Moment of Impact: Harness the Explosive Power of Three to Maximize Your Mind, Life, and Business

By Jennifer Touma

The Moment of Impact serves as an inspirational guide to personal change. It offers compelling stories, teaching moments, and an introduction to the Power of Three, the practice of using self-management, clear thinking and mental strength. These help prepare you to take more effective action in the face of adversity, to overcome moments of uncertainty and flux, and to make the most of opportunities, both obvious and hidden.

The detailed stories and teaching moments presented in the Moment of Impact help you develop the inner strengths of mental toughness, perseverance and grit.

These essential qualities aid you in becoming more inner- directed rather than surrendering control to any outside situation that is only momentary or to the opinion of others. The Moment of Impact offers you strategies you not only can use but also bring about the results you want in effecting personal change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483638966

Jennifer Touma

Small business executive coach and mental toughness in leadership performance expert Jennifer Touma teaches small business leaders to be better, stronger, skilled-leaders and build long-lasting relationships with their teams, co-workers and clients. In 2008, Jennifer launched her executive coaching, mental toughness, and learning development business in the Boston area. Over the years Jennifer has had people refer to her as a mental toughness coach so she decided to own that role and be intentional about it. She takes the same approach in coaching leaders and professionals as she does in martial arts – to be mentally stronger and intentional. As a professional learning and development specialist and coach by trade, Jennifer spent 15 years with Fortune 500 healthcare companies in sales and as a District Sales Manager -during this time she was honored to be recognized as a member of the President’s Club for her achievements in leadership and sales as District Sales Manager, and 6 years in small business in a privately – held transportation relocation company as a regional sales manager. Jennifer Touma is a peak performer strategist, certified mental game coach (mental toughness), certified meta master practitioner in NLP, author, speaker, and workshop leader with a 2nd degree black belt in martial arts, and a masters in organizational leadership from the military college in Vermont at Norwich University. If you would like to learn to be more influential in business and life I invite you to visit http://mindscapemind.com http://jennifertouma.com

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Power Of Three

PART ONE

Zen And The Beginner’s Mind

1. The Beginner’s Mind

2. Your Personal Action Plan For Clicking Into Your Beginner’s Mind

3. My Personal Moment-Of-Impact Experience

PART TWO

Managing Yourself

4. A Moment Of Impact

5. Mind Body And The Outside World

6. Turning Uncertainty Into Assurance

7. Imposing Order On Chaos

8. Neurolinguistic Programming

9. Awareness: Being Your Best Self

10. Seven Levels Of Awareness

11. Your Personal Action Plan For Managing Yourself

PART THREE

Optimal Thinking

12. Think About Thinking

13. Four Stages Of Thinking

14. Using Neuroscience To Become A Self-Directed Leader

15. Take Charge Of Your Amazing Mind

16. Runaway Mind

17. Connecting To Your Mental Muscles

18. Fifty Tips For Better Thinking

19. Your Personal Action Plan To Optimize Your Thinking

PART FOUR

Mental Strength

20. If At First You Don’t Succeed… Try, Try Again!

21. Strength Through Mental Toughness

22. Your Competitive Advantage Begins First In Your Mind

23. The Weak Or Undisciplined Mind

24. As Far As The Mind Can See, Visualization

25. Fear: Is It Real Or Imagined?

26. Four Ways Of Turning Fear Into Personal Power

27. Situational Awareness

28. Your Personal Action Plan For Mental Strength

Your Next Step: The Peak Performers’ Approach

Moment Of Impact: Power Of Three Recommended Reading List

Glossary Of Terms

About The Author

To my parents, Mal and Josephine Touma.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book is seldom a solitary endeavor. I express my appreciations to a few people who provided me support and guidance in developing the Moment of Impact: Harness the Explosive Power of Three to Maximize Your Mind, Life, and Business.

I extend my heartfelt gratitude to Earnest Hart Jr., my sensei, whose training in martial arts helped me perform my best in life and in business. My deepest appreciation to literary agent Elizabeth Kracht, who helped me find my voice to write on this topic that I am passionate about; To Debra Borys, an author and editor, for her assistance and counsel throughout the process. Special thanks to my editor Thomas Hauck, an invaluable collaborative partner throughout, who edited the draft manuscript and helped make this book the best it could be.

INTRODUCTION

Are you in charge of your life? Do you go after exactly what you want, feeling confident and resourceful, able to succeed?

Or do circumstances control you? Do you let events and situations push you away from what you want? Do you downshift your goals into idle as you sit by while things happen around you, leaving all your potential untried and untapped?

Every day, you face changes and challenges. Unexpected things happen. Lives change at a moment’s notice. If you’re like most people, you simply react—you let the events of the moment dictate how you feel, think and act.

But what if you were in control? What if you could feel more aware, more self-directed, more focused? What would happen if you made the most of every one of these moments of impact by taking charge of your thoughts, emotions and actions? How would your life look if you were a peak performer?

Peak performers come from every walk of life. But they all have one thing in common: they’re self-directed. They’re able to call on their own inner resources instantly to make the most of those moments of challenge and opportunity that arise every day.

These individuals are able to deliberately create their most fulfilling life and meet high stakes business challenges with calm deliberation. They don’t place wild bets on random thoughts, or glide through life on cruise control. They bring peak performance to every situation.

They are self-directed.

Being self-directed means:

You take charge of your thoughts and emotions, so that they don’t control you. You don’t react to situations and things in the world around you. Instead, you act and initiate change.

You develop an inner blueprint for success, drawing from your beliefs, thoughts, habits, emotions and behaviors.

You develop an outer blueprint for success by balancing strategies, tactics and action steps to take in order to achieve the success you want.

Moment of Impact: Harness the Explosive Power of Three to Maximize Your Mind, Life, and Business offers essential guidance for becoming self directed, so that you take charge of your thoughts and emotions rather than surrendering control to others and circumstances in your life.

In this book, you’ll discover strategies for tapping the power of three: managing yourself, your thoughts, and mental strength. Mastering these three interconnected aspects of your life expands your ability to succeed by regulating your emotions, managing your thoughts to make the best decision in any situation, and strengthening your inner reserves to achieve the outcomes you desire.

The stories, examples and teaching moments in this book will show you how to apply the power of three in all aspects of your life. You’ll learn how this power aligns with your own experiences to help you master emotions and become self-directed.

And that’s where performance truly begins.

During my fifteen years working with peak performers in many fields, I’ve learned that being a peak-performer means being able to rise to every occasion and meet every challenge. You may not succeed in every venture or win every contest, but you’ll be fully present and functioning at the highest level possible for you. Every performance is your moment of impact. The confluence of the power of three transforms you into performing your best, which results in you being your best. Whether you’re providing performance feedback, facilitating a meeting, or negotiating a deal, you’re congruent in thought, emotion, and action.

Through my peak performance articles, one-on-one coaching, seminars, cable TV show in leadership, Internet, radio, and speaking engagements, I’ve introduced this possibility for personal internal change to affect better business results, and for the people who work for them to increase their productivity and professional satisfaction and to enjoy life more. The result is an individual or an organization that is more productive, nimble, and adapts quickly to a changing business world.

I strive to assist my clients to transcend self-imposed limitations to create new possibilities of getting better results, to hold oneself to a higher standard of nonjudgmental thinking. As a metamaster practitioner in neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which teaches people how to use their own mind and manage the self more effectively and deliberately, when I ask my clients Who is in charge of your mind and therefore your results in life and business? my clients respond, I am.

My method of achieving business success is exceptional and combines my martial arts mental disciplines with insights from neuroscience and psychological and behavioral perspectives, tenets of leadership, and business experiences. You may have experienced success through my system. Maybe you are a client of mine or have attended one of my many seminars or heard me speak from the stage or in a classroom. Perhaps you’re reading this book out of curiosity or it was given to you as a gift or you’re looking to change something in your life or profession. No matter what the reason, when you make a deliberate effort to embrace and apply the recommendations, you will discover improvement in knowing yourself better and better results from knowing how you think, feel, and act.

Jennifer Touma

THE POWER OF THREE

What is the power of three? First I’ll show you that the power of three is not

• an IQ which is fixed and unchangeable,

• a natural innate gift,

• genetically determined.

The power of three is, however, key to becoming self directed and aware of your immediate experiences, and your ability to recognize and understand the ways those experiences have affected you. You’ll know who you are and intend to be, design your own scripted life, not one determined by the moment or circumstances around you.

In the pages of this book, I reveal the three core powers to becoming a self-directed individual: managing yourself, optimal thinking, and mental strength.

Managing yourself, or mindfulness, is the first power. This is an awareness of being mindful of your thoughts and emotional moods, of being deeply aware of both your inner and outer self. As your sense of awareness increases you’ll be able to intuitively sense problems inside and outside your immediate surroundings. This will enable you to respond with deliberate self-control rather than uncontrolled emotions.

You are able to delay or resist acting on impulse no matter what’s going on around you at the time, and you can regulate the highs and lows of your emotions in order to respond appropriately to the emotions of others. This core power will help you instill a deeper level of self-awareness that goes hand in hand with both building a self and your immediate experience, which leads to your best performance.

Optimal thinking is the second power. This is your ability to think and act with the intent to prevail. You give yourself the best approach or solution to the need, problem, or opportunity. You are empowered to be your best in any situation or circumstance; to avoid excuses, self-sabotage, and negative thinking; and to develop a spirited curiosity to know what you don’t know.

This core power will help free you from rigid and inflexible thinking and think more by choice with flexibility, using your reasoning skills in everyday situations. It will help you to better communicate with others and organize ideas and information more skillfully.

Mental strength is the third power. Mental strengths are inner forces that you depend on to carry you through the difficult times so you can make the most of opportunities and deal effectively with high-speed change. You apply these intangible forces to influence everything you do: face a confrontation, instruct a class, facilitate a meeting, deliver a presentation, practice a sport, negotiate, or handle conflict.

Mental strength shows mental flexibility rather than rigid thinking, and perseverance in the face of a personal weakness, challenge, or adversity.

Here are a few examples of mental strengths:

21741.jpg Resilience (take problems in stride)

21744.jpg Confidence and an unwavering belief system

21746.jpg Patience

21748.jpg Mental flexibility

21750.jpg Feeling in control of the situation

21752.jpg Mental toughness

21754.jpg Full awareness of your inner and outer self and of your environment

The more prepared you are for the expected as well as the unexpected, the better you’ll see the opportunity, need, or problem. A prepared mind is essential to attracting success, no matter what the moment.

In this book, you will discover which of the inner strengths listed above you use most often in business and life and which enable you to cope better than others with similar demands.

The power of three can help you in everyday life and can especially make the difference in the moment of impact—those times in your life when you know that you must act decisively. You’ll perform better at the moment of impact and be better equipped to live with purpose and discipline.

PART ONE

Zen and the Beginner’s Mind

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

—Suzuki Shunryu

The world of martial arts, which is a source of great inspiration to me, is filled with stories and lessons from ancient times to the present. I believe that when we operate in the field of business leadership, we can draw upon the wisdom and insight from the world of martial arts because we’re not looking for information about techniques any more than we could hope to apply specific techniques from the game of golf to the world of business. It’s when we look deeper into the philosophy and mental approach of martial arts that we can see how to transfer this knowledge to the world of business and leadership.

If you merely read this book you will not reach the way of strategy, says Miyamoto Musashi. Absorb the things written in this book. Do not just read, memorize or imitate, but so that you can realize the principle from within your own heart. Study hard to absorb these things into your body.¹

And as Master Ueshiba says, Progress comes to those who train and train; reliance on secret techniques will get you nowhere.² This book draws on your own moment of impact, experiences of being emotionally intelligent, involved, and aware of your