Reframing your Mind for Professional and Personal Growth

Dr. Fred Mugambi MwirigiJKUAT

A man is but the product of his thoughts.

What he thinks, he becomes.

– Mahatma Gandhi

Life is a journey

You are on a journey. Wherever it takes you, only you

can decide

Wherever it takes you…

It is a journey that is ultimately rewarding for some people and awfully torturous for others.

Wherever it takes you

Ultimately your journey must build you and your organization

Both are intertwined

Your greatest challenge

In your journey you will constantly battle four challenges:

i. Your awareness about yourselfii. The awareness of your team about youiii. The awareness of your team about itself iv. Your actual capacity to deliver as a team player

Awareness about the self

So who exactly are you?

Do you know yourself well enough

to entrust your future with that

person you call ‘me’?

Awareness about the self

You are your fears and your anxieties;

your frailties and your flaws;your wishes and your anticipations;

your hopes and prayers;your capabilities and your confidences.

Awareness about the self

Self Awareness allows you to understand people,

understand their perceptions about you, understand their attitudes towards you

….it helps you to respond to them

Awareness about the self

Without self awareness, self improvement is impossible

Awareness about the self

The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting to change

Improving self awareness

• Analyze yourself constantly and objectively

• Question personal current reality

• Perform a self-review every too often

• Find benchmarks and use them

Awareness of others about you

We all have Blind Spots

These are the habits, preferences, dislikes, prejudices and all those things about us that are clearly apparent

to those with whom we deal.

Enhancing external awareness

The awareness that people develop about us is informed by:

1. Who we actually are2. Who we ‘act’ or behave to be

Enhancing external awareness

Key things:

Impression management

Aligning the real you with the person we wish you were

Awareness of your team about itself

Does your team membership facilitate your team to keep rediscovering itself?

The Building Blocks

Dreams

• We were created to dream and so we are perpetual dreamers.

• When we dream we wish and hope that we could one day achieve the object of our dreams.

•The journey to being successful must, therefore,

begin with a dream.

Plans

• The journey towards success demands that dreams be transformed into plans

• planning is the process of seeing the end in clearly quantifiable terms

Action

• Action is simply doing• You must move from plans to doing taking into

consideration three things1. Time 2. Resources3. Returns

Transforming Wishes into Action

Identify and overcome illusory hurdles -imaginations

that are unreal and surmountable

Develop an action plan as if you have no hurdles first

Handle the hurdles

The power of your mind

Are you wired to be a loser or to be a winner? What is your DNA?

Some of us spend their days building DNA’s of

success while others spend their days, often

unconsciously, building DNA’s of failure.

The power of the mind

Who we end up becoming is very little a product of education or even opportunity.

It is more about what we end up doing with enablers such as education and opportunity.

We decide if to be or not to be winners or losers

Communing with the mind

We continually communicate to the mind over time conditions it to believe or not to believe in specific

possibilities.

Words have the power to translate to inclinations and eventually action.

Communing with the mind

Repeated involuntary and voluntary action is a product of mind conditioning.

The power of repeated communication, especially

communication to the self, is simply immense.

Communing with the mind

The more you communicate victory to yourself the more you take up the lifestyle of a victor and the more

you conform to the culture of victors.

Communing with the mind

You get what you attract and you lose what you despise.

What the mind can conceive and repeatedly claim it

can achieve.

We have within us the power to attract or to repel.

Leading a Crusade

You must make whatever you wish to achieve a crusade.

You do this by communicating your passion to achieve a certain goal to those that hold the keys to your

success repeatedly and in a convincing way.

Leading a crusade

No one wants to invest in an idea whose owner has

not invested in.

You must constantly exhibit undying passion to

succeed

Nurturing strength of Mind

Mentally strong people are less likely to give up when

challenges come.

It requires great inner will and consistency.

It involves making a mental decision to block mental

weakeners and nurture mental strengtheners.

Mental Strength Mental Strengtheners Mental Weakeners

Private meditation and prayer time Constant bouts of regret and worry

Trying out new challenging things/ risk taking Resenting other peoples achievements

Empowering and serving people Dwelling on the negatives (e.g. past failures)

Identifying and following a powerful role model Following negative role models

Constant learning through reading and training Self-pity

Physical fitness activities Engaging in tasks that are way off your capabilities and skills

Social time with positive minded friends Keeping friends who are perennial losers

Quality family time Overdependence on other people

Working in teams Individualistic task performance

Ambition Satisfaction with current conditions

The low moments

In your journey to achieve success you must realize that you are a mortal being and a chip in the wider and more complex configuration of

life.

The low moments

You must remember that the journey of success

is often interspersed with moments of physical

exhaustion and psychological stress.

The low moments

This journey is sometimes characterized by feelings of

deep inadequacy and a thirst for higher level

reassurance.

This happens to everybody, even the strongest man

or woman.

Reacting during the low moments

Don’t be too fast or too slowDon’t be too emotional

Don’t be too judgmentalDon’t raise your voice too high

Remember, your work is to show excellence, whether the conditions are right or wrong.

Networks

Networks are to success what oxygen is to life.

In today’s world most business deals are sealed informally before the documentation is done.

Networks

build a wide network of friends and associates don’t burn bridges.

When conflicts develop between you and your friends or associates make every effort to resolve them.

If you cannot resolve the conflict just yet don’t be tempted to burn the bridge.

Networks

As a leader keep all your networks active.

The world is a complex network of skilled and informed people each of who holds a key to something.

The more friends you make the more keys you will be in control of.

Exit the crowd but work with the crowd

Crowds are good and bad.

Sometimes crowds cheer us to victory while on

other occasions they cheer us to failure.

Exit the crowd but work with the crowd

We need the crowd because we need its networks

we need the crowd because we need to be cheered

on

we need the crowd because we need their resources.

Exit the crowd but work with the crowd

We must learn to tap into the resources of the crowd without necessarily singing the tenor of

the crowd.

We must master the art of being in the crowd and being out of the crowd at the same time.

We must know when take over from the crowd and when to hand over to the crowd.

Your main shortfalls

1. Practical knowledge and

skills

2. Capacity to anticipate

3. Affinity to information

4. A balanced ego

5. People orientation

6. Team orientation

7. Passion and energy

8. Undying loyalty

9. Appetite for risk10. Emotion management11. Impression management

Thank you