In today’s Manopause Manopod, Mike Essrig and Larry Pollack caught up with published author and ‘peak-performance’ and ‘life-mastery’ coach Mark Fournier to find out what it takes to live a ‘limitless’ life by turning a negative into a positive

 

How Do You Turn a Negative Into a Positive? Give a Great Example of Turning a Positive Into a Negative.

 

The first step is to stop calling it a NEGATIVE; that’s just a label. Who says it’s a negative? Calling it a negative assumes that it’s a bad thing.

The reason we do that is that it’s not what we want. Anytime we want or expect something to be in a certain way and it doesn’t turn out that way, we label it as bad. If you remove the label, now it’s just ‘what has happened,’ not ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

So, instead of taking it from a negative to a positive, it’s looking at what happened and asking the question, ‘What’s great about this?’ ‘How can I benefit from this?’ 

If you look at every invention ever created, that was a result of somebody saying, ‘oh no! this is bad.’ Then, someone else walks in with an opportunity mindset and goes, ‘what’s great about this?’ That person goes, ‘If I can figure out a solution to that, I’ll make a fortune, and I’ll be helping many people’.

You can let that be your way of being, where you refuse to see anything as a negative. It’s just what happened, and it’s different from what you expected.

 

When You Are Sitting in a Board Room, and You’ve Got All of Your Employees Sitting Around, and the Client Says, ‘Hey, You Blew Up the Hospital’. How Do You Get Out of That Room Turning That Into a Positive?

 

You ask for real-life examples, and we go back to Elon Musk. One of the most important things you can do is – I do not believe in negative feedback. I don’t think there is such a thing.

GET RID OF THE WORD NEGATIVE; IT’S ALL POSITIVE FEEDBACK BECAUSE IT’S ALL CONSTRUCTIVE. If you look at all feedback as constructive, no matter what the feedback is, it’s just information.

That’s what Elon does; it’s just information; give me more and more. So, you go into that board room eager to get FEEDBACK that you can use to grow and improve, so in the long run, everyone wins (including the hospital).

My definition of FAILURE is the ABSENCE of GROWTH. If you learned from it, then you didn’t fail.

‘Fail your way to success’; that is how you get there. By doing something and having it blow up and asking, ‘Now, what do we do?’ ‘How do we keep from blowing stuff up?’

That was what he did. His rockets would blow up, and he would build another one. He planned on failing. All along the way, he was saying, ‘things are going to blow up. Get ready for it.’ After the third one blew up, they said, ‘we don’t have enough money for the fourth rocket’.

At this point, you get to decide on what to do next. Because he has the opportunity and Limitless mindset, his immediate thought was everyone is going through the same learning curve. It is great because it’s a barrier to entry.

This will shut down; anyone trying to come this way will be discouraged and we will find a way to get the fourth rocket up. They learned from every time it blew up, and they asked questions on how to stop it from blowing up again and how they could make their rockets better.

Everything that happens sets you up for the questions ‘what’s great about this?’ and ‘How can I use this to make things even better?’ With that mindset, nothing can’t be turned into something else. All the good things on this planet probably started with something that people thought was negative or bad.