“Breaking the Rules: Removing the Obstacles to Effortless High Performance” – Kurt Wright

Kurt Wright is a business consultant and personal coach who has spent the last forty years helping companies create vision and individuals reach a state of sustained effortless high performance. You can learn more about him and his company here.

Wright presents two major themes throughout the book: 1) the intuitive (feeling) mind is more powerful, faster, more holistic, and energy creating than the analytical mind (problem solving), 2) how to avoid mindsets that drain energy and kill vision and create ones that foster energy and vision. We’ll give you a brief overview of these themes here, if you want to dig deeper you can purchase his book here.

Intuitive Thinking is greater than Analytical Thinking

The intuitive mind can process more information and process information more holistically and contextually than the analytical mind. However most people and businesses operate almost entirely out of an analytical paradigm. This is characterized by “What’s wrong and how do we fix it?” questions. These questions try to break your business down rather than building it up with a clear vision. To engage the intuitive mind we must use “What’s right?” questions, of which Wright proposed five levels:

1. What do I know is already right? This sets to table so you can build off of who you are and amplify your strengths or your businesses strengths.
2. What is it that makes it right? This produces insight and generates the initial energy.
3. What would be ideally right? This is the vision building question. Building vision requires energy input, but then creates energy as you pursue it!
4. What’s not quite right yet? This identifies and motivates the areas that have yet to align with the vision of ideal.
5. What resources do I need to make it right? This is a focusing question that identifies how to get from where you are to where you are going

When a company has this type of vision building question in mind every level of the company from owners to employees gets moving in the same direction as they buy into the vision and see how they fit into accomplishing it.

Energy Creating Mindset

The biggest killer of energy is when actions do not align with beliefs and/or vision. To be an “effortless” high performer action must align with vision. This is inherently an intuitive process as vision is built by the intuitive mind and the feeling of misalignment or alignment is felt intuitively.

The second killer of energy is judging something in your life to be deficient. To overcome this Wright proposes that there are no such thing as weaknesses there are only undeveloped strengths. He also proposes viewing every situation as the perfect place to take the next step towards your vision from. You can’t change where you are, you can only control how you react and the steps you take to keep pursuing your vision. There is a key mindset changing question that comes out of this discussion: “What is the best thing that happened to you today?” Having someone ask you this question and giving an honest intuitive answer will change your mindset and have you looking for the positives in your life rather than the negatives.