THE LINKAGE LEADER

Copyright 2009 Marilyn King. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

www.linkageinc.com


Manage your Mindset with
Olympian Thinking
TM

By Marilyn King


Marilyn King is a two-time Olympian in the
grueling five event Pentathlon (100 meter
hurdles, shot put, high jump, long jump,
800 meters). Her 20-year athletic career
includes five national titles and a World
Record. An automobile accident in 1979
rendered her unable to train physically for
her third Olympic Team. Using only mental
training techniques she placed second at
the Olympic trials for the 1980 Moscow Games. This
extraordinary experience launched her exploration into the field
of exceptional human performance. Her discovery of the three
elements that are always present when ordinary people do
extraordinary things led to the development of Olympian
Technology. Through keynotes, training and consulting her
techniques have been incorporated by businesses seeking to
empower employees, embrace change and provide global
leadership.



COPYRIGHT 2009 MARILYN KING. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION.
"Are you waiting for things to return to normal in your organization? Sorry, Leadership will
require new skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty - even
after the current economic crisis is over."
Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009, Heifetz, Granshow, and Linsky
There may be no more important role on the planet at this time than effective leadership! When
change is happening so quickly and people are willing but unsure of what to do, moving
confidently into the unknown is a question of leadership. Our ability to shift from old ways of
thinking, doing, and being which are no longer viable; to engage new, as yet untested practices,
requires leaders to tell a compelling story of now that makes meaning in the midst of chaos.
Then our organizations must provide the infrastructure to support people in the ongoing
identification of the highest level of strategic changes needed, and the means to shift quickly to
engage with the new story.
Change, Leadership: Our Current State
The Business World is a place of constant change, with stories of mergers, layoffs, bankruptcy,
and restructuring appearing in the news every day. No matter the scale, when these kinds of
changes hit the workplace, the literal, situational shifts are often not as difficult for employees
and managers to work through as the psychological transitions that accompany them. Indeed,
organizational transitions affect people; it is always people who have to embrace a new situation
and carry out the corresponding change. William Bridges, Managing Transitions, 2003.
It is clear that change is no longer episodic, it is continuous and it is not confined to a particular
area. Change is occurring in every arena and is impacted by changes occurring in seemingly
unrelated industries and parts of the world. To complicate matters even more, there is not just
one agreed upon reality, there are what I call multiple, simultaneous, competing realities. This
shift from manageable, episodic, contained change with a solid base of reality consensus, to
rapid, ongoing, systemic change and competing realities, leads to a high level of uncertainty,
anxiety and even fear. People do not know what the future will look like, they often feel out of
control, and they do not know what to do to be prepared to survive, much less thrive, in this
unknowable future.
When people are caught up in uncertainty, anxiety and fear, it is unlikely that their creativity
and effectiveness are operating at the level required for the organization to be successful in this
highly competitive, fast paced, constantly changing environment. It is important to understand
that under certain conditions, humans can be extremely adaptable and change very quickly.
Unfortunately, our traditional business environments tend to heighten the sense of anxiety and
fear in times of uncertainty rather than nurture creativity and adaptability.
Effective leadership can provide the critical success factor for the ongoing shifts required.
While leadership competency frameworks abound, the vast majority of the identified traits of
effective leaders are the same qualities required of good managers, good sales people and
people in general. Being a good listener, being open minded, and recognizing others are
important qualities for all people including our leaders. But the essential and critical
responsibility of leaders, especially at this time, is that of making meaning, managing mindset
and modeling the ability to speedshift.



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Leading Through high stakes and uncertainty
Then how do we as leaders best move ourselves, the people we work with, and our
organizations through the white water of high stakes and uncertainty and make the high
leverage changes? When we too are challenged by information overload and where to focus our
attention, what are the new proven tools we can use to manage our mindsets and shift to the new
ways of being and doing? First, we need to better understand change, transition and mindset.
William Bridges, well known pioneer author and consultant on human and organizational
change, has made considerable contributions to our understanding of the change process.
Bridges identified that within all change experiences there are three phases:
1. Ending, Losing Letting go of the old ways and the old identity
2. The Transition or Neutral Zone its when the critical psychological
realignments and repatternings take place.
3. The New Beginning - Coming out of the transition and making a new
beginningnew identity, new energy, new sense of purpose.
While women tend to naturally address the larger context and make meaning to ease the anxiety
through these three phases, a process I call Speedshifting is a very powerful mental practice
to engage during the Transition Phase. In this phase Bridges says, a significant shift takes
place within people That shift comes from an inner repatterning and sorting process in which
old and no longer appropriate habits are discarded and newly appropriate patterns of thought
and action are developed.
They (People) need something they can see, at least in their imaginations. They need a picture
of how the outcome will look, and they need to be able to imagine how it will feel to be a
participant in it. This picture in peoples heads is the reality they live in
Mindset Awareness: The New Leadership Imperative
In 2007 Avastone Consulting conducted an important study of ten prominent corporations titled,
Leadership and the Corporate Sustainability Challenge: Mindsets in Action. As we all know the
embrace of effective, efficient sustainable business practices is essential, but managing mindset
is often the missing ingredient. The following excerpts from the Avastone study speak for
themselves.
From the Executive Summary, Missing, however, is a key dimension of the conversation that
exists below the radar for most organizations. Few are focusing on the influence of patterns of
the mind, which shape our capacity to understand the world and allow us to take effective action
in support of it. Mindsets, the nature of their development, and the headway gained through the
expansion of consciousness, are often overlooked in the larger sustainability discussion.
The term mindsets refer to interior patterns of mind, or frames of reference, from which
individuals see sustainability and its importance. Two aspects driving mindset growth and
expansion are horizontal development and vertical development. While horizontal



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2009 MARILYN KING. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION. 4
development refers to expansion in capacities through increases in knowledge, skills, and
behaviors associated with a current mindset, vertical development is associated with capacity
shifts from an individuals current way of meaning-making to a broader, more complex
mindset.
By these references to mindsets, we are referring to the potential of leaders, to the
transformation of mindsets, and to the transformation of perspectives that may rest at the heart
of large-scale sustainability gains.
The Mindset of a Champion
My initial schooling in mindset management came through athletics. As an ordinary person with
slightly above average athletic ability I became an Olympic Pentathlete competing in five
events at the highest level on two Olympic teams. I succeeded because of my ability to manage
my mindset and speedshift, or literally learn on the run. In athletics I saw legions of highly
talented athletes who did not achieve their potential because of what and how they think. For
every Tiger Woods or Michael Phelps, there are thousands of physically gifted athletes who
never achieve their potential. Current research indicates that more than 80% of the people who
wake up on Monday morning do not want to go to work. If that mindset is prevalent in your
workforce, that is a recipe for organizational extinction.
Since retiring from athletics, and in my work with senior executives, I have been astonished at
how poorly equipped our organizations are to provide what is necessary to establish and
maintain key elements of a high performance mindset! While organizations may have been
successful in the past without effectively addressing the mindset within their organization, in the
future they will be left in the dust by organizations that effectively do. As leaders we will be
providing the essential elements for sustained high performance when we take responsibility to
make meaning, identify what to change, and provide the means for how to change quickly as
ongoing core competencies.
Olympian Thinking: Your Gold Within Reach
While the awareness of the value of these capabilities is not new, how to do it effectively and
make them an ongoing organizational process has not yet gone mainstream. Those
organizations that do acknowledge the mindset of their organization, will literally leap into the
lead and embrace a new exciting future filled with creativity and a desire and ability to
continually reinvent themselves.
In order to lead in an organization that makes meaning, manages mindset and enables ongoing
strategic change, leaders must develop and model those competencies at the personal level.
Making meaning as a business leader comes from a combination of our values clarification
practices and ongoing access to information that keeps us abreast of not just what is happening
in the world, but the vision of what business needs to look like in a world that works. Then,
managing mindset and internalizing the ability to speedshift starts upon awakening.
Looking back at my athletic career and learning from athletes who are the best in the world, it is
clear to me that the most important moment in determining who makes it and who does not, in
athletics, in business, in every area of endeavor, occurs when we first wake up in the morning.



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Each and every morning, upon awakening, when we move from asleep/unconscious to
conscious, the first thing that happens is we re-set our minds. We literally re-mind ourselves
where we are, what day it is, what is going on, what we are up to and what we need to do that
day. As we awaken, we tell ourselves a story and then act out our perceived role. Our actions
that day tend to fall into alignment with our story, with what our mind has been set to. For most
people their morning reset is to an old established mindset, an autopilot. Oh yes, its Monday,
this is what is going on and I have toblah blah blah. They are automatically snapped back
into the mindset they had yesterday when the world has moved on.
I remember the day I went from a mindset that said, I am an average, hardworking athlete and I
hope to someday make the relay team that goes to the national championships to the
outrageous thought that I could be in the Olympics. That new mindset immediately changed
my behaviors, created new thoughts that led to different strategies which precipitated new daily
practices and took me to two Olympic teams. That kind of shift in mindset most often happens
by accident or is crisis induced. But as leaders, we are responsible for the mindset of our
organizations and we must manage it by design. It is up to us, we determine if our workforce
begins each day in the old outdated mindset or engages a new mindset that sparks new ideas and
strategies.
Because people can change their minds in a nanosecond, as leaders, we must be clear and
consciously manage our own mindset as a core practice in undertaking responsibility to guide
the day to day mindset of the people in our organization. Awareness of your own mindset is an
essential first step.
Begin Your Day the Olympian Way- A Daily Practice
I would like to suggest a powerful daily mindset practice that is a first step in aligning the three
elements that are always present when people excel. High achieving individuals and
organizations are:
Passion-powered, which allows access to unlimited energy and creativity,
Vision-guided, which provides a compelling context and focus
Action-oriented, providing the infrastructure to effectively guide daily mental and
physical practices.
If you are a rookie and new to paying attention to your own mindset and recognizing how it
impacts your energy, creativity and effectiveness, take this first step:
Set your clock five minutes earlier than you normally do and pay attention to where you
mind goes. For just five days when you awaken, notice where your mind goes. Do not
try to make any changes; just notice your autopilot. You will be amazed what you
discover.
Then, take The Ten Day Challenge. For the next ten days whether your goal is
harmony at home, productivity at work, or as President Barak Obama has stated, a more
perfect union, I recommend what a former training partner has allowed me to call The
Bruce Jenner Technique. For four years Bruce, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist in the
decathlon, ran five miles every morning, envisioning that in Montreal he would win the



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2009 MARILYN KING. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION. 6
gold medal, set the world record and retire. This practice aligned his highest aspiration
with new thoughts, strategies, and daily practices that led him to the gold despite the fact
that he was not the most talented athlete in the field of world-class decathletes.
To apply this kind of Olympian Thinking in your life, I recommend that instead of
running five miles each morning as Bruce did, set your alarm clock five minutes early,
run a mental movie of your goal, your gold medal. (Can you imagine 8 gold medals?)
See your gold clearly and in great detail as Bruce did, and as all great champions have
done.
Through this intentional mindset practice you will quite naturally begin to look at your day and
notice what actions and behaviors are moving you toward that goal and what actions are
inhibiting your progress. You will begin to focus more attention on the behaviors that contribute
to your goal and naturally move away from the behaviors that detract. Like Bruce envisioning
the victory stand in Montreal, you will find yourself energized by these new images and new
creative strategies will emerge to support your desired outcome.
This simple, powerful, daily mindset practice is a first step in aligning the three elements
common to all high achievers. As this mindset practice becomes a habit it forms the foundation
that allows you to make meaning and manage the mindset of your workforce by role modeling
what it takes to speedshift.
Your Full and Complete Call to Leadership
I echo the Avastone study conclusion, Yet the fact is that new manifestations of leadership are
required. Today more than ever, we need leadership that can re-imagine the boundaries of
individual and organizational identity, thought, and purpose in light of the fundamental nature
of reality and who we are as human beings. This is ultimately a full and complete call to
leadership to live and fulfill the true nature of our human potential.




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