I was kicking off Day 2 of my courage workshop.
Standing before me were 20 of the 70 leaders who were in the room from the day before. Where Day 1 was laying down the case for courage, today would be a roll-up-your-sleeves jaunt towards a courageous conversation. Ultimately, we were now walking the path together leading to that big scary word: “change”.
But first…
Day 2’s “nIce breaker”.
Something that could defrost the room while also giving me a taste of each leader’s personality that had a direct line into Kohl’s Chief People Officer.
The nIce breaker is a fun one:
If you were a superhero, what super power would you want AND what would your Super Hero name be?
Round and round we went. Some folks were into teleportation. Others wanted invisibility so they could have the ability to listen in on team members’ conversations. Another wanted to beam sunshine to anyone she encountered in this heavy world.
Then there was one leader who shared….
“I would love to be able to know what people are thinking. I want to be inside people’s heads.”
Like a good facilitator, in the moment, I smiled and nodded on the outside.
On the inside?
As a guy who had just finished co-authoring a book about self-talk? This would not be near my top choice in super powers.
We are loud.
We are cloudy.
We are messy.
And the words we say to ourselves? We would rarely murmur out loud to another person.
Truth is:
We can be very mean to ourselves.
As a quick tangent, to lighten this heavy, my superhero name would be: Mr. Saturday.
I’d have the ability to turn any day immediately into a Saturday. Mr. Saturday, where are you!
Mr. Saturday isn’t going to swoop in here, reader, and save you from the words your eyes are now dancing over.
Getting back to the heavy, it took 3 co-authors and 7 years to wrap our heads around what’s going on inside our heads.
The science is staggering: According to the National Science Foundation, the average person has roughly 60,000 thoughts a day, and up to 80% of these musings are negative. That’s 48,000 negative thoughts every 24 hours. The study also revealed that up to 90% of those debilitating thoughts are repetitive.
My new book addresses this cognitive conundrum. It’s called Headamentals, a deconstruction of what’s actually going on in your brain in human speak. I went into the project thinking negative self-talk could be fully defeated. This was a flawed hypothesis.
We all have a self-talk Monster in our mind that’s a roommate for life. While I can confirm that you can retrain your brain by catching, confronting, and changing your negative self-talk patterns, I can also confirm your monster isn’t moving out…ever.
The best we can do is crack it.
We can learn to understand it.
We can learn to live with it.
We can learn to even love it.
All that fear and doubt swirling in your mind is code for your Monster is simply trying to freeze you from harm. It doesn’t want you to move to that new city, to speak up when you disagree with a boss or to take on a meaty, new but uncomfortable challenge that will create heart palpitations.
That’s a pretty sweet roommate when you really think about it.
Just don’t overthink about it because overthinking is one of the 6 Monster fuels your Monster feasts on we discuss in the book. It’s a cognitive distortion that’s crippling productivity in America. What’s the cost? Research suggests just under $600 billion annually!
We are not talking enough about self-talk in Corporate America.
We are not talking enough about self-talk with our friends and families.
If you are a leader of a business, a team or a family, it’s on you to create the conditions to have this conversation with your people. Our big unlock was learning just how much self-talk impacts team-talk. Culture doesn’t start in the board room: It starts in your leader’s brain.
If you’re up for learning about your self-talk, give yourself a holiday gift of running your head through Headamentals. What I learned is that it’s not a leader’s lack of strategy or skill that was holding them back; it was the spin happening between their ears.
-Ryan
Ryan Berman is an MEA alum and corporate fear fighter. He’s the founder of Courageous, the author of Return On Courage (and now Headamentals), and the host of The Courageous Podcast. For over twenty-five years, Ryan has helped corporations that have been stuck, scared, stale or safe choose courage. He has counseled on the topic at Google, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Kohl’s, Kraft Heinz, Houston Texans and Snapchat. His firm, Courageous, is a full-spectrum courage company, guiding its clients through courageous conversations, courageous decisions, courageous ideas and courageous transformation. Ryan believes that change is hard, but the hardships that come from not changing are harder. Learn more at ryanberman.com