Two words that most commonly create a very negative reaction to people are “interrogation” and “micromanagement.” Any of us who’ve worked in corporate America with a tough manager or boss, have been frustrated by micromanagement. Any of us who were ever a rebellious teenager has experienced interrogation from our parents, mentors, or leaders in our lives. Both of these situations don’t necessarily create a great feeling. On today’s show, Paul Blanchard shakes the snow globe and changes up how we interpret these terms so that we can realize not just the power of words but the power of how we’ve been conditioned to react to them. Listen closely and consider what the opportunity to interrogate more and micromanage better might do for your life and your business.
I’m very excited to be with you. Every episode, we want to discuss some things to be able to change some patterns, address some patterns and see our patterns. Everything that we teach at Habit Finder and we’ve been working on for years comes down to patterns, which is another name for habits. We’re not talking about habits of brushing your teeth, what books you read or whatever the case is. We’re talking about your neurological habits, the habits of the neural processes of your brain and those are based on patterns. Your brain operates in a sense of patterns. It wants to be able to find patterns that work for this so it’ll apply those patterns to every other area of your life.
Your Mindset
We realized years ago that the most common term for the patterns of your mind out there was the term mindset. Everyone is talking about mindset. Everyone is talking about mindsets for everything, mindset for success, mindset for money, and until we created it, we had never seen a way for you to be able to scientifically measure or be able to quantify what your mindset is. That’s what we do here at Habit Finder is named after that particular technology and specific tool that allows us to measure your mindset because if you can measure it, you can understand it, you can dictate it, and you can change it. You can start to understand the conscious and the unconscious tug of war that we all have going on in terms of the reality of our lives and being able to shift those to be able to support the success that we want to create.
I love the opportunity to get on here just as my business partner and my father does every Monday or he brings some elements of The Ten Scrolls because Habit Finder is the official Og Mandino Company. For those of you who are familiar with The Greatest Salesman In The World and The Ten Scrolls, if you’re not, you’re going to want to get familiar with it real fast because it’s only one of the greatest books ever written. If Og Mandino was still around, which is why you haven’t heard of it if you haven’t, he passed in 1996, he would tell you he didn’t write it. He took dictation and every Monday morning at 8:00 AM Mountain Time right here on this Habit Finder page, my dad gets an opportunity to share with you some of those principles and be able to take you through applying those ten scrolls to your life. Don’t miss Og-menting your life and Og-menting your week on Monday mornings.
I get an opportunity to come on here on Tuesdays. We give you a double dose of Habit Finder principles and being able to understand that the goal we have here for Habit Finder is not to get you to see the world the way my father and I see it. We want to break you out of the way you see it. Why would we want to do that? Why would we want to break you out of the way you see it? Most of you, if not all of you, are here to grow, improve and create better results in your life. The way that we assess that is, “Here’s what I’m getting, here’s what I’d like to be getting,” and the only thing standing between those two things is your mindset or the patterns of your brain.
Temporary Deviations
You can create temporary deviations from your reality. You can feel like you’re making progress but so many end up feeling like they’re back at square one as we would commonly say. That’s when we have to surrender to our unconscious patterns and we want to disrupt those patterns. We want to change the way we think the world works because you are results, the results you’re getting in your life are based on how you believe the world works and what you truly believe you deserve. Not what you believe you deserve in a heightened state where you’re in a great, enthusiastic, inspired state. We’re talking about based on the patterns, the unconscious dialogue that has been feeding your mind and never sleeps as Og Mandino would say so that we can start to become aware of those and shift those.
If any of you reading this have not scientifically measured your patterns of thought, your habits of thinking to be able to understand how your unconscious mind is an incredibly, powerful influence in your life. Og said, “Never sleeps, creates your dreams and makes you act in ways you do not comprehend.” We want to understand that so that we can start to apply the principles and the practices of disrupting what’s created some of those patterns and then allowing room for new furrows as Og Mandino would call it, to be able to create new patterns and new habits of thought.
I’d like to take on two of them that are specific to when we’re working in the patterns and the habits of people and work. Those are two particular areas in the Habit Finder. The people section where we’re scientifically measuring your patterns of thought about other people and work your patterns of thought when it comes to getting the job done. When it comes to the objectives, the people involved in those objectives and the different areas that we’re focused on. Those are powerful measurements to understand. They’re both in your outer world.
Thinking Outside the Box
We’ve found entrepreneurially across the board with hundreds of thousands of assessments that the majority of entrepreneurs have high scores, great clarity, and what we’ve called a genius in these two areas. There just tends to be a lot of internal noise that robs us of being able to capitalize on that genius. I’ve found that one of the things that can disrupt us is when we’re doing something that we’re not willing to admit it’s what we’re doing or we don’t understand that it’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to dress it up in our conscious mind as something different.
For example, as I’ve talked about on here before, we’re going to a different level on this, sales. A lot of people struggle with sales but it’s because they’re trying to sell without acknowledging that that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to dress it up as something that it’s not and that can be frustrating for you and for the other people. As I’ve said many times, most people don’t suck at sales, they suck at selling on purpose because they feel like, “I’m sharing. I’m connecting.” No, those are all important elements of selling, sharing, connecting and finding real value. Somewhere along the way, we were taught to look at a particular process or a particular word in a different way.
Disrupt Your Thoughts
The two that I’ve chosen to take on, I’m not trying to convince you that these two things have been a great standard practice in the history of mankind but I would like to use them to shake the snow globe a little bit. I’d like to use them to disrupt how you think about certain processes and some of the conditioning like social conditioning, religious conditioning, family conditioning, all kinds of things that have created challenges in terms of being able to embrace what it is that you’re doing.
Another common one, in addition to sales, is money. Many of us want to make a lot of money but don’t want to admit that we want to make a lot of money. We are professing that we want to make a lot of money but we haven’t done the deeper neurological work, the unconscious mind that seems to be digging in when it’s time to create more abundance in our lives. You’ll know you’re this person because you’ve tasted it. You could touch it but you don’t get to have it. You don’t get to feel like it’s deserving to you, consistent to you, or you have to fight to get it and then you find you’ve got to fight to keep it. All of these are pointing out misalignments between what you are professing in terms of, “I am just sharing, I’m not selling,” or “I want to make a lot of money but I haven’t addressed some of the deeper conditions in my unconscious mind.” We want to shake those things up.
We only have a little bit of time, so I’m going to focus on two of them, to give you an example of what happens when you disrupt and change the way that you perceive things. This isn’t how you perceive the definition of these two words but how you perceive the energy behind these two words. The two words are interrogation and micromanagement. I happen to believe that these are two critical elements that you will want to have in your business and your life to be tremendously successful. Some of you who haven’t been working with us or don’t understand my disruptive personality are going, “Really? You want us to interrogate people? You want us to micromanage people?”
I couldn’t think of two words that most commonly create a very negative reaction even a visceral reaction especially micromanagement. Any of us who’ve worked in corporate America with a tough manager or boss, the big brother mentality have been frustrated by micromanagement. Any of us who were ever a devious or rebellious teenager has experienced interrogation from our parents, other mentors, or leaders in our lives and other things that don’t necessarily create a great feeling. We’re going to shake the snow globe. We’re going to change up how we interpret these terms so that we can realize not just the power of words but the power of how we’ve been conditioned to react to them. How we try to dance around what they are and miss some of the beautiful core concepts involved.
Interrogation
I don’t want people to go jump out in social media and say, “I am an interrogator and I am a micromanager,” without giving people the context of what we’re talking about here. Most of what I talk about disruptively is taken out of context if people don’t understand where it’s coming from. Let’s talk interrogation first. Let’s shake up how most people view interrogation. Interrogation is an interesting thing that we are conditioned to have an adverse reaction early on in life. We’re taught when we go to interrogate when we’re younger, we start asking questions and then we ask more questions. In fact, the most effective interrogators in the world are 4 or 5-year-olds. They do it with one single word. Why? We get taught that it’s not okay and that’s annoying.
We can feel the irritation we’re creating in the adults that we’ve asked this to over and over again. Some of us continue to be bold. Hopefully, there are some of us that never lost that but you can see right there how we start to get conditioned that interrogation, the persistence of asking questions and getting deeper to understanding was a bad thing. We became sensitive to asking too many questions. Many of you have sensed this in your own conversations where you’ll be talking to someone, you’re trying to get to know them, and you’ll start hearing the dialogue of, “That’s none of my business,” or “I don’t want them to feel like I’m interrogating them, I’m prying or whatever.” If we listen closely, you can hear evidence of how we were taught from a very young age that asking a lot of questions is not okay. That we should be brief, we should be to the point and we should have it well thought out before it’s presented to someone else. We missed the beauty of interrogation.
Breaking It Down
Those of you who have been on here before know that I love words. I’m a huge fan of words. When we break down the meaning of this particular word, you automatically create a different perspective. If we break down interrogation, we get to primary core etymological words. Inter which means between and rogare, which means questions. To interrogate means to seek, to see, and to pursue between the questions. In a world where we have been conditioned to take life at face value, to ask questspectation, I call them, which are questions where we have a very expected answer to them. In court, it would be called leading the witness where you only ask questions you already know the answer to or you only ask questions that are going to give you the answer you want to get. We’ve lost the ability to interrogate each other.
I’m not asking you to bring the energy you would to a criminal or a terrorist. I’m asking you to bring the energy of wanting to understand what is in between the questions because that’s where their humanity, pain and reality are. Not the one they profess, not the one that they put on as a show, which we all do. Every single one of us. Even the most authentic people you have met because I’ve met them too still have a wall and a little bit of a presentation. Theirs is a lot thinner than others and they’re aware of theirs but we all do it depending on the audience we’re around and who we’re with.
We might have a thicker wall around our family, coworkers, our friends or vice versa, but we will want to start to interrogate. We want to inter, to see between rogare, the questions. To ask questions and listen. Not ask questions and grab onto one little piece to advance the conversation. It’s not about advancing a conversation, it’s about getting the conversation deeper. Doing so with respect, love, and care. We teach this in a very specific process called intrinsic validation that when understood and when we reach some level of mastery, we become an intrinsic validator rather than do intrinsic validation. It has unlocked more income, more depth and relationships, more cooperation and collaboration than anything we have ever taught. We want to understand that one of the things that get in its way is our own internal dialogue.
Isolating the Noise
Our inability to see in between the questions comes from our own noise and this conditioning of to ask why is irritating like our 4 or 5-year-old selves. Why? Oftentimes, we weren’t asking to be annoying. We were asking because we didn’t understand. We wanted to understand more. We saw a world that didn’t necessarily make sense to us. It’s why when building a business plan, writing your goals, or coming up with a strategy, the greatest critics in the world are 4, 5 or 6-year-olds. Because if you can’t explain it to a kindergartener, more than likely you’ve got too many walls, it’s too complicated, and it gives you too many places to hide. We don’t want to offer that to others. We don’t want to give them places to hide.
We want to create a safe place to allow them to come out from where they are hiding, whatever part of them is hiding. We do that through interrogation, through a scene in between the questions. I’m not saying you should go talk to people and say, “I’d like to interrogate you.” I want that to be your mindset to see in between the questions to not take for granted what’s being presented to you. Not to be skeptical or look at them suspiciously but to look at them with an incredible desire to see them accurately and accuracy comes in the details. We will want to see in between the questions.
We will want to ask the questions that we have talked ourselves out of in the past whether we believe they weren’t any of our business, it was too personal, we had no credibility in asking, or that it would be annoying. We want to bring the appropriate energy to interrogation so that we can start to get behind people’s walls and see what’s going on. From that space, you can serve. I’m not saying you should interrogate so that you can sell your product to them. I’m not saying you should interrogate so that they automatically trust you. I’m saying you should interrogate because you care, you love humanity and you would like to understand theirs a little bit deeper.
Once you’ve done that, you can find yourself in a position to make other decisions as to whether to introduce them to a product, to a community or to let them know that you appreciated them opening up to you. You’re grateful you were able to offer them a safe space to do so. It’s not a matter of interrogating with any other objective other than to connect and allow them to but it is from that place that gives you the right and the clarity to determine what if any objectives could be offered or presented after that. That’s interrogation.
Micromanagement
Number two is another term that a lot of people have a visceral or negative response to and that is micromanagement. Don’t be a micromanager, we’re taught. Don’t be the person who’s controlling all of the people underneath you, overwatch and all this intensity and all these different things where you make everyone under you feel inadequate, and feel like they’re in a prison or whatever the case may be. This is a gross misunderstanding of what micromanagement is.
Let’s break down the word. Micro which means small, little or magnified, microscopic, and manage, which is to handle, train or direct. I love that last one in particular. To direct the small things. I chose these two on purpose because the most important people you can interrogate are the ones who want to follow you, join you, and partner with you. It is through seeing in between the questions, getting to their deeper why’s, their deeper pain, and the actual reality that will allow you to them appropriately micromanage what they would like to create for themselves. What they would like to create with you and with the opportunity you have to offer because details, millimeters and baby steps, all of these things are micro. They’re little, small and microscopic.
One Step at a Time
These millimeters and baby steps are the only ways to get there, to enjoy the journey there, and be able to sustain it when you arrive is to micromanage, to handle, train, and direct to the small things. Where it went wrong? Similar to interrogation was a force tactic to see them between the questions and extract, oftentimes, painfully and unwillingly information. I’m asking you to interrogate with love which means they’ve got to surrender that of their own free will and choice but more people will than you might realize when you show up, care, honor and love them and create a safe place. We’ll want to find those things but similar to interrogation where it had a sense force, micromanagement was corrupted by control.
It was all about controlling. Whereas I’m asking you to micromanage, to train, to direct, and to handle in a collaborative state. The simple equation for that collaboration is you interrogate to get clear on what they want. It’s not what they’ve been taught they’re supposed to want and not what they’re sharing with you they want because it sounds nice but the things they really want. Some of those things might not be stuff they would admit to a lot of people but then you are going to get to the micro, the small little things, the baby steps and the millimeters of how they’re going to accomplish that. You’re going to collaborate with them, help them direct to those things, train them on those things, guide them on those things, and manage those things to get them there. If you go to help them manage those things and they do not collaborate, then there might be something that you want to interrogate, to see in between questions to be able to discover if that’s what they want or if they want it right now because those are both important things.
Getting Rid of the Stigma
It’s not just what they want, it’s whether they want it right now. It’s not whether they’re willing to do whatever it takes. Are they willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes, getting clear about those things, and not micromanaging punitively? Micromanaging for proper integration. Because if you’re in the little, small things in a collaborative guiding, training and managing way, you’re going to then be able to see the first little piece that falls off that they don’t accomplish or they don’t follow through on so you don’t need to keep beating them to death. Being in those details allows you to see, “This is where we diverted. This is where they lost focus. This is where we stopped moving forward and now I can address that particular area,” not control it. Interrogation was corrupted by force and micromanagement was corrupted by control but they’re both powerful things to own, to master, to be aware of and to deploy in your businesses.
We want to deploy interrogation with love and micromanagement with collaboration so that we can get into the little details. Another place we go wrong is when we go overboard with too many details. We are micromanaging too many things. It should be one thing. It should be the very next thing. I want you to consider those of you working in a people-driven business, what is the very next thing that they need to do to move their business forward? What are the three baby steps that can help them accomplish it that will allow you to help hold them accountable? Some of you will want to find three baby steps that will lead to those three baby steps and now you’re micromanaging at an appropriate level to be able to serve that person.
We make too many assumptions that because they’re an intelligent human being, we should not micromanage them. Because they’ve been successful elsewhere, we should not micromanage them. We should not micromanage them in terms of control or expectation, we should micromanage them in terms of influence and collaboration. Meaning they are telling you, they are surrendering their why, their pain, and their reality to you. Why? Because you interrogated them with love, you brought their wall down and you created a safe place.
Approaching Things Differently
I know safe and interrogate sounds opposites, but again, we’re shaking the snow globe, and we’re changing up how we’re looking at things. We’re starting to understand the ways we’ve been conditioned as children, spiritually, socially, and everything. We’re starting to see some of these patterns where we started this conversation that disrupts our ability to get in there and see in between the questions. We are starting to see what’s going on to guide them, direct them, and handle them in a collaborative state on the small things, which matter most so that we can integrate and differentiate, which are critical pieces.
I hope that moving forward, you get an opportunity to go back and look at your business, relationships, family and dynamics. Consider what the opportunity to interrogate more and micromanage better might do for your life and your business when you interrogate with love rather than force and when you micromanage with collaboration and influence rather than control. I hope this gives you an opportunity to consider things a little bit differently because if we can disrupt some of those patterns in your brain even indirectly. We open up the opportunity for you to unlearn what is holding you back and to relearn some of the things that are keeping you stuck so that you can use them to accelerate and create greater levels of success. Thank you for being on the Power Session. We will see you all next time. Take care.