Leading With Force

I'd like to offer you a tool that will radically reshape the way that you experience your life. And that really should be our goal is to experience our lives.

There's a difference between living your life and experiencing your life, experiencing the joy of life, truly experiencing the pain of life, learning from that pain, using that pain to translate into a more meaningful, more purposeful existence and a more impactful [00:01:00] experience in your time here on earth.

Today I'd like to talk about how you can reshape your experience by the way that you control your focus and control your mind.

Now, this idea is based off a very fundamental premise that has applications across all kinds of different areas of life and all kinds of different industries. Military, for example, business, entrepreneurship. It's the idea of controlling the controllables. Controlling what we can control allows us to have the greatest influence over our outcomes.

Now notice I didn't say control our outcomes. We can never fully control our outcomes. There are too many variables in this super complex, nuanced world in which we live to fully control our outcomes. Everything that happens to us and where we totally end up on our path. It's just impossible. So the idea of controlling your life, the idea of controlling your outcomes is something that we should really try to avoid from an [00:02:00] existential perspective because if we set the expectation that we are in control of our lives, we're going to set ourselves up for a lot of disappointment and pain and suffering when things don't go our way.

And what's worse is we're not going to learn as much from that experience because we're so focused on controlling the outcome that we tend to miss the lessons that that experiences is offering us.

And so rather than trying to control our outcomes. What we want to do is control our focus so that we can have the greatest influence on our outcomes. We control the controllables, and what we control mostly is our own mind.

Our version of the human experience, which we're living is entirely dependent on how we control our minds, what we choose to place focus on, how we ascribe meaning to the events in our world. These are all elements that combined to create our version of the human experience, the life that we're experiencing this, the difference [00:03:00] between living and experiencing life is where and how you place your focus, how you control your mind and the way in which you control your mind.

has a direct influence on your outcomes. You can never entirely control what happens to you in this world, but you can have a massive influence on it by controlling your focus, controlling your mind, placing your focus in the right areas. So we're going to talk about how you can control your mind and place your focus in areas that elevate your human experience and have the greatest positive and influence on your

outcomes.

Our ability to positively influence our outcomes simply comes down to the way that we frame the questions that we're asking ourselves. This is something that we're doing all the time in any situation, mostly subconsciously.

We are constantly underwriting our human and experiencing and ascribing meaning to the things that are happening in our world. And the quality of our experience and the influence that we have on our outcomes is directly tied to the questions [00:04:00] that we are asking ourselves.

To put it very simply, the quality of our lives is directly tied to the quality of the questions that we're asking ourselves.

If we're asking ourselves poor questions that keep us in a state of anxiety and fear and stress or self sympathy, self righteousness, self pity, then we're going to experience those things. If we ask ourselves empowering questions that allow us to grow and learn and see experiences as happening for us, not to us, then we're going to increase the influence in a positive way that we have on our outcomes and the quality of the life that we live.

And when we ask ourselves better quality, empowering questions, we create positive momentum and forward energy to go and create the outcomes that we're looking for. We inspire ourselves to action.

We expire ourselves to experience life as happening for us. For us and not to us. We take any situation and based on the questions that we ask ourselves, we [00:05:00] ascribe a negative or positive meaning to that experience and the more we can see those experiences as being positive and for us, the more we can influence our eventual outcomes.

I know that that can sound at certain times, like it's easier said than done, and it certainly is. But it's not mysticism. It's not magic. It's simple neurochemistry. is designed to respond to the stimuli that you feed it. And so when you feed it empowering questions, when you feed it questions of curiosity and learning and forward momentum, You're going to succeed, whereas if you ask poor quality questions of woe is me and why are these things happening to me and why can't I catch a break and why am I not getting what I want?

You don't allow for yourself to experience the blessings that are happening in those moments. The lessons you can learn, the gifts you're being given, the space that can be made in your life for something incredible to [00:06:00] happen. This is how you control your mind. And this is how you place your focus in the areas that are going to help you influence your outcomes in a positive way.

It all comes down to the quality of the questions that you ask yourself at any given moment.

Now, before we get even more specific here, I'd like to highlight this entire thought process by asking you a simple question. How do people get to know one another? Well, there are certainly many different ways, but the fastest way to get to know someone, let's say you just met someone new, Is to ask them questions when you're having a conversation with a new person whom you just met And all we have are answers the conversation would never move forward You would ask one question they would answer and then the conversation would be over People get to know one another by being inquisitive Have you ever had a really amazing conversation with another human being maybe even someone you just met?

My gut tells me that there are a lot of [00:07:00] questions asked in that conversation. The way that you can truly get to know another human being in a very quick amount of time is to ask them better questions rather than how are you doing or what do you do for work? You can ask better questions about their life, their goals, their purpose, their drive, anything that really gets them talking about the things that are truly meaningful to them.

That's how you get to know people in relatively short order. You get to know someone more deeply based on the depth and the quality of the questions that you ask them. Most of the best conversations you've ever had have been based on the quality of the questions that you're asking.

And since we know that to be true about how we get to know others, it stands to reason that it's also true about how we get to know ourselves.

Our ability to get to know ourselves more deeply and therefore control Influence our outcomes and control. Our focus is entirely dependent on the quality and depth and frequency of the questions that we ask ourselves. This is true in a lot of [00:08:00] areas of our life. Now, including technology, our relationship with our devices is entirely dependent on the quality of the questions that we asked them. Many people use chat GPT for a lot of things now. And as you know, if you've given a lot of prompts to an AI or a chat GPT type tool, you know that the responses that you get The quality of those responses is in direct proportion to the quality of the prompt that you're putting into the system.

The quality of the question that you ask determines the quality of the answer that you get. And so if we have that same mindset towards the quality of the questions that we ask ourselves, we're going to get to know ourselves more deeply, and we're going to figure out how to control our focus to influence our outcomes.

So let's talk about some of the questions that you can get in the habit of asking yourself every day to start priming your mind, affecting your neurochemistry and influencing your outcomes in a positive way.

This isn't all going to happen at one time.

This is about building a habit over time [00:09:00] and priming your brain to see your life experience is happening for you and not to you. In the moment, it would be amazing in every moment. Every moment of stress or anxiety or fear or danger or whatever that we were able to take a step back from the mirror and Ask ourselves really key questions around that situation and turn it into an empowering moment That's probably another level to this But we're never gonna get there unless we create a daily habit of asking ourselves key questions over and over and over and therefore Forcing ourselves to put the focus in a positive way on on the experience that's happening around us.

So, for example, get in a habit every day of asking yourself, what have I learned today? And I know that sounds incredibly simple because some days it's going to be an incredibly simple answer. If you get in the habit of asking yourself, what have I learned today?

Every day, it's going to be relatively easy [00:10:00] to answer that question. Some days, some days are going to be really great. And you're going to learn that you were awesome and everything in your world is right. And there are going to be some days where you struggle with that question. There are going to be some days where you struggle to answer the question, what have I learned today?

Because today was a painful day. Today was a day of suffering. Today was a day where it didn't feel like I learned much. It just felt like life was happening to me. If you force yourself to answer the question, what have I learned today? You'll realize very quickly after about 10, 15, 20 repetitions of this, that you've always learned something today out of every single day, no matter how stressful or how many obstacles you faced or how it really just felt like a crappy day, you've learned something and you can take that knowledge and you can use it for empowerment.

But so often, so much of what we've [00:11:00] learned gets lost because we're so focused on the negative. We're so focused on that stress. We're so focused on those obstacles. We're so focused on our fear of the future and our fear that today is just going to be like tomorrow and tomorrow is just going to be as bad as today was.

And so we don't allow ourselves to step back and say, what have I learned through this experience? Another question would be what would need to happen? for this experience to be positive. This is going to be a key question. You make a habit of asking yourself on very difficult days. You want to get off the emotional roller coaster of living through highs and lows, adrenaline and dopamine, and then all sorts of stress hormones in this endless rollercoaster.

And you need to get in the habit of asking yourself what would need to be true for this experience to be positive. I wish that I had asked myself that question more [00:12:00] regularly throughout my career. I'll give you a great example of a time that I could have used that question to myself. I had a business once, it was one of the first ones that I started that was doing very well.

I had poured my blood and sweat and tears for years into this business and experienced very little success until we finally had a breakthrough. For And we had a very great run for about five straight years. We were just like undefeated. We were winning every day, every month for five straight years, day in and day out.

And then that business started to falter. It started to fall apart a little bit. Market volatility made it very difficult. Some personnel things made it very difficult. The culture that we had built had started to fracture. And with all those things combined, the business started to disintegrate a little bit.

And I wasn't asking myself at that time the right questions every day. Every day that I saw the business get more difficult, more challenging, I was experiencing life in a [00:13:00] way that it was happening to me and not for me. And I had stopped asking myself questions around what I could learn and what would make these things a positive experience.

What would need to be true for the things that I was experiencing to somehow be positive?

And if I had gotten in the habit of asking myself those questions every day, I would have been put in a position where I had to come up with answers and I would have inspired myself to much more decisive action.

I either would have taken action to move the business in the right direction much more quickly rather than coming from a place of fear, or I would have made the decision to move on from the business much sooner than I actually did save myself a lot more pain and give myself the time.

to go get a head start on the next project. And I would have done it from a place of learning. What did I learn from this business? How can I take those lessons and apply them to something new? And what was positive about this experience that I can [00:14:00] go replicate and make it even better. The thing about going through a very difficult time, especially in a business that you've built, is that we get so close to the mirror when things are good.

that when things go bad, we have to actively back up from the mirror and learn the lessons because we see everything that we worked for is just falling apart when the reality is, if you've had any level of success for any period of time, you've learned so many lessons. You're such a more powerful person now, such a more gifted and equipped person to go out and do something even bigger and better than when you, than you were when you started this business.

And if you started this business with so much less and built it to something so great, just imagine who this person over here, what they're going to go build. If they take the lessons they applied from that first experience, but we tend to stand so close to the mirror and not ask ourselves those questions.

That those [00:15:00] lessons tend to get lost and we just get lost ourselves in this cycle of stress and fear and anxiety and going from top of the world and our egos being fed every day to those egos being threatened and feeling like we're not worthy again, and that life is happening to us, even though life has given us an incredible blessing in all the years of success that we had and all the lessons that it afforded us, we can take those lessons and go build something great.

So first, get in the habit of asking yourself every day, what have I learned today? Because when you prime your brain to look for the lessons in life, you'll start to retain them, and you'll start to apply them, and that will influence your outcomes in a positive way. And then get in the habit of asking yourself, what would need to be true for this experience to be positive?

If I had asked myself that, when my initial business was really suffering. I could have actively searched [00:16:00] for the positive that was happening in that moment in time, taking those lessons and go and applied them in other areas of my life and save myself a couple of years worth of suffering. Now that I've experienced that, I look back on that period of my life very fondly because it was incredibly painful chapter.

But now that I've gotten in the habit of asking myself the right questions, I frame it in a way. where I take that suffering away as a blessing now because I know what it's like to suffer and not ask yourself the right questions. And it's a reminder to me to ask myself the right questions and empower myself to have a positive influence on my outcomes.

So those are two right off the bat that I think can

be very meaningful questions that you get in the habit of asking yourself every single day. And just forming that habit is going to have a transcendent effect in your life. I can already tell you, try it for 10, 15, 20, like I said, days and formulate that habit, really solidify it. And you will see the way that you [00:17:00] experienced the world change, but what you can do to go even further and really immerse yourself in this habit and create a positive momentum in your life.

Is to internalize it by getting it back out, getting the answer to your questions back out. One of the things that expert salespeople like myself have learned is the power of documenting your conversations, the ability to recall the answers to questions or the experiences you've had with another person and how empowering that is in your ability to form relationships.

And what you're really trying to do with these questions is form a more positive and meaningful relationship with yourself. You are the only you in existence and your relationship with yourself is incredibly important as far as how you experience the world.

So through this exercise and through forming these habits, you're really creating a deeper relationship with yourself and documenting the answers to these questions does a couple of things. One, it gives you data and gives you the ability to go back to [00:18:00] the record and recall how you've answered those questions in the past and bring back the memory of the things that you were experiencing in those moments and see your answers to those questions.

It helps to continue to prime your brain to positively influence your outcomes and your actions,

The other thing that it does is it gets you to actually articulate your answers when we only keep things inside. And I just think deeply about something without actually physically expressing it. It's much more difficult for my brain to remember and to recall those things, especially when I'm doing it every single day.

That's why as a salesman, I've gotten such a good habit. of taking crazy detailed notes and my entire sales team knows that I'm maniacal about this. , the quality of your conversions is in direct proportion to the quality of the notes that you take. When I have a conversation with a new person that I eventually would like to do business with, my job is not only to find out their needs and how I can be of service to them, But to [00:19:00] document every detail I can possibly think of from that conversation so that I can recall it in our next conversation and make sure that person understands that my relationship with them is meaningful.

The way that I see them is as a meaningful human being worthy of my time and worthy of my brain space. So when I'm taking notes, I want to remember your dog's name, where you grew up, what high school you went to your favorite sports team, things that have nothing to do with us doing business. Because when I remember that you're a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, six months after the last time we spoke, you're going to feel a connection to me because I made space for you.

And I think it's the same exact thing with documenting your answers to these questions as you're forming a more meaningful relationship with yourself. You're telling yourself. That the answers to these questions are worth more than just a fleeting moment in time. They're worth your documentation.

They're worth your focus. They're worth your recall. And again, all you're doing is [00:20:00] affecting your neurochemistry in a way that is showing you that your relationship with yourself, which is really the relationship you have with your mind. is meaningful, that it's important. And the answers that you give these questions will become so much more deeply embedded when you document them.

So this is where things like journaling and those types of tools come into play. I use the day one app for journaling. I think it's fantastic. You can have it on your phone, your laptop, anywhere. And when I ask myself these daily questions, I believe you can even template journal entries inside an app like that, where when you pull up a new entry, those questions.

What did I learn today and what would need to be true for this experience to be positive will already be there and they'll be yours to answer. If you get in the habit of doing this day after day after day, you will be astonished at how much differently you experience the world.

And how much differently you experience the events that transpire throughout your day, how you frame them, how you learn from them and how you apply those lessons to [00:21:00] drive closer towards the outcomes that you're looking for. That's truly all this is. It's a simple feedback loop.

When you get yourself thinking about the things that you've learned. Asking yourself how you can make your experiences more positive. then documenting those answers every single day.

What you focus on tends to materialize. And if nothing else, all you get is a much closer relationship with yourself. But my gut tells me that you'll get a heck of a lot more than that. You'll start to see the world in a way that there's positivity and blessings all around you, that you are much more powerful and knowledgeable and capable than you ever thought before because you were so focused on life happening to you.

And when you make that mindset shift and you see all the lessons that you've learned and you document them, your brain is now primed. To see you as an empowering human, a capable human, a powerful human, like you are, like I know you are. So get in this habit. Start asking yourself, what have I learned today?

[00:22:00] And what would need to be true for this experience to be positive? And come up with your own questions. And then tell me what they are. Drop a comment, get in contact with me. Let me know what questions you've come up with in your daily cadence and how they've helped empower you to have a positive influence over your outcomes.

I really appreciate you spending some time with me today and I can't wait to talk again soon.