PREFACE:
In This article I focus on reasons why we don’t access all of our talent. Once again, it is very difficult to do justice to a topic in 500 words. To bring more clarity to this subject, let me add a few other issues that get in our way. One of the key points is confidence. I personally find it to be very difficult to deploy a new skill because I’m not comfortable enough with my ability to deploy that skill. Some people are more comfortable tapping into their underlying abilities than are others. This then creates a key point, attitude.
The attitude that allows us to tap into our talent, skills, and abilities is a double edged sword. Some people are over confident while others are under confident. Either way, if taken to an extreme, can have a very deleterious effect on our performance. Too much confidence allows us to wage battle before we are adequately prepared. Too little confidence keeps us out of the fray for so long that we are left with only the spoils of the competition. Finding the appropriate balance between over confidence and under confidence is a key skill for an effective leader.
What causes us to have the level of confidence we have? Our own unique set of experiences probably has more to do with our confidence than does anything else. Some of this is colored by our parents and how they reacted to our experiences beginning very early in our lives. Overly protective parents have a tendency to stifle confidence and limit our ability to take risks. Other parents may play a big role in us growing up to be big risk takers and having a belief that we cannot fail. During our teen years many will go through a period where the predominant thought is about getting what you want when you want it and consequences never enter the equation. Other teens will be much more cautious and will resist engaging in activities that are high risk.
As we age and mature all of our experiences tell us that success is dependent up our behaving in a certain way. Some people fear failure so much that they become paralyzed with that fear and end up failing because they never act. Some people actually become fearful of success because they so lack confidence in their own abilities that a successful endeavor may create an expectation that they repeat the performance and they are afraid they will not be able to sustain that performance level. Making the best of our opportunities is dependent upon our ability to
know ourselves and to understand why we do what we do. Unfortunately, way too many people really don’t understand 6 critical factors about themselves. These factors are:
1. How do I perceive and relate other people in my world?
2. How do I perceive and relate to the things and tasks that must be done in my world, the problems that stem from my attitudes about these things and tasks, and my interpretations of others attitudes about those things and tasks?
3. How do I perceive and relate to the information and systems in my world?
4. How do I perceive and relate to my own ability to accomplish actions of importance in my world?
5. How do I perceive and relate to my role in my personal and professional life?
6. How do I perceive and relate to my future?
Most of us don’t think about ourselves in these terms. Most of us have never been presented with these dimensions of our personal experience. But these 6 questions lay the ground work for what we believe and value. Ultimately, our ability to draw on the talent we have hinges upon these 6 questions. If I perceive other people as deceitful and full of ulterior motives, it will be hard for me to draw on all of the talent I have for building positive relationships with the people I work with. If I perceive people as being totally trustworthy and possessing the purest of motives I may needlessly open myself up to being taken advantage of by those that hold material possessions in higher regard than people. Having either extreme regarding my relationship with the people around me can keep me from adequately deploying the skills I may possess. Being trusting without being excessively and blindly trusting or being skeptical without being so negative about everyone else puts me in a place where I can build relationships that work.
We can examine the other 5 questions in much the same way. What emerges from that examination is the realization that balance is better than the extremes. We need to all search our own experiences and come to grips with who we are. I have done this and it has had some interesting affects on how I go about my personal and professional activities. One of the things I have learned about myself is that I am a very “neutral” person. I am not exceptionally enamored with things or ideas nor do I revile them. I see both things and ideas from a very utilitarian point of view. I do tend to be more people oriented but I do not find myself to either too trusting or too skeptical. I tend to accept people based on what I experience about them. Even people I have heard a great deal about before I meet them. Rather than accept what everyone says about the person I reserve my conclusions for my own experience. Not many people are so neutral on things and my experience is that some people believe I sit on the fence way too long and they wish I’d take a firm stand and take it now. I understand that my own preference is to take my actions based on my own collected data rather than based on what others have said.
Knowing what I know about myself allows me to better manage the way I go about my daily functions. When things need to be done in a hurry, I know my tendency is to put things off until I have the information I need to take confident action and I can check myself on that and step up the pace to meet deadlines and expectations. I didn’t always have this knowledge and not having it set me up for some hard lessons over the years. It has just been in the past several years that all of this information about me has come to my attention. Now I wish I had known it years ago. It would have made life so much easier.
Accessing More of Our Talent:
In my last article I discussed a few reasons why we don’t access all of the abilities we have and I promised to go into these reasons a little more deeply. So here is that additional information.
I stated that we don’t deliberately practice in a way that will fully develop the skills we need and we don’t practice enough. The truth is, most of us don’t like to practice at all, and we’d rather just play the game and hope for the best. But outstanding performers understand that practice is more than important; it’s essential to becoming a top performer. That is reality whether you are an NBA player or a sales professional.
Deliberate practice is a very specific type of practice where the activities are designed to hone specific skills that will be needed for success. It’s not the practice we too often do, which is work on a skill until we get bored and then do something else all while totally ignoring the opportunity for feedback from someone who knows what good performance really is.
I also mentioned that we don’t pay attention to feedback that will help us understand how well we are doing on the development of critical skills. We don’t like criticism so we block out the “bad news” we hear about our performance. We rationalize and make excuses and sometimes we even accuse the person who’s providing the feedback of being incompetent, mean, or just plain out of touch. Top performers pay very close attention to the criticism and look for ways to use that feedback to create more effective performances.
We also become biased towards some skills and against others. I use an analogy of a carpenter who is excellent with the saw but is not so fond of the screw driver. What kind of book shelf will he be able to make if he only uses the saw and never a screw driver. In our everyday world of dealing with problems, we are often guilty of trying the solution methods that we like the most even when that method might be inappropriate for the situation we are in.
What I have also discovered since is that we often allow our standards to be lowered. We want to have more fun so to cut work time we say that’s good enough. We believe we can’t afford it even when we know that poor quality always costs us more. We don’t know what we don’t know and too often we are happy in our ignorance. We say we’ll do it later when we know procrastination is a huge enemy of top performance. We get too emotionally involved in “the way things are.” Just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t make it the best way to do it. We are often afraid of success. What if they expect me to perform this well all the time? We make things too complicated and forget to master the simple things first. We lack persistence and give up too soon. We want to have all our ducks in a row before we start so we never get started because we can’t control our ducks. The desire for perfection can kill many quality efforts.
My next column will take a deeper look at each of these reasons for lowering our standards.
SUMMATION:
Knowing who we are and then engaging in deliberate practice on those skills that require more development is such a critical point. I want to encourage every reader to go back to the preface of this article and start asking yourself the 6 questions I pose there. Get to know yourself as well as you possibly can. In fact, as come up with your own analysis of you, share it with a trusted friend or colleague and ask them what they think. Do they think you are on target or are you missing something? Having intimate knowledge of how you relate to yourself and the world around you is critical to achieving all you possibly can.
Coming up with a personal success plan is also a good idea. When you know who you really are and you examine the areas where you could stand to do a little improving, creating a plan that includes strategies and tactics that can be practiced over time will allow you to make the progress you desire. And make no mistake, I don’t care how successful you are, you are not perfect.
There is always room for improvement. In fact, the only people who don’t need to improve are the ones who’ve already passed on.
As you work on your own personal success plan it might be helpful to enlist the help of another person. If you can afford a coach I would always recommend a coach. A coach is like a mirror for your improvement process. In the morning we groom ourselves and we usually do that by looking in the mirror. We are trying to achieve a certain look so we shave or put on makeup. We do our hair and get dressed in clothes to achieve the look. We check our progress and the final outcome by looking in a mirror. As we try to make personal improvements we have no mirror to gaze into to check our progress. We can look at the numbers and look at the fallout from our actions but we tend to be a little biased in our view.
A coach can serve as our mirror. The coach can give us feedback about what we are doing and how we are doing it. We can share out goals and objectives with the coach and the coach can tell us how close we are getting to the targets we’ve set. But whether you get a coach or you use a trusted friend or colleague, make sure you have someone who can give you the feedback you need. And then, don’t get mad at the coach or friend or colleague when they give you feedback that seems a little harsh. Think of everything you’ve ever accomplished in your life that you thought was worthwhile. How many of those accomplishments came easy? Did you have feedback as you did those things and was it always positive? Probably not!
0 Comments