Catch Yourself on The Flip Side
Before I went away with the band to record our album, I asked a couple musician friends if they had any tips. One guy said, "Do it until you get it right." Another guy said, "Eat lots of bacon and chew lots of tobacco." How that is relevant I have no idea. But the advice that I found the most interesting was, "If you make a mistake that sounds good, keep the mistake." It turns out he was right. In one song, right before the climax of a long crescendo, one of the guitarists hit and sustained the wrong note - a really dissonant note - that was clearly out of place. But it sounded great. It's almost as if that ugly note announced the coming of climax. On another song, I was late on a bass cue by a fraction of a second. You can clearly hear I missed it, but the song as a whole is really lazy, so it actually sounded better that I wasn't totally on rhythm.
When you break it down, what we were doing was allowing our mistakes to become assets. But mistakes and weaknesses don't usually play out like this in real life. If we have something holding us back, a personality trait or behavior, it's rare for these constraints to magically become advantageous. We have to identify and deal with these constraints, or as Flip Flippen would say, we have to "flip" our negative thoughts and behaviors into positive action. That's what Flip's book, The Flip Side is hear to help us do.
The first thing we always have to do is identify where the problem lies. On a couple songs, we played them like we had always played them, but when we listened to the playback, we could hear something wasn't right. We listened and listened, and for a while, couldn't quite identify what was wrong. On one song, it turned out to be one single guitar note (out of about 32) that was clashing with what the other guitar was playing. For months we didn't recognize that note as a problem. That's sort of how we all exist with our constraints.
We all have skills and talents that get us to a certain point, but it's usually the other things that are "far more reliable indicators of our success." The other things are constraints, and we need to learn how to identify them like the band recognized that bad note. Luckily, through 30 years of teaching, coaching, and psychotherapy, Flip Flippen has discovered that we humans generally fall into one of ten constraint types. Some people are "Bulldozers". Bulldozers, as you might imagine, are too dominant. They tend to flatten objections and ignore opinions that don't match their own. Other people might be "Marshmallows". These people are overly nurturing and shy away from conflict at the expense of their own happiness. Some of us (me) might be "Quick Draws" who are impulsive - our poor self-control causes us to act before we think.
OK, so now what. We've identified three of the ten constraint types...what now? Well, that's exactly what this book is for; it helps with the "now what." After Flip helps us identify our constraints, "builds a plan to help 'flip' that weakness into a newfound strength." To put is simply, The Flip Side will get us over our self-limiting behaviors, replace them with the good stuff, and makes us way happier, more productive, and will allow us to do things we didn't think we could do. Flip will "flip" you.
If you want more, go check out an excerpt from The Flip Side on the 800-CEO-READ Excerpts Blog.
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