Leading Our Mindset Change With Grace: Elevating Self-Image

When my daughter was 12, she said something that made me change my entire theory about parenting and educating kids.?

When I left my full-time job Professor of applied linguistics and ventured into a new position in management, I was quickly humbled by the experience and had to shed layers of my old personality.

When I started getting the first hunches about opening my side hustle the Transformative Consulting agency, my ego kept standing in my way and nagging “how are you going to do it? You don’t have the skills, the resources and funds to do it. Who do you think you are? How dare you claim the business world? you are a teacher...and teachers stay in the classroom.?????

You see “#Change is inevitable but personal #growth is a choice” that’s what my mentor Bob Proctor would always say. It’s his mantra. But you know the point I want to drive home today is that change is inevitable and adapting to the requirements of the change is no longer a choice…...It is a MUST.

Why? because the only constant in a constantly- and fast changing world is CHANGE? itself

Let me share with you some of the drivers of change or ‘disruption’ as 4th industrial revolution people tend to call it:

The first driver is technology:

Today, there are 5.9 billion users of technology? and 91% ask a question while doing a task and ask it on Google.

Jobs are being replaced by technology: 53% of people of all ages are afraid of being replaced by technology. Around 34% of the workforce, today, according to the Elance survey, ?do not want to take fixed jobs and prefer freelancing and working on projects. According to the WEF report of 2018 an average of 71% of total task hours across some industries are performed by humans, compared to 29% by machines. By 2022 this average is expected to have shifted to 58% performed by humans and 42% by machines.?

The second driver is impact on skills needed:

According to research from Linkedin, the top 5 soft skills companies need most in 2019 are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and time management.Again in the WEF among the top 10 skills need are Emotional Intelligence, creativity and adaptability (the ability to reinvent ourselves.)

what does this mean? most of the young people present here today will be assessed for their emotional intelligence Quotient EQ and not IQ.

One might say: “Ok this is great, now that we know which skills are needed, the next thing we need to do is go in there and teach it to kids at schools”

Easier said than done!

Why?

When my daughter told me : “ my friend has COOL parents, I envy her” I knew something deep deep in me shattered, and had to go and be replaced by something new… it’s my #selfimage ... the image of myself as a parent. It was time for me to explore what “cool parents” do and replace that chip in my software. I had to take inventory of my thoughts, my beliefs, my actions and reactions as a parent ...a mom… I kept what served me and my daughter and intentionally ditched all the rest...it was like rebirth for me. There was a ME before and a ME after that incident.

When I stepped into my new job in educational management, I had to let go of some of my old practices and paradigms inherent to lecturing, researching working with words, and data mainly into the world of interpersonal communication, exploring the maze and intricacies of the human mind ...of my colleagues to be able to better understand them to help them and serve them. “Radical #Empathy” as Seth Godin calls it was huge for me to make it happen. I was no longer the same. My self-image received yet another upgrade.

When I started my consultancy practice, everything in me.. my logic, my reasoning, my memory, my upbringing were siding with the imposter syndrome and the loud voice in my head imploring me not to do it and to stay in the comfort of the 9 to 5 job, except a flash thought of me enjoying myself ….doing what I love … and living life on my own terms. That one single thought where I fused with my desire was enough to engineer a whole change in my self-image by facing my self-sabotaging beliefs with a simple but powerful question: “Is it true?”?

I guess the idea I want to impress upon you is that skills and skills training are great, but they are not enough! Why because those #skills listed in the WEF do not require a change at skillset level they require change at the mindset level. Take for instance creativity, how do we teach someone to be creative in a 90 min or even a two-day workshop... doesn't it require first the person seeing himself as creative “I am creative?” change in mindset and in particular our self-image is the name of the game!

Maxwell Maltz in his book Psycho Cybernetics says: “Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishments”?and that “We can never outperform our self image."?

Why: because our self-image is our control mechanism, our auto-pilot system that is controlling all of our thoughts, our beliefs of who we are and what we are capable of doing, and our actions. Any change operated at the surface level, and that does not take into account a change at the deep root cause of our behavior as human beings, is mere wishful thinking.

Steve Brazell America’s leading strategist, Founder of Hitman Inc and CEO of Fullbridge (states that the skills we currently have will take us between 3 to 5 years.

So the main characteristic of the upcoming era is CHANGE: meaning constantly refining, updating, upgrading our mental model, our self-image by bringing the future into the present and preparing ourselves for it.

Buckminster Fuller America’s 20th century avant garde Engineer and educator says:” You never change things by fighting reality. To change something, build a new model that will make the existing model obsolete.”

So, while creativity, emotional intelligence, and adaptability are coming high on the list or priority skills, all of which demanding self-image change,?What would be the ramifications of these new requirements for educational systems and teachers??How is this going to impact parents and the way they educate their kids??and how are companies going to plan training for their staff?

For example, for those of us... who are doing the school curriculum, are we providing the dedicated expertise resources, and facilities to hold students’ hand, and train them in the skills they need in the future? For the best part,? I think overall we ARE.

The question that remains then is: are we willing to make our homes, schools, and classrooms a safe space for our children and students to take risks, to allow themselves to try and fail, to be messy in projecting themselves in the future, until they develop clarity in their mind and create the self-image they aspire to have in three, five, or 10 years years down the road.

In a nutshell, for me the answer remains in our ability to reinvent ourselves, to learn as we go and to be always 2 steps ahead of change to lead it with grace;?and that’s by being ready, willing and able to shed the old self-image of ourselves and embrace the new one...the one that will help us navigate the new wave of change with grace.

And to me the third and most impactful driver of change is our way of navigating.

This is my own personal experience with change, what's yours?

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