Video Transcript:

Because I’m a giver. I’m going to tell you something. In case you’re ever lost in the woods or in the wilderness, learn this one thing. Stop, Think, Observe, Plan, and you’re thinking, well, what does that have to do with anything?

If you were four years old and you got lost in the wilderness, what would you do? Well, four year olds, what they typically do is they walk a few hundred yards. They get scared, they cry, they sit down and they’re easy to find. What we learn in wilderness survival works in the rest of the world and what they teach people in wilderness survival. Stop. Think, Observe, Plan. When you get afraid, you start moving and you start thinking, I gotta do something different, otherwise I’m going to be in trouble. No, no, no, no, no. When you’re anxious, when you’re keyed up, the part of your brain that starts firing is the basic, is the lizard brain, the amygdala. How do I respond to this fear? But the part that gets turned off is this convenient part up here, right above your eyes called the prefrontal cortex.

This is in charge of what’s called executive function planning reason, patience, self-control. Guess what? When you’re afraid, all of that turns off. 

So Stop means really literally stop. Sit down. Okay, stop and sit down. Settle yourself.

Second part is stop, Think. So. You’ve got to start to analyze, okay, here’s my issue. Here’s my problem. What do I need to do? Where do I need to go? What’s the best resources that I have?

The third is Observe. Once you observe what your resources are, once you’ve slowed yourself down, come up with a Plan. People are like, “Oh, we gotta get our profits up,” and they start to, they get spun up in a way that they do all kinds of activity. Most of it’s not very productive.

The biggest problem the leaders I work with have is they don’t spend enough time in quiet reflection. They don’t Stopand they don’t Think, and because they don’t stop and think, they can’t Observe and they can’t Plan.

So they’re in a flurry of unproductive activity.

And that’s Roger’s 2 Cents.