Mike Hawkins

MIKE HAWKINS is award-winning author of "Activating Your Ambition: A Guide to Coaching the Best Out of Yourself and Others", author of the "SCOPE of Leadership" six-book series on coaching leaders to lead as coaches, and president of Alpine Link Corporation. Mike coaches, consults, and trains organizations and individuals to higher levels of performance. He is a respected executive coach, management consultant, author, speaker, and college lecturer. He is considered an industry thought leader on leadership, consultative selling, self-improvement, and business management.

If you are a “just get it done” person who focuses on what needs to get done today, you might be thinking “focusing on today is just my personality and who I am.” Or “I just like to check things off of my to-do list.”

Why then do people in positions of influence focus on the “what is” instead of the “what does” when first attempting to gain buy-in for something? In other words, why do people talk about solutions instead of the problems their solutions solve or the opportunities their solutions leverage?

When people are on a stage, or asked to speak, their brains immediately sense danger and they start to react. Some people sweat. Some blush. Others tremble, lose access to their memory, or feel sick in their stomach. Some actually get sick. However, there is hope. In fact, there is great news. Our brain isn’t limited to automatic thinking and responses. There is another much bigger and more powerful part of our brain called our pre-frontal cortex located in our forehead. This is the part of the brain we control.

When change is a part of helping people, applying proven practices ensures the best chance of success. These practices are listed below, but before reviewing the list, …..

Neuroscience finds that others have a more accurate perspective of us than we do ourselves. We only have our own perspective which is generally based on good intentions, not realities. Plus, our internal perspective is clouded, if not obscured, by our many biases, fears, desires, and innate personality traits. Then there is our instinct which can lead us astray. For example, …