Shownotes
The key to our failures and successes always lie within us. Aiming for the latter, we have the CEO and Executive Leadership Coach at Velocity Leadership Consulting, Karen Brown, to talk about how the science of words or neuro-linguistic programming gives a window into what is going on in us that hinders our greater success. Karen guides us to find the blind spots in our behavioral patterns and address the limiting beliefs that hold us back from taking action. She also directs us to the fears that we keep locked down in our unconscious mind, urging us to overcome them and eventually lead better with the capacity to transform the world.
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Conquering Limiting Beliefs Through Neuro-Linguistic Programming with Karen Brown
I am an expert in behavioral blind spots and identifying them. How they’re hindering greater success and by resolving them, you get greater success
We are so fortunate that we have Karen Brown on this episode. She’s the CEO and Executive Leadership Coach at Velocity Leadership Consulting. Karen, thanks for coming down.
I’m happy to be here.
Karen, tell me a little bit about your business and who you serve.
In Velocity Leadership Consulting, our mission is to elevate leadership performance and impact with greater velocity and ease. We do that through one-on-one executive coaching using neuroscience techniques. Everything we do is scientifically proven effective.
There’s that E word. In some of the backstory, for you, there’s a journey. Karen was nice enough to let me know she has a book out and I read the book before getting together. If I’m the business owner and I heard you said we help leadership in Velocity, what does that look like when you show up day one at my business?
What that looks like is I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. Most of which I probably know the answer to but I want to hear what you have to say and how you say it. This goes back to something called Neuro-Linguistic Programming which me and all of our coaches are experts in. It’s the science of the words that you use to express yourself and it gives us a window into what’s going on for you. Specifically, what are the blind spots in your behavioral patterns that are holding you back from higher levels of success? We tend to work with either high performers or the person in the organization who is the trouble spot. We also work in areas of succession. Maybe someone’s been identified as the successive candidate and maybe they have some developmental work to do. Whatever it is, it’s going through those blind spots and identifying them. I’m adept and I would say, if I have a special gift it’s that, being able to see behavioral blind spots in an instant. From what I ask someone and how they respond, I can see exactly what’s going on and then ask them a question to open that up even further so that they can see it.
By and large, at some point you pretty much see all the problems that you can see, if you’ve been doing it long enough.
I think that until a new problem emerges and then I go, “I haven’t seen it all yet. I thought I had.”
We've all risen to a nice level of success, and that's also where our blind spots live.
Is there a typical leadership challenge, blind spot that you see most of the time?
Yes. Number one that every single executive we work with talks about is not having enough time to achieve what they want, which is ultimately a blind spot and a limiting belief. It’s something that they thought maybe it was possible, they tried it. They tried to achieve it, they couldn’t get to it and they gave up on it.
There’s no hope of getting it fixed. I’m your leader and I have more to do than they and you come in and go, “Bob, here’s what I think would be a good remedy. This is what I would tell you to do to get control of your time.” What would you tell me?
First of all, I don’t tell you very much. I ask questions because you have the answers. You’ve not ever had someone like me that can look behind the scenes and ask the right question to unearth the answer. I’ll ask you a question like, “Look at your schedule, what is the biggest time bandit that you have? Where do you lose the most time?” We go from there. I’ll say, “What can we do differently with that?” First of all, we need to identify, what’s the point on the horizon that we’re going for? What will your schedule look like when you do have enough time to achieve everything?” You also have that crazy idea called work-life balance, where you are no longer working at home on weekends and evenings. Your spouse and your family don’t have to put up with that from you anymore. I guarantee every executive out there, I’ve not met one yet, that their family doesn’t do that. They all do that.
When that executive goes through the training and all of a sudden he or she start showing up on the weekends, how’s that resonate with the family?
They love it. A couple of quick examples of that, one client and his wife actually used to work in the same company. It’s a large regional bank here in the area. He was very quick when we first started working together to tell me, “My wife worked in the company so she knows how it is.” I said, “What you’re telling me is she will fall prey to the same excuses that you use.” He sat there and went, “Probably.” He’s the same client who, when I said to him, “Here’s the truth. You do have enough time to get everything done during the day and not work at night or on weekends. You gave up on this because you didn’t find the way to achieve it. I’m here to help you with that.” Fast forward, he typed in his notes that day in our client interface system. He said, “Karen said it was possible,” and I remind him of that because three short weeks later, he’s not working at night. He’s not working over the weekend. His wife actually had the realization, the awakening of, “I was falling into the same excuses that you did because I didn’t think it was possible either. It was a goal that I had way back when that I let go of because I didn’t find the right strategy and I couldn’t make it happen. I gave up.”
I imagine there’s some level of pushback. When you get the pushback from them, what’s your typical rejoinder to them when they’re pushing back?
My favorite thing to say is, “How do other people that are more successful than you do it? Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, how do they do it?” I say, “What’s the evidence that shows you that they’ve achieved a higher level than you?” They can’t argue that and I say, “Do they still have 24 hours in a day like you do or have they invented more time somehow?”
Unlimiting Your Beliefs: 7 Keys to Greater Success in Your Personal and Professional Life; Told Through My Journey to the Toughest Race in the World
You were talking about in the beginning and velocity is part of what you do. You mentioned the three-week timeframe. For transformation, what’s the timeframe typically that you see for a committed student that’s willing to be coached?
This is where it gets great. For someone who’s willing to do the work and make the changes, we always start out with a six-month engagement. I always let this play out. I don’t set up the client for this. I let them discover for themselves. About six weeks in, we have accomplished all of the goals and objectives that we’ve established at the beginning of the engagement. We come to that session and I review the goals and objectives with them and say, “Have you achieved what you wanted to there?” Yes. “How about there?” Yes. “How about there?” Yes, and then the light bulb goes on and they go, “I’ve achieved everything that we set up for six months in six weeks. Now, can we work on this, this and this?” “Of course.”
As you come into an organization and I’m sure that everybody that looks at this leader goes, “That’s a change.” What’s the dynamic in the organization when the leadership goes through this transformation?
The impact is enormous. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from others in the organization who have said, “The change is so remarkable. It’s marked difference. It’s transformational. They were good before to work with or they were a good leader and now they have completely leveled it up and they are delightful to work with. They are a pleasure to work with and they’re helping me. I can see that they’re helping other people because they’re so much better. They’re adept at actually effectively coaching their team.”
In the financial metrics of a company, is that something that you observed pre and post your engagement?
Yeah, we have KPIs that measure all of that and they’re on our website.
What do you typically see?
I typically see a 48% increase across the board and even oftentimes that will translate into net profit.
I think about the audience going, “I’ve had consultants. I’ve had this and that and the other. There’s a cost and I think if you have a good number moved up in your bottom line, then it’s an investment not an expense.” What many of the folks may not know is that you participate in some extreme sports. The part that I’m interested in is not only the fact that you participated but you’ve recognized along your journey that you needed to bring on a coach or two. Let’s talk about that moment when you were doing what you were doing and getting what you got. You finally decided that I have to take and get somebody to help me or coach me.
To explain that, I need to back up even further than that. I spent the better part of twenty years being a successful senior executive in the corporate world and also being an internal business coach for my team members. This is before coaching was even a thing.
The power of fear is alleviated after you verbalize it. When you let it out, you let it go.
You started very young.
This is before coaching was a thing and you did this as team building. You did it because you were a good leader and you want to bring your people along. You want to help them perform. I was very adept at coaching and I also found that there was a
lways this place that we couldn’t access. We could only take that coaching work so far. What I later found out through my journey to the IRONMAN is what I was feeling was the unconscious mind and neuroscience techniques, which is one of the reasons why I founded Velocity. That’s why we do the work that we do. What we were coming up against were behavioral blind spots and the way that you work through those is through unconscious mind and neuroscience techniques.
Neural-Linguistic Programming like I talked about and a whole bunch of other stuff that you have to go to school and study a long time for and be fascinated with human behavior which I am. Learn that and then fast forward to the beginning of my IRONMAN journey, I decided to pursue this crazy, big, hairy, audacious, gargantuan dream of mine which had existed for 28 years. I wanted to compete in the toughest race on the planet, which is the IRONMAN World Championships as a recreational athlete. I had never ridden a road bike. I was a terrible swimmer. I had never run a marathon and I had never completed a triathlon of any length and yet I wanted to do a race that’s 2.4 mile swim in the ocean, 112 mile bike ride and a 26.2 mile marathon. It’s absolutely nuts. I finally discovered limiting beliefs and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.
I read it as well. It’s a good book. Pick it up, you’ll learn lots.
What held me back for 28 years for me even pursuing the IRONMAN and come to find out other professional goals that I didn’t realize I was holding myself back from, is something called limiting beliefs. When we think or say, “I don’t have enough money, time, talent, buy-in or whatever,” fill in the blank to achieve X. That’s always what I thought about the IRONMAN. That’s what holds all of us back. This is how our unconscious mind is wired. It goes back to cave man days, but come face-to-face with that, learned how to conquer that, which I also give you the key to that in the book. There’re also keys to that on my website. I decided to pursue the IRONMAN and I’m ready to jump in with both feet. Come hell or high water, I am doing this. Then I realized, “I don’t know the first thing about this. I don’t even know what I don’t know yet.” It might be a good idea to do something different than I’ve ever done before which is to hire a coach right out of the gate. I don’t even know what questions to ask. I was actually at a barbecue and I had just started verbalizing to other people that I was pursuing this dream.
Did they move away from you?
Yeah, rapidly. They ran the other direction except for a very kind person who I met and shared my dream with said, “You probably want to hire a coach,” and I played it off very well, I must say. Inside I thought, “That’s the best idea ever,” and I said, “Do you know where I could find one?” He said, “I have a couple of names actually, my cousin did this.” Monday morning, I was interviewing the coach that I ended up hiring who had gone herself to the IRONMAN World Championships multiple times and had helped other athletes get there as well. I hired somebody that had done what I wanted to do. That was the golden ticket and I had to talk this person into taking me on. I was a super no one and I said to her, “I will do whatever you tell me without question and I will be your most committed athlete.” That was true and I said, “The other thing about me is, I will never give up, never. I will do whatever it takes to get there.” That’s exactly what I did. That’s another key in the book.
That’s a committed student and coachable. The part that that struck me as I was reading in the book and thinking about what you do for a living, the genesis of this notion about bringing the coaching and bringing the insights from something that’s out of your comfort zone. I think about gender issues. You come in to talk to the “CEO of the company,” do you see much pushback in expectation? Do you get much of that in your industry anymore? They go, “You’re diminutive,” at what point in time they go, “She is to coach.” Do you get much of that anymore?
Some, it depends on how big their ego is. I get it from women too but from the opposite side. From women, it’s their disbelief. I’m not enough or what I call the Oxygen Mask Syndrome that, “I’ve got to help everybody else before I help myself or before I do something to help myself.” I always say, “You’re going to suffocate first. That’s how it’s going to be.” That is what cuts through and alleviates the pushback which is me being direct just telling them what I see and saying, “How’s that working out for you? It doesn’t look to me like it is working out for you.”
Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Being able to walk alongside someone instead of pushing them is our gift that we give to other human beings.
At some point in your athletic endeavors, were you still working in the corporate world?
Yeah, in fact, this is the other reason for founding Velocity. A year after I crossed the finish line at the IRONMAN at age 46, I was fired from being a CEO. I thought I was doing a great job. It took that level of pain for me to recognize my blind spots because at first I blamed the board. I blamed politics and all the typical stuff. I finally had to come to grips with what caused me to be fired, which was these behavioral blind spots that I was unaware of.
It’s a tough pivot. I think about that and here you are on whatever day it was after you’re going, “I haven’t ever been fired.” What was that thought process going on between your ears?
Like a lot of achievers and this is why I bring this up because probably everyone in your audience, we’re all type A, we’re all achievers. We’ve all risen to a nice level of success and that’s also where our blind spots live. What was going on between my ears was, “If I had these blind spots, what was it costing me, others and the organization?” That’s when I began to feel really badly about it. I could have been so much better than I was. I could’ve been so much more effective than I was. I wish that someone or something would have pointed this out to me. I would have seen it and been able to do something about it. That’s a major reason why I founded Velocity because I thought, “I don’t want to see that negative impact or opportunity cost anymore.”
Do you think you would’ve recognized the blind spots without this event?
Amongst achievers there does have to be a level of pain, to get us to sit up and pay attention. I will say this, I would have sat up and listened had it had it come from the mouth of someone I respected. If I highly respected them and they said, “Sit your butt down and let’s have a direct conversation about this.” If they had pointed them out to me, yes, I would have sat up and taken note.
You left the job and you made a choice. Did you start Velocity right after that?
I did.
That had to be pretty riveting and scary.
The state of your company is nothing more than the state of your mind.
I felt that was the right thing to do that was like with IRONMAN, I felt like that’s what I’m meant to do that’s what I’m called to do and that’s the mission. Even though I’m afraid and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, I do have the experience, the credentials and the background to know what I’m doing. At the same time, I was also still developing myself. I think that’s a good thing, to be able to walk through that with other...
