The Reset Mindset: How to Get Unstuck, Focus on What Matters Most, and Reach Your Goals Faster
Penny Zenker
Amplify Publishing Group (September 2024)

“If that’s how you’ve always done it, it’s probably wrong.”  Charles Kettering

There are many reasons why people resist change. James O’Toole suggests that the strongest resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom. Warren Buffett believes that bad habits are “too light to notice until they become too heavy to change.” As I began to read The Reset Mindset, I was again reminded of these observations. At best, changes really are inconveniences; at worst, they are threats.

In the Introduction, Penny Zenker recalls when she and a friend decided to go skydiving.  Excitement turned to fear and then terror as it became clear that “one way or another, I was going to be leaving this plane.”

What happened? “I took what I call a Reset Moment. A purposeful pause. A moment to rethink, reconnect, and be intentional. I needed to reset my mind and body. I took a deep breath and allowed my heart rate to slow, even just a little bit. Then I  could take a mental step back and reassess the situation.  I remembered that the entire point of doing this was to challenge myself, expand my comfort zone, and experience something new and breathtaking. I could enjoy this ride…if I chose to.” Then she jumped into what proved to be an unexpected epiphany: “Seeing the earth from 10,000 feet changes the way you look at your whole life.”

Zenker examines the three steps of the Reset Practice in terms of several commonly used Mental Models that illustrate its simplicity, practicality, and impact. Here’s the first:

1, Step Back

o Apply Hanlon’s Razor (“never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity”) to avoid jumping to conclusions about others’ intentions

o Recognize the Sunk-Costs Fallacy to avoid continuing on a path just because you’ve already invested in it.

o Review SWOT analysis to help a person or organization to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning.

o Use the Five Whys to get to the root cause of a problem and ensure the team aligns around the problem to work collaboratively toward the solution.

o Choose the opposite with Inversion Thinking. Challenge your current perspective by selecting the opposite. It helps in identifying potential problems and avoiding blind spots in decision-making.

The other two steps are “Get Perspective” and “Realign.”

Once again, Penny Zenkder provides a wealth of information, insights, and counsel to help prepare her readers to make much better decisions and help others to do so. Whatever their size and nature may be, ALL organizations need better decisions made at all levels and in all areas throughout the given enterprise.

It is impossible to exaggerate the potential value of the material in this book.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The Reset Mindset. First, highlight key passages Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and whatever you have learned that will be most helpful. Pay special attention to head’s-up alerts at the beginning and transition comments at the conclusion of each chapter.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite your frequent reviews of key material later.