do I feel empty? And it took me a while to realize it was because I was sacrificing my core values. Things that were deal breakers for me, but I didn’t know that they were deal breakers at the time.
So as you invest in your character, make sure you’re, you’re honest and transparent. Make sure that you are providing value to other people that you’re not cutting corners. These things are going to help you in the long run because you’re changing who you are. You’re not short changing yourself, but you’re investing in yourself and your character.
Courage
The last stage is to implement step seven is the law of courage. Once you have your mindset in place. Once you have your processes mapped out. And once you understand the motivations you have, the only thing left for you to do is to take action. You can’t allow your fear of failure to keep you crippled from taking action.
Once we know what to do, we got to get started doing it. We can’t think about it anymore. It’s no longer mental gymnastics. Let’s get after it. It’s not that you’re going to get everything right away. But you’re not going to get it right. Unless you get going. So give yourself the opportunity to fail. Give yourself the opportunity to get rejected and give yourself the opportunity to learn from those mistakes.
Failure is not failure. Failure is simply the feedback loop of the action that I took. Did I get the result that I wanted? If I didn’t, what tweaks do I need to make? The fear of failure leads to a lot of people procrastinating and I’ll put a link in the video about the six types of procrastination.
If you’re going to lead change, then that means you have to be leading people. You have to be the example, walking them forward, showing them what’s going to happen. Creating the culture and the environment that says, it’s okay to mess up. We encourage it. But the feedback that we get is going to set us up for success.
We always focus on the success, but if we can talk about the failures, we would see that the most successful people weren’t successful because they did the same thing every day in their comfort zone. It was because they tried new things. They invented new things. They were trailblazers in their own rights and it’s not always pretty, but it’s necessary.
Give yourself the opportunity to become your best self, so that you have a life full of memories and experiences. Instead of looking back at a bunch of regret and concern.
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