Podcast June 8, 2021

E147 | The Process Of Change With Greatness U Founder, Gina Mollicone

Are you ready to change? If so, don’t miss Greatness U founder, Gina Mollicone, on this week’s episode of Mind Your F**king Business.

Gina, based in Whistler in British Columbia, Canada is a best selling author and an agent of change. She’s written Think Or Sink and The Secret Of Successful Failing.

She is a product of what she preaches: having had to pivot hard in March 2020, when Covid hit and her business went to zero, overnight. Today, Gina helps clients get what they want. Because, says Gina, anything is possible.

“There are only two conditions required to change anything. That is a bonafide desire to change and that desire must be burning inside the person, you’ve really gotta want it. And the second thing is you gotta be willing to give it what it takes.”

Her business, Greatness U, trains coaches, like Dom, to be better coaches. From talking about change and her model for change and the things people need to do to see change, to how to build rapport, and why if you’re struggling, impact change can help you break out of the box. Download and listen now.

You can’t spend time with Gina and not find yourself learning new things. We found this conversation illuminating, we hope you do too.

On today’s podcast:

Becoming the change person
The leadership game
Successful failing
Flexibility of behaviours
Representational systems
Inductive change

Links:

Twitter – @GinaMollicone
LinkedIn – Gina Mollicone-Long
Website – Gina ML, Greatness U

How To Change With Changemaker Gina Mollicone

Gina Mollicone lives in Whistler, Canada. She’s the founder of Greatness U.

“The reason why I get out of bed every morning is to reveal the greatness that is always there. And it’s just a matter of tapping into what’s present.”

She’s written a couple of best selling books, both of which are about people tapping into the resources they have to get what they want faster, and with less effort.

Becoming the change person

“I realised that you’re either standing still or you’re changing. It’s one or the other. The only people who don’t hit any obstacles are people standing still. And I realised early on that the only thing in life that never changes is the actual process of change itself.”

If you can master the process of change, you don’t need to worry about what’s changing.

Gina helps people get what they want. She says they have to give it what it takes, not what it needs, but what it takes to succeed. She helps them achieve their dream with the resources they already have, but aren’t aware of.

“When I say you have to have desire for change, and willingness to give it what it takes, desire is really important, because a lot of people confuse true desire with wanting to want to change.”

And the thing is, if someone doesn’t want to change, there’s literally nothing you can do to make them change. However, if someone wants to change, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

This desired change is as applicable for organisations as it is for individuals.

The game of leadership

The biggest mistake leaders make is trying to change someone who doesn’t want to change. The game of leadership is thus: if you’re a leader, says Gina, you have one job and one job only. You have to have flexibility of behaviour.

As the leader of your organisation, you have to be the most adaptable person there. It’s the most important quality for a leader to possess. Every other quality falls under flexibility and behaviour.

You have to be able to adapt your communication, your style, your processes, everything, says Gina. It’s your job to lead, and how do you lead people, change people? You pump up their desire for change.

How can you pump up a desire for change?

“Well, there’s really only two ways: carrot or stick. You either offer some incentive to want to change, like money, vacation, pizza party, whatever. Or you offer a penalty for not changing, that creates a desire.”

These are the tactics that have been used by leaders forever. But the number one mistake leaders make, says Gina, is they think that their employees are going to share their desire for change, because of the vision.

“But the majority of leaders have people working for them who are just going to work, they literally don’t share the same passion and vision for whatever it is that you’re doing.”

It doesn’t mean they aren’t committed, it means you have to adapt what you have, you can’t force people to change.

Successful failing

The secret of successful failure, says Gina, is about recognising everytime you try to adapt a new behaviour, create a new behaviour, get a new result, you’re going to fall down.

Babies when they learn to walk fall down all the time, but they don’t sit there, wallowing, they get up and try again. Adults become so scared of falling down in an attempt to run faster or jump higher, says Gina, they stop moving.

“They’ve wrapped this stigma around failure. Failure is very unemotional. Failure means you didn’t get what you wanted your way. That’s it, it doesn’t mean you’re a loser, it doesn’t mean you’re never gonna get it, it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. It doesn’t mean any of that. It just means the sequence you tried to put together, bombed. And so you gotta try a different sequence.”

The quicker you can take the feedback you learned from the failed attempt and incorporate it into the system, the faster you can adjust your system, and try again.

Flexibility of behaviours

The only way to be the best leader is to appear to be a chameleon to your employees, to make them believe that you’re just like them, no matter what.

Being able to build rapport isn’t something you’re born with, it’s a skill you learn and become good at. Building rapport with employees means each of them believes you are exactly like them.

“Because when that happens, then you get more done faster with less effort, because you’re not struggling against the differences.”

Rapport is the process of matching and mirroring, says Gina, i.e. copying, mimicking. Rapport is a connection, when we’re in rapport, we’re connected. If we aren’t in rapport, there’s an invisible barrier between us. It’s the job of the leader to remove the barrier, to create a likeness, a similarity.

“You need to walk a mile in their shoes, you need to become like them, not make them like you or agree with you, or adopt your model of reality or see things your way. But the actual opposite. You have to drop who you are, your preferences, your ego, if you will, and become like them.”

Representational systems

There are four main ways we approach the world, and these are called representational systems. These are visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and a robotic digital type approach.

Leaders should be able to do all of them. Because leaders have to be flexible.

“The leader should be able to jump between visual, auditory, kinesthetic, digital, no matter what, they should be able to be comfortable in all of those. And it should be the circumstances that dictate which one they’re doing. And the circumstances are the people in front of them.”

The problem some leaders face is that if they successfully achieve change once, they think they’ve ‘got it’, but their mastery needs to be turned into a process. Because that’s what makes companies scalable – processes.

Inductive change

If you feel like you can’t do something, or you’re struggling, like Gina was as a new mum, and you get trapped in this cycle of thinking, ‘I can’t do this’, you have to challenge yourself with something you think is totally impossible, i.e. running a marathon.

“What I realised was, when you give it everything you got, and you fail, it’s actually not everything you’ve got. It’s everything you thought you got. So it was a limit for sure, but there was something beneath it, there was a deeper level that you could only reach if you actually got there and broke through it. And that’s the willingness.”

If you want to change, says Gina, it has to be a burning desire for change, you have to be willing to poke through the hardest part. As Churchill said, if you’re going through hell, keep going.

“As long as you have the desire and willingness to give it what it takes, there is literally nothing you can’t achieve.”

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