Patrick Mosher outlines a four-step framework to convert stress into power: Receive (choose what to accept), Reset (extract wisdom from the challenge), Release (direct your energy toward specific people and outcomes), and Reflect (gather feedback and cycle again). The faster you convert negative energy into intentional action, the more influence you generate.
Chapters
So let's go about this. There's 4 steps to build your personal power generator. 4 steps to build this personal power generator. And the first step is you've got the stressor coming in, so you've got to receive that energy. And I want to look at receive because you can also elect not to receive it. So that's also a part of this, is saying there's a stressor coming in and you can reject the challenge and You can reject the energy, you can reject the opportunity. There's a lot of ways to receive it or not receive it. So the first thing is to, like, am I going to receive this or not? I love how I've heard it described that the Dalai Lama, somebody like does, you know, puts hate on him, they give him a hate email or something, and it's like, "Thank you, but I choose not to receive your gift." You can choose not to receive the thing from the start. So the first thing is, how do you receive the energy? And when you accept it, when you accept that energy that, that you receive, that stressor, then how are you going to use it to gain wisdom? What's your objective with pulling this in? Okay, the second one, I call this reset. How are you going to reset this energy? If a stressor came in, even if a challenge comes in, there's a challenge and you feel good about it, how are you going to reset it? Because you can have it inside of yourself, and if you don't reset negative energy, you're going to spew out negative energy. We're positive deviants here, so what we want to do is spew out positive energy out of that. I know I get angry sometimes, that negative energy stressor comes in and I go like, "No!" And it's like, "Okay, I didn't reset that energy before I put it back out in the world." We need to reset energies as much as possible. Okay, and this is the hardest part. I'm converting this restraint, you know, turning that restraining force we have to return to an equilibrium and converting that to something different, something altogether different. So when you look at this pencil— oh, my broken pencil— when you look at this pencil and that stressor came on the one side, one of the options was that the pencil's rigid on this side too. So when you think about the stress that you have, the stress that you put in, what's the rigidity with which you're holding that? What are your assumptions, your limiting beliefs? What are some of your desires, so your desired outcomes that may be unrealistic or whatever it is, but where's the rigidity? Because if you're feeling a high level of stress, you're having also a high level of rigidity. Ooh, let me say that again. When you have a high level of stress, you also have a high level of rigidity. And that's the restraining force. That's the, the restoring force that you have there. Okay, so in that moment to reset, how are you going to seek wisdom? How are you going to gain knowledge? How are you going to experience something, even if it's a bad experience? Bad experiences give us a lot of learning and wisdom. And how are you going to use this for good judgment? How are you going to use to gather options to judge this versus that? All these things are ways to look at resetting. And I have a mindset about this. I always think about difficult challenges I'm in, things that I don't want to do, and I think about how is this training me for the next bigger challenge? When I'm in something I don't like, how is this training me for the next bigger challenge? Cool. So good. And I'll tell you this too. This reset could take milliseconds. It comes in, you convert it. You're a ninja in that energy conversion from negative to positive. People will sit back and go like, "Wow, how does she do that?" And people want to be around people that take that negative energy and convert it into something positive. It's so attractive. But it could also take years. Some of these things take years. And you know, if you're trying to take negative energy in therapy, if you need therapy, please go seek it out. Counseling, coaching, advisors. It might take a long time to really do that reset. So, that's an important thing to think too. It could be milliseconds or years to take this negative energy and convert it. All right, so once you receive it and you've reset it, then you release it. You release that energy in the world in an influential— because this, when you release energy, that creates power, that creates work. And what is work? Work is influencing other people to behave differently. As influencers, as project managers, as change managers, as executives, whatever it is, we're out there to be a force, to move objects, to move people, to inspire them to act, behave differently. So power, when we release that energy, we want that positive energy to be out there because when we have positive energy out there, or maybe even more intentional energy is a better way to describe it, when you have that intentional energy released in the world, you're really thinking about what outcomes are you looking for. So important to have that as a piece of releasing that energy in a good, powerful way. Blowing up doesn't achieve the results you want. Typically, people— you scatter the energy out there and people scatter to the hills because they don't want to be around. All right, so what does this mean? When I think about release, I think about this in 3 ways. When you release energy, Are you releasing energy— oops, gotta fix my screen here. When you release energy— it's still not working, come on out. Here we go. You release that energy with the right offer to the right people at the right time. Now, this isn't just entrepreneurial work here. An offer is— you could be making an offer to your significant other. An offer is a recommendation to behave, to act in a certain way. That's power, that's work, that's influence. You offer them the right thing to the right people at the right time, and then they'll opt in. To me, that's what opting in is. That's when they choose you, they choose what you're offering them because you release that energy in a positive way. How do you craft that? I could do a whole session with you on how to release that energy and do that with the right offering, with the right people at the right time. Because you know how you've done that not so constructively. I know I've done that in not so constructive ways. So that's a way to look at release. And then the final piece of this is reflect. When we go back and reflect on our world, on what we've done, it's so important after we achieve all this, we've released that energy out there, we've launched something, now it's to mold and reflect on, did that work? And then what happens with that is you get feedback and you say, okay, let me adjust, receive new energy, and do the reset, release, and keep going. This is a circular process. So receive, reset, release, reflect.
