From “Blur” to Clarity and Success

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now here's your host, Doctor Relise Cortes. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks for tuning in again, sweet, great to have you. This show has been live on here since February twenty fifteen. It's my pride and joy. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we have not met before, I am a managed for consultant, organizational locotherapist, speaker and author. My team and I at gusto Now help companies to enlive in and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant destination workplace. Their people are

1:34 intrinsically motivated to perform with their best, grown to their higher potential, and are committed to stay and dynamically deliver on the company's mission. You learn more about how we can work together at gustodeshnow dot com or Eliscortes dot com. Getting into today's program with us today is Susan Ford Collins, an executive coach, author and speaker. She's the creator of the Technology of Success, in which she teaches ten critical skills she learned from highly successful people that she researched through several books over the years, including her latest blur Clear The Way Ahead Even in the Worst of Times, which will be talking about today. She knows us today from Miami. Susan, welcome to working on Purpose. I'm glad to be with you. Wonderful, it's wonderful to have you too.

2:14 You're in Miami, clearly, I'm in Dallas. I'm bundled and you have bare arms. So that's the difference between where we're at. Right. Okay, so you've done it again. You've got another book out. This was a delight to read, and as you know, I read cover to cover wonderful. So I love that about you. Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate that. It's one of the things that continues me on my learning and growth journey so I can be more value to my clients. And plus I love learning so good. So I think you might know a couple things about BLUR given what I read in that book. So just to start this thing off, just as you did in the book, help us understand how you got to be better intimately connected with Blur. What happened to you that situation did this intimate knowledge? Well, we were told that there was a hurricane coming and I had on the emergency radio and it said warning tornado.

3:12 Do in the next twenty minutes in the North Miami area. That was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of the story because then the house went dark. My husband thought that he was going to die because the wall cracked all the way across, and I mean it was just it was hell. It was scary, it was it was devastating water pouring through the ceiling. But a month later he was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer, and a month after that, my sister was diagnosed with two stage four cancers. So it was bang, bang bang. You know, I didn't get a chance to breathe. And I think COVID has put a lot of us in that spot where we just feel like, wham. A business was hit, our family was hit, we were hit, and neighborhood was hit. So in my case, it was a tornado and a hurricane.

4:04 But I think life is doing it to us all and that's why I took the time to write the book. Well, I really appreciate you know. One of the things about this show that makes maybe a little bit different than others is I curate the content. And what I mean by that is all the nine years that I've been hosting, I just keep adding what's different new, and you know, different has a different twist than what we've already covered. So we've never covered blur, and yet most of us can all relate to this. But I think it would be helpful for you to find what you mean specifically by blur. Your definition. Yes, well, my definition came because I told people I was writing a book about blur, and they immediately said, oh, I know what that is. I'm in it. How do you get out of it? And I said, well, okay, let me define it, because there isn't something called blur until now.

4:51 And for me, blur is a model state that we find ourselves in when we get hit by one thing after another. There's not enough time for to recover before the other hits. We get confused, we get disoriented. The people that we usually depend on aren't there for us, The jobs that we're familiar with go away, and we're just a brain as an overload. We just can't handle it all. But we don't have the option of not handling it at all. I think I think just a couple of listeners just went, oh, that's what's going on for me, that's what you call it. I figured, let me put a name to it because so many of us are experiencing it off and on in this crazy time. Agreed, Agreed, And I have to say one of the most many there were many refreshing things about your book, but one of the refreshing things that I got out of it was the way that you say the way out of blur is remembering, remembering as many sensory details as you possibly can. That is so fresh.

5:55 Where did you get that from? Well, remember I was a research psychologist that nih. Yes, yeah, so I'm a scientist at heart other than being a psychologist. But what I learned is that most people try to forget bad things that are going on that actually just delays the impact of it, so then it goes into the unconscious and then we get into something that the brains is similar, and boom, the whole reaction comes up. So it's very dysfunctional to try to forget things because we're wired to remember things. We're wired to remember where the lions and tigers are, where we fell off the cliff, you know, all the places where we've gotten hurt or injured or frightened. They're in our database so that we don't do that again.

6:45 And that's the good news and the bad news. And the book is about how do you remember without going through the pain again. And that's the process that I develop that it's called updating. It allows you to get the knowledge from that experience without getting all the emotional overload that comes from the experience. And speaking of that whole notion of those kinds of memories, et cetera, and the pain, et cetera. Then the other thing that you had to endure not very long after you lost your husband, was you felled down and busted open your head. Yes, I was walking and then went underwater.

7:26 I crossed stepping stones late afternoon, thunderstorm, trying to get in before it got dark. Slipped on the stepping stone, whacked the back of my head, went underwater, and I looked up in the golden light and I'm seeing bubbles go up, and I go, oh, my god, you're going to die if you don't get out. I thought i'd broken my neck. Fortunately I didn't, and I was able to get my feet down there and get myself out. And then I found out that it's a brain function. When you hit really hard on the back of your head, you do see golden mine. Fortunately, my doctor, my daughter, and newer radiologists. So I learned these things in conversation. But an amazing device that's in the brain that saved my life that day, oh so so many I just as I continue throughout the book, I'm like, this woman is extraordinary. I can't wait to see her on the other side of the mic. I'm I enjoyed your books. She's not depressed, she's not unhappy, she's going forward.

8:22 Life is good. It's it's it's wonderful. That's so, that's that's who we can learn from. And and speaking of the brain, one of the other things you talk about a few times in the book is this thing that you refer to as RAS, and so if you would talk about that little fuzzy friend of ours and what it does for us, Oh, it's one of my favorite things. So it's really the reticular activating system. But that's a mouthful, so I didn't want to repeat that a thousand times in the book. So my word is RAS are a z ezy And it's a function of the brain stem that it's the searching device, you know, it's we put something in there and then our senses are always looking, listening, feeling, for something that's similar. So it's like ways, if we put a destination in I think this is so important. We put a destination in, and we put it in correctly, then our brain unconsciously is looking for opportunities for that to manifest. But unfortunately, either we try to not think about painful things, so that shuts off a whole segment of data that we can't handle, and then we're fuzzy about what we want. And I love your title working on purpose. I mean, if we aren't working on purpose in our lives, then who knows where we're going? But it's certainly not where we want to go. And you know, we were programmed as children to do what other people told us to do. That's how you got the stars and the lollipops and the cookies, and you know, you get to

9:52 the you go through school and if you're able to do that, you get good grades and then you get into the workplace, and that's what they want too. The problem is you're not getting what you want, and there comes a moment in life where you just have to go, wait a minute, I've pleased everybody else, but how about me? You know, what do I really want? And so the reticular activating system is something we all have to be conscious of. And it goes to that word purpose of yours. And if we don't know what we're searching for, then we're not going to find it because the brain has all of these little When we say I'm looking for this kind of job in this kind of place, with this kind of salary, then our brain is looking for that and searching for that and will give us clues and introduce us to people and make us bump into people.

10:41 You know, one of the people most important in my research career was Buckminster Fuller, and I literally walked into you. You did. That is my RAS working over time. I'm so glad. But the RAS is really important and being on purpose in our lives and knowing where we want to go, not where our parents wanted us to go, or teachers or our bosses. But you know, I think one of the benefits of going through blur is that it forces you to take a fresh look at your life and say, Okay, I lost my husband, Okay I lost my business, I lost my job, whatever loss you had, and then say, well, what do I want now? You know? What is my life about? Do I want another partner, Do I want to keep working? Do I want to start another business? All these really vital questions that we have to feed into the brain so that our whole nervous system can work with us and not against us. So many delicious thoughts in there that I want to kind of keep probing. And one of the other other delicious things that you read about in your book that I don't think I've ever heard written about, or I've not come across it in my research, but it makes so much sense when you talk about it. It's hologramming. Yes, you talk to us got programming. Well, you know, I started off at NIH so I'm science based as well as psychology based. And we've all seen holograms like in science

12:11 museums or in Star Wars Princess Leiah, you know, calling out to the universe to assist her. But our brain actually operates holographically. And doctor Carll Program from Stanford University studied brain injured soldiers and he realized that when people had like a half of their brain or a third of their brain destroyed, it didn't mean a third or half of their memory was destroyed. So he's like, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. This is what I was taught. You know, we go through this, we're taught something in school, we assume it's true. And he had to come up with something completely different, holographic brain theory to explain what was actually going on. When he as in yourser and so saw what was happening with brain loss and memory loss and that they weren't the way the science said they were going to be.

13:09 So he's my hero. And this is one of the big benefits of having been at NIH was I got connected with him and he really created the science of dreaming that I talk about. He says that the thoughts actually attract what we're thinking about to us. He said, they have an electromagnetic force field that attracts our attention to what we're thinking about. And I thought, wow, that is profound. Profound is amazing, and so I was like, well, which thoughts are more powerful than other thoughts? And he said the ones that you can see here, feel, touch, smell, you know, all the senses. The more senses that are involved, the greater the force field. And he said, the more deeply tales that are involved, the greater the force field. So therefore you know it goes back to my logic class and college. Therefore, if you have something that you really want, then you need to detail it out in your mind so that your brain can work with you and so that you're clear about where you're headed. So he's my hero about the science of dreaming. And you know, that job didn't work so well. And I got laughed at there when I suggested studying healthy successful people, because it was a year and a half into it and I was disgusted. All I was learning was about illness and dysfunction, and

14:39 I wanted to learn about success and what made people healthy, and so I suggested that and I got laughed at. But that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, because if they hadn't laughed at me, and I hadn't gotten mad, Oh, I understand, I might not have done this, you know, I really not. But I was standing there and I can get very red faced if I'm upfront and embarrassed, and I just said no, I've been thinking about this for a year and a half. They haven't. They say I'm wrong. Maybe I'm right. What if I'm on to something big? And I was sure that I was, And I literally spent the next twenty years shadowing highly successful people. And you know when I told them what I was seeing and what skills I saw them using, and why they weren't able to pass on what they had learned to the people around them, so success became a burden for them. Then they said, okay, well you can shadow me for three months because that's what I wanted.

15:39 An interview wouldn't do it. And then they said, okay, well, here here are the people I know that you should also, And pretty soon I had like hundreds of people that had been shadowing, and within ten years I had taught these ten skills in training sessions around the world. And I want to hear more about those our listeners and viewers, and I want to applaud you for sticking to your guns when you got labbed at and getting mad about it too. And to while we're on the note of getting mad, we'll let our listeners kind of relax a little bit with our first break here, since we just worked them up a little bit. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We've got on the year with Susan Ford Collins. She's an executive coach, author and speaker She's the creator of the Technologist Success System, in which she teaches ten critical skills she learned from observing and tracking those highly successful people. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused culture that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Alease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to

17:11 get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease A Lise at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to helping create a world where people realize their potential at work and are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business at Betters the World. I keep writing my own books, so the last one that came out for me was March of twenty twenty three. It's called a Great Revitization How activating meeting and purpose can radically enliven your business. And I wrote it to help leaders understand how much the workforce has changed in just the last few years and then offer twenty two best practices to fold into your culture to provide the leadership culture that they actually want.

18:11 You learn more about my books and how to get a hold of them at at least quretest dot com and buy them on Amazon as well if you are just joining us. My guest is Susan Ford Collins. She's the author of BLURR Cleared the Way Ahead Even in the Worst of Times. So before we get back into the book, I do have a little, one small, little question. I just am dying to ask you because it's just who I am good and I can't please your accent. I think it's Eastern and southern. It is. I was born in New York City, Okay. And I was raised in Richmond, Virginia, Okay. And then I moved to Philadelphia, so, and now I'm in Miami, so I'm on my laune. You know, I don't yeah, and I don't hear it very well, so I haven't been able to correct it, but I can hear it.

18:53 I love languages. Just a quick story on that front, and because it does help to get mad. When I lived in Brazil in my mid twenties, and I by that time I spoke French and Spanish and was learning Portuguese and was on a flight then you know, you can understand the language better than at first. When you can you can speak it. And some woman took it. She took a dislike to me as I walked on the plane, a Brazilian woman and she was watching me interact with the flight attendant, and the flight had said something to me and I understood it and I was trying to was working to formulate a response, and the woman on the plane said, ah, quite that hell la, which means ah, the poor thing she can't speak. Oh that was all that I needed, man to motivate me to learn still speak Portuguese today and don't tell me how many decades that is later. Exactly right, all right, let's get back into it. So one of the other cool things that I again delightfully fresh.

19:44 Susan, this idea of you know, being in gear and out of gear. Never heard anything like this. So let's talk about how how we can use this notion and when we're in gear, when we're out of gear, especially what it relates to getting out of blur. Well, it goes back to what we were talking about, is that we try to forget painful experiences, but in fact, forgetting them creates much worse situations down the road. So then I had to discover a way to remember things without them bringing up all the pain and throwing us into a week of blur. And so I created this thing I called in gear and out of gear. In gears, when you feel it all and it's you're there, and you put yourself right back in that whole scenario and it's all alive and fresh. Out of gear is when you're sitting in the audience at a movie and you see it playing up on a screen and there's actors and actresses, but you're not up there.

20:41 You're watching, You're in neutral and you're watching. And I've done this with hundreds of people, and one CEO came to me because he had had a car accident and everybody on his executive team was killed except him, and he was a wreck. And so he came to me to do this updating process with him because he couldn't function, And so we did out of gear, out of gear, out of gear, And after a week of doing intense work, he's able to get back to work again. And I get emails from him every once in a while saying thank you. I'm able to function again. But out of gear is really important. And you know, if we aren't able to go out of gear, then we can't really risk going back and remembering you like the moment of death, or the moment of an accident, or a lot of those situations which are so important for us to remember because it's vital literally vital information, and you know, like being let go of in a company, or or having a big upset in front of a group of people, all of those things are important for us to take a look and say, hey, what could I have done differently?

21:56 What could my leader have done differently? You know, how well can I learn from that horrendous situation? And it's funny because you know, after being laughed at a nih twenty years later, I was invited to speak as a keynote speaker at the National Grant Management Association in Washington, d C. And afterwards I was signing my book The Joy Success, and like twelve people came back there to speak to me, and it was like I didn't know what they were coming to say. And they said, we only wish we'd been there that day because we're the team now that decides on grants at NAHE and we would have helped you get a grant. And I said to myself, that's wonderful, but twenty years too late. Well, I think you did just great, mind, dear, you built a whole company around this, which is just beautiful. You've altered thousands, tens of thousands of lives.

22:47 It's amazing. It's beautiful. Thank you, You're welcome. Okay, do we distinguish in gear? Did you already distinguish that? Yes? Yes, in gear is when you are in it, you feel it, You're all the sensations going in your body, you get short of breath, your head spins and all of that. And out of gears, when you're watching it up on the screen, it's not you. You're seeing it externally. You're seeing somebody else going through it, that it is somebody else, but that you're having a perspective that you would get if you were watching it going on for somebody else, and that allows you to learn from it and to say how I would have responded differently, or how better I will respond differently in the future when I am in similar situations, or if I'm teaching people and I can help them to see how to do things better the next time around.

23:41 And then you also want to understand your book that you choose to start a neutral out of gear and then decide consciously whether you want to shift into gear and allow those members to carry you back to earlier times or not. I think that's really interesting, very conscious choiceful. I think you have to be conscious because you know, it's kind of like post traumatic syndrome. I mean, you know, these things are very traumatic and they do echo. So unless you learn to manage this, you can stay suck in that cycle of upset over and over and over. And and I've seen this with people. So when I show people how to update, and I do that in the book and I do that in my work, people are amazed. It's like, oh, my goodness, my emotions settle down, and you know, I can think about this now and I can use this information. Man.

24:29 So it was a very important distinction in gear, feeling it all, out of gear observing it all m So, I think this is just extraordinary and I wanted to further applied this year. Started talking about it before the break, and I want to get it some work, some more airtime here. And that is again that you did chose to choose to overlook or override the laughter of the These are your peers there, These are your peers that you're connected to. You know, you want their respect, et cetera. But you chose to stick to And what I want to celebrate about that for you, Susan and listeners and viewers, each of us have a unique lens on the world that only we can see through because of our own accumulated experiences, our values, and just the unique way that we play with life.

25:14 And that is our opportunity to create something valuable and maybe even live and serve our purpose. So I really want to applaud that and let our listeners and viewers think about how they have seen something really unique that the rest of the world went. Now, that's crazy that'll never work. That's silly because they're very well. It just might be something there, just like there was for Susan, and it just just want to applaud that. Thank you. And if you look at all the great inventions, they were laughed at when they first introduced the idea. You know, I say, you have to be willing to be laughed at to create anything new. Agreat Well, Maslow was the same way. I mean, he was like, I don't I don't want to like you. He didn't want to study people that were ill or that were you know, struggling. He wanted to study people that were thriving and doing well in life. Well blackable. I mean, they just absolutely and now ANDIH does that. But you know, that's another story of my life. I was about two decades too, so it's happened to me too, Susan. By the way, I can recognize that so well. I like a lot of like I do it too. I'm so happy to meet you. That's one of the greatest things about hosting the show, Susan.

26:19 I love meet people that I wouldn't otherwise have any reason to cross paths with, and then they can't get away from me. Okay, just so you know that's okay, I'm not worried. Okay, good, okay. So one of the things, there's a few things we like to do on this show. So I like to be able to inspire, I like to be able to educate, and I like to be able to help our listeners and viewers walk away with something immediately applicable. And you already talked about some of the other skills here, but I want to talk about this this. You say it's your the first essential skill, and I recognize it in other forms, but you call it success filing. I really recognize this and it's so important. But I will just venture to guess that many relations of viewers have never been in reduced to this kind of a topic. Can you give give them how it works, what it is, how it works? Yes, And I was saying that when we're growing up, we are taught to please other people. That's how we get the prizes and the awards and the treats.

27:15 But you see what happens then, is we get used to other people saying, yes, you did that right, No, you did that wrong, you should do this, you shouldn't do that, and in the process of learning and having leaders that are not responsible for this transition or this gearshift I call it. We don't learn that there's a moment in time where we have to start choosing for ourselves. I have a grandson who's in that process right now, and he's like, ugh, I never thought about it that way, that I was really good at pleasing other people, but now I need to figure out how to please myself. So, you know, it's it's really important for us to think these things through and to make sure that we're leading our lives and not just other people's lives. And I see when we get into blur, there's a tendency to stop dreaming and to say, you know, I don't know. I see this with people who lose partners a lot. I don't want anything anymore because I can't go on that trip with him or her. I can't do that. I don't want a bigger house. You know, we lose the big picture, the big puzzle of our lives, and we have to go back after blur and say, Okay, I'm still alive. That goes back to the story where I hit the back of my head and I said, you know, okay, God, you know, maybe I'm paralyzed. But you know, if I'm supposed to

28:47 go on, you know, let me live. If I have said that, yeah, yeah. So if there's more for you to do, then the way to affirm it is to say I want this, I want to do this. I want to make contribution and to really use that brain that we were talking about, the holographic brain and all the details that we can generate. And I love to think about how manufacturers and marketers understand the solographic brain without knowing about doctor pal programmers, Susan fort Collins. But they make their packages bright and sparkly and shiny, and they add jingles and they do all of these things that he would have said, yes, that makes the thought more powerful. But we don't. We don't do that about our dreams, especially if we're coming out of BLURR. So my challenge to people who are in blur right now is start dreaming again and start doing it in detail.

29:44 And in the book I talk about redreaming my garden and redreaming my house and redreaming Albert's office into this wonderful room that I go into to think about the future that I want. I talk to a lot of people who go through blur and they just sit there for like a year or two without really any forward momentum. And I'm saying in this book, get yourself moving forward, get your dreams clear again, get your reticular activating system attracting stuff to you and people to you, opportunities to you again. Otherwise you're just going to sit in that uncomfortable, blurry, confused, disappointed state for the rest of your life. And I know people who have done that in decades.

30:33 It's tragic. It's tragic. So you're rescuing them, rescuing them. I just I love this. I love this. And then since you do talk about you've studied and you're teaching habits of how successful people, I think it's a good idea for us to actually talk about what you mean by success and so actually deliver three pieces of success that accordinate to these how successful people. This is how they talk about success. So let's get that. Yeah, well, that's part of the success filing that we started looking at. Success filing is taking time every day to file our success is the thing me thinks are steps in the right direction, and it could be something as simple as making sure you eat breakfast or to go to the grocery store and get food in the house, or you know, take a lunch or return a phone call. Highly successful people said, you know, most people make a mistake of thinking these great, big successes are all there are no they said, it's the little, tiny, daily successes that's strung together create the big successes.

31:36 I want to say that again because that changed my life. Yeah, you know, it's the little things that make a difference. One of the directors that I was working with at American Express, like he got all excited. He was waving his arm and he's like, let me tell you a sorry about that. I stopped and got gas at the gas station on the way because it was on my list. I made the enter you and the other guy who was being interviewed didn't make it because he forgot to get cast and you come. So it's the little things. It's the accumulated little things that add up to the big things. And success filing is taking time every day to sit with yourself and say, what was I able to do today that moved me in the directions that I want to go And as a leader, what were the people that I lead able to do today that move me and the team and our purpose forward today. So success filing it's different than grat Gratitude is being grateful to the world. This is about saying I have personal power. Yes, I can take these little steps, and the little steps are what I need to take. I don't have to jump the grand canyon. I can just stop and get guessed, you know I yes, Oh my gosh, Susan, and I also teach my coaching clients at too when I'm working with teams. We need to grab a quick break now, but then after break, let's come back and talk about how they define success

33:06 in that pre part way. Yes, I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with Susan Ford Collins. She's an executive coach, author and speaker. She's the creator of the Technology Success System, in which she teaches ten critical skills she learned from researching and following highly successful people. We've been talking a bit about some of the some of those things that she teaches in the book. After the break, we're going to talk about their definition of success and failure. See what this will be right back.

33:49 Doctor release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and Purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Alease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease A lisee at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staining with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. I mentioned in the last break about my latest book called The Great Revitalization. It's about how to elevate culture. So what I did for you is I created a three page assessment for you. It's on my website. It's free, and it will help you evaluate the extent to it's your organization is actually prepared to meet the standards of today's discerning workforce. You can find it at at least Cortes dot com, orgustodeshnow dot com. If you are just joining us. My guest is Susan Ford Collins. She's the author of BLURR Clear the Way Ahead Even in the Worst of Times, which we've been talking about in this program.

35:16 So now, well, let's distinguish these terms success and failure. You're from these highly successful people. What's success? This is so important and so shocking it is. You know, if you look it up in the dictionary, it doesn't have anything to do with what they said it was. So they said, it has three essential parts. One completion. It's the ability the personal power to be able to say you're going to do something and actually carry through with it and remembering it could be the simplest of things, but you know that builds a momentum for them to accumulate into giant things. So success is completion. But completion, they said, is not just finishing.

35:57 It's a different word. Completion means you also have to take this success filing moment at the end of the day. And said I was able to do that. I have personal power, and so for them this was essential. And I watched them do it, and I said to them, do you know that you do this, and they went, oh, yeah, I always do that, doesn't everyone. That's the thing, doesn't everyone. Yeah, no, everyone doesn't do it. So that was really important, was hearing their definition of success. But this part really shocked me. They said success is completion, but it's also deletion. It's knowing when to stop doing what you're doing. It's knowing when to get out of the relationship you've tried everything to improve. It's knowing when the dream isn't fulfilling to you anymore and it's driving you crazy because it hasn't happened and you're making yourself wrong. So success is also deletion. And I taught this in nursery schools one year and the teacher went, I'll never understand what deletion success is. And a little girl came in one day and she said, I have a deletion success to add to my success file. And she said, my dad took the training wheels off my bike last night and I rode all by myself. Oh yes, and he winked at me and she said, oh my goodness, she got it. She understood it exactly. We don't give them credit, I know. So then the third part of success is creation. It's being able

37:30 to say, I am the CEO of my own life. I am the creator of my own life. What is my purpose? Where am I headed? What do I want to do? How do I want to be remembered? You know? So creation is really important. Do you have the guts to say I have an idea, I'm willing to put myself behind like I did at an Am I willing to stand up and be laughed at about an idea? All the greats have been laughed at, trust me. I've talked to so many of them, and they go, I love that you say that you have to be willing to be laughed at to do something new, because it's true. So they said that you've got to success file all three of those parts on a daily basis, and most people don't. And one of the things that I've gotten the most feedback about is a lot of people say, oh, I thought my divorce was my worst failure. And I said, well, if it was a choice and it was a bad situation and you wanted to free yourself so you can move forward, then that divorce was a deletion success, and that like reframes their whole life all of a sudden, they're like, oh, my goodness, I didn't fail. I chose to get out of something that we were not able to change and to move forward, and to model having the strength to get out of bad situations for the kids. You know, being a victim is not something we want to model for our kids. No, No, what isn't such a such

39:01 a powerful story to illustrate that, Susan? Okay, So if those are the three ways we success, we can success, file and achieve success. Now let's talk about what's failure then? Through their eyes. Oh, they said it's so simple. They say, it's just incompletion. Don't beat yourself up about it. It's just you don't make it more than it needs to be right. But you didn't do it. Okay? Does that make you stupid? Does that make you bad? Is it? No? It just means that you didn't do it. So do you still want to do it? Do you want to delete that? Is it? I mean, maybe it was a dream we had fifteen years ago and it doesn't even mean anything to you anymore. But it's rattling around in your head because you haven't deleted it. You know, it's kind of like a computer. Every once in a while you have to go out and go in there and clean up your files, you know, so you can make a little more space in there.

39:49 So deletion is really important. It's really the thing that allows us to make choices that are up to date. That is what we want now. And so failure knowing that failure is just in completion, says opportunity and not I'm a bad, stupid, moronic person. Yeah. And then you said something also really powerful, which I wrote in my other research notes but not for the program, but I'm going to bring them here. You also said that there's a few reasons why we fail, and like, let me just try to summarize, and then you catch me where I'm wrong. You said something like it's because we didn't say no to what we should have said no to. Oh, yes, that we didn't ask for help for the things that we didn't know how to do. And then what was the other reason that we fail But we didn't define what we really wanted? Ah, yes, you know, that's a big one, is that we never really sat down and said what we wanted. So we have this sloppy program writing going on, and then we get sloppy results and then we beat ourselves up when it was just we didn't understand. We had to be very deep. And you know, having met back to call program, he drove that into my brain really deep, that you know, the more detail and more power, the more senses involve, the more power. And I say to you that's true of your dreams too. If you want them to happen, then you've got to do either get up earlier, get stay up late. But you

41:21 got us make some time each day to imagine in detail the things that you want and the directions you want to go in. So then you have for opportunities like I did of bumping into Buckminster Fuller in the hall, because even on my list of how these successful people that I wanted to shadow, and he loved it. He was like, oh, my heavens, you're you're a spunky young woman. I really like that. You know that you would like bump into me and realize that I was on your list, because most of us bump into people. And then we get home and we go, oh, that was Bucky Fuller. I should have and we don't act on it, you know. So grabbing the opportunities is another important piece in the being a highly successful person. Indeed. Indeed, all right, So now I want to turn the coinback over, because that's kind of what I do, is I like to go back and forth, up and around and around the corner. I really loved what you talked about when you talked about how the ancient sages said that to heal, we must also first allow ourselves to become disoriented, disorted enough to let go of our old points of view and habitual approaches, the ways that made us diseased in the first place. Exactly.

42:31 I think this is really powerful because so many people get as you know, when they get stuck in blur, it feels like the world's against me, and I what did I do to deserve all this? And it always happens to me right right? And I found that so refreshing. So can you say more about this? Yeah, I'm so glad you picked up on that. It's one of my favorite things having studied, you know, all of mythology and history and all that there were giant mazes that the healers used. And you get into the toller than man mazes. You get in there and you get lost, and you turn the wrong way and get frustrated, and people would say, why are they putting me through this? I'm coming here because I'm sick. And then when they got inside to the heeler, the heeler would say, well, we had to disorient you because if you were holding onto your old thoughts then we couldn't heal you. So a big piece of the healing process is letting go of the old stuff and getting dizzy.

43:30 And you know, this is why blur is a great opportunity, and why compare the mazes and the disorientation of going through a giant maize and the disorientation of going through a major disruption in your life, because it's a huge opportunity to restructure your life, to figure out what you want now, and to create these things in great detail, give yourself more power than you've ever had before. It's exciting, it is exciting, and in fact, you even went on to say that disruption is a gift. I completely agree with you. That doesn't usually look like that in the time, that when they're delivered right, doesn't feel so all right. So one more little question that I want to say something else here as well, but I wanted to give you a chance. You do list at the very end of the book the ten skills that you teach in your Technology of Success toolbox, And I just wanted to give you a chance, you know, if there's one in particular that you wanted also to speak to. We've just got a couple of minutes here, maybe one other that you might want to try to teach to our listeners and viewers. Of all we've got time. Well, what I've found is that a lot of times people don't use experts. They're afraid they'll look dumb or they'll ask a dumb question. And it's really important to know that you have an opportunity. If somebody can already do what you want to do, then in your world they're an expert. Ask them, ask them how they do it. And I would say to you, the only dumb question is the one you don't answer. Ask because then you don't get the answer

45:01 that you need to accumulate the knowledge for the next step. So use experts. You don't have to figure it out all on your own. And especially today, I mean, you know got YouTube videos of it. Everything, we've got shows by at least we've got you know, we've got stuff all around reach out. But it's hard to reach out unless you know what your purpose is and where your goals are. So what you're doing excites me just as much as what I'm doing excites you. Hey, I'm thrilled. I'm so thrilled. Well, before we close here, I just want to also say to you how beautiful I found your story of sharing how you met Albert, how the two of you navigated your your relationship and what you he meant to you, and how you cared for him in his last years. It just it really was beautiful. And for you listeners and viewers, you get a two fer in this book. You get to read about this really beautiful love story that probably should have happened but did but because the way Susan is in the world, and you get to learn all of these amazing tools.

46:05 So I just wanted to tell you how much I really loved reading about the love story between you and Albert. Well, that was a very important piece of my life. And I just want the audience to know that this is a series of books. Blur is number four in a series, The Joy of Success. Success has gears at children and watching and CEOs. Beg me, Susan, please teach these things to parents, so the parents can model them and teachers can reinforce that, and then when they come to the workplace, my workplace, they will already be using this gild much easier. Yeah, I won't have to hire you to train them. You're like, wait a minute, okay, So we just have a minute here for this part of it. You know, the show is listened by people around the world Shusan who are interested in elevating their own leadership, creating places where people actually want to come and give their best, and they want work that ultimately fulfills them and their team. What would you like to leave them with today?

47:02 I would like to remind them that they are in charge of their lives, not their spouses, not their family members, not their bosses. They are in charge of their lives. They are the ones who have to decide what's important to them. So if they're laughed at, you go, but this is what I want to do. Or if something falls apart, you can say, okay, the next thing I want to do is just remember that you are the CEO of your own life. But you know, it's interesting you were talking about your work, and I would say a lot of times people in organizations don't know the purpose that the CEO has in mind. I'm sure you run into this and I've said to them, can you describe the hologram of what you think your boss wants from you? And they're like the and no. Then I look at the leader and I said, well, that's not their problem, that's your. You didn't share in detail what you wanted the team to do. So it goes both ways. As individuals we have to be detailed. As leaders, we have to detail what it is we want from a team. If they don't give it to you, it's on you. It's not on them because they didn't get the instruction, the motivation and the coaching that they needed. Beautiful Susan, I am delighted to have read your book cover to cover and to be informed and elevated by it and share a mike with you to talk about it. Thank you for being

48:32 on working on purpose. I love to thank you so much. Good. I'm glad. Listeners and viewers, if you want to learn more about the spectacular woman named Susan Ford Collins, the coaching work she does in her programs, or her latest book, or the series Blur, you can start by visiting Technologyofsuccess dot com. So Blur is the last it's the fourth in a series, and it's the most latest book. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it recorded podcast. We were on the air with Mike Lee talking about the work he does clearing and elevating his client's mindsets and his new book, Future of Leadership, How the bold and Driven can elevate engagement when the war for talent and create a culture of belonging.

49:14 It was a pretty amazing conversation. He's extremely accessible, so you'll get a lot out of it. Next week will be on the air with Zach mccurhew again the second time, this time talking about his latest work helping companies to create cultures where people matter. See you there and remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's Work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C. Why Together We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave see you there.

49:57 Let's work on purpose.