018 A Conversation with Paul Adams

Key learnings:

“Your future and present can update your past.”  Reclaim your power—the power to choose, to be self-directed, and the power to defy the mindset that says that what happened to you yesterday defines who you are today. Instead of thinking your yesterday defines your today, embrace the reframing idea: your today can redefine yesterday. Do you let crisis define your future or do you choose to create a future that redefines your experience? What can we learned from Aviv’s decision at age seven to create a story of meaning that pointed to all the benefits available for him after his parents separated?
What can we learn from the formative experience of Pope, John Paul The Second in an underground theater during WWII, and how this experience shaped the role of his life? “Instead of thinking: today is the product of yesterday, think of today as the beginning of tomorrow.” This mental model proposes that what appears to be a setback can become the setup for new beginnings that lead to your next breakthrough.
How do parents foster the can-do mindset with their children? By creating a dual memory: a memory of the incidence of success and a longitudinal memory of overcoming of challenge that enabled the success.
Why and how did Aviv reframe a devastating loss in the air force? What is the deeper meaning of integrity? And how Aviv uses a story to reinvigorate the essence of integrity? "A complaint is the misdirected energy of an unaddressed or unmet need." “For many of us the natural reaction to complaint is that we become defensive because we internalize and personalize the complaint. Instead, we can seek to understand and help the other person become part of the solution by converting the complaint into a concrete request that will help us address the unmet need.” What is the process Aviv applied to help executives convert complaints to facilitate the emergence of new future possibilities?

Full show notes: http://www.avivconsulting.com/cnf18