“The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.”
I live in a small town in northeastern Wisconsin. Not much happens here. Recently, I had the opportunity to go to an entrepreneur’s event at Lambeau Field (Go Pack Go!). They limited the participants and speakers to within an 80-mile radius. These folks came together to share and speak about their innovative programs, missions, and movements. As I mingled amongst the people who were solving hunger, providing affordable, clean energy to Africa, and offering abused women reliable transportation and the means to make a living wage, I realized these were the very people for whom this book is written. I have also come to believe that the world desperately needs people like us.
Society runs well when its people conform to the rules. However, sometimes the rules need a nudge. The people who do the nudging are the ones who see how things can be better and have the passion to present their ideas to the masses. These are usually people who see the world differently, and they are a valuable resource. If you are reading this book, then I suspect there is a part of you that resonates with the person who sees things differently, notices how things could be better, and says, “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
The big challenge is finding the courage to challenge the status quo. At this point, I’d like to speak to the leader in you. This is the part of you that wants to go against the grain. This is the part of you that is tired of watching people be treated badly by doing things the wrong way. This is the part of you that gets passionate about changing a system that no longer serves us. However, there are other parts of you that are fearful of, resistant to, or overwhelmed by taking on an extensive, immense mission. This internal conflict happens to all of us. Those of us that carry out the big mission in spite of these barriers are leaders.
When you think differently from everyone else in the room, it means you have lots of ideas, many of which haven’t been thoroughly kicked around. These ideas, when you have the courage to present them, may have the potential to change the world in some way. We have enough managers. You know, the people who uphold the status quo and focus on more effective ways to get work done. What we need more of are leaders. Leaders start movements. Leaders promote change. Leaders do the things that rest of us are scared to do.
When we ask a group of people to consider a new idea or new way of thinking, they have to consider it and may find the process of reflection uncomfortable. They may feel the need to defend or justify not changing. After all, most humans resist change. We tend to get comfortable in our stability. Inertia takes over, and we need a prod to get the momentum to move in a different direction. Great ideas and great passion can provide that push if we can be brave enough to expose them to each other.
To experience personal, professional, emotional, and spiritual growth, we have to change our perspective. Even a one-degree shift can unlock us from some of the underlying beliefs that have held us back. Consider a plane. For every one degree a plane is off the correct heading, the plane will be off course by about 100 feet. This means that a one-degree shift can have you missing the mark by about a mile for every sixty miles a plane flies. Just a one-degree shift can have you end up at a totally new endpoint. How does this relate to mindset? This is good news for us humans because it means if can slightly shift our thoughts, then we will experience immense results. Because we are the people who think differently, we have the ability to shift people’s thinking just by sharing what we are thinking. This is both a responsibility and a gift.
I have a client who challenges communities to shift how we work with our youth in a dramatically different way. He had this sense that we were handling things poorly, and the data support his hypothesis. So he decided to do the courageous thing and challenge all of us. He has created a movement that is ruffling feathers. He keeps going anyway. He has people telling him that he’s wrong. He keeps going anyway. He gets rejected on a regular basis. He keeps going anyway. As he is moving forward, everyone who witnesses his movement is forced to shift how they think, even if it’s just for a moment. We are all growing as a result. When the youth are getting better as a result of his work, it is harder for us to shift back to our old way of thinking.
Another client of mine was struggling with an employee. This client has been running her business for over 20 years, so she was pretty confident that she knew what the problem was with her employee. She shared with me that this was a millennial who was just lazy. Because I am a different thinker, I got curious and asked if there were other reasons that this employee seemed incapable of getting his work done on time and to their standards. I told her to give me any options that came to mind. Just throw out ideas and see what happens. This exercise immediately shifted her perspective. She had to change how she was looking at him to answer my question. In less than five minutes, she came to realize that she had created a corporate culture that made it impossible to ask for help and admit when you don’t know something. By shifting her perspective, she was able to uncover the real cause of her employee’s problems and better assist him in getting what he needs to succeed.
If you don’t think like anyone else in the room, then you can be the catalyst for a shift in perspective. For me, coaching is only one way to facilitate a shift in how a person looks at the world. Challenging the status quo is another way. Staring movements is yet another. That shift, regardless of how it occurred, causes growth. When we grow, we learn, we improve, and we get better.
I think of a highly evolved thinker as someone who has strong self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-regulation. To get to this level of evolution, most of us have to go through multiple experiences that result in personal growth and development. It might look like breakdowns followed by breakthroughs. It may be going through a particularly challenging situation where a person is forced to go in a different direction. It could be ending up in a dark hole emotionally or spiritually and finding that a new mindset is the way out. For some reason, discomfort seems to be part of the process of evolving how we think.
As we participate in the journey of continuous discovery, we are able to let go of some of the less evolved thinking behind. Here is where the real value starts to emerge because this is where we come to understand more profound meanings in life. For example, the less evolved thinking of love is an if-then proposition. If you ask me to marry you, then you love me. If you help with the children, then you love me. If you quit drinking, then you love me. Lots of expectations, both spoken and unspoken, live in the world of if-then, conditional love. It’s also where most of our relationships can stall out if we aren’t careful.
A higher evolution of love is unconditional love. It means we experience love regardless of what the other person does or says or believes. Unconditional love is relieved of the burden of expectations, which makes it easier to experience. This opens us up to loving more people more deeply. People who think differently have a high capacity for discovery, which makes them prime for highly evolved thinking. When they can ascend to higher evolutions of thinking, their ideas become more meaningful as well. Developing an evolved sense of consciousness is a gateway to a happier, more productive life.
I have a client who started with me at an average level of thinking. He had done just enough work on his own to know that there were higher states of satisfaction and purpose, but he was stalled out. He was getting stuck in worrying about how he was being perceived, rather than working on understanding himself more intensely. The visual I have in my mind is of this client holding out a mirror to everyone and asking if HE looked okay. Our work together had him turning the mirror back at himself.
During a session, he was agonizing about feeling so tired from trying to take care of everyone. We explored how solving other people’s problems served him. His big insight happened when he realized that fixing was satisfying him, but didn’t really help anyone else. This is when something inside him clicked. He was able to decouple caring about someone and fixing them. The weight was immediately lifted. When he practiced loving people without having to fix their problems or give them solutions, he could love more people more deeply. By growing his self-awareness, his thinking reached a higher level of evolution which paid off big dividends in his relationships.
Carol Dweck introduced us to the “growth mindset” in her book Mindset published in 2006. The idea is that we can learn and grow as much as we want because we are not innately born with traits that we are locked into for life. A growth mindset supports our neuroplasticity. We know that our minds are constantly learning and adjusting. We are lucky because we can consciously decide the mindset we want to have. If we want to believe that people are just wired to be smart, athletic, thin, funny, etc., then we have a closed mindset. If we choose to believe that anything is possible and there is always a way to get what we want, then we have a growth mindset.
People who think differently usually have a growth mindset. They are a curious group who are continuously looking for a different way. These folks are thirsty to learn, and most of my clients learn through experience. Their growth mindset helps them to take risks, fail without judgment and reflect on what they have learned. Lots of experiences results in lots of learning.
My daughter is a teenager, and she has plenty of intense experiences that have forced her to grow. Some people would characterize her as having a fair share of hard knocks, but that isn’t how she sees it. Her perception is that the difficulties she faces have taught her how to cope at a younger age than most. She doesn’t see that she was born a certain way or a victim of genetics. Instead, she has figured out that she can determine the best answers for herself and her solutions might not be the same as anyone else’s.
For example, she has plenty of drama with her middle school peers. With social media, it seems much more intense than I ever experienced at her age. One night, she was caught up in a group chat that became a heated argument between two groups of young ladies. She became stressed and worried, and found it difficult to sleep. She asked me if she could take a mental health day the following day to regroup. I’m not sure that most teens would know to ask for a mental health day. Even if they did, I wonder how many parents would agree. Our daughter made her case without any excuses, blaming or victim talk. She knew she had gone too far and things had gotten emotional. She deleted the app. She blocked some people on her mobile device. She took a day to lay low, read a book, snuggle with her pets and reflect on what had happened. This is how a growth mindset approaches challenges and learns from them.
One of my colleagues is in a wheelchair. At coffee the other day, he shared with me that he doesn’t care if he fails. He has a degenerative nerve disorder, so he had to learn at a young age that he may literally fall on his face without warning. He decided that he wasn’t going to make that a big deal. His growth mindset allowed him to overcome the humiliation and embarrassment that could accompany falling in front of people. When I do something that is new and scary, I think of my friend and decide not to care if I stumble, make a mistake or mess things up.
I was talking with a colleague who used to teach teenagers. He is an innovative person who thinks differently from most teachers. He shared that he was always trying out lots of crazy ideas with his students. Other teachers would approach him and ask where he gets his ideas, how he gets great partners from the community to help out and how he gets his students to buy into what he’s doing. His simple answer was “I just try it.” After many, many trials, he would have some great breakthroughs that would lead to new trials and newer breakthroughs. Trying it is an effective approach to learning what works for you.
NPR has a podcast called “Invisibilia”. One episode, titled “Flip the Script”, detailed how the Danish police approached the problem of young Muslims being radicalized and running away from Denmark to travel to ISIS training camps. The police chose to flip the script from demonizing these youth to opening their hearts and bringing these young Muslims into the Danish community. They didn’t know if it would work. They didn’t know what they were doing. They just had an idea and they tried it. They learned as they went, and they tweaked as needed. They were able to reduce the numbers of young Muslims leaving Denmark to join terrorist groups and the ones that returned to Denmark have stayed and are part of the community.
There are many barriers that can get in the way of trying things. For example, I have been dreaming of a program for middle school kids that would have them loving themselves rather than tearing each other apart. When I shared this dream with others, I didn’t get much support until I talked with Chris. My dream resonated with her too. We’d meet for coffee to brainstorm ideas to get a program up and running, but nothing would ever come of it. There were too many unknowns, and we couldn’t quite get ourselves to the point where we could even get started. It wasn’t until we broke the program into the tiniest step we needed to move forward that we got any traction at all. We agreed to work with two kids for a few hours for two Sundays in a row. It was small enough that it was doable. We could try it. We could tweak it. We could learn from it. Trying it took our dream and converted it into a reality.
Of course, trying it isn’t easy because there are always going to be barriers. Here are a few of the barriers kept me stuck with my middle school dream.
See, I can keep on going because, frankly, I’m a marvelous catastrophizer. So the barriers never stop. It’s just that I take the barriers, put them in a nice little compartment in the back of my brain and take the tiniest step that moves me closer to my goal. I know that trying it will teach me something because I’ve already decided that it will. The biggest risk is to do nothing or to not learn from trying it.
We all admire people who have big successes and have accomplished enormous goals. What we don’t always realize is what it takes to get there. Many of the change makers of today suffered through loads of failures, tons of fears and lots of rejections. They aren’t so different from the rest of us. We may put them on a pedestal, but it only serves to make audacious goals unachievable for us. The world needs more change, more challenge, and more service. It needs us, the different thinkers, to step forward and share our ideas with others.