New Jersey Governor Chris Christie staged a marathon press conference Thursday as he attempted to stem the political tide rising from Bridgegate, the George Washington Bridge traffic scandal ostensibly engineered by close Christie aides last September as payback against Ft. Lee, N.J.’s democratic mayor Mike Sokolich for his refusal to endorse Christie’s reelection bid.

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Telling a packed Statehouse audience in Trenton that he had no knowledge of the incident, Christie apologized then said he was “embarrassed and humiliated by the conduct of some of the people on my team…This is not the tone that I’ve set over the last four years in this building.”

While it may not be the tone he thought he was setting, all evidence suggests the opposite, because look at the results.  Would the Big Gov’s closest staff have undertaken any such action without what they considered to be, at the minimum, the implicit approval of their boss?

What does this have to do with running?  Well, nothing specifically, but everything in terms of tone and belief.  Governor Gastric Band’s staff believed in the in-your-face style of leadership their boss practiced, then simply acted in accordance with that belief.

In his book Elite Minds, Creating the Competitive Advantage Dr. Stan Beecham discusses how the belief in an outcome is predictive of same.  As he writes, “your brain is the software; your body the hardware… the mind is in control of the body”. Life, in that sense, is a series of self-fulfilling prophecies, both positive and negative. If you don’t think you can do something, you are right 100% of the time. (more…)