Imparting practical and effective wisdom for improving leadership skill and workplace performance, Henry Cloud is the author of more than 20 books, including the four-million selling Boundaries series.

Here are my notes on Henry Cloud’s session, which was fantastic just like his message two years ago on three kinds of people .

As leaders, you are people who take charge and do stuff.

Leaders take the stewardship God has given them and exert their energy in that space to lead people and take ownership of that.

The hardest thing a leader has to be in charge of is himself.

Some leaders get results, and some don’t.

Some in the middle of here to there hit a block in the middle and start to stumble and fall because they can’t lead themselves.

How does a downward spiral of a leader happen?

The leaders who can stop a spiral: they think, feel, and behave differently than the ones who spiral out.

They put the smart guys who were pessimists, and the no-nothings who were optimistic, and the no-things out performed by 53%. The ones who believe they can will win every single time. The biggest factor on whether you will get from here to there is whether or not you believe it can be done. The number one factor is “do you believe that it can happen.” All leaders believe it can happen when they start, but then something happens—they get into a circumstance (and it will happen to you) where they become out of control (that is, not of their own doing—they are out of control of the circumstances behind them, and that begins to change their brain: learned helplessness).

We are designed by God to be in a cause and effect universe. But when we find ourselves in a circumstance where there are things we cannot control that are affecting us. What happens to the brain in a situation that you can’t control? It begins to change—in some predictable ways. The three Ps.

The brain begins to change in the ways it interprets everything around you.

The Spiral

1. Personal

The brain begins to interpret that in a personal way. “Why didn’t that sale happen? I’m no good.” Or a failed capital campaign. Or whatever. You interpret in a way that “I’m not good enough.” Every leader does stuff that doesn’t work. But the “dummies” don’t take it personally. They say “I guess they weren’t ready, or I need to tweak the presentation.” But they don’t conclude it’s because “I’m not good enough.” And they go on to succeed.

But for those who take it personally, the brain begins to shut down, and goes to the next P.

2. Pervasive

They then generalize from this. “My whole life sucks.” It goes to a different region of the brain and everything goes bad. Then there’s another event. You get an email that’s critical. It reinforces the first to Ps. Then to the third p:

3. Permanent

You think it’s permanent. Once the brain begins to go into this state, even the best performers can get here, but there’s a way out.

Science and the Bible always agree in a place called reality. If they’re not agreeing, you have goofy science or whacky Christians, and there’s no shortage of either.

We see David in the Bible going here. We see great leaders here.

When your brain is going negative, the things you can do to change things—you don’t do them anymore.

How do you get out of it? You have to reverse the three Ps.

Reversing the Spiral

1. Log them and dispute them

Write down the negative thoughts. 99% of will be absolutely false. Then you find the themes, and start to dispute them. You dispute it with God’s word. “What do you mean you aren’t good enough? You are my workmanship (Eph 2:10).” There is a difference between your brain and your mind. Your brain is a physiological organ that can give off false signals.

Dispute the personal stuff, dispute the pervasive stuff. One client might be mad at you, but another one loves you. It’s not pervasive. When you begin to look at the whole picture, life changes. Your life is a movie, not a scene. Every great movie has crisis scenes in it. It’s the people that see it as a scene that make it through. And it’s not permanent because there’s a hope for you.

2. Get back in control

What caused this problem? The loss of control. Write two columns. What you can control and what you can’t control. Obsessive about what you can’t control as hard as you can—for five minutes. Then take action on the stuff you can control.

Some passengers said about an airline: “It’s like they hate us. It’s like they don’t want us to be here.”

Dispute the negative noise and get back in control of what you can do.

3. Connect

Your brain turns to a cesspool of stress if it is focused on things it can’t control. The brain runs on oxygen, glucose, and relationships. So you must connect.

The opposite of bad is love. You don’t start trying to do good to feel better. You connect—relationships. Once you start to feel good in relationship, you forget about whether you are doing good or bad, and you begin to solve problems.

Study: when they connected, the brain changed.

Connect, connect, connect. When you feel the spiral starting, connect and your brain will change.

A can-do attitude is something that will give you confidence. What God wants for you is a “find-a-way” thinking.

Vijay Govindarajan is a Top 50 Management Thinker and Professor, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

Ongoing operations are at odds with innovation.

Strategy is not about celebrating the past but leadership in the future. And the world keeps changing in the future. So if you want to be a leader in the future, you need to adapt to change. Which is innovation. So strategy is innovation.

Manage the present, selectively abandon the past, create the future. Most organizations over focus on box 1, and think they are doing strategy.

Competition for the present is about efficiency; competition for the future is about innovation. Both are important. So how do you create the future while maintaining the present?

Innovation is more than ideas. People mistake innovation as creativity. Innovation is commercializing creativity. Creativity is the idea; innovation is commercializing the idea. Innovation takes massive work. The idea is only 1% of the process. The bulk of the challenge lays in the execution.

innovation = idea + leader + team + plan

“Effective innovative leaders are subversives fighting the system. “ “Making innovation happen is not just the job of the leader. It’s not just about breaking all the rules. You have to work with the bureaucracy. The role of the leader is not to subvert but to harness the core capabilities of the core business.”

Innovation killers: 1. Assume that innovation can happen inside the performance engine. The performance engine is built for one purpose: to promote efficiency. But innovation is the opposite of efficiency. It is about flexibility. 2. Not constitute the team and the plan correctly.

You need to separate out the team and have them devoted to innovation outside the framework of regular operations. Innovation is a non-linear shift. It’s not just an improvement on the existing model; it’s a creation of a new model altogether.

NY Times digital should not be thought of as a newspaper on a digital platform. You have to create a distinct team. This means you can have different processes, metrics, culture, people. Almost assume you are a Silicon Valley startup. But must be linked to the performance engine, because it has assets that can be leveraged (100 years of digital archives, etc.—a SV startup cannot even imagine having that). The dedicated team is the new logic; the performance engine is the dominant logic. When they interact, there is difficulty!

You have to protect the performance engine and plant seeds. If you want a tree five years from now, you have to start today—not in five years.

Conflicts are not bad in organizations. Conflicts are healthy, provided you know how to manage them.

“Innovation is unmanageable chaos.” Innovation is non-routine. Ongoing operations are predictable; innovations are unpredictable. So you have to go about planning differently.

Zero-based planning. In ongoing operations, you are responding to clear signals. In Box 3, the future (innovation), you are responding to weak signals and non-linear shifts, because box 3 is about the future, and the future is less clear. Weak signals: don’t know size of the market, what the customer wants, etc. So the job in box three is to learn to resolve unknowns. In box 1 you can plan, because you have strong signals. In box 3, it’s very hard to plan because you have weak signals. So it’s about testing assumptions. Spend a little, learn a lot. Low cost experimentation.

How do you track and judge whether an innovation is working and you should keep investing in it? A performance engine you can evaluate on the basis of present results. It’s a known system. Box 3 is an experiment. You can’t evaluate it on the basis of short-term financial results, for it’s a bet about the future. So how do you evaluate? On the basis of the ability to learn. Can you set up your hypothesis or assumptions? Can you set up low cost experiments to test those hypotheses? The way you evaluate the performance of a leader here is their ability to conduct low-cost experiments and continuously learn.

Joseph Grenny is Co-Founder of Vital Smarts and a best-selling author of many books.

I’ve never mentioned him on the blog for some reason, but Joseph Grenny is one of my favorite authors. His book Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High is one of the best I’ve read. Very clear, profound, and wise. And his book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Editionshould be required reading for every Christian.

Today in his message he talked about mastering the skill of influence. Here is the chief point that stood out to me: When we want to influence people, we often focus just on motivation. Motivation is indeed a big part of change. But ability is just as crucial. In fact, most people who become effective actually start with ability and then move to motivation.

Hence, helping people develop skills is an essential part of influence.

The most effective way to develop a skill is through deliberate practice. “If you and I want more influence, we need to involve more people in deliberate practice.” In deliberate practice, the practice setting must approximate the real world; practice is done in small bites with intense focus for brief periods, and the person receives immediate feedback.

“You want to change the world? Learn how to change behavior.” And you help change behavior not simply through motivation, but through helping people develop skills.

I really enjoyed Hybels’ interview with Mark Burnett, four-time Emmy award winner and executive producer of the Apprentice, Survivor, and the recent Bible series on the History Channel.

Here’s the best quote:

“Making Christian movies or shows doesn’t give you the permission to make it crappy.”

And here’s how Hybels ended the day yesterday, which was excellent (note: this is slightly paraphrased):

Whether you are a lawyer, in advertising, in construction, in film, or whatever you do: Do it for God. Make the difference you can with the skills and talents he has given you. You only have the time now to do something beyond yourself and that will serve others.