Activating Leadership From Within

Move from Ideas to Action - Harness Non-Conscious Brain Power

With our constant stream of emails, voicemails, meetings, conference calls, and so on, it is a minor miracle that any of us can accomplish anything. With our smartphones surgically implanted into our hands, our time is sliced so thinly that we never have the focused time to develop the big-picture perspective required for an action plan, let alone the time to execute it.

"Daily routines, superficial behaviors, poorly prioritized or unfocused tasks leech our capacities—making unproductive busyness perhaps the most critical behavioral problem” in business today, contend Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal in their book A Bias for Action.

For so many of us—whether CEOs for major corporations, small business owners or solo-entrepreneurs—there is a fundamental disconnection between knowing what needs to be done and doing it. Calling this disconnection the “knowing-doing gap,” Stanford University researchers Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton pose the question: “Why does knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fail to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge?”

Is there anyone in business today who hasn’t wondered the same thing?

The answer, argue Bruch and Ghoshal, is both simple and profound. They sum it up with the term “willpower.” The problem they say is not that managers’ time is divided, but that their intention or “volition” is split as well.

 Getting things done requires two critical components: energy and focus. And both are at risk in the modern workplace. Building a bias for action in yourself and your organization requires developing and reinforcing the skills to become a “purposeful” or “volitional” manager. These are people who consistently achieve their objectives by making an unconditional commitment to their goals and then leveraging the power of that intention to overcome the obstacles in their way, whether it's within their doubts or the bureaucracies within their organizations.

 “Purposeful action-taking depends on engaging the power of the nonconscious mind,” according to John Assaraf of One Coach. “Not only does your non-conscious mind galvanize your mental and emotional energy, but it also enables you to make your intention happen against the most powerful odds: distractions, temptations to move in a different direction, self-doubt, and negativity. Non-conscious brain power is the force that strengthens your energy and sharpens your focus throughout the action-taking process.”

Anutza Bellissimo of the Stress & Anger Management Institute identifies four critical steps that form the basis of successfully taking action:

Gain clarity of your beliefs
Your goals must be in alignment with your core beliefs to gain momentum. Your professional beliefs must be aligned with your personal views so you can visualize its success. Your feelings will affect your habits and your perceptions.

Empower your conscious mind
A critical step, when we do not take the time to align our beliefs with our intentions, a chaotic mental vibration causes us to feel uncomfortable; doubts, fear or anxiety begin to set in. This experience leads to the amygdala releasing stress hormones, and we revert to our old habits, thereby creating difficulty in accomplishing our new goals.

Protect your intention
Once you have made your commitment, you have to protect it from forces both within yourself and your organization.

Disengage from your intention
The point of success—or failure— from which you walk away and take up the next challenge depends on whether or not you can allow the seed you have planted to grow. Many times we stunt our growth by not allowing the changes we’ve put in place to come to life naturally.

From the commitment comes both the emotional energy and the focus that are critical to your success. In short, the process of getting things done in business is pretty much the same as in any other aspect of life: The only things that get done are those that you genuinely believe in and believe will get done.

To your success!

The SAMI Group provides individual coaching and group classes on the power of the non-conscious mind and how to use your brain power to harness your ultimate goals and success. Please call for an appointment at 888-241-1167.