Chris Colley: 0:11

All right, everyone. Welcome back, everyone, to another Shift Ed podcast. Um I have a great guest today. We're really gonna jump into mindset. Um I have Mitch uh Weisberg who's coming in from around New York area, I believe. Hey Mitch. Yep, yeah, just uh Westchester County, just north of New York. Amazing. And Mitch has a great website called Mind Shifting with Mitch. Um I'll put that in the notes of the show, but um he has tons of great resources on there and a couple of amazing books, which we'll we'll get to. But Mitch, before we start into what's happening nowadays, let's go back in time a little bit or a little time machine. And I'm always curious to ask guests what some of those foundational moments were in your career that kind of led you to where you are now.

Mitch Weisburgh: 1:08

Yeah, so I I've had I guess quite a few different careers. Um I uh started off uh in 1975 um at a time sharing company. So time sharing in the sense that they had mainframe computers and small companies would send their work in. Um and this was kind of a pioneering company uh at the time because they used phone lines for the people to phone the data in. Whereas in at that time, people were uh were sending you know 80 character punch cards uh back and forth. Okay. Um so I you know I I I did a number of things for those companies. I was a I was computer support. Um I then uh graduated to designing systems and then went to sales, and then um and then while I was working, I went to business school. Uh I went to Columbia Business School. And there was like, you know, something this company that I'm at now, it's it's not really going anywhere. Um, or there's no place, there's no real future, future for me. At the same time that working full-time and going to business school was a lot of work because we worked, you know, you know, we we had about 20 hours a week worth of homework. So in 1981, I bought an Apple II Plus computer. Okay. 64k, you know, like uh some serious power we're talking about. Like, like, you know, now what we we have gigahertz processors. This is like kilohertz processors, you know. Um but included with the with the Apple II, after you assembled it and everything, you you had the very first spreadsheet that exists. Uh you know, VisiCalc, um, which had 64 columns, you know, um uh uh 256 rows, you know. Um, but I found that using VisiCalc to do my finance homework and using WordStar to write my reports, I was doing my work in maybe 20-25% of the time of everybody else. Not at 20% savings, like one quarter of the time. And I'm sitting on a train going into New York with my dad, and I'm telling him that. And this guy jumps up from his seat and he says, you know, I just bought an Apple II. It comes with five different boxes and six different instruction manuals. All I want to do is cash flow. Could you show me how to do that? And then from that, which I did free, and then I trained his friends free, and then um it just thought of me like, well, you know, something maybe people will pay for this. So I started charging people for it, and I started a business and learned a lot about instructional design in addition to what I already knew about systems. And for 20 years, I ran a company that taught business people how to use computers. But I could see in like in the year 2000 that the future was changing. You know, the the new generations were coming up, they they knew how to use computers, and Windows meant that software really didn't change. If you knew Excel in 1999 and you stepped onto a computer today, whether you used Excel or you used Google Sheets, it's basically the same thing.

Chris Colley: 4:25

Right, so you know functionalities and everything.

Mitch Weisburgh: 4:29

Functionalities, the interface. You didn't have this need for content retraining that you used to have in the old world. So I was looking around for different things to do, and I um I settled on education because they felt, you know, something with all this technology, there's so much opportunity to change the way we educate kids. And this was in in the US, we had this the no child left behind, um, which we used to call nickelby, right? Um, you know, so there's this emphasis on education, and I felt, you know, like you know, maybe I can make a difference and help publishers understand how to take their book products and remassage them so that they could fit into an online or uh classroom, a computerized classroom, uh, both from the standpoint of how the teachers would use it and the kids would use it and how to sell it. And so that that's the business I did for about 15 years. And then, you know, like 15 years later, I'm sitting around and saying, you know, technology is now in the schools to a large extent. It's still being resisted in in many cases, but it's but it's there. And you know, kids aren't any well any better prepared in 2017, 2018 for being adults than they were in 2000. So what's what can I do? And then at that time, I also got uh an email from a university asking if I would teach their show their undergraduates education technology. And I'm thinking, you know, education technology has not changed. You know, I mean they've changed education, but they haven't really affected kids. Right. So I don't really want to show them education technology, but you know what kids need? Kids need to understand how successful people think. How a successful person looks at a problem and instead of like judging it or whatever, comes up with a potential solution, starts implementing the solution, enrolling others in their vision. And even when things don't work out, they take that as information and they pivot or whatever, but they eventually become, you know, they eventually win out. So it's like, let me let me see if if they'd be interested in me teaching the kids that. And then all of a sudden you have to figure out like, how am I gonna do this? Yeah, I I you know, I had done instructional design, I had done systems work and all this kind of stuff. I've been an entrepreneur, but I'd never taught a two-day workshop for kids on how to think. And so I had five months to do it. So I I read um I read books in a lot of different topics that deal with decision making or deal with success. So, you know, psychology, um, you know, uh military strategy, sales, uh, instruction, uh, cognitive science, neuroscience, economics, you know, so all these different areas, and everybody seemed to have like a piece of what it took to be successful, but I felt, you know, I could pull things from all these different areas and make it in one uniform treatise, and really uh decided that there were going to be three different tracks to this two-day uh two-day workshop that I was gonna teach. One was going to be how do you harness your brain so that you could be resourceful even when you felt like you were blocked? Second, um, how how should you look at situations so that you're not dispirited when things don't work out and you're taking the feedback that comes in as uh motivational in order to continue to improve. And third, how do you work with other people who very often are resisting change or trying to compete with you or disagree with you, or maybe you don't like them, but somehow or other you've got to work in this environment where you're working with other people anyhow. So one was again the the brain, the situation, and working with people, put put it together, teach the class, and at the end of the two days, the kids stood up and cheered. And it was like, okay, so this is something, you know, two thousand eighteen, this is something that when people uh when people learn these skills, they immediately see, oh my gosh, this is gonna really improve my life.

Chris Colley: 9:27

Right.

Mitch Weisburgh: 9:27

And so I transitioned from education technology to really just focusing on this. And my goal is, you know, what if we could get a critical mass of people in the world? Okay. What if we could get people, enough people who really understood how to be resourceful, how to be resilient, and how to be collaborative so that we could really work towards the problems that we're trying to solve? That could be the force that allows everybody to live you know more productive and happier lives. Like we, you know, you could be, you know, you could be down on yourself and another person who knew all these techniques, you could take a look at you, say, Oh, I see that you're in survival mode right now. Why don't you take a second and try one of these things to get back into resourceful mode? And so we can support each other. So that's that's my mission. And arbitrarily I've said critical mass of people, I don't know, eight billion people on the planet. Let's say we reached five million people somehow or other, and five million people knew this. That's to me seems like a good number to be a critical mass, but you know, it's an arbitrary number, but that's totally that's what I'm going for.

Chris Colley: 10:34

You know, and I I I love what you're saying, which is super um it's making me reflect a lot on on mindset. And I know that that's kind of the crux of you know, enough of this showing people how to do stuff on Excel sheets and you know, like that stuff's there, but it's how you're approaching it from your you know, your thought process and and how you process all this stuff. Could you kind of define what mindset is for the listeners? Like, what does that mean? A mindset, and I know that in your book you look at the survival mind versus the sage mind or mindset. Like what is mindset?

Mitch Weisburgh: 11:17

So everything starts with the way your brain makes sense of things, and that's really that's that's your mindset. And as as you brought out, um you know, our brains uh develop two different ways of assessing situations. One is is for survival, okay? And that part of the brain operates really quickly, takes very little information, comes with what with comes up with something that we have to do in order to survive, and it's very binary. So something is either going to kill us or it's going to help us. And if it makes us, it's either bad or it's good. There's no nuance there. It's bad or it's good, you do it or you don't do it. You're right, they're wrong. Every you know, it's it's it's just a binary choice. And once that part of the brain locks into something, that's what we do, unless we also have the presence to think, oh my gosh, I'm using that part of the brain right now. This is not a survival situation. I could relax a little bit and I could be more creative. So when we come up with a mindset that says, I know I can't do this, that doesn't mean that we can't do it. Well, it does to a certain extent, but it it it because we if whatever whether we think we can do something or whether we think we can't do something, that's gonna be our truth. Uh, but it doesn't mean that that if we looked at it, we we couldn't do it. It just means that we've come up with this story in our mind, our our survival parts of the brain have decided, you know, it would be wrong for you to do this because you might be risking yourself, you might fail, you might feel ill at ease. So I'm gonna come up with a story that you can't do it, and then we justify that story, we can't do this. You can't argue with that part of the brain, okay, but you can kind of go in through the back door and open it up. So if you, as you know, as an example, if you have something that you really want to be able to do and you know that you can't do it, you could say to yourself, hmm, perhaps I can. And just saying, perhaps I can, your brain can't help, but start coming up with ways that you could possibly do it. Now, maybe you can't do it right now. Maybe you need to study something, maybe you need to get some help, maybe you need to ask somebody, maybe you need to practice some more, but it's gonna start coming up with things that you could conceivably do. And that's that's mindset. Um, you know, I I can go on because you know, I'm because I'm what I'm thinking is as I'm going this is that it's a lot less effective for somebody else to tell you perhaps you can, and it's absolutely ineffective for somebody to tell you you can. So if you if I say, you know something, I can't save up enough for retirement, and you say, Mitch, that's crazy, you can, that's just gonna cause me to argue. I'm gonna say, no, no, no, I just said I can't do it. You know, I've looked at it, I can't do it. What are you telling me I can't for? If you could say to me, you know, Mitch, I realize that uh you're looking at this and you and you you believe that you can't come up with a way to retire uh or to accumulate enough money to be able to retire, right? What if you just quietly said to yourself, perhaps I can? Why don't you think about retiring? And when your brain says to you that you can't, what if you said perhaps I can and just do that for a minute and then tell me what happens? Okay. And so you can, you know, that's allowing somebody to change their own mindset and opening up their brain.

Chris Colley: 15:06

I love that. Yeah, because we often talk to teachers about the fixed mindset and then kind of the more open mindset, you know, where fixed is no, no, this is what I can do, and I know I can do this. I can't do any of that other stuff. Whereas open is like, sure.

Mitch Weisburgh: 15:22

I mean, I'll try. You know, I'll try. And uh hopefully with with open mindset, when you try and it doesn't work, you're using that as as as feedback. You're saying, Oh, I did this, the I expected these results, I got slightly different results or or the opposite results from I expected. How can I take that to still be able to move forward?

Chris Colley: 15:47

Right, right. And I I I think in education, I mean that's the crux a little bit of we're hoping to instill a little of that in the students that sit in front of us every day so that when they are beyond school, that they have those tools that they developed, or that there are no challenges that I can't take on. I'll figure it out, I'll find out help, I'll persevere, etc. Like all of these really important um aspects of the human development, really. How do you get practicing those in a practical way? Now, I know on your on your site you have some courses, and they're called personal development courses. Do those courses help open those doors up a little bit that to help you with resilience and personal developments?

Mitch Weisburgh: 16:35

No, they're the courses are actually horrible. You know, nobody nobody likes them. Um people complain about them all the time, but I offer them no, yeah. I I I hope I I I get uh really interesting feedback from the teachers, uh the educators who who end up taking courses because that's that my focus in these courses is to help educators, you know, live better lives, teach better, and teach kids those skills. One of the examples was in the the the course that we just finished, which is on the resourcefulness part of it, you know, that a teacher was saying, and this is a kindergarten teacher, so she's teaching five-year-olds, and she says the kids were coming in and they were they were wild. And I said, hmm, sounds like you guys are wild. And she says, one of the kids says, you know what? We should all sit down and do some box breathing now and calm ourselves down. Okay. And she says, you know, she she had introduced them to the box breathing as part of the, you know, after the first session of the course, and um, you know, and and and and they got it. So you can teach these techniques to kids. Yeah. Um, the techniques, the way I look at it is you first are learning the techniques for your well, for your own life, and second, you're learning how to co-regulate with the kids. And so the and the kids are learning how how to be co-regulated quicker, and then they gradually also learn how to take on and do these things for themselves. Interesting.

Chris Colley: 18:07

And and if I'm taking the the course, Mitch, like what's the interactivity? Like, how to what does the course feel like that that you've created that kind of gets teachers thinking about themselves a little bit more?

Mitch Weisburgh: 18:19

Uh well, there's three different courses. Um the uh the course on resourcefulness and the course on resilience, which is the situations, those courses are both six two-hour Zoom sessions. Okay. Now, in the Zoom session, uh say in in the first session, uh, we we go over some concepts, then you break into small groups and you try them out in the small groups, then you come back, then we talk about what happened in the small groups, and then at the end, you're given a a couple of the things that you that we covered in in that session, and you're supposed to try them with other people. Now, you could try them with a class, you could try them with fellow teachers, you could try them with your family, you could try them with friends. It doesn't matter who you who you try them with, and a reflection that you that you type in um on what happened, what worked, what didn't work. Then in the next class, one of the first things that we do is that if uh a number of those people share what happened, so we get really good stories about what worked. Like uh one of the most powerful stories, and this has very little to do with school, but um but a teacher was saying that uh she has a friend which who was in an abusive relationship, and she was going to uh she and another friend were going to help this woman move with her kids into another place on a Saturday, and they given the woman a list of the different things to do, and they were gonna come on a Saturday, pack up the cars, go, and then deposit her in this new place. And they get to the woman's house on a Saturday, and the woman hadn't done any, not one of the things on the list. And so their immediate reaction is anger, right? And that's normal. Like we we told her to do these things, it really wasn't that hard. And then, like, and then they they they said, you know, something that's that is our survival, that's our limbic reactions right now. Why don't we first calm ourselves down? And so the two of them did some you know, meditation or something to to slow down their breathing, to and then and then reach in and says, Well, what is really important to us now? And that came from the course also. And they said, you know, what came back is what was really important is we have this good friend, and what's really important is to help her get started with another life. And and as a matter of fact, she was probably just trying to survive during this week, much less do these things. So, big deal, we're gonna spend this entire day working with her, but that's gonna set her up and her kids for a good life. And they did that, and at the end of the day, all three of them were satisfied that the two had who had helped just felt that they had made a huge difference in somebody's life. And they said, we couldn't have done that without understanding that our initial reaction was just um was just our our our survival system trying to protect us, and we had to first quiet it down, then figure out what we really wanted to do, and then we could do it. Right, right. Interesting.

Chris Colley: 21:37

And you said too that you want the courses, you want five million people to follow them, right? Yep, yep. And what five million people follow this course, okay?

Mitch Weisburgh: 21:48

Or the courses, books, or learn from other people. They don't have to learn from me. Yeah, okay. Right. Um, I'm more than happy if somebody you know takes the class and they say, you know, something I would like to teach the rest of my teachers in this in in my school? I'm more than happy to just let them use anything that they want to in order to teach the other teachers in their school.

Chris Colley: 22:08

Amazing. And and what's that outcome though? Like, what do you want those five million teachers to be doing? How do you want their mindsets to shift from the starting of to the ending of the courses? Like, what should happen what do you hope is the result of that, you know, five million people uh changing their mindset? Like what what do you envision?

Mitch Weisburgh: 22:32

Well, so so it's it's complex. Okay, it's not just one thing. Okay, they if you look at the really big outcome for the individuals, it's like, wow, you know something? I'm doing the things that are most important to me, and I feel great about it. Okay, so that would be number one. Number two is and I'm supporting others living their best lives too. Okay, and then the third thing is that if we get enough of those people, then these these fights that we have about um should we be conserving or should we be pushing business? Should we uh should we be stopping guns or should we be finding other ways to reduce violence? Um, should we be increasing taxes or should we be or we should be spending more on social services? Those aren't like simple questions, and we're treating them as if like, yes, there's there's one answer. It's to be able to understand that those are complex issues and to be able to change with those to to um discuss with people who disagree with us in order to come up with solutions that are more nuanced than we could have come up with on our own. And so you so you know, we all think that conflict is bad, um, destructive conflict is bad, but to be able to look at conflict as a way to come up with something better than we could have come up with on our own, right? Well, that's that's that's a great gift. And so all that's what I wished for everybody. I love that.

Chris Colley: 24:08

I love that. It's I mean, and I love your goal. It's not like no, no, I hope that you know my little community is no right a million people, yes. And Mitch, I want to help you with that because I I mean I really value your insights and this work that you've done is is a you know a lifetime of work really that you've assembled to support people just to shift in mindsets. And I just I've always loved the idea that we're never in a box. We can always open that box up and and and look beyond it. But sometimes we need the tools, we just not sure how to go about doing that. Um so I want the listeners out there to to know that we're in talks with Mitch about getting these courses available to our community here in Quebec for free. And if you uh know that you want to shift your mindset a bit, well uh take note and I'll get you this information soon. Hopefully sooner than later, Mitch, we can do this because I want to take this course now too, or courses, I should say.

Mitch Weisburgh: 25:14

Okay, well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, so I felt, you know, doing the courses, I'll reach a s certain number of people, and those people can reach other people. Writing the writing them as books, you know, I have this um, you know, my bias has been that you can't really learn this from a book. I still have that bias that you can't just read the book and learn this. I've even and I and I have had people who've read the first book and starting people who've read the second book who have come, you know, sorry, I read your book three times and I'm able to practice it. But how many people read a book three times and practice it? Okay. But, you know, like so the the book allows me theoretically to reach more people. We're also writing study guides for the book so people in a in an organization could read the book and they've got lesson by lesson reflection exercises and discussions so that you could do you could you can have this combination of social learning and reflection along with the book. Maybe that will contribute to the book. And then um I'm also trying to well, I'm I'm uh you know, the the next experiment is uh is developing this as a course where um AI mentors will mentor people through the technique, so you don't necessarily need a person. Um you can I don't know, you know, there's this whole debate about you know general artificial intelligence, but this is really much more targeted. It's like okay, we're gonna we're going to use the perhaps I can technique. And so in the perhaps I can technique, what's something that you really feel that you should be doing and you know that you can't? And then it just asks you questions about that so that you come up with it with uh so that you're able to then apply it to yourself and you're able to apply it to other people. So that's that's you know another thing that I'm that I'm I'm trying. But uh, I don't know how I'm gonna reach five million people, but somehow or other that you know with with my goal and with other people taking this beyond where I can take it, right? That's my goal. Amazing.

Chris Colley: 27:28

Amazing. Well, I hope that we can help with that, Mitch. Um, it's been a real pleasure talking with you. I hope that we can continue this conversation and and that we can have you come into our community and share some of your insights. Um I would love that. I would love that.

Mitch Weisburgh: 27:42

Jean par Francais, but I speak English and I speak a very tiny bit of French.

Chris Colley: 27:48

Well, we we service the Anglo community, so you're in a safe spot. Good. Right on. Well, Mitch, thanks so much. I wish you a great day, and um we'll talk again soon.

Mitch Weisburgh: 27:58

Okay, good, Chris. Thank you. Thank you so much.