MIND THE GAP ELEVATOR PITCH
As projects and projects teams have become more complex, Project Managers are increasingly expected to manage the emotional demands of the team and stakeholders while also successfully navigating the project through its many obstacles. This requires the ability to quickly pivot from activities centered on managing the day-to-day interactions on the project to leading the project.
The burden of managing the day-to-day of the project team has gotten more complex and taxing. We are expected to be masters of resolving conflict and competing priorities, motivating, and seeking clarity from ambiguous stakeholder imperatives. All the while doing our best to project a positive attitude. Daily antagonizers of dealing with people who won’t cooperate, people who subvert, people who want to overly control and misdirect wears us out.
This grind doesn’t just wear us out. It also dumbs us down. Managing the emotions of the team, causes our own emotions to run full tilt as well, although, as I mentioned, we don’t have the luxury of expressing them. This daily grind keeps our thinking shifted from our vastly powerful, higher-thinking, more strategic part of the brain, to the lower-thinking, survival-focused part. Without realizing it, our thinking often comes from the windowless thought basement as opposed to our cognitive top floor with sunlit vistas and strategic views.
This shift takes away access to the brain power that we need to lead. People often say that leadership is very hard to define. So let’s clear that up. I think most people would agree that leadership, more than anything, is about conceptualizing, developing, and delivering solutions to complex problems. When we are helping to resolve ambiguous directions or facilitating the conceptualization of solutions to solve problems, we are leading. All of us, every one of us, already knows how to lead. All of us, every one of us, is very good at leading. The problem is managing, or coping with, the day-to-day, acting as the calm emotional control center of our teams, cuts us off from the cognitive power that we need to lead.
What if we could engineer a lever that we could use to elevate ourselves from that windowless basement, back to the top floor of our intellect with all of those expansive views? What if we could use this lever to fluidly move from managing the team to leading the project with the utmost cognitive agility. As it turns out, the Mind The Gap seminar will teach you how to build that cognitive lever so you can do just that.
The daily decent into the thought dungeon is caused by cognitive gaps that we are literally pitched into like being thrown into an empty elevator shaft.
But by using this strategy, we can become aware of these gaps and build our very own lever to elevate our thinking back to our cognitive top floor so we can both manage and lead our projects masterfully.
The Mind The Gap Strategy seminar will teach you how to:
Recognize behaviors that cause the lower-thinking part of your brain to gain control of your thinking
Visualize the communications gaps between the two key brain areas that compete for control of your thinking
Develop a lever, comprised of new thought patterns, to allow the higher-thinking part of your brain to retain control
When you do: You will become legendary for mastering the ability to both manage and lead your projects by being able to maintain full top-down control of your cognitive abilities.
Here is a quick example to help illustrate the effective use of the strategy. I had just participated in a webinar where I provided an overview of The Mind The Gap strategy for a seminar on a cruise ship. Now I’m not saying that it was this this particular cruise. But my part did not go well. I had tried to prepare. But it didn’t work out very well. I slipped up getting out of the gate on the webinar and it all came out sounding quite jumbled. After speaking in high-pressure situations for the past 10 years, you would have thought I had no experience or talent for speaking at all.
I knew I needed to do something to fix this going forward. But I was really struggling with how to develop a crisp and entertaining overview of a talk that establishes a definitive leadership development paradigm that is backed with neuroscience and historical case studies of the world’s greatest leaders. So, after the call was over, I thought I would look at this webinar as a good practice and I vowed to invest the time to develop the overview that I was looking for.
Shortly after the webinar, I saw a call pop up on my phone from the cruise sponsor. Now I’m not saying the call was from the sponsor of this cruise. But I can say that I didn’t answer right away. I kind of knew it wasn’t a call to tell me how wonderful I was. But I had hoped that there would just be general agreement that I needed to do better next time. Instead though, when I returned the call, things took a different turn. The sponsor asked me how I thought things went. I was honest and said, I thought everyone did very well except for me. I wasn’t fully prepared and I knew I needed to put some work into my overview. Still trying to salvage things I said, “I thought It was a good practice though – right?”
There wasn’t the agreement to this I had hoped for though. I apparently, I had done so poorly that there was some kind of consensus that I should never do webinars ever again because these webinars were maybe, “just not my thing.” At that point, I was just hoping to get off the phone without being referred to a speech therapist.
To say that my emotions were deeply disturbed would be to put it mildly. Although I maintained a calm demeanor on the post webinar phone call saying, “I understand, I’ll be prepared next time. My bad.” Inside a torrent of emotions was unleashed that would make the Galveston flood look like a duck pond. After the call, my lower-level, fight or flight thoughts were in high gear. For three or four hours my thoughts centered around the idea that I didn’t deserve this. I had done all of the marketing material for both the cruise and the webinar, I had recruited an advanced planning team, and had also heavily promoted the cruise at the PMI Global Conference. I guess you could say I felt like I had earned the right to make at least one mistake and not be thrown overboard.
I am the first to admit that I have never been particularly good at impromptu speaking particularly in front of a phone or laptop. Part of this is because I prefer the challenge of distilling complex and vague subjects into practical strategies that are easy to understand and apply. So I have to put a lot of practice time into developing a new overview and that kind of time was the one thing I did not have in the run up to the webinar. Rest assured though that presenting and interacting with a live audience is a different story. Fortunately, I recognized that I was in the cognitive basement and more importantly, that was a place that I didn’t have to stay. I knew there were a few steps that I could work to elevate myself back up to my cognitive top floor so I could develop a strategy to keep my cruise experience under control.
I knew that by recognizing that my thoughts were coming from the lower-thinking part of my brain, I had already started step one of the Mind the Gap strategy. To complete that step, I needed to acknowledge the behaviors that I had found so disturbing and separate those out from this particular situation. Those behaviors would point me to exactly what was going on in the thought basement.
It was kind of my own personal nightmare to feel like people had come together to tell me that I am just not good at something. Particularly when that something is speaking. It set off cognitive alarms that I have regarding feeling sabotaged and discounted that actually go back to the time when my brain was forming during my adolescence. Although I was pretty sure there was no ill intent on the sponsor’s or team’s part. But because of step two of the Mind The Gap Strategy, I had learned exactly how and when those alarms had gotten implanted into the lower-thinking part of my brain and now I needed to tend to those alarms.
I had one side of the gap clearly in my sights and I was ready for the master stroke. I knew that I had to get the higher-thinking part of my brain to signal back across that gap that “I hear you - This is not life or death - We’ve got this – You can stand down.” By actively scripting and continuing to think these kinds of thoughts at exactly the right times, I bridged the communications gap so I could use the lever to elevate where my thinking was coming from and restore access to my full cognitive abilities.
As I repeated these steps, I started to be able to conceptualize a plan to get things back on track while I was still processing my rather intense emotions. Then I was able to execute my strategy by rewriting my session overview completely, thoroughly practicing it, and then running it by one of the team members for a critique. And now I have a fresh overview of my workshop, that I’m quite comfortable with, at the ready for any webinar that comes my way, including this one.
The Mind The Gap strategy helped me shift my thinking, focus on the problem, develop a solution and get back into Cruise Control. I was able to deal with the internalized emotions that came from interacting with the team and then fairly quickly elevate my thinking back to the level needed to conceptualize and execute my plan to keep things moving forward.
On the cruise we will break the cognitive mechanics of examples like this down further. We will highlight the strategy and tools that you will debark with to make Minding The Gap a leadership game changer in your daily professional & personal lives. We may even liven things up a bit by looking at a historical leader that was almost forgotten, but has not become very popular as a case study.
Since by now you may have heard enough from me, I would like to leave you with some feedback from the PMI Global Conference. One attendee wrote, “This was the best workshop I attended. The content was well laid out and presented. There was a lot of learning in a short time. I was talking to a guy on the airplane that was also in this workshop and he agreed that it was by far the best presentation he was in. There is always one workshop that really stands out and this is definitely the one for this year.”