The One Truth: Elevate Your Mind Unlock Your Power Heal Your Soul

| Author : Jon Gordon, 2023

What’s It All About?

We aren’t meant to feel negative emotions, like anxiety, insecurity, or chronic stress most of time. Instead, we’re meant to live with hope, clarity, power, purpose, and confidence. But how are we supposed to achieve this? Jon Gordon delves deep into this question in his book The One Truth: Elevate Your Mind, Unlock Your Power, Heal Your Soul. Jon is the bestselling author of fourteen other books and by the time you’re reading this book report, I’m confident this will be his fifteenth bestseller!

In The One Truth, Jon offers many insights on how to elevate your mind and live life to the fullest. He distills it all into one truth: our state of mind—and all the experiences that come with it—is influenced by our oneness and our separateness with the world around us. When we’re separated, we feel disconnected. This hinders our communications, our relationships, and the overall way we show up for our teams or others in our lives. On the other hand, when we’re grounded in who we are, we can forge stronger connections and feel more at peace with who we are!

In The One Truth, Jon explores this idea and shares how learning to see life through a new lens can help you find more confidence, elevate your mind, and change the way you show up in your leadership and relationships. The book is broken into three easily-digestible sections, and guides readers through a short but filling journey toward discovering “the one truth.”

Favorite Quote

“Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to believe it, especially when negative thoughts are lies that distort the truth in order to discourage and divide you”

Biggest Takeaway

From time to time, all of us get negative thoughts. When we find ourselves faced with negative thoughts, it’s often driven by anxiety and depression—and when we don’t know why we’re feeling this way, it can make us feel even worse. In The One Truth, Jon offers the important reminder that the negative thoughts are not coming from you. After all, it’s not like we wake up in the morning and decide to feel anxious, stressed, or even depressed.

Bonus Information

I love when a book includes actionable information, like Jon does with his action plan at the end of The One Truth. With this action plan and ideas from implementation, The One Truth isn’t just a book you finish and set aside—it’s a valuable tool you can use your change your mind and your life.

Reviewed by: Trevor Blondeel, September 26, 2023

At Manufacturing Greatness, Trevor Blondeel works with manufacturers to connect the top to the shop. If you’re ready to improve your own organization, contact Trevor to learn how Manufacturing Greatness can help you build stronger leaders and develop a dynamic, high-performing workplace.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website