Why am I so stupid?

I used to ask myself, "why am I so stupid?" Unfortunately, my brain would look for and find plenty of evidence for my stupidity. Now, I ask myself, "what can I learn from this setback?"

As leaders, many of us have probably learned to ask ourselves higher quality questions to get higher quality answers. That is fantastic. Congratulations!

I'm curious, in our culture of 24x7x365 Constantly Negative News (or CNN for short) and the never-ending diet of Mental McDonald's (yes, this is a thing!) being unconsciously consumed by our colleagues and our children, how dangerous is it for our loved ones not to understand this truth? And...how are we helping others learn what we've learned?

Our brains are automatic success mechanisms. (Read Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz for more insights) Meaning, our brains are like computers. Ask our brains a question and our brains will blindly answer the question. Our brains will not tell us whether or not we are asking a good question that will serve us. For example....asking our brains these questions will give us answers and evidence that will not serve us:

Why am I so stupid?

Why do I get all the bad luck?

Why don't I get promoted?

Why don't I have the life I want?

Why are my friends to successful and I'm not?

This list goes on.

However, when we build the habit of asking better questions, we direct our brains in very productive directions that will serve us much better:

What can I learn from my mistake?

How can I create more luck in my life?

What can I do to increase my chances for a promotion?

What life do I want and how can I start taking steps to living it?

If my friends can have success like that so can I!!! What can I do differently to have more success in my life?

Notice how the quality of the question drives the quality of the answer. This is a life-changing habit....FOREVER.

Public Service Announcement (PSA): I've made a ton of progress on this for one simple reason. If I didn't improve in this area, I was going to eat myself alive from the inside out.

John Maxwell is a leadership coach that I work with and he wrote a book called Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn. That is the primary saying that I go to when I have screwed something up. How ironic that most of our learning wins tend to come from our mistakes and/or losses. I've learned to ask empowering questions after my setbacks. How can this setback serve to make me stronger? How can this setback serve my future self?

I used this book to facilitate a mastermind with 2 work teams in 2019. We reviewed 2 chapters per week for 6 weeks. There was crying and tears in at least 4 of the 6 meetings. Why? Because, in retrospect, people were recognizing how they had unconsciously asked themselves terrible questions after their setbacks and those questions were causing them more pain. Years of pain. Once they learned that their mistakes were tools to make them stronger, they felt relieved, strong and unburdened. Going forward, they now had tools that empowered them to stop beating themselves up and start learning and healing on their paths to becoming stronger men and women.

In reflecting on my own life, I've come to realize that my mistakes and life experiences are at the core of my strength. How ironic. I don't set out to make more mistakes to become stronger. What I've come to learn is....once the mistake is made, it is time to take accountability ASAP in order to open my brain to learning from the mistake ASAP. Ignoring my accountability and ignoring my mistake shuts my brain down from learning.

Sometimes we win, sometimes we learn. When we don't win, what quality question can we ask to accelerate our learning process?

As leaders of families and businesses...how can we use this knowledge to help the people we care about empower themselves to ask themselves better questions? How do we lead by example? How do we create new awareness of this process within our loved ones?

Those are some quality questions.