Shift Happens - I'm Counting On It!

I'm coming off a wonderful month of amazing experiences - so I apologize in advance for not posting more often. I'll try to sum up my month in two words: PARADIGM SHIFT.

I was in Chicago in May for Linkage's Organizational Development Summit and had a chance to meet great people and learn from some amazing speakers. From there I came home for a week and then left for Florida for 2 weeks where I participated in the First Annual TWI Summit and spent a week with Bob Proctor and Michael Beckwith. Wow.

Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I had the pleasure of hosting Lisa Haneberg, author of Two Weeks to a Breakthrough, Focus Like a Laser Beam, and the blog Management Craft. It was an absolute joy!

Lisa participated in four events here in Fargo, including one sponsored by my friend Dr. Susan Mathison of Catalyst Medical Center and Bock's Office. It was appropriate that Lisa talks about how we can become catalysts for our own and other people's breakthroughs (that's Susan and me with Lisa below - above Lisa and Hazel outside the fabulous Hotel Donaldson, where she stayed the first night).

Lisa really challenged me to think differently and to be more focused on the actions I'm involved with as I grow my business. That was fabulous advice, and, coupled with everything else I've been learning lately, is really challenging my old paradigms.

As I was preparing this morning to be on a local TV news show to promote next week's Bigger Small Talk Summit, I found myself visualizing lots and lots of people, with lots of activity and lots of action - and I stopped myself before the dream could get too big. It was an automatic response and one I probably wouldn't have even noticed if I hadn't been in breakthrough mode thanks to Lisa.

I realized that my paradigm is to expect nothing so I won't be disappointed. It played right into my old story that says I'm not good enough to expect anything great. It was then that I started to wonder how often I've stopped myself from dreaming big without even realizing that I'm stopping.

I'm very good at recognizing opportunities and possibilities for other people - but I don't seem to be as good at taking my own advice. So I'm working to have a breakthrough on shattering my old paradigm which says "play it safe and give up when things get too difficult."

I'm counting on Lisa's advice that in order to achieve breakthroughs, we need to share our goals with others, take small steps toward those goals because small steps yield big results, do our daily practice, and redefine our definition of success.

My goal for next week is to create an outstanding opportunity for people to actually practice deeper conversation and communication - with others as well as with themselves - in order to achieve breakthrough results in their own communication. That's my share. My first small step toward that goal today was the news interview. Daily practice will be to continue to share today and to visualize my goal instead of the safety of a "whatever" goal. And to redefine success not in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality. This will be a fantastic event and I can't wait to tell you more!