Peer Power Invitation

If you have come to this posting in follow up to one of many keynote presentations congratulations and thank you.  Most people have good intentions in the moment but it is easy to fall back into the daily grind of too much to do and too little time to invest in yourself.   You are your most important investment. 

According to   Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, each day we are given 20,000 moments.

  For most a vast majority of these moments are simply reruns or what has been before but for a few they are filled with incremental insights that compound daily to create a future free of fear.  I hope you will chose to be one of the fear-less few.

The choice between Love and Fear as represented by the cards presented during my program is based on research conducted by Dr. David Hawkins and published in Power vs Force.  Every decision we make and every thought we have can be categorized in one of these two classifications.  The titles we use to define these groupings are not important.  If you don’t like Love and Fear you might also classify these choices as energizing or de-energizing or helpful or not helpful.

De-energizing thoughts are not-helpful, fear is not-helpful, and force is not-helpful. 

Lecturing is also typically not helpful.  Most people don’t appreciate being talked at, they do like to be “included in”.  This is one purpose of humor in my presentations.  Humor is an invitation to join in common experience.  If you read my evaluations or have attended my programs you know that humor is key but I am not a comedian.  I use humor as a tool to “reframe” challenges by changing the chemistry of our experiences.  This kind of “attitude intervention” is very effective in the short term but the benefits last only as long as the conversations continue.

I am grateful that you have chosen to continue our conversation.  Keynote presentations by their duration and design are more invitation than education.  They are an opportunity for like-minded people to connect in a quest for awareness.  By questioning the limitations we place on ourselves and others we rediscover the best in each of us.

My friend John Scherer likes to say “we don’t change ourselves, we become ourselves and that changes everything.”

The first step, and today’s lesson, is awareness.  This step is not to be taken lightly and must be retaken daily.  People impatient for progress like to jump right to “how” but if you don’t take the time to observe your current “motivations” changing behaviors is nearly impossible.

Zen practitioners call this process “the mind studying the mind”.  It is the process of observing our internal conversations.  The purpose is not to study the subject of those conversations but the tone.  Psychologists describe this as our explanatory style

defined by the extent to which we experience events as Personal, Permanent and Pervasive.  Our job at this stage is not to judge but to simply observe.  Try and view your conversations as an impartial bystander.  What adjectives do you use to describe your experiences?  Are they on the Love side of the card you received or the Fear side?*  Are you using Love Language or do you have a Fear Focus?

Stuck for twelve hours in the Washington DC airport, I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now.  I would not trade those lessons for all the on-time flights in America.  Eckhart was the first person that convinced me to become aware of how often we are used by our minds.  The easiest test to know when you are being used by your mind – Do your thoughts bring you peace or pain?  If they bring you pain, choose different thoughts.

If spiritual teachings don’t float your boat you can find the same lessons in the clinical approach of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.  This approach, established by Albert Ellis, is founded on the belief that each of us has the ability to become less self-disturbing by becoming aware of our own conversations.  Ellis believed that events do not cause suffering. What happens to us “is not” good or bad, he said. It is our interpretation of events and the meaning we give to them that is responsible for our way of feeling about them

Remember:

“whatever you look for you will find, whatever you find will continue.”

Focusing attention through help-full conversation is the most powerful tool we have for improving both employee engagement and job performance.  Sustainable transformation is seldom the result of either short term inspiration or education.  What makes change stick is ongoing conversation.  Every day we are being taught by our media, our culture, our selective memories and even our own physiology to be afraid.  Turning this tide requires persistent attention which is the purpose of Peer Powered Performance™.

We become like whatever we think about most, we move in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts.

The simplest way I can describe Peer Powered Performance™[iii]

is with a question.  How would education change if teachers were required to coach their students for a full year after graduation?  Then what if both teachers and students were evaluated on the success of their collaboration?

This is the essence of Peer Powered Performance™; it is a membership based approach designed to encourage uplifting conversations through the regular introduction of targeted education and insightful illustration.  The “Bee the Difference” illustrations in this process are key as they provide both anchors and impetus for expanding our awareness where lessons alone would quickly be drowned out by our daily demands. The content for our bi-weekly lessons includes best in class business practices, the latest developments in neuroscience and personal development secrets that span the ages.

If the 20,000 moments you are given each day are filled with help-full thoughts then we hope you will join our Peer Power Community and share your insights with others.  To learn more download this publication in process (another way of not finished yet) Peer Powered Performance™.