The Western Retail Lumber Association’s latest annual Building & Hardware Showcase, held in Winnipeg last month, featured a dynamic keynote speaker. Lauren Johnson is a mental performance coach and public speaker who has worked with top professional athletes, including the New York Yankees baseball team.
Her presentation at a morning breakfast event was titled, “Achieving Extraordinary Results.” It focused on one’s ability to turn plans into decisive actions through high-level decision making.
One of the things that keeps people from reaching the next level of empowerment and decision making is the impulse to hold onto old ways of thinking. Johnson challenged her audience to look at their own “maps” and question how to change that map to better confront change.
“You have to apply change to your old map,” she told the audience. If you’re not adjusting and not asking how everything is changing day to day, then your attitudes toward coping become out of date.
Often, people will stand by and let change happen without them. Even people who are willing to confront that change often hold off until the need is too great. “Don’t wait until there’s a big gap in where you are and where you should be,” she said. Ask yourself: “What did I do well? How can I do better? And what did I learn?”
But you can’t wait for someone to instill these attitudes in you. “You have to own these. Do them for yourself.” If you’re trying to please someone else or simply go through the motions, your efforts won’t succeed. “Development will only happen if you choose to do it.”
Johnson concluded by urging the audience to take responsibility for making change themselves. “If you want to be unstoppable, you have to be accountable,” she said. “Mindset is everything.”
