Monthly Archives: February 2012

February 29, 2012 · 5:52 pm

Leading for Creativity Advantage in Entrepreneurial Startups

Key Concept ~ The creativity of your organization must be a strategic imperative for success in the 21st century.  Unless you’re a Millennial, we all must appreciate the fact that we matriculated through a business world that was optimized for the Industrial Age.  Leadership philosophies, managerial processes, attitudes towards inclusion and process that we were taught are completely incongruent with the nature of business today.  Fortunately, the first calibration entrepreneurs need to make in order to embrace the new paradigm is close to home…it lies within one’s self.  

Seth Godin released his 30,000 word manifesto on transforming the school system earlier this week entitled, “Stop Stealing Dreams” StopStealingDreams – PDF.  In it, Seth points out the fact that the public school system was created and optimized to support the need for workers and consumers during the height of the Industrial Age.  It does what it was designed to do, but that design no longer aligns with what companies now need in order to create and sustain competitive advantage.  The same is true in business.  The approach to leadership, strategic planning, and organizational develop that was optimized for the Industrial Age no longer fits the source of contemporary value creation; human creativity.

While Seth speaks for the need to transform our educational system, the same position can be taken (and often is on the blog) towards the structure, leadership, and processes that mainstream businesses still cling to twelve years into the new century.  Information technology helped masked the underlying shift for several decades, but technology, in and of itself, is reaching the point of diminishing returns.  We need simply to look to the numerous research studies and surveys to see how the transactional leadership approach of the past has created the worst employee disengagement crisis since serfdom.  Disengaged associates are not creative associates, and creative associates are the fuel for success going forward.

At point 22 (there are 132 points in the manifesto), Seth points to the concept that we are in the Age of Connections.  To quote Mr. Godin, “The industrial revolution wasn’t about inventing manufacturing, it was about amplifying it to the point where it changed everything. And the connection revolution doesn’t invent connection, of course, but it amplifies it to become the dominant force in our economy.  Connecting people to one another. Connecting seekers to data. Connecting businesses to each other. Connecting tribes of similarly minded individuals into larger, more effective organizations. Connecting machines to each other and creating value as a result.  In the connection revolution, value is not created by increasing the productivity of those manufacturing a good or a service. Value is created by connecting buyers to sellers, producers to consumers, and the passionate to each other.”

I can see where Mr. Godin is going, but I think we need to take this a bit deeper to reveal the source of value creation.  The most important connections are within the human mind.  How we, as human beings, can make connections between disparate points of knowledge, experiences, and perspectives to create entirely new opportunities.  Without this neurological spark of creative insight the external connections are just more noise in an already cacophonous landscape.

Leading for creativity advantage demands that the soil be tended and cared for in order for intellectual property to germinate.  This starts with the leader’s level of consciousness, with their insights and understanding of how to connect, engage, and inspire those around them.  In order to do this with resonance, the leader must first connect, engage, and inspire their authentic self.  Transformation cannot occur without transparency.  The answers to our adaptive challenges aren’t out there floating in the technological ether, they’re in here, within our own capacity to create new neural pathways and actually change the way we see, think about and react to the world.  This does entail some self-reflective work, and typically doesn’t emerge of its own accord.

Seth also speaks about fear and passion.  He points to how schools leverage fear to control large student bodies and how this disengages the young people from pursuing their passions and dreams.  It’s a good point, and one that is also prevalent with transactional leaders in business (light on the carrot…heavy on the stick).  Command and control doesn’t propagate creative thinking.  It creates risk-aversion and passive-aggressive behavior in the workplace.  The research of Dr. Jaak Panksepp demonstrates that fear is part of our Core Mammalian Emotional System.  Our ancient survival hardwiring that is shared by all mammals.  The flip side of fear, however, is seeking.  Cultivate an environment of fear and you’ll get a predictable, emotional response; disengagement.  Cultivate an environment of seeking and you’ll also get a predictable, emotional response; engagement.  Engagement is the pre-requisite for creativity.  Enabling seeking holds the space for the discovery of passion.

Passion involves the brain and the embodied neural networks of the enteric nervous system (the gut) and the heart. When we engage in our sense of authentic self, when we consciously choose self-awareness and empathy over conditioned behavior, we align our entire neural network and enter into a state of biochemical coherence (R. McCraty, M. Atkinson, “Psychophysiological Coherence”. In: Children D, McCraty R, Wilson BC, eds. Emotional Sovereignty. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, forthcoming).  Coherence promulgates what researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as flow.  When we enter into flow we are at our highest point of creativity and performance.  We’re firing on all cylinders!

Google is a great example of how a once entrepreneurial startup got this right.  Not only do they promote seeking (20% of their engineers’ time at work must be spent on a project of individual interest that is independent from the company), but they also promote two other Core Mammalian Emotions; playfulness (ping pong tables around the office) and caring (all the little perks on their campuses).  Can anyone argue with Google’s results?

This is the strategic imperative for entrepreneurial firms that emerge from the creation of intellectual property…to lead, plan, and organize the business in such a way as to maximize creative flow with associates.  Research from Applied Behavioral Economics clearly demonstrates how we feel about companies is as important, if not more important than what we think about said companies.  The leadership lessons for entrepreneurs working in the 21st century lie within our very own nature.  The path forward begins with walking a path inward.

© 2012, Terry Murray.

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February 24, 2012 · 7:19 pm

An Entrepreneur’s Key to Attracting and Retaining the Best Talent

Yet another survey, the exact same message!  What is bad news for major corporations, opens the door for entrepreneurial firms to gain a competitive edge by attracting and retaining the best talent available.  The fact of the matter is, the most creative, intrinsically motivated, and engaged talent is also the most mobile.  Corporate environments don’t fit their skin, either.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look at the research that continues to illuminate the leadership crisis in global corporations and the resulting associate disengagement levels.  If you’re mindful in your approach to leadership, strategy, and organizational culture, you could be a magnet for the best and the brightest!

The global consulting firm Six Seconds just published their 2012 Workplace Issues Report, “Insights on the People Side of Performance” and it is yet another significant piece of evidence that a new perspective towards leadership, teams, and organizational culture needs to emerge.  In the report, the three key findings were the need for identifying, hiring, and retaining talent; the thirst of employees for visionary leaders; and the absence of business culture that resonates emotional intelligence.  This report is in total alignment with the previous, recent research conducted by RogenSi, McKinsey & Co.®, The Gallup Company, Maritz Research, peer-reviewed research from Cornell, and the IBM CEO Survey of 2010.   I can’t help but wonder when leadership will get the message and finally move forward to embrace a transformational approach their employees are crying out for in survey after survey?

Talent is the key factor in our modern economy.  Without talent companies cannot create and market innovative products and services.  The key driver of value creation in the 21st century is the commercialization of intellectual property (IP).  The source of IP is human creativity.  Fully engaged, inspired, and creative human beings, working cohesively together, are the raw material of business.  Yet every single survey and research paper I’ve read over the past two years points to the exact same conclusion.  There is a critical leadership crisis in the business world today that has left employees feeling empty, used, and of little value.  Our own firm dug a little deeper into the flood of research and calculated that many firms are lucky to be getting a positive return on investment on approximately half of their payroll.  If Henry Ford had seen a 50% scrap rate on his raw materials how quickly do you think he would have addressed it?  Exactly.  Yet we continue to see transactional leadership continuing with business as usual.

The second key issue that surfaces in this report is the desire of associates to be led by visionary leaders.  People don’t come to work looking to lose.  They want to win, they want to succeed, and they want to feel like their a part of something purposeful and larger than themselves.  This is especially true for Gen Y and Gen X associates.  We can find very clear insights for our human need, our very human nature that is pre-programmed to embrace visionary, transformational leadership by looking at Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s research on Core Mammalian Emotional Systems.  These are constant, hard-wired emotions all mammals share and respond to accordingly.  Create an environment that cultivates fear (which is what transactional leaders do…light on the reward and heavy on the punishment) and you’ll get a very predictable emotional response; disengagement.  Cultivate an atmosphere that encourages seeking (which is what visionary, transformational leaders do) and you’ll also get a very predicable emotional response; engagement.  Engagement is a pre-requisite for creativity, the single most important leadership attribute identified in the IBM Global CEO Survey.  Seeking, our constant impulse to explore and make sense of our environment, is directed and coordinated, to a great degree, by the vision of the business.  We all want to know where we’re going.  Leaders that authentically leverages this core emotion accelerate accretive value creation; the whole is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts.  This isn’t theory, I’ve seen it work first-hand.

The final key issue, the absence of organizational culture that resonates with emotional intelligence, points directly to the solution!  Emotionally intelligent leaders (self-aware, self regulating, socially aware, and relationship driven) cultivate a mindful, engaging organizational culture in which people can flourish.  Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re seeing.  Leaders say one thing, and then their behavior indicates another.  This state of incongruity resonates throughout the organizational culture.  People feel this intensely and choose to go into survival mode, avoid taking any risks, stop creating, and simply try to stay off the radar.  Here’s a quote from a professional that was surveyed by Six Seconds that pretty much says it all, “We have abandoned all leadership training, in large part because upper management was frightened by the gap between information presented and their own leadership practices.”

We’re approaching an inflection point.  A time when the urgency to act will emerge.  For many firms, this sense of awareness will come too late, and they’ll find themselves just another footnote of history.  People misinterpreted Darwin’s theory of evolution.  It isn’t survival of the fittest, it is those that are most adaptive that survive.  We live in a time of accelerating, adaptive challenges and unprecedented volatility.  Transactional leadership, the status quo in corporate, is walking the same path of the Dodo bird.  Smart entrepreneurs recognize this, and leverage it to their competitive advantage.  Create a better culture, and the talent will come to you!

© 2012, Terry Murray.

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February 20, 2012 · 4:32 pm

The Problem with the Perpetual Pendulum in Leadership Thinking ~ Lessons for Transformational Entrepreneurs

Key Concept ~ Proponents continue to emerge that point to the fallacy of strategic planning in our rapidly changing world and that goal setting is somehow bad, in and of itself.  Here are some tips for setting, and more importantly achieving, stretch goals that will engage younger workers in entrepreneurial organizations.

I was speaking with the vice president of training and development at a medical device company the other day about our integrative approach for professional develop.  She is an avid horse fan, and expressed the value she sees in the linking of our experiential learning workshops with horses to our Accretive Coaching Process™ to spark a shift in perspective, explore adaptive solutions, and engrain sustained, creative thinking.

“Unfortunately, we’ve been directed that all of our training and development programs be migrated to computer based training,” she commented.  ”But stay in touch, everything changes every 18 to 24 months.”

Her comments brought me back to my days in corporate when I had witnesses this seemingly perpetual swinging of the pendulum of leadership’s thinking towards innovation, structure, strategy, well, in fact, pretty much everything.  It was almost binary in nature; if not this, then that.  When that would fall short, a new group would come in, and immediately begin to move the organization back in the other direction.  Sound familiar?

I’ve come to realize that this cyclical thinking, that never breaks us out of our well worn path, is rooted in our tendency, as Westerners, to continuously look out there for solutions that are in fact waiting to be discovered, quietly beneath the surface within ourselves.  If only we’d find the courage to take a hard look in the mirror of self-awareness.  This is why we built our process on the emerging research from the neurosciences, performance psychology, emotional intelligence, core emotional systems, quantum physics, and individual learning styles.  More and more, the research from these fields, especially from the neurosciences, and yes, quantum physics, supports our approach.

The latest pendulum swing is pointing its nebulous finger at stretch goals.  That’s where the fault lies, in our corporate obsession with establishing, and most often missing, organizational (and personal for that matter) goals.  The research coming out of our leading business schools, is attempting to make their case that obsessive goal setting damages organizational culture, erodes intrinsic motivation, distorts risk evaluation, drives unethical behavior, and is one of the primary reasons for the endemic associate disengagement crisis.1 Another earlier report from the American Psychology Association states  ”The optimally striving individual ought to endeavor to achieve and approach goals that only slightly implicate the self; that are only moderately important, fairly easy, and moderately abstract; that do not conflict with each other, and that concern the accomplishment of something other than financial gain.”2  I can’t help but come away with the impression that what this study is suggesting is less accountability and lowering the bar is the key to performance.  I do agree with the fact that goals should be in alignment and should reflect positive intention that expands beyond simple financial gain.

The pop psychologists, books like “The Secret” and the self help gurus have helped push goal setting and vacuous visualization to the point of foolishness, so I can see what prompted the good intentions that I’m sure prompted much of this research into goal setting.  Please remember, research begins with a hypothesis, in this case, that goal setting in and of itself results in missed targets, bad behavior and poor performance, and then sets out to prove the theory.  This can lead to myopic perspectives that lose focus on other variables that may also be in play.

Here’s where I think this research misses the target.  Goal setting, in and of itself is essential in aligning and moving an organization forward.  Especially in these times of unprecedented volatility and the acceleration of adaptive challenges organizations will continue to face in the 21st century.  What the research didn’t take into consideration is the prevalent, transactional leadership mindset that is setting the goals.  Transactional leadership is dominant, and operates on the 20th century premise of reward and punishment.  It’s almost Pavlovian.  Hit the goal, and you’re rewarded, miss the goal and you’ll be punished.  This, and the culture of fear it cultivates, is what drives the negative outcomes, not the goal setting.

Now, what if we were to actually rethink our fundamental approach to leadership, and migrate to a transformational leadership style?  An approach that leads from a perspective of serving those we lead.  A mindset of developing and supporting the professional and personal growth of those we are charged to lead.  An inclusive, transparent, and congruent approach that is inspirational and is the key to cultivating creative thinking, discerned risk taking, and adaptability.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand while in corporate.  In the 1990s, I had P&L responsibility for a global service unit operating in the pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment market that I had been charged to launch.  I was able to start from scratch, hire my leaders, and recruit our own technicians, and create our strategy.  Even then, I was a transformational leader, doing so more out of instinct than anything else.  It just felt right, and had always served me, my associates, and the company I was working for at the time quite well.  Our entire company had a stretch goal of growing revenue by 25% that year.  Now that’s a s-t-r-e-t-c-h goal!  Ours was the only unit that hit the target.  The rest of the company did not do as well, but none of us received our bonuses, even the ones that had performed, because the entire company missed the goal.  What do you think that did to the morale of the truly engaged associates in our business unit?  This also points to the inevitable problems transformational leaders will have operating under transactional leadership paradigms.  Eventually, you’ll be undermined.  Younger workers thirst for transformational leadership.  They want growth in experience and learning, and when they don’t see this and feel this, they walk.

In my real-world experienced opinion, the research on goal setting is flawed because it is assuming other factors are not in play, and the fundamental environment is functional.  But nevertheless, they found the statistical information to support their hypothesis.

Here are my five key tips for setting and achieving performance goals:

1.) Before you do anything, re-evaluate your leadership philosophy.  Transformational leadership is critical to success in the 21st century.  Creativity is key, at every touch point in an organization.  Creativity cannot emerge in a transactional leadership environment.  Transaction leadership leverages our core emotion of fear rather than encouraging our core emotional desire for seeking.

2.)  Don’t start with the goal, this is metaphorically putting the cart before the horse.  Start by exploring your firm’s vision and intention.  Are they in alignment?  Is it a shared vision and do your associates feel the positive intention of that vision?  Does it resonate congruently throughout your organization and your marketplace?  Now co-create the goal with inclusive, associate participation and use these parameters as a guiding factor.

3.) Once you’ve embraced the goal, which is truly only a projection of your vision lying somewhere over the horizon, create a detailed approach to bring the steps necessary to achieve the goal into the present day.  This isn’t radical in thought, it is classic GOST planning.  Goal ~ 3 to 5 years out; Objectives ~ measurable performance gates, in terms of time and other tangible criteria, to be achieved in the current fiscal year that move you towards your Goal; Strategies ~ initiatives that will move your people towards the achievement of the Objectives; and Tactics ~ the day-to-day, week-to-week action items that will implement your Strategies.  This builds presence, focus, and engagement in the moment, the only place we can ever influence anything.

4.) Take a hard look at your organizational culture.  Is it still in its transactional state or is it pulsating with possibilities.  This is why our firm focuses on aligning and optimizing Authentic, Transformational Leadership, Mindful Strategy, and an Engaging, Creative Organizational Culture.  Miss one element and high performance is extinguished.  The best visionary seeds will fail to germinate in depleted soil.

5.) Educate, coach and empower associates to grow as they move forward.  A study published in the Harvard Business Review® cited research that indicates a dollar spent on advertising created two dollars in revenue but each dollar invested in education resulted in forty dollars in increased revenue.  In addition, a research study published in the Journal of Public Personnel Management found that training improves the productivity of management a little over 22%. The integration of training with professional coaching improves productivity 88%.

Why is this important to entrepreneurs?  If you embrace these five elements, goals will be met and the creativity the CEOs in corporations so desperately desire will emerge…tipping the competitive advantage (the talent of your associates) of your small company over big corporate.  The key is to leave transactional leadership behind and embrace the new mindset of transformational leadership.  If you want to engage and inspire the Gen X and Gen Y generation, your up and coming workforce as well as your emerging marketplace, you need to leave the leadership paradigm of the 20th century behind.  This perspective is as antiquated to them as telephones mounted on a kitchen wall!

1.) “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting”, Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman, Harvard Business Review, February, 2009.

2.) “The hazards of goal pursuit. Virtue, vice, and personality: The complexity of behavior.”, L.A. King, C.M. Burton. Edward C.Chang (Ed),. xxvi, 189 pp. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association, 2003.

© 2012, Terry Murray.

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February 16, 2012 · 4:06 pm

Why Our Intention Should be a Strategic Imperative

Key Concept ~ We need but look around us to see that the predatory, exclusionary business mindset of the 20th century no longer serves our best interests.  This fabric of the industrial age has grown threadbare.  The research that reveals the current leadership crisis is reaping the seeds it has sown by cultivating an endemic employee disengagement crisis.  Our intention truly matters, it is what resonates in the hearts of those we lead, and those with whom we wish to do business.

I was reading through the newly posted discussion threads from the groups I belong to on LinkedIn this morning and two in particular really struck me.  The first one was on a spiritually-oriented discussion group.  The individual that had started the group posted a rather scathing declaration that no promotional activity is acceptable in the group.  I can understand this, to a certain extent, as we’ve all been involved in discussion groups that are spammed and this can become more than a bit annoying.  But LinkedIn is, after all, a business social media site.  It isn’t Facebook, so shouldn’t we understand why people are on the site?  Because they have a business interest of some sort or another.  I know this is a fine line…one never wants to come off as a shill, and most discussion groups do have a promotions’ section.

What I found rather ironic about this particular post was how it was signed by the person that posted it…the individual’s name and “Group Owner”…on a spiritually-oriented group.  The individual also signs their name with one of those peculiar sequences that can appear, at least to me, to run like alphabet soup…CGI, BMOC, BPOE, ABCDEFG…Isn’t this a form of self promotion?  My point is, between expressing “ownership” and the presentation of credentials with signature, of which I have no idea of what they mean,  left me feeling a sense incongruity of intention.  My background is in the life sciences, so I truly appreciate when someone signs their name with Ph.D. after it…it represents a truly significant accomplishment. But isn’t our growing obsession with becoming certified, often by trade groups that are mere marketing organizations, just another form of promotion?  True certification indicates you have journeyed through an accredited school or training program that is recognized and meets the educational standards of a state board of education.

The other discussion group that was started was by a business coach offering to share the “Dirty Dozen”, his tips for making money in coaching.  The language caused me to recoil. Not cognitively so much, but on a deeper, emotional level. From my perspective, business coaching should resonate with positive intention, holding the space for both personal and professional growth for the one being coached. They’re both so closely intertwined, and many of the problems we see in business today are because people and their firm are thoroughly disengaged.

I read a study released late last year that indicated only 14% of employees believe their company shares their own personal values and beliefs. How can authentic engagement emerge in that type of climate?

I also deeply believe coaching should be highly inclusive. When I followed this gentleman’s link, I had to provide a litany of contact information before I could read what he had to say. For me, this again resonates with intention. I felt like this gentleman was trolling for prospects rather than reaching out with positive intention to share his wisdom. Please understand, my intention is not to be judgmental, it is simply meant to share what resonates within me when I hit landing pages that are a mile long, or must join another mailing list to access something that may have peaked my interest.

It’s readily apparent that the old ways of doing business no longer serve the broader interests of community and society. As Einstein so apply stated, “We cannot solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.”

Coaching is built upon relationship. Relationship emerges when we first connect cognitively (as I did when I was drawn to this coach’s discussion thread). Then we engage emotionally (which I couldn’t do because I felt a sense of coercion…I was offered a transactional deal for knowledge…I had to give something first, before I could receive the original offer…prior to seeing the actual value proposition).  Finally, we inspire and motivate others by touching the human spirit. With authenticity and transformational intention.

We all must make a living in this material world, I do not provide all of my business coaching services for free. But I do share my knowledge for free. This resonates with people, they feel my intention. If we look to the lessons from Applied Behavioral Economics we can fully appreciate that 70% of economic decision making is emotionally-driven, often unknowingly.  Intention truly matters.

I ask, as you head out into your business landscape to step away from business as usual, for just a moment and ask yourself how is my intention resonating with my prospects, associates, and colleagues?  It may open a door for a fresh approach that can truly drive sustainable, meaningful success!

© 2012, Terry Murray.

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February 14, 2012 · 2:13 pm

Finding Your Way Into Professional Journals ~ Performance Transformation, LLC™ Featured in MPI’s Meeting Planners Guide to Hawaii

Key Concept ~ A few months ago I posted a blog entitled, “Building Your Market Presence Brick-by-Brick”.  The process is one defined by persistence, and in my opinion, authentic intention.  By putting your firm out there, to generously provide your products or services for the parts of our community that are in need or at risk, good things can happen.  Not only for the community, but for your firm as well.  By bringing our pro bono Warriors in Transition program, which we began back in 2009, to Hawaii last October, we found ourselves in a feature article of ONE+, the professional journal of Meeting Planners International.  Positive intention, not from the ego but from the heart, resonates with others.  In expressing our intention to support combat veterans and their families, we found our message in the hands of 30,000 professional meeting planners we may have never reached in any other way.

Here’s our press release discussing the article in the MPI Meeting Planners Guide to Hawaii.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Performance Transformation, LLC™ (Venice, FL) announced today their founder and Managing Partner, Terry Murray, is to be featured in February’s edition of MPI’s  Meeting Guide to Hawaii.  The professional journal ONE+ has monthly circulation of 30,000 professional meeting planners.  The article, written by Elaine Pofeldt, focuses on the value of revisiting Hawaii as a viable and economical option for professional meeting events.

“We were really excited to receive the call from Elaine to be interviewed for her article,”  commented Terry Murray.  ”The series of workshops we conducted last October in Hawaii couldn’t have been more successful.”

In the article, Terry is quoted as saying, “Hawaii is a perfect setting for our programs.  Our developmental approach focuses on building competencies in emotional intelligence to improve leadership and team cohesion.  So, for us, the Aloha Spirit reflects and aligns with our philosophy and approach.”

The root meaning of Aloha comes from three Polynesian words.  Alo,which means sharing in the present moment.  Oha, which means joyous affection.  And Ha, which means the life energy of the breath.  The traditional greeting of Hawaiians involves an exhale of breath with each other to emphasize the Aloha Spirit.

“The traditional approaches towards leadership development and team building are no longer delivering the results our rapidly changing, multi-cultural business world demands, ” comments Terry.  ”Our evidence-based programs are designed to build presence, rapport and authentic empathy in our next generation of leaders.  These are the keys to inspiring teams of knowledge workers, to creating genuine engagement  Cultivating competencies the embrace inclusion and ignite cohesion are the keys to unleashing human creativity, the key driver of value creation in the 21st century economy.”

Performance Transformation was brought to Oahu by the nonprofit Palmarie Community Transformational Alliance to provide leadership development and team building workshops for their leadership team and launch Performance Transformation’s award-winning “Warriors in Transition” program.  The program is designed to assist active duty military personal, veterans, and their families successfully navigate the stress of the deployment cycle and eventual transition back to civilian life.  The program received a formal commendation by General David Petraeus in 2010 for “helping to create emotionally resilient families.”

“By the time our involvement in the the wars in the Afghanistan and Iraq finally wind down approximately two million of our fellow citizens will have been deployed in these combat zones,” adds Terry. “The VA is simply overwhelmed by the needs of so many of our veterans that are returning home with PTSD, or with the poly-traumatic effects of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury.  It’s up the community to step up and lend a hand to help these brave Americans transition home and find their way back to living successful and fulfilling lives.  To be able to once again enjoy the things their service has enabled us to enjoy, undisturbed these past eleven years.”

The VA estimates the rate of PTSD to be somewhere between 18% to 24% with OEF/OIF combat veterans.  Additional research indicates combat stress is impacting spouses and family members as well.   Performance Transformation’s innovate approach partners with licensed therapist to conduct Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy.  The approach enables Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to be conducted in real time, and with horses, instead of a traditional office setting.

“We discovered the CBT benefits during our presentation at the 18th Annual Military and Civilian Combat Stress Conference in L.A. in 2010,” adds Mr. Murray. “Most recently, we’re discovering our approach to working with horses also aligns seamlessly with Gestalt Therapy as well.  It’s an exciting time to be involved in Equine Facilitated Learning and in support of Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy.”

The concentration of the military in Hawaii presents unique challenges in the community.  It is estimated that 40% of Hawaii’s homeless population is comprised of veterans.  During their visit, Performance Transformation had the opportunity to introduce their approach to Councilman Tom Berg, who is working diligently in support of the islands veteran community.

“To come to the islands with such positive intention, and to have felt the Aloha Spirit directly in support of our work truly resonated with us all,” said Terry. “Last year we conducted various professional development workshops in Florida, Montana, and Colorado, but Hawaii was truly special.  The fact that we were able to conduct our programs at Equine808, the islands’ first and only horse rescue organization in support their mission added to our Aloha Spirit experience.”

You’re welcome to click here to learn more about Performance Transformation’s leadership development and team building workshops they conducted in Hawaii with a sequence of photographs of their approach with the horses.

Photo courtesy of Precision Photography of Honolulu.

© 2012, Performance Transformation, LLC™.

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February 10, 2012 · 4:37 pm

Presence and Intention ~ Two Simple Questions to Center You Each and Every Day

Key Concept ~ Running your own firm can be stressful at times. Whether you’re a sole entrepreneur or building an scaleable organization, the events of the day can be absorbing and drain us of our creative energy.  Here are two simple questions I ask myself upon waking every morning, before I even get out of bed, that can improve my productivity each and every day.

Successful entrepreneurs are mindful leaders.  Whether they’re leading others, or simply leading themselves throughout the day.  Mindful leadership is centered in the competencies of Emotional Intelligence (self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management skills).  These competencies emerge from our pre-frontal cortex, what Dr. Daniel Goleman refers to as the executive center of our brain.  Research from neuroscience demonstrates that our brains have plasticity.  We can actually change our neural networking by mindfully choosing how we choose to think.

Through our professional and personal development work with horses, we’ve learned some very meaningful lessons that relate to how we connect, engage, and motivate those around us.  In order for a horse to join up with a human, which is a voluntary response from the horse, one must first be fully present, engaged in themselves, engaged with the horse, and fully attentive in that very moment.  You can’t be thinking about what you have to do later in the day, what you should have done yesterday, or engaged with our rooftop chatter, the stream of verbal thoughts that continuously flows through our heads.  You also must express authentic intention.  You have to want to be in relationship and feel the joy that relationship will represent deeply within your heart.

You see, you must engage the horse in their world, where they live and operate from every moment.  Time is a human concept.  Our thoughts about time can be consuming to an entrepreneur and pull our emotional, cognitive, and creative  energies out of the moment…the only place we can really act…the only time that actually exists.  In the moment lies eternity, for the moment is continuously present while simultaneously moving us into the next moment. This is where horses live…in the moment. In addition, as prey animals, horses are hyper-sensitive to their environment, lest they be lunch for some predator surreptitiously stalking them, downwind and in the high grass.  They can quite literally sense intention and require congruency in order to relax and join up with us.  When we are emotionally congruent and holding the space for positive intention to emerge, people will join up with us as well!  Neuroscience research into the function of mirror neurons and the state of entrainment have proven that a biochemical cascade of hormones emerges when this occurs.  The pleasure center of the brain is activated, and we feel good and want to be around people in this state, just like the horses.

So, as I awake every morning, I ask myself two simple questions:

How do I wish to show up today…how do I wish to be?

How long can I make it through the day without having a negative, judgmental thought?

This frames my entire outlook before I crawl out of bed.  I walk with a smile and great everyone I meet with positive intention and a sense of grace.  It is amazing how wonderfully they respond to this simple act of presence and intention. Regarding the other question, well, that’s a bit more of a challenge!  We’ve been socially conditioned to see ourselves as individuals, separate beings from one another.  Separate from nature itself.  Separate, even from God…in Western religious traditions God is up there and we are down here.  In the Eastern religious traditions, the idea of Divine Spirit, of God, is present in all things.  There is a perception of Oneness with the Creator and all of creation.

Seeing ourselves as separated from each other opens the door for judgment towards those not like us or those less fortunate than us to pop into our thoughts.  It closes the door for compassion and empathy to emerge.  But we truly are all connected.  Research form quantum physics reveals this through verifiable and reproducible experiments that have proven the non-locality of consciousness.  Two electrons that were once in the same location, then separated and isolated, without any chance for a signal pathway to occur, will continue to mirror the spin of the other.  Change the direction of one electron’s orbit and the other, even if it a thousand miles away, will match the new orbit of the other electron, and do so immediately…the shift and match in orbit occurs faster than the speed of light.

Letting go of judgmental thoughts is difficult (please don’t confuse this with discernment, and important attribute for every entrepreneur).  I find if I am selective with my neural inputs I can hold this space of being longer into each day.  If I have to go out into traffic, if I choose to turn on the media, or if I’m at an airport, this really requires mindfulness not to react to my conditioned perspective and behaviors.  But that’s the world we live in, right?  We must engage the world if we are to succeed as entrepreneurs.  But here’s the payoff of letting go of judgmental thought patterns…it redirects your physical, psychological, and creative energy to be fully engaged and present with everyone you meet and in everything you do!  Judging is exhausting.  The more I let this go, the more energy I find myself having to get more accomplished in my business!

Try these two simple, little questions for a few days in a row and see what begins to happen.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Photo courtesy of Precision Photography of Honolulu.

© 2012, Terry Murray

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February 9, 2012 · 8:52 pm

A Truly Creative and Transformational Entrepreneur

Key Concept ~ I’d like to share a story about an individual that authentically exemplifies the spirit of transformational entrepreneurship and the role creativity plays in the emergence of delivering lasting value…that of knowledge and wisdom.

Back in 2008 during my studies at The Epona International Study Center at Apache Spring, Arizona I met a woman named Heather A. Taylor.  We were classmates in a highly innovative, spiritually explorative workshop together and as our little group of five individuals got to know each other I discovered what Heather was working on at the time.  She had been working in the world of corporate television and decided to strike out on her own to pursue a remarkable vision.  Heather wanted to do a film about the first all women’s national air derby that was held in 1929.

Now, striking out on one’s own to launch an entrepreneurial endeavor takes courage, but choosing to walk the path of an independent filmmaker requires a level of courage of nearly mythic proportion.  It truly represents what the ground-breaking, comparative mythology expert Joseph Campbell would call The Hero’s Journey.  Every indie filmmaker must find their own path, discover their narrative voice, invest enormous treasure, build collaborative relationships, engage fully with their creative spirit, and hold fast to their vision with tenacity against nearly insurmountable odds for success.  And all this must emerge before they can even begin to tirelessly work the film festival circuit in hopes of securing a distribution deal.

The result of Heather’s heroic journey has created a beautiful and inspirational film that brings a part of our historical and cultural landscape that was all but forgotten to life.  “Breaking Through The Clouds – The First Women’s National Air Derby” tells the story of the 20 courageous, trail-blazing women that flew, by themselves, from California to Cleveland, Ohio.  A mere nine years after the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, giving women the right to vote, these remarkable women set out to show the world just how equally capable they were in the dangerous world of competitive flight.  

Living in 2012, it is easy to forget how deeply embedded chauvinistic attitudes were some eighty-three years ago.  Even in our contemporary times, women still are not paid the same wage for the same work as men. As of 2011 only 12 of the Fortune 500 companies were led by women. The representation of women leading these large corporations actually fell from 15 in 2010.  Just imagine the hurdles, barriers, and barricades these 20 women faced in 1929!

The film itself is a masterpiece of storytelling.  It is fast paced, deftly interweaving rare archival footage of the historical event with original interviews of the women during and after the race, commentary from contemporary, champion female aviators, aviation history experts, museum curators, and the descendent’s of the women who truly broke through the clouds of cultural constraints.  It even includes the commentary of the last surviving woman from the race!

As Heather pulls us into this thrilling journey (trust me, you wont want to look away for a moment), we’re introduced to some of the most fascinating and important women our world has ever known.  Women like the vivacious and bold Pancho Barnes, the brilliant Louise Thaden, the glamourous Ruth Elder, the Alaska bush pilot Marvel Crosson, the iconic Bobbi Trout, and of course, the legendary Amelia Earhart.  As the story unfolds something more begins to come to the surface.  Something our contemporary world could use today; a spirit of cooperative competition and authentic community these women, mostly in their 20′s at the time, demonstrated throughout the grueling race.

Through the creation of this historically important and wildly entertaining film, Heather has brought this message into our world.  Not by telling us, but by showing us how this handful of women competed and cared for one another while demonstrating to the world just how capable women truly are in whatever endeavor they choose to pursue.  Their collective display of competency and courage helped propel the idea that commercial aviation was a viable endeavor.  This is a film that should be in every classroom in the country and seen by every aspiring, visionary entrepreneur.

I’d like to share a quote from the credits from Heather, who wrote, produced, financed, and directed this monumental film ~

“I am enormously grateful to the 20 women pilots who flew in the First Women’s National Air Derby.  They are role models for following one’s heart and pursuing one’s passion, no matter how illogical it may sound to others.  They were true pioneers who were able to reach towards the sky and break through the clouds.” ~ Heather A. Taylor

I’m enormously grateful to Heather for sharing her vision, passion, and wisdom that jumps off the screen in the telling of this inspirational tale of the American experience.  Heather’s award-winning film is available on DVD on her website.

© 2012, Terry Murray

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