Breaking the Pattern of Focusing on “I Don’t Wants”

My name is Laura Goodrich, and I love working with individuals, teams, and organizations to create cultures grounded in effective workplace dynamics. Many of the companies I have worked with were undergoing significant change, and I loved helping people get past the reactionary phase and ultimately begin seeing themselves as part of the solution. I loved helping employees craft the go-forward direction and establish the strategy to support it.

Through these experiences and through the process of training and coaching hundreds of executives and other people around the world, I witnessed a phenomenon that played itself out repeatedly: People’s natural inclination is to focus on what they do not want to have happen, not on what they do want to have happen. It happened so often that I started recognizing the pattern. When I asked people what they want, without hesitation they would say, “What I don’t want is this: I don’t want people to be gone that day, I don’t want to be stood up at meetings, I don’t want to waste my time.” Even after I repeatedly pointed out that their statements began with “I don’t want” and I specifically asked them to rephrase their statements as “I wants,” they quickly returned to expressing what they didn’t want or what they were trying to avoid.

When people intentionally change their focus to what they do want, phenomenal events start happening in their business and personal lives. And when a group of employees or an entire team or organization gets on board and focuses on what they do want, positive outcomes replicate, and achieving corporate objectives becomes even more possible.

What puzzled me for some time was how to cause that shift from focusing on what you don’t want and are trying to avoid to a positive mind-set. I longed to help people understand how to:

1. Resist the natural inclination to focus on negative thoughts, concerns, and fears.

2. Create a sense of awareness around their individual interests, passions, strengths, and values.

3. Make the connection between their personal and professional “I wants” and those of their team and organization to create individual and collective positive outcomes.

I had seen what can happen when people choose to concentrate on positive outcomes and ultimately succeed in influencing the collective goals and objectives of teams and organizations.

While I was pondering this question, my business partner, Greg Stiever, was telling wonderful and emotional stories through his video camera. When we met, Greg had 25 years of experience as a digital storyteller and Emmy Award–winning producer. I had spent my life in front of the camera, and Greg was the pro behind the camera. When we began collaborating in 2007 and formed On Impact, we discovered how to blend our talents in a powerful way by using digital storytelling to help companies and organizations influence positive change. The first result of our collaboration is the Seeing Red Cars metaphor with support materials, a film, and now a book with a toolkit of activities that turn insight into action and action into outcomes. We are excited to offer this book to help individuals, teams, and organizations grasp these concepts and put them to work toward their own personal and professional successes.

The tremendous response to the Seeing Red Cars film was the impetus for writing this book. On www.seeingredcarsbook.com are the Red Cars Toolkit and a variety of additional supplemental Red Cars items and activities to build individual understanding and clarity and to engage people at all levels. They can be used to develop a long-term program to drive your organization’s positive change. They contribute to the effort to extend the experience and keep Red Cars in focus for meaningful change to occur.