America’s Leadership Expert : Objective thinking

Clay Staires: This is America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership and podcast number 50. We’re talking about a call to action. We have just gone through our series of podcasts on personal growth. With Clay Staires and Tulsa Business Leadership this has been a process or a path that I have used with multiple executives across the country in helping them expand their capacity to process greater complexity.

It all begins with, as I’m talking with him, as Clay Staires and Tulsa Business Leadership, we first talked about how to prepare for growth, and then we talk about preparing the soil. Once we have prepared for growth we have to get the soil ready for the seeds that will be planted, and then we sow the seeds for personal growth. Once the seed are sown then we begin to nurture those seeds. After we nurture then we get growth, and as we get growth now we have to begin to prune and shape personal growth. Then in our last podcast we talked about how do we harvest the fruit of personal growth.

Now, here we are with podcast number 50. I want to talk about a call to action. Now that we have gone through the steps of growth what are the next steps? What do we do now? As America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership, again this is a place where I find leaders and entrepreneurs across the country are finding themselves trapped. They’re finding that they are stuck in this place of, “How do I move forward? I don’t know what action … I’m learning a lot but I don’t know how to implement. I don’t know how to take the next steps.” In this podcast we’re going to talk about the four steps that you can take to help you in all of these areas of your growth, in all of these areas of planting and harvesting and nurturing and sowing and preparing, all of these different areas. I’m going to use the acronym of GROW. We’re going to start, there’s going to be four steps of how you can take … Four steps that will help you actually move forward in each of these different areas.

The first one is that we want to set Goals. The G in GROW is we want to set goals. There’s an ancient proverb that says, “Without a vision the people will perish.” We have to set goals. We have to set a target. What are we going after? Here’s another huge question, I want to encourage you with America’s Leadership Expert  Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership, I want to encourage you to start with the why. Start with why you want to get there. Why do you want to reach this goal? If you just focus on the what you can very easily get distracted and get off-point, get the vision drift if you are not consistently connected to the why, the purpose, the reason behind.

Step number one with Clay Staires and Tulsa Business Leadership of a call to action to help you actually get to the next phase, is to set your goal, set your sight, to set the target. What are we going to aim at? Why are we aiming at that? Once we have set a goal, then we move to our second step. Our second step, the second piece of GROW is the R. This is Responsibility. It’s taking the responsible. It’s owning it, not blaming other people. I often hear the phrase from business leaders as Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership, I often hear the phrase of, “That’s not fair,” and, “I shouldn’t have to do that,” and, “I can’t believe that they aren’t doing that. America’s Leadership Expert Clay, it would be so much easier if these people would do X, Y and Z.” But the thing is that you have to take responsibility for yourself.

You have to take responsibility of your personal growth. If your external circumstances are greater than your capacity, if your external responsibilities are greater than your capacity, then you will find that you will feel overwhelmed. You will feel pressed. You will feel anxiety that there’s too much out of control. The purpose, rather than trying to reduce the responsibilities I just need things to slow down. What I do as America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership is help people expand their capacity to meet that level of responsibility, to get rid of the blaming, to get rid of the pointing of fingers.

I have an equation, A plus B equals C, where A is your situation, B is your interpretation of your situation and C is actually your response. So often when we are not happy with our response, with the outcome, the first thing that we do is look at A. We want to change the situation. We want to change jobs. We want to change relationships. We want to get a higher pay. We want the weather to be different. We want people to be different. We want the situation to be different. But so often you are out of control of the situation. What really needs to happen to change C, you have to focus on B, your interpretation. Again, it’s taking responsibility, so we have setting goals and then taking responsibility.

The next one is to actually see. The O in GROW is Objective thinking. This is gaining wisdom from a mentor. Objective thinking is thinking that comes from outside of your brain. I say many times as I travel across the country, speaking to groups as America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, talk about, “You can only think what you think. It’s impossible for you to think anything other than what you think.” What I need in my life is consistent objective thinking, or else I will be trapped and always coming to my old same conclusions.

It’s why we sit and look at the ceiling at night trying to solve problems, we continue to come back to the same solution of, “There is no solution,” and we go over it and over it, and we keep coming to the same solution. What we do here is there is a place where we begin to allow outside thinking to come into our mind. We begin to submit to a mentor. We begin to listen and allow other people to help change the way that we think. You can’t change yourself by yourself. It will take a Yoda in your life, a Gandalf, a Morpheus. It will take a leader, a Mr. Miyagi, in your life to help you change the way you think and to help you get on track.

I know for me I have had multiple mentors in my life, even today I have multiple mentors in my life that are helping me get where I want to get, because I know that I have to have this consistent objective thinking if I’m wanting to move forward and not get trapped in my old mindsets. Then the fourth step, we have Goals, Responsibilities, Objective thinking, and then step number four with Clay Staires and Tulsa Business Leadership is Willingness. This is actually having the openness, the willingness to learn and to change.

Learning, we think that learning is easy. We think it’s just a matter of reading a book, going to a workshop, getting an answer from somebody, but if we’re not careful we’ll get trapped in just putting the new information on a pile of old information that we are carrying in our brains. Over time we setup our own conclusions, we setup our own belief systems based on all of this information that we have put into our brain. As a result, even though we want to change, even though we are passionate about change and growth, I have found as America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership that when it comes to changing your mindset it can be very, very difficult, because the new mindsets that are coming in, they conflict with the old mindset.

Again, if you want to keep the old mindset that’s fine but the old mindset will get you the old results. If you want new results you have to have a new mindset, there needs to be new ways of thinking. This doesn’t mean that everything has to go but again, it takes that objective thinking, that mentor in your life to be able to identify and discover what old negative mind sets, what old limited thinking is keeping you from moving forward. Then when the mentor advises, when the mentor brings new information, we need to begin thinking this way. There is a willingness that you must have if you want to move forward. To learn is to change. To grow is to change. Growth without change is impossible. Change without growth is impossible. What we want to do is make sure that we have come to a place where we have embraced a willingness to change, even when it goes against our old mindsets.

Again, this is something that I have found over and over with leaders across the country with America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, is the resistance. Yes there is a desire to change. Yes there is a desire to grow. But where the conflict comes, where the struggle comes, is in the resistance to change. This is Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership, with podcast number 50, a call to action for greater personal growth.

Clay Staires