Today our expert guest is Flip Flippen. He is a New York Times best-seller and is recognized as one of the top leadership thought leaders in America, a prominent global keynote speaker, and founder of the Flippen Group, one of the fastest growing educator training, corporate talent, and team development companies in the United States.
From his early career working with kids in gangs to his later work in boardrooms and classrooms, Flippen has dedicated himself to helping people write a new story.
His newest book, Your Third Story: Author the Life You’re Meant to Live, shows us there’s more to life than what’s written and empowers us with tools and inspirations to write our third story on our own terms.
Flip had a very different career track than most people. When he got out of graduate school, he started working with kids in gangs in a free non-profit clinic. He saw all these kids with so much potential, and he just knew he had to find a way to tap into that in some way.
These young kids were solving problems most of us don’t have to even think of. How to get home safe, how do I get to the store without getting robbed, how do I keep my siblings from being hurt?
But when it came to school or business, they had no idea how to approach it. They told themselves reasons they couldn’t do these things, and they believed those stories, and the people around them believed those stories.
Once you begin to penetrate those stories, and get to challenge their own thinking, a whole new world opens up for them.
With the way Flip was impacting kids’ lives, the school administration began to notice, and in Texas the Governor called and asked if he would start putting this program and work into the public school system. Flip took the tools he knew to get into kids’ heads, and started teaching those in the schools.
Flip knew from his work with kids that he could improve their levels of engagement, and these same principles apply the same from kids in gangs to employees on Wall Street. And if you have higher levels of engagement, you also get higher levels of performance.
From his work in the non-profit, education, and the corporate world, Flip knew the power that story, specifically the stories we tell ourselves, play in our lives.
There’s a story behind everything in our life, and we often don’t take the time to gauge whether or not they are true.
Our first story is the story we were born into: “I was born here, I grew up here, I went to school.” You didn’t write that story, you were born into that story.
Our second story begins usually in adolescence. We start to tell ourselves things to make ourselves feel okay. Why you did or didn’t do certain things, and the story behind that. It’s not always going to be true, but it’s the stories we tell to make everything make sense.
Eventually, something is going to happen in your life that makes you realize “I think what I believe is not really true.” You have to have to urge to look at your life and examine what is and isn’t true.
So what is the third story? We need to find the courage to look at our stories and say, “What could be true?” If you have an emotionally compelling reason to look at your life, you will find the truth and lies in your story.
Once you’ve challenged your stories and your beliefs, you have to dream about what there could be.
The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway
“There’s so much more than what you ever dreamed of. You’ve got more potential than you could ever imagine.
It doesn’t matter where you are today, there is more. Challenge where you are. Challenge what you think. Challenge what you love. Stop and say, what else could I do with my life? What are the stories I’m telling myself?
Once you find those, and break through those, there’s a world out there so large you couldn’t imagine.”
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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.
Resources:
- Learn more at https://flippengroup.com
- Read: https://www.amazon.com/Your-Third-Story-Author-Meant/dp/1532078013
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FlipFlippen
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/flipflippen
The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media
There is incredible potential that lies within each and every one of us to create positive change in our lives (and the lives of others) while achieving our dreams.
This is the Power of You!
