how to overcome the mind-blocks holding you back from total success.
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with steven sacks
the new fundamentals: thriving in disruption
professionals need to use a blend of psychology and strategy to guide them with both mental fitness and tactics to produce career breakthroughs, executive coach nancy fox tells steven sacks.
more steven sacks: effective networking is an art | business development activities shouldn’t be a chore | cpa’s best role: leveraging knowledge, not just process | avoid last-minute deal making | five common negotiating mistakes | the myths of performance management | business is about relationships | reaching for authenticity in client service |
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in business, the mind is 95% of the game, according to fox, so it’s essential to recognize the causes of mindset blocks that are encountered, such as competition and business development, and what their impact can be.
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key takeaways:
- leaders may not understand the nuances or fundamentals of mentoring and cultivating talent. as such, they find the biggest impediments to be themselves.
- the conscious mind is where our thoughts are directed in such areas as logic, strategy, memory, learning, data analysis. however, 95% of our thoughts are directed by the subconscious mind, and only 5% by our conscious minds.
- the subconscious mind is where the inner game of work, career, and life is really won — or lost.
- there are some strategies you can use to train your mind to prepare yourself to experience an outcome and imagine ways to achieve that outcome.
- in addition to training your mind to block negative thoughts and experience only positive thoughts, there are physical techniques that can be used.
nancy fox is the founder and president of the business fox, a business consulting and training company specializing in guiding law, accounting, and service business firms grow through smarter networking and business development and niche marketing strategies.
the business fox approach to business development and growth is grounded in providing professionals and business people with the skills to attract and build the right business relationships. nancy is the creator of the foxology system: four quadrants of breakthrough success, and t.o.p.p. networking training, targeted opportunities for powerful professionals, an exclusive program for targeted business networking and lead generation.
with over two decades as a marketing executive at major organizations such as warnaco and vf corporation, nancy has brought her business development and marketing expertise to professional service firms and organizations including sheppard mullin richter & hampton, latham & watkins, citrin cooperman & company, great banc trust, whole foods market, betsey johnson, the toy industry association, berlex laboratories, and the city of new york.
a passionate advisor on networking and building strong business relationships, nancy co-founded the highly successful networking group, metro roundtable, a monthly nyc event for lawyers, accountants and bankers, and has been quoted in the new york times, the daily news, cbs money watch, featured in business week, the journal news, and accounting today, law practice magazine, 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, and has been a speaker at the new york state society of cpa’s, toy fair, legal marketing association, and a keynote speaker at franchise brands international national conference. nancy has been a guest columnist in the westchester business journal, fox business news online, and webcpa.
nancy is the author of two books, “make rain without the pain” a guide for client attraction strategies for professionals, and “network like a fox™,” a targeted approach to meeting and melding with the right people for professional and personal success, in-person and online.
full transcript:
steven sacks
nancy, you use this business fox approach to blend psychology and strategy to guide professionals with mental fit fitness and tactics to produce career breakthroughs. please provide a big picture perspective of what this approach is all about.
nancy fox
so, this approach evolved over the years, as i was working with many, many professionals who were seeking to elevate their performance and to advance their careers. they were looking for strategies. they were looking for guidance about how to do that. and i noticed something really fascinating. that they would get really great roadmaps, strategic roadmaps for how they could achieve these goals that they had. and they would be given the step by step roadmap for how to do it. and most of them, many, many, and actually, most of them, would get tripped up. they would actually know what to do. and then they would only implement a part of it, or they would delay implementing what they knew they should be doing. or they would find reasons. they would have excuses, they would get busy. and i began to realize that this pattern wasn’t an accident. that it wasn’t really the real reasons that they were giving me for why they weren’t implementing more, regularly, more intentionally, more, why they weren’t doing it with more with greater acceleration is because of this. they were stuck here, between their two ears. their psychology was getting in the way of their intellect, telling them what to do. the intellect or the conscious part of the mind is saying, you know, take action. here’s the strategy, you know what to do. you know, implement. and their subconscious mind would get in the way. old messaging. old stories. old fears. old self-doubt, would get in the way. and they would — just they would be, they would sort of be stymied by. they would be blocked. they would be stuck. and so i began to realize that unless i worked with people on their psychology at the subconscious level, they were going to get great information, they would get great roadmaps, but they would not implement. and therefore, their results could not be as good as if they really worked on the internal part of their game as well as the external part of the game. and so that’s what i went to work on to — to develop methodologies that would apply working on the psychological part of the — of the subconscious part of the mind, helping people to eliminate any old blocks, any old fears, any old messages of self-doubt. imposter syndrome. fear of failure. one of my one of my clients had a twin brother, and an old message from his parents because he was actually the older of the two twins. his parents told him not to outshine his brother when he was a little boy. so, he wound up letting his younger brother — he never wanted to do anything that would that beyond what the result of his younger brother. but he had no idea that that’s what was going on for him until we got it started to dig into his psychology. that’s fascinating.
steven sacks
it is, especially when you talk about twins,
nancy fox
it, but it happens even if it’s not twins, it could be an old, an old message from a parent or family member or a psychological fear about money, or a fear of success, or even fear of failure. you know, it really — a lot of these stories they start very, very young, usually ages of, you know, two to the — usually your stories get programmed in up until about the age of six or seven. and then they’re, they’re sort of solidified. so, you can be much more valuable up until six or seven. after that, it becomes much more, it becomes like concrete. and every minute goes by, it gets harder and harder to unravel and eradicate those old stories. when i work with people, professionals who are in their 20s and early 30s, getting to the old blocks are much easier than when i work with people who are in their 50s and 60s, because there’s more years where they’ve been re-indoctrinating themselves over the years, you know, the same stories getting they tell themselves the same stories over and over.
steven sacks
you know, in athletics, the whole idea of the mind, you know, and the role that it plays, in addition to the physical speed and strength, you can see both playing major roles. but in business, you know, 95% of the game is the mind. so, what are some of the mindset blocks encountered in business challenges? you know, how influential can they be?
nancy fox
um, well, i mentioned a couple of them. a big one especially well, a very, very big one is fear of failure. the fear of failure, the fear of looking stupid, the fear of looking inept, the fear of being ashamed, is huge. and so people will do almost anything to avoid looking foolish or making an error, which can be a source of embarrassment. so, people are terrified of being embarrassed or shamed. the fear is also fear of failure, a lot of people get early messages from family members, from teachers about that the failure is so is to be avoided at all costs. it’s so terrible, you’ve really got to only succeed, and that you should reject any possibility of failure. so, people wind up not even making attempts at expanding, growing, advancing, taking on risk, you know, trying new things. and yet, those are two biggies. but also, other examples will be imposter syndrome, the fear of looking like you’re a fraud, and that you’ll be found out. and these are really, really, really common in business, why we don’t have people working on their internal game as a natural automatic training ground at the very beginning of careers is a mystery to me. but it’s becoming more now more available and more discussed, especially in certain fields, in certain industries. there are a lot of industries and companies who are paying a lot of attention to mindfulness, and more attention to the psychology of success. but in sports and in performance in music, and other performance arts, it’s a given that you’ll work with a coach who is working with you on the psychology of your performance, as well as the physical manifestation of your performance. that’s automatic, but in business, no. it’s like, in fact, it’s in sometimes people even think of it as a stigma to be working on them. it’s completely the reverse. and it shouldn’t be because we know that we are emotional, psychological beings, and that that’s where they most, it’s so dominant, our thinking is so controlled by our emotions.
steven sacks
you and i have discussed before the conscious mind, where, you know, we’ve been trained primarily on logic and memory and learning and data analysis. but 95% of our thoughts are directed by the subconscious mind and only 5% by our conscious mind. so, what do you actually mean by this?
nancy fox
well, think about it. we spent so we spend 95% of our time and effort, developing our conscious mind learning, memorizing, we really take incredible pride at our logic and our analyses, right? we love that we talk about it all the time. we talk about strategy, and this is all focusing on conscious thinking. so, conscious thinking is controlled by the prefrontal cortex of our brains. and we spend a lot of energy and effort and we admire that part of our mind. but the subconscious mind is working. by the way, that part of our brain is slower, and is the newer part of the brain. the subconscious mind is controlled. it really is actually, the more it’s, the more that we call it the reptilian brain. it’s older, it’s the — it’s the part of our brain that’s functioning 24 seven. and our mind is at all these sites are going 24 seven. if we didn’t have a subconscious mind, we wouldn’t be able to continue breathing, or our hearts would not — would stop beating when we’re asleep. because we’re not really conscious when we’re asleep. but our bodies and our all of our, our systems are on go. even when we’re sleeping, controlled by subconscious thinking. it’s 24 seven, it’s a faster part of the brain. and we have about 30,000 thoughts per minute in the subconscious, and only a fraction of that in the conscious mind. so, it’s so it’s much faster. but the thing is, we store many more thoughts and memories in the subconscious mind. the subconscious mind – this is the key. the subconscious mind doesn’t know tense. any thought that it has it perceives as the present. so, if you have an old fear that came with or when you were five years old, and they pushed you in the pool, and you know, you didn’t like being thrown in the pool, and you carry that forward your whole life, your brain, your subconscious mind does not know that that was in the past. your conscious mind tells you it’s a memory, but your subconscious mind perceives it as the present. and that’s why if you’ve ever had, stage fright is like that. if you’ve ever had stage fright, your brain is going to think i’m always going to have stage fright. i’m always going to have stage fright. until you actually teach your subconscious mind to eradicate those thoughts and replace them with preferable thoughts, you’re always going to be experiencing the same thinking pattern. but the good news is that every thinking pattern, those thought patterns are basically just neurons connecting with each other. you can interrupt them, and you can prune them, and you can create new ones. and the more you reinforce them, the more they become your natural way of thinking. negative people can become positive people.
steven sacks
so, the subconscious mind is basically where the inner game of work career and life is really won or lost. so, if that’s the case, how does the fear of failure impact our chances for success? i mean, there’s different types of work cultures and interpersonal relationships, and they must have an impact on subconscious feelings.
nancy fox
they do. and what we tend to do about this is the exact opposite of what we need to do. so, anything that you have a fear about, the more attention you give it, the more energy you give it, the more oxygen you give it, the more it’s going to take over. so, the more we try to resist the failure, the more we actually fear it, the more it’s going to be present in our minds, and we’re going to actually create it. so, the thing to do is to embrace — is to really teach your mind to have a new perspective about any one of those thoughts. it’s just a thought. it’s not real, you’re not failing now. you are creating a failure before it even happens. and so, each time we have an experience of something, we have to realize that it’s a once and done. doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again in the future. we have to teach our subconscious mind, and allow our conscious mind to, to, to embrace it. and then — then we can have control over the thinking. but most of us think that we have no control over our emotions, or our feelings, or our thought patterns, but we have a lot more. we have enormous power, we just have never learned to use it. we’ve never learned how to prune old thoughts away and create new ones. we don’t know how to do that. we just think that our thoughts are our thoughts.
steven sacks
so, without naming any names, can you provide an example or two where a rock-solid plan, which was supported by the strategy and tactics went south because the individual was stymied by his or her thoughts of failure, that that really won the day in that battle?
nancy fox
yeah, i have a really good one, as a matter of fact. a client of mine was the head of business development for a very major division of a major organization. and they gave him a lot they gave him this, you know, there was a goal. there was set of goals and everything. and what he claimed his problem was, when he started working with me, he swore up and down that his problem only wanted to go to work on was his time management. so i said, hmm? and right away when he said, i don’t have any other issues with time management, my antennae go up, of course, because i have to dig. i have to open i have to open the hood and find out what’s really going on. that’s my first inclination, what’s really going on under the hood. so we dug around in there. and then i started to look at his to do list. and i said, okay, what are your — what are you getting paid to do exactly? and he said, i am getting paid to bring in business from these kinds of accounts. i said, what are your second accountabilities? i’m also supposed to be helping some of the professionals also. i said, what is your bigger priorities? he said, bringing in business i said, great. we went to look at his to do list. and his to do list was — was enormous, unprioritized. and he was putting — helping his colleagues at the same level of importance as bringing in those activities that related to his own business development. and i would say to him, well, why are these equal? and he, in his own mind, he was thinking he had justification. so, let’s go a little deeper. so then when we went a little deeper. so i just said, okay. we went a little deeper, and i started to look at his actual business development activities. and we broke them down into two categories, some of the business development activities, or lead generation, meeting new people, bringing them to the table, having them open up discussions about what was possible for them. and then, part b would be actually taking those leads and turning them into closed deals. he was paying a lot of attention on lead generation. so, he was doing a fabulous job on lead generation. when he would get stuck in a lead generation that was dragging on and on, he would start to focus on helping his colleagues. what he was not focusing on, was closing the deals. and when we dug a little deeper, what he was really afraid of, was asking for the business. when we really, really dug in there, the big fear was hearing no. he didn’t want to hear no. so, every time we came up against — now, maybe two or three months into the lead generation was going nowhere, or was getting close, but would go nowhere. he would then turn back to his colleague. start helping them out. he was avoiding hearing no, by helping his colleagues. he didn’t have a time management problem. he had a fear of — he had a fear of closing. he was great at lead gen, had a terror of closing. he went to work on his closing here.
steven sacks
so, is there some type of strategy that you can employ? to prepare yourself to experience outcomes? and imagine ways to reach that outcome?
nancy fox
absolutely. um, so what we do is, first,, we have to, we have to learn what the actual thinking patterns are that are robbing somebody of moving forward. that are holding them back. the excuses. and, you know, i’m too busy. what’s making you too busy? why are you doing that? like, what’s the what’s? and if you don’t do that, what’s your fear? and you start to digging. and you keep asking why, why, why. you know, there’s a whole process to this, until you get to the root. when you get to the root, you can then deactivate that. and then you can start to use something called visualization. visualization is used a lot in sports, where people can actually mentally create a picture in their minds. and they’re teaching their brains to walk through a scenario where, for example, in this particular client, we walked through the scenario of actually asking for the final meeting for closing. and going into a client meeting where he’s actually visualizing moving the conversation, eliminating all the objections. handling them, one by one. having the person, the client, the potential client, nodding their heads. visualizing all of this. telling his brain to actually give him the solution for what to say, when a potential client was throwing roadblocks up so that he was preparing his brain to feed him all the right answers, to feel confident to lower his fear factor. and when you pre-train your brain to set you up for success, you can actually — your subconscious mind doesn’t know tense, it only knows the present. so, when you’re walking into the actual situation, it’s like muscle memory, except for your brain.
steven sacks
it must be kind of a challenge to train your brain to only, you know, have thoughts that connect with the current goals and the positive outcomes that you want to achieve.
nancy fox
so it’s done. it’s done in a process. so, let’s say i was giving you let’s say, we would actually create a custom visualization recording for you, steve. like you would have a recording. and then you would listen to it. usually it’s about 15 minutes or recording 10 to 15 minutes, and you listen to it for 21 days, so that your — because your mind needs at least 21 days to eliminate one body of thinking and replace it and then have it be solidified in the mind. more than 21 days is even better. but if you consistently listen to it, and you go through literally train your mind to see it at least once a day, for 21 days, it starts to become the reality.
steven sacks
so besides training your — your brain to let’s say block negativity and allow this positivity to flow, are there any physical techniques such as controlled breathing, or some other method that could also be used?
nancy fox
yeah, i think you know, people use many meditation and breathing techniques as well. what i like about them, i think it really helps because a lot of times, you just need to just lower the body anxiety level, and breathing will automatically do that — if you take deep breaths, your anxiety level will automatically improve. but i like a combination of things. i think you need, you need a sort of a cocktail of ways to retrain your brain. remember, the more your brain has been fed the same pattern of thinking it’s hardwired in your brain. you have to basically deactivating an entire set of programming, clearing out the system and putting a new motherboard in basically. that’s basically what you’re doing. our brains are computers. they are neurons, they are electrical connections. every thought is an electrical connection. so, if they connect this way, then they can connect this way. you need to just teach it new ways of connecting. and breathing will be part of the process.
steven sacks
so, who have been some exemplars of the power of positive thinking, or from imagining to actualizing?
nancy fox
in terms of the leaders in the field? yeah, i love — there are a few. the first person i studied. well, i’ve been i’ve been doing a lot of studying about this for many, many years, of course, and you know, there have been all these books written — the power of positive thinking and all these books, even think. grow rich, which is really a famous, famous book, was really probably one of the earliest books on how to really work your thinking. but we’re now talking about you know how to use your thinking process at the very deep, subconscious level. the first person that i started following about this is a neuroscientist by the name of dr. alex core. and he wrote this book called the upward spiral. fascinating book. he really, he used the, the issue of anxiety and depression as the focal point for his — for his body of work. but it really relates a lot to way beyond anxiety and depression, but also about performance and, you know, achieving results. and then i started also learning about dr. joe dispenza. is fascinating. he wrote so many different books on this. he became a neuroscientist after he had a very serious bicycle accident, and used his subconscious mind to heal his body. and he does a lot of work with people. and he’s written numerous books. and he’s a fascinating guy. and then the other person that i follow is a guy who wrote that i forgot his name now. dr. brian something. sorry, my brain, just, my brain just went off. but he wrote a book called buddha brain. and that’s he’s another neuroscientist. so, he’s a really, really wonderful specialist on how to –and they basically are all saying the same thing, that we have to teach our brain or subconscious mind, what kinds of thoughts we would like to have. if you really want to have thoughts that tell you, i’m going to succeed in this project, i see myself speaking and being a success on this stage. if you teach your mind to see yourself being engaging in a conversation with potential clients, with potential, with potential students, with people who are going to hire you or people who are going, or if you’re going on a job interview, or if you’re going to study for an important professional exam, people use visualization and hypnosis, when they’re about to study for the bar, go for the — take the bar exam, or sit for the cpa exam. so, there’s so many ways that this can be used. fascinating, fascinating stuff.
steven sacks
absolutely. well, nancy, i want to thank you for sharing your insight on a topic of concern to, i guess, not only leaders in business, but for those who are looking to ascend the ladder in their career, because you know, there’s this — it doesn’t matter. networking, let’s say whether you’re a top leader, or person who wants to ascend, and they want to be able to gain more confidence in different venues. and they have to use the mind. so, when we talk about athletics, we know there’s a mixture of the physical and the mental, but in the business world, it’s a lot more reliance on the mental, and i think that’s fascinating stuff that you share with us. and i think our audience would be most interested, particularly your references to a few of the books that you read. so, i want to thank you for taking the time today. do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?
nancy fox
yeah, wanting to throw in one other thing that i wanted your — all the people that are watching and listening. and that is that the visualization techniques, you know, it’s really fascinating. they can be done in group setting, as well as individually. they can be customized for individual. but they are also like, if you have, let’s say you have a practice group, or you have a team that’s going in for making a pitch presentation, they can be done in group format. like this kind of training can be done. it’s very quick kind of training, because you only need under a half an hour to do the training. it’s really just set the goals and you can actually get people set up. it’s very quick. it’s very effective. they get the recording. so there’s — it’s very pragmatic way to give a really powerful tool to people in organizations and in firms to use with very, very tangible, trackable outcomes.
steven sacks
that’s terrific. thank you for sharing that. and again, thank you for sharing your expertise with us today.