Have you ever had an insight hit you so hard that it just completely rearranged the way you think, just almost restructured your brain. And it could be something small, maybe just a phrase or a question, but it completely unlocked a whole new way of seeing the world. And then once you saw the world that way, you couldn't unsee it, you couldn't go back. Well, that, my friends, is a paradigm shift. And that's what we're talking about on the episode of the podcast today is paradigm shifts.

And I'm going to share with you a very powerful paradigm shift that hit me about 15 years ago. Tell you more about it later. But right now, let me just tell you what it was. I was in a coaching training program and I'll tell you more about it later. But the, the guide, the instructor in our program who is a dear mentor of mine, said the following. “Don't believe everything you think.” And that was a mind blowing moment for me. Don't believe everything you think. Because for the first several decades of my life, I'm pretty sure I believed everything I thought up until that moment when I was caused to question if what I was thinking was really always serving me. And honestly, I think for most of us who have the 60,000 thoughts per day, there was a bunch of garbage in those 60,000 thoughts. So don't believe everything you think was one that really, really shifted my world.

Now the idea of a paradigm shift and this language paradigm shift was coined by philosophy philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, and this was back in the 1960s. And in his thinking he realized that we have this theory on the way the world works and you know, big macro theories on the way the world works and small theories on the way the world works as well. And then something happens that challenges that idea of the way the world works and shows us a different way and that creates this fundamental shift in our worldview, in our mental model, in what we believe to be true.

Now in leadership, it's the moment when your assumptions get challenged and then you start to see the world in a new way and you can't unsee it. And then it's very natural that behavior changes after that. So today we're going to explore four paradigm shifts on this episode. Two that are at the personal level and then two that are much more at the organizational level that can fundamentally change the way organizations work. Not only how they work inter internally, but how they relate to their customers and the markets they serve.

These aren't just stories, these are invitations to get you to think differently about the world, invitations to get you to see the world differently, and invitations for, for you to create paradigm shifts in your own work. Now let me go back to the paradigm shift that I had about 15 years ago. So I'm trained as a coach by Martha Beck, and she is one of the early coaches. She's a Harvard Business School professor turned coach and has a whole huge pedigree of coaching accolades to her credit. And she has a coaching program, or at least she did. I haven't found followed closely if I'm gonna take that part out. And she had this coaching program that I was a part of 15 years ago, and I was trained in her coaching methods. And one of the things she said very early on in the coach training was don't believe everything you think.

Again, I had been going through my life for multiple decades believing pretty much everything I thought was when something went through my head, it just reinforced what I already believed. Now, the insight that I got is that, you know, the brain is there to protect you. The brain's job, first and foremost, is to keep you alive. And so it will alert you to things that are maybe not that dangerous, and it will concoct stories in your head that are probably not true. Now, of course, we, we often think lots of things that are true and do serve us well. But if you examine those 60,000 thoughts that you have every day, I'm pretty sure you're going to find some of them that do not serve you. And again, most often it is just your brain trying to protect you, telling you that there is a threat when perhaps the threat is more perceived than real and is not actually going to cause any damage or hurt you. So oftentimes we have these, again, these thoughts going through our heads that don't serve us.

Now, it really stopped me in my tracks to think about the thoughts that I think and whether or not they were all true. And a lot of times, let's say, you know, you read an email and you think maybe there's a slight in there. And then it's again, very easy for your brain to concoct this whole, you know, politics with a lowercase P where this person's out to get me or doesn't think I have what it takes to do this job or whatever it is. And again, that's where our brain is trying to protect us, making up things that really do not serve us. And again, you've maybe heard me say this on the podcast, or if you've heard, I use this in several of my programs as well, but that our brains are constantly making stuff up, MSU making stuff up. And some of us have advanced degrees from MSU. And you know, if you're having an adult beverage or in an area where you're not necessarily needing to hold yourself to professional standards, you could insert a different word that begins with us making stuff up. But that's what our brain does and it does it to protect us.

So I had this fundamental shift like 15 years ago, huge paradigm shift for me to not believe everything I think. And it causes me to have much greater self awareness about not only my thoughts, but how I carry myself in the world. So the leadership lesson here is that self awareness is foundational. And when we start to examine our thoughts and when we get more introspective and when we listen critically to the thoughts that are going through our head, we then begin to examine the narrative that we're telling ourselves and oftentimes telling those that we work with or those who are following us if we're in a leadership position, that there's a narrative there, there's a story. So we need to examine that and really see if it's serving us individually, serving our team, serving our organization. Now you can choose not to believe fear based thoughts or reactive thoughts that you have in your brain. And you know, maybe it sounds naive, but no one had ever told me to critically examine my own thinking about the thoughts I was having as I just went day to day through the world.

So what I want you to do with the paradigm shift that I'm, and maybe some of you right now are having that same paradigm shift. In fact, welcome to the club. If you are now having that paradigm shift that you don't need to believe everything you think and that much or some of what you are thinking is not necessarily serving your highest power or doing the best. Good for you. So my question for you on this one is, what thought have you been having? Maybe it's a specific thought, maybe it's a whole host of thoughts that you've been believing lately that might be worth questioning. Like maybe it's I'll never get promoted here or I'll never be a vice president, or I'll never be a fill in the blank. Well, I want you to question that. Question whether or not it's true and question whether or not having the thought is serving you.

I mean, I will never be a professional basketball player. And I don't go around thinking to myself, oh, I'll never be a professional basketball player. But now, if I did have that thought, I could then critically examine that thought and say, you know, that thought is actually true, and it's not serving me to think that. And so I'm going to let that one go. So sometimes you will find things that you are thinking that are true but just aren't serving you, and it's okay to let those go. Okay, now let's go on to another internal potential paradigm shift.

Now, in some of my work, I talk about the work of Carol Dweck, Ph.D. who's a Stanford professor, and the work that she does on growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And I've even talked about that here on the podcast in one of the previous episodes. But it's a theme that comes up in some of my work and in fact, much related to what I was just talking about. Don't believe everything you think. So in Carol Dweck's work, she identifies fixed mindset as you telling yourself, like, I'm just not that good at that, or you're comparing yourself to somebody else, or you're holding yourself to a perfectionist standard where you're really limiting your ability to grow as a human being. On the other hand, growth mindset is when you're reminding yourself, I can get better with effort. I can get better by putting in the repetitions. I can get better by trying harder. Now, we might still not become that professional basketball player, but we can get better at whatever it is we are aiming to do.

And we're not holding ourselves back. When we're in that fixed mindset, we're really holding ourselves back and we're believing that we can't do something and that we have limited skill set. Now, in a workshop that I did, gosh, I don't know, it was probably close to 10 years ago where I was teaching this inside of an organization. And they had all of their senior leaders all the way down through their managers, their supervisors, and then the, the folks who were emerging leaders and on the cusp of that first supervisory position, whether they were supervising or not, were present. And one of those more junior folks came up to me on the break. So we had done some work with growth mindset and fixed mindset, and again, fixed mindset. We often get conditioned into comparing ourselves, or we get conditioned into having other people, oftentimes adults in our lives, comparing us or telling us, you know, giving us messages that we're not good enough or we're not smart enough or we're not talented enough. And then we start to shut down and not put in the effort, because we start to believe that we just don't have the innate talent that this particular thing requires, let's say a leadership position or a management position.

Now, this participant came to me during the midday break. It was a full day workshop. He came to me during the midday break, and he had clearly just had a major paradigm shift. He told me that he had, of course, never heard of fixed mindset versus growth mindset. But as I described fixed mindset, he realized he'd pretty much been in a solidly fixed mindset his entire life. And I would peg him at about 35 in terms of how old he was when the this conversation was happening. When I had led this workshop for their organization, he had been conditioned based on messages he'd heard from his parents and his teachers when he was a child in school, they were always comparing him to an older brother who was very academically talented, very athletic, and, you know, had the whole package. And this particular person didn't necessarily have the same innate academic talent or the same innate physical talent or athletic talent. And so he was constantly being compared and told that he just didn't have it. He didn't have what it took.

Now, this shift, it unlocked for him that it's not that he didn't have talent or that he didn't. Wasn't able to achieve things, which is what he had been thinking, but that it was going to take effort and that there was growth available to him if he put in the reps, if he put in the effort. And it was just like I felt like I could literally see his potential unfolding across his face. I mean, it changed his physical demeanor the rest of the day in that workshop, he was literally a different person. So the leadership lesson here is that how we label people affects how they develop and what they think is available for themselves.

When leaders model a growth mindset, it literally shifts the team's culture. And when leaders remind people that there is more growth available for them, that they need to put in the effort, put in the reps, and not just like, try harder, but to acknowledge that there is potential in all of us and that we haven't fully realized what is available to us in our potential. So as a bonus, Dweck's research also applies to organizations and organizational life. So it's not just an individual occupying growth mindset or fixed mindset, sometimes entire organizations. And I've definitely seen this with teams and divisions within larger organizations that they feel that they, you know, that, that they can't get any further, that they can't get ahead. And then when we, when we do that work and we unlock the idea that there is more potential there and there are ways to get around roadblocks and setbacks and so forth, it really does change, not just on the individual level, but on the team and the organization culture level.

All right, now let's shift into looking at a couple of paradigm shifts that are really at the organizational level and that have changed organizations. So Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel for many, many years, his paradigm shift was Only the Paranoid Survive. And he's got a book by the same name. It's fascinating read if you are looking for a great nonfiction business book to add to your library or to dig into. Only the Paranoid Survive is a great book. So here's the context. Intel at the time was making memory chips for computers. So they were making, again, hardware, pieces of hardware that go into computers. And they, the foreign markets were encroaching on the success, the initial success that they had in that space.

And so Asian countries were able to make memory chips more economically. And so Intel's business model was on really shaky ground. They were very attached to this product line, however, because that's how they got their start. It was the memory chip inside the computer. They were in the memory business. But then, as Andy Grove describes something he refers to as a strategic inflection point, he has this strategic inflection point where he has this moment of clarity and he asks the question, if I was a brand new CEO and stepped into this leadership role instead of having moved through the ranks and having been in this company for a while, but if I just stepped in right off the street, what would I do differently? And the insight he has in that moment is that he'd get out of the memory business and that the memory business was rapidly being again, encroached on by Asian competitors and he wasn't going to be able to, you know, have a viable business. So getting out of the very business that intel was built on was what he came up with in this strategic inflection point. And again, where he says, only the paranoid survive.

So he's being paranoid about his own success. That's what he means about being paranoid and only the paranoid survive. If you're not paranoid about your own success and trying to figure out what you might need to do differently because the, you know, competition could be banging down your door any second, then, well, it's likely you're not going to survive. So what intel then did is they got out of memory and they got into microprocessors. So again, still working inside the guts of your computer, but they're making the thing that makes it go fast instead of the thing that saves your documents. So very gross oversimplification of what microprocessors are versus what memory is in your computer. But so they stayed in, you know, kind of in the same sandbox, but they started making something entirely different in that sandbox. They started making microprocessors instead of memory.

And the result was that intel dominated the PC era. Intel dominated microprocessors. So as we start to think about what's the leadership lesson here from only the paranoid survive and Andy Grove's stint as CEO, I shouldn't say stint, that makes it sound like he was there for a short time, very long tenure as the CEO there. But really it comes down to this. What got you here won't get you there. And in taking a look at this strategic inflection point that he had, first of all, I want to note that that strategic inflection point was self inflicted. He thought about how can we make this company more viable? How can we not get taken over by our Asian counterparts who are working in this space and making better product for less money? So, but instead of waiting for that to knock down his door and upend his business, he took on that strategic inflection point on his own. He initiated it.

And leaders really do need to find the places where it makes sense to have those strategic inflection points instead of waiting for the market to have them on them and this is one of the ideas that I bring up in my keynote, Expect the Unexpected. Because we have to call upon ourselves to challenge our assumptions, challenge our way of thinking. And one other thing I'll note about Andy Grove here, and that is he had to have some level of detachment of his past success and realize that what, again, his past success was not necessarily a predictor of his future success. And what got him to this point was not necessarily going to take him to the next level of success and achievement. And so he had to have some detachment from not only that past success, but also the specific product line. In this case, they had to change product lines in order to stay competitive and viable and to continue to dominate the market. So again, I do hit on some of these ideas in my keynote called Expect the Unexpected.

A great quote From Andy Grove. If you're looking for, you know, a quote to kind of push you through here. Strategic inflection points are opportunities in disguise, but only if you're paranoid enough to spot them. Again, let me say that one one more time for you. This is again a direct quote from Andy Grove. Strategic inflection points are opportunities in disguise, but only if you're paranoid enough to spot them. And if you don't have that certain level of paranoia, you're not going to reflect back on your own success and question whether or not you're going to continue to be successful in the future. And we've seen plenty of companies that get so stuck in their ways and believe that, uh, whatever their business model is going to work in perpetuity, and it just doesn't.

So in not only a strategic inflection point, but also a paradigm shift for you to think about, only the paranoid survive. How does that apply to your work individually? How does that apply to your team's work and to your division or organization? I invite you, again, I said at the beginning of this episode, this is more of an invitation, but I invite you to try that one on for size and think about what do you need to cross examine or reexamine. Where do you need to have a strategic inflection point in order to be paranoid enough to realize that what got you here isn't going to get you to where you ultimately want to go? And what do you need to change up to get there? All right, next example. Again, also at the organizational level. And this example comes to us from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Love them or hate them. I know I've probably got listeners on both ends of the spectrum here, and some of us love them and hate them at the same time. But part of the reason, I think that for those who don't necessarily like Amazon, part of it is the market domination that they have. And here is Jeff Bezos paradigm shift. Your margin is my opportunity. Your margin is my opportunity. That is his way of thinking. Now, of course, he's also incredibly customer obsessed and wants to have an amazing customer experience. But as he thinks about a business model, he realized that high margins on things like.

So if you know the history of Amazon, they started with books, and then of course they've expanded into just about everything imaginable that could be sent through the mail to you and even some things that can't be sent through the mail to you, which I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit. But his insight was that high margins were what were making certain companies successful. So just basic economics here. The margin is the profit that the organization is going to make because let's just say it's a book. Well, there's printing costs, there's cost to pay the author, there's, you know, there's various fixed costs that go into a book. But then for the bookseller, whatever the differences between the fixed cost of producing the book and, and what they're selling it to the consumer for, that's the margin, the profit margin. Now what Jeff Bezos saw was something entirely different. He saw these companies with large margins making tons of money.

And he thought, what if I squeeze the margin and what if I just have a very, very small margin of profit on the things I'm selling, but that I make up for it in volume? So he saw inefficiency in big bloated companies that have these high profit margins and were making lots of money. But he thought, I bet there's a different way. My margin or your margin is my opportunity. So he could undercut the retail markup, that margin with low, with lower cost for the customer by improving the logistics, so improving the shipping cost, improving all the different things warehousing, all the back end things that we as the customer never see. So he knew that, or I should say he had a strong hunch that he could undercut those retail margins with better logistics so that he could sell for less. Now he could sell, he'd have to still sell way more in order to make the same amount of money to make up the difference in a smaller margin with a larger volume. And he built an infrastructure to do just that. So powerful warehouses with lots of technology, excellent shipping systems.

So he just built out the logistics system and it proved, you know, it proved the point and for sure his paradigm shift. Your margin is my opportunity absolutely worked in his favor now as he built out all that infrastructure to handle all of the inventory information and the product information and everything that goes into that user experience when you're on Amazon.com's website. Well, that infrastructure behind the scenes, we would ordinarily think of that as a cost center. It costs the organization something and they don't necessarily make any money on that. But Bezos and his team had built out this incredible infrastructure and he realized that other companies were building similar types of infrastructure, even if they weren't necessarily in the online retail space, but they needed similar types of infrastructure to keep track of things in their organization, whether it be inventory or data, other types of things. And so he was able to take that technical infrastructure that he created in order to have the website, Amazon.com and all the products and, and again, logistics, product information, all the things that go into that, and take that cost center and all of that technical, technical infrastructure and turn it into a profit center called Amazon Web Services AWS. And AWS right now is the biggest moneymaker for Amazon.

They make way more money reselling that infrastructure to other companies and hosting other companies data on that infrastructure than they do in their retail sales. So I mean, brilliant. To take the infrastructure that what was once a cost center and turn it into a profit center. Absolutely brilliant. Again, the paradigm shift that started all of this is your margin is my opportunity. So he's taking again that idea of somebody else's bloated profit margin and finding ways to make a smaller margin, but again, make up for it in volume. So as a result, Amazon, I'm sure, as you know, has become absolutely dominant as an online retailer, but then also as an online cloud storage space where again, companies are using that AWS infrastructure to host their own data.

So the leadership lesson in this one is really to question industry assumptions because the profit margin was the profit margin was the profit margin. Until Bezos goes, oh, we can get by with much smaller profit margin and we're just going to make up for it in tons and tons of volume. So innovation here comes from flipping the lens. We're not necessarily seeing the world as everyone else sees it. We're looking to see what else is possible. How else could we make this work? And I think one of the important lessons too for organizational life as we think about applying this paradigm shift inside of our organization, is that you do need to empower your teams to find those places where they can take something that is a sticking point, something that is friction, something that is a cost center, and turn it into a profit center or turn it into an opportunity or, or just redesign it into something that's going to work differently for the organization.

Okay, so just quick recap of these four paradigm shifts. The first, don't believe everything you think. Taught to me by none other than Martha Beck. Self awareness and discernment at the heart of examining our own thinking. Number two, growth mindset coming to us from Carol Dweck. Developing talent. Not just assessing it and saying, well, this person has this much innate ability and this person has that much innate ability, but instead to open up the idea that we all have the opportunity to learn and grow in any situation. Number three, from Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. So disrupt yourself before others do. Question your own assumptions and have those strategic inflection points of your own accord, rather than the market thrusting them on you. And then number four from Jeff Bezos and Amazon, your margin is my opportunity. So innovation comes through questioning norms and finding different ways to be profitable and even turning a cost center into a profit center.

Okay, so as I close out this discussion of paradigm shifts, I just want to remind you that paradigm shifts aren't just things that happen to you as a leader, whether you're leading from the top of the org chart or whether you're leading from the side. Leaders have the power to create paradigm shifts for the people that they work with, for the customers that they serve, for the internal and external clients alike.

So what I want you to be thinking about as you go through this week, having listened to this episode, is what belief, assumption, or story might you be holding onto that's ready to shift?

Now, if this episode gave you a new lens or sparked a shift in your thinking, maybe you heard a paradigm shift or two in here that's changing the way you fundamentally see the world, or a slice of it, then I would love it if you shared this episode with a colleague.

And if you're feeling that you are leading change and designing culture and doing all the things, just remember the most powerful thing that you can do is to help people see the world differently. All right? That is my charge to myself when I am on a keynote stage. And that is my charge to you, my friends, as leaders, as you go through this week.

How can you help people see the world differently this week? All right? Be well, my friends.