The Pearls In Your Mind
Bottom Line Up Front: Understanding the "pearls" in your mind isn't just psychology—it's strategic intelligence that determines how you process market information, make competitive decisions, and respond to business challenges. Leaders who master their mental pearl patterns can reprogram limiting business beliefs and install empowering strategic mindware that creates breakthrough results while competitors remain trapped in outdated, limitation-based thinking patterns.
What are pearls in your mind? Well, that's the way I think of what traditional psychologists call a Gestalt.
We've all heard of Gestalt. It's a form of psychology that has been prevalent for decades. Gestalt also offers a vivid way to describe how we store and manage our expectations that control our experiences.
First, let's start with the definition of Gestalt.
A structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.
That's exactly what our mindware apps/pearls resemble.
Business Application: In strategic terms, these mental pearls determine how executives process competitive intelligence, evaluate market opportunities, and make decisions under pressure. They're the unconscious frameworks that either enable breakthrough thinking or trap leaders in limiting patterns.
Gestalt, Pearls and Your Mindware
When you think of the Gestalt of your mindware, the image I use is a string of pearls. Actually, thousands of strings of pearls. Each string is devoted to your mindware about a specific belief or experience in your life.
For example, you have Gestalt(s), or string(s) of pearls that create your belief about your skill at music, your response to a certain type of situation, your triggered behavior when someone yells at you, your unconscious decisions about what you can and can't do. Everything you think and do is associated with these strings of pearls, the mindware that controls our behaviors and decisions.
Strategic Examples: In business contexts, you have pearl strings that determine your beliefs about:
Your strategic capabilities and market expertise
Your response to competitive pressure and board challenges
Your triggered behaviors when facing business criticism or setbacks
Your unconscious decisions about what strategic goals are achievable
Your automatic responses to innovation opportunities or market disruption
You also have strings of pearls that keep your body functioning for you. Many of them. I'm focused on the pearls that direct your experience in this post.
Business Impact: During my 30+ years of strategic consulting, I've learned that executives' pearl patterns determine whether they see opportunities or threats, pursue breakthrough strategies or defensive approaches, and create extraordinary results or settle for incremental improvements.
How You Create Your Strategic Pearls
Here's how the pearls of our mind work:
Each string of pearls begins with a single pearl. The first mindware app that is created in response to a situation or stated truth. Most of our initial pearls are formed in childhood, when we do not have a critical faculty to determine whether an experience or statement is true or false. Everything we experience and hear, see or feel is taken as true and we create a mindware app to reflect these inputs. By the way, we each create our own unique critical faculty based on what we are taught individually as right and wrong.
Business Pearl Formation: Similarly, business pearls often form during early career experiences when we lack the critical faculty to evaluate strategic feedback objectively. A harsh boss, failed project, or market rejection becomes the first pearl that creates limiting beliefs about our strategic capabilities, market potential, or innovation capacity.
That initial pearl of mindware begins to filter our data stream, selecting a reality that reaffirms that mindware pearl as truth.
Strategic Filtering: Business pearls filter how executives process market information. A limiting pearl about "innovation is risky" causes leaders to unconsciously select for evidence that supports conservative approaches while missing breakthrough opportunities that contradict this belief.
As we hear, see, feel or experience other situations that reflect that initial pearl, we create more pearls of mindware and associate them with the initial pearl.
With each new experience that matches our initial and follow on pearls, we create another mindware app and add it to the string. The more apps, or pearls, we add to the string, the more influential the mindware app becomes.
Business Pearl Strengthening: Each time an executive encounters a situation that seems to confirm their limiting business belief—"that strategy won't work in our industry," "we can't compete with larger companies," "innovation requires massive resources"—they add another pearl to the string, strengthening patterns that constrain strategic thinking.
Over time, that initial pearl becomes a powerful Gestalt of mindware, driving our thinking and behaviors. If it's conscious, we recognize that we're responding. If it's unconscious, we don't even know it's happening.
Strategic Unconscious Patterns: Most business pearl patterns operate unconsciously. Executives don't realize their automatic responses to competitive challenges, market opportunities, or innovation possibilities are driven by pearl strings formed years ago during early career experiences.
Strategic Pearl Examples in Action
Throughout my consulting career, I've identified common business pearl patterns that either enable or constrain strategic performance:
The "Industry Limitation" Pearl String: Formed when executives repeatedly hear "our industry doesn't change much" or "that's not how we do things here." This pearl string filters out disruptive opportunities and innovation possibilities, keeping leaders trapped in incremental thinking.
The "Resource Scarcity" Pearl String: Created through experiences of budget constraints and limited resources. This pearl string causes executives to automatically assume they "can't afford" breakthrough strategies, missing opportunities that could generate the resources they need.
The "Competitive Disadvantage" Pearl String: Formed when leaders experience setbacks against larger, better-funded competitors. This pearl string filters for evidence of competitive weakness while missing unique advantages and differentiation opportunities.
The "Innovation Risk" Pearl String: Developed through experiences with failed projects or conservative cultures. This pearl string makes executives unconsciously avoid breakthrough thinking and settle for safe, incremental improvements.
The Power to Change Our Strategic Minds
People ask me all the time how they can change their mindware, especially the unconscious business mindware that we aren't even aware is running in the background of our strategic lives.
The first step is to find the business behavior or strategic thought patterns that are the result of the mindware. This isn't as simple as we've been taught. Just because we are experienced executives does not mean we can easily recognize the pearl patterns driving our strategic decisions.
Business Pattern Recognition: In fact, we usually recognize what we want to see in market data—not necessarily the reality of our strategic mindware. That's why it's important to have an objective party involved in identifying the pearl strings that are driving our business minds.
Once we discover the strategic mindware apps, which are usually represented as a core business decision, market belief, or competitive emotion ("I can't compete with industry leaders," "I'm afraid of strategic failure"), then we can delete that app, or string of pearls, in our minds, and our strategic responses and business experience changes.
Strategic Transformation: I've helped executives delete limiting pearl strings like "innovation is too risky for our company" and replace them with empowering patterns like "calculated innovation creates competitive advantage." The result is dramatically different strategic behavior and breakthrough business results.
How do we change our strategic minds?
It takes a blending of mind methods and theories from quantum mechanics, hypnotherapy, neurolinguistics, and ancient energetic practices to shift our strategic minds. I combine them all in my Lifeline Journeys.
Once the string of pearls associated with a specific strategic mindware app or apps is released, that limiting business process or competitive emotion is gone. We no longer filter market data in the same way and our strategic reality changes. As my executive clients say again and again, "How could I have ever believed that market limitation? Wow! It's completely gone."
Business Results: Changing strategic mindware is just one of the amazing gifts of neuroscience applied to business performance. I'm blessed and honored to share it with executives from every industry, as part of my coaching for leaders who want to operate free of strategic anxiety, competitive depression, market fear, and limitation-based thinking.
Imagine—being able to delete the negative business beliefs and replacing them with breakthrough strategic confidence and innovative thinking.
You Can.
It's all in your strategic mind!
Ready to identify and reprogram the pearl patterns that limit your strategic thinking? Your unconscious mindware may be either your greatest competitive advantage or your biggest strategic constraint.
Image courtesy of caroliend
