Our first coaching app is turning ten years old this year! I’m proud to say JMA’s MindMastery app was the first transformational, change technology app in the marketplace. Back in 2012, there were data-driven apps – apps that allowed you to record your activities and feelings – but ours was the first designed to facilitate systemic behavioral change by disrupting your habitual patterns in order to retrain and re-wire your brain.
Are You Self-Aware?
The MindMastery app builds four key areas: self-awareness, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and resilience. The free version of the app targets building self-awareness and mindfulness, areas that I find people are particularly lacking in. Most people think they are self-aware, but they really aren’t. When someone is self-aware, they are able to see their own patterns of behaviors and motives. They understand how their emotions and actions impact those around them, for better or for worse. They can instantly identify their feelings, emotions and moods and understand why they are happening. They can recognize their own triggers, feel confident about their strengths, and own up to their limitations.
Self-awareness researcher and expert Dr. Tasha Eurich says there are two types of people:
- Those who think they are self-aware (95% of all people).
- Those who actually are self-aware (10-15% of all people.)
That means 85-90% of us don’t see ourselves clearly. The MindMastery app helps us build the requisite self-awareness, mindfulness and emotional intelligence for change to happen, for you to level up your leadership and to navigate the world more effectively. And the “full” version MindMastery app also facilitates firing and wiring new neuropathways and building resilience, of which self-awareness is an important component.
How Does MindMastery Work?
There are two versions of the MindMastery app. The free version, which is available to anyone, supports you in building your own self-awareness and mindfulness by recording your moods and thoughts. If you have attended our virtual MindMastery workshop or are working with a JMA coach, you will use the private (but still free) “full” version of the app as a supplement to one-on-one coaching after the workshop.
The app is completely confidential. Even when working with clients, our coaches cannot go into your profile to see your entries until you send it to us. We built this app thoughtfully and securely to support our clients. Our apps fully respect your privacy, and we do not gather your personal information to share with anyone. In fact, there is no financial benefit to the company at all; it’s truly an altruistic app built and delivered to exponentially increase the speed of transformational change in our clients. In today’s world where apps have a reputation of reporting and spying on you, we’re proud to say that MindMastery is no Big Brother!
Haven’t Heard of our App?
I’m not surprised. Our app isn’t well-known. It wasn’t built as a lead generator for business, or an advertising platform. Its purpose is to help our clients get the changes they want more effectively and exponentially quicker. It’s elegant, simple and uses best practices from neuro-science and psychology. It’s our proprietary change technology that we call our rocket fuel for exponentially faster client change.
The private version of the app that comes with the workshop is a much more robust version than the public one and actually impacts neuropathway change in your brain. This is where you really rebuild yourself and your underlying operating system so that you can:
- Feel lighter and more in control.
- Learn to pivot out of triggered emotional states very quickly.
- Bring down your reactivity, so you can respond, instead of reacting.
- Disrupt old habitual old patterns and rewire your brain.
- Weaken your amygdala response (the part of the brain that oversees our fight-or-flight response).
- Strengthen your pre-frontal cortex engagement (the part of the brain that is our executive functioning or rational thinking).
- Think with clarity and make better decisions.
- Have more energy.
Most people don’t manage their thoughts and moods, but instead let their thoughts and moods run their behavior. This app, in part, will help you start to be aware of the running commentary you have in your brain day in and day out that self-sabotages your performance.
Working out the Brain
I love to use the analogy of “taking our brains to the gym” because that’s what we are doing with our executive coaching, this app and even my just-released book, Leading Lightly. We spend time at the gym exercising our bodies, but where we should be putting in more time is rebuilding ourselves from the inside out – where it really matters, “working out” our brains. When you are in control of your thoughts, moods and behaviors, you, and you alone, are in control of your results. You are no longer the result of your life experience – your history, family of origin and childhood. All of those old habitual patterns can be retrained in your brain, and research shows that you are never too old for change to happen!
Research also shows the brain is constantly rebuilding itself. We now know that the brain is capable of reorganizing pathways, creating new connections, and in some cases, even creating new neurons – a concept called neuroplasticity. But it also works the opposite way for a negative double whammy. For every moment that you stay in a triggered state (i.e. anger, anxiety, sadness, overwhelm, etc.), your brain is actually deepening and strengthening those pathways. That’s how negative habits and patterns form and maintain themselves.
By staying in that triggered state, you cause your brain to strengthen the exact neural pathways you want to weaken. You aren’t your best self, you aren’t performing optimally, and you don’t feel good.
But here’s the good news: in the same way your brain formed those original patterns that you now think is your personality, you can create new and improved patterns. This time it will be the patterns you consciously choose, patterns that are effective for success. Your brain is capable of endless potential and capacity to grow and to change at any age, so it will build new patterns for anything you repeat with motivation and with sustained interest. The powerful difference is that you can do this consciously instead of unconsciously.
Introducing the Accountability App
We are now introducing another app to the JMA family, and it’s all about accountability. If you have taken our Accountability Mirror workshop or simply read this blog, you know our definition of accountability is wildly different than Webster’s. Most people feel accountability is doing what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it. But from my perspective, that’s minimum accountability. From my executive coaching perspective, I’m coaching leaders to be accountable for their thoughts, moods, behaviors, and of course, their results – and the results of their team.
So, we built an app that exponentially changes the probability of getting to an outcome or a goal you want quicker with less stress and a higher rate of success. We do that by having you build a foundation by staying in alignment with your thoughts, moods and behaviors so you actually create the outcomes you want. The app supports all of the components of uber-accountability.
How Accountability Works
In our app, you enter professional or personal goals, using the SMART goal framework:
S = Is your goal Specific?
M = Is your goal Measurable?
A = Is your goal Attractive?
R = Is your goal Reasonable?
T = Is your goal Timely?
You then identify the types of actions you will take to achieve your result. You then list mood states, emotions or feelings you will need to have throughout the process to achieve your outcome. You document thoughts you need to have in order to achieve your goal. Over the next two weeks, you will take a few minutes before you go to bed each day to enter in the app whether you actually had the behaviors, moods, and thoughts consistent with those needed to reach your goal. The app provides a notification to remind you to do this every evening.
Remember the power of the brain? By training your brain to have the right mental state for success, you will get to your goals faster. In fact, 90% of what creates failure is your mindset. It’s the thinking that throws you off, it’s not actually not doing the behavior. This app helps you identify the thoughts and moods you need to have in order to create the desired behavior. It helps you identify your underlying operating system and become aware of the ways you could be self-sabotaging yourself.
Want access to the new Accountability app? If you have taken our Accountability workshop, you are eligible to access it. Just fill out our Contact Us form, and indicate that you have taken the workshop and want access to the app, and we’ll handle the rest! Haven’t taken the workshop yet? Sign up for our next virtual session.
Download JMA’s MindMastery iOS App
Download JMA’s Accountability iOS App
Download JMA’s MindMastery Android App
Download JMA’s Accountability Android App