The legendary Jim Rohn once said, “Feed your mind just as you do your body. Feed it with good ideas, wherever they can be found. Always be on the lookout for a good idea; a business idea, a product idea, a service idea, an idea for personal improvement. Every new idea will help to refine your philosophy. Your philosophy will guide your life, and your life will unfold with distinction and pleasure.”

At the end of 2023, I was like an iPhone battery on red and SO tired physically, emotionally and mentally. I needed to learn how to build mental toughness, how to better control my attention in a more powerful way, how to focus on the most important strategies (not just for myself, but for clients).

Since then, I’ve been hyper focused on thoughts and nutrition for both my body and mind. That’s when I started weighing, measuring and logging food for my trainer to review daily (not fun), and consciously trying to stay out of my head and not overthink conversations (also not fun, yet necessary).

I shared with you my word for 2024 is Elevate (you can read about it here). Elevate also means that I need to continually work on my own thinking processes, frameworks and ideation.

It was time to take my own advice I share with clients “protect your valuable real estate; your beautiful brain.” We need to focus our attention on our thoughts because they create our actions, habits and how we lead personally and professionally — you can see why Jim’s quote resonated with me.

New Year, New Mindshare

There are a gazillion social media memes, Instagram reels, blogs, and articles about ‘New Year, New You’ — I know it gets a bad rap, however I think a new year is a fresh start to think about how we think. How does our team think? What do our clients think?

You may know a large percentage of my time when I am not on stage for clients, it is working 1:1 with CEOs and their leadership teams to help them develop strategies to grow their business (own client mindshare) and show up as the best leaders they can be. So many of my clients in luxury travel, hospitality, media, financial services and even the medical industry want to know how to own client mindshare to help grow their business.

One of my luxury hospitality clients recently introduced me to his executive guests where I was sharing the Luxury Mindset research and he said “we love that Neen always makes us think differently” — that’s such a compliment. I shared our Idea Shaping Methodology with a medical CEO client as we were working on her board presentation, and she said, “Neen our team has been working with an agency and consultants for a year trying to explain this, you did it in less than 20 minutes.” That made me smile.

When you have great thinking frameworks, and you really pay attention, designing ideas and concepts to help your own mindshare might be easier than you think.

Clients will tell you they hire me to facilitate strategic thinking sessions — ideation is something I love. Did you know you can measure ideation productivity? Mine is high (yep I know that sounds braggy — I just really love it!).

The Monkey Brain

I believe our inputs impact our output.

During a recent walk, as I was listening to Jay Shetty’s audiobook, Think Like a Monk I heard him say: “You have a monkey mind” — hold on, what? I started to giggle. I like monkeys and was instantly transported to a fun trip to Ubud, Bali visiting the Sacred Monkey Forest where they are so cheeky, climb all over you, and steal the peanuts from your pocket and bananas from your backpack.

The Monkey Mind in Buddhist philosophy originates in Chinese folklore to describe the chaotic thoughts and emotions of our brain. (Brain experts trace this region known as the default mode network (DMN) in case you want to sound fancy.) Jay explained the difference between a monkey mind and monk mind (an excerpt below), and that got me thinking about the link between our personal thought patterns as luxury leaders and our professional thought patterns we use to lead our teams and clients. I want to have a monk mind and you can read more on our blog if you are interested in this!

In our Luxury Leadership keynote for clients we make the connection between the characteristics of luxury from our Luxury Mindset research (long lasting, high quality, unique, indulgent and authentic) to being a luxury leader and to demonstrate those same characteristics as they communicate and elevate the experiences for their team and clients. What can you do today to develop your Monk Brain and develop your leadership qualities?

You have heard me share the luxury is about experiences, not things.

How do people experience you? What do they think about when they work with you and your organization? How do you get them to keep thinking (positively) about you and your brand?

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