Success Training,Life Skills,Personal Development.

The Courage to Be Brilliant

The Courage to Be Brilliant

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…We ask ourselves, `Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.” —Marianne Williamson

The most responsible — yet most challenging — thing to do is to face up to your natural talents. It is an honor to have such blessings. Do not waste them. Step up to the potential inherent in your talents and find ways to develop your strengths. Be true to yourself by becoming more of who you really are.

This advice is easy to give and difficult to practice. It is easier when working with a trained professional coach. Working with your coach can make it easier for you to identify your talents and strengths. There are also a number of online self-assessments available to help. Once your five top strengths are identified, you can examine how they show up in your life.

It is a process of a few steps back, a few steps forward, and learning as you go. It is not the same as book learning. The only way to learn about your strengths is to act, learn, refine, and then act, learn, refine. Open yourself to feedback. This means you must be strong and courageous. Personal development is not for sissies.

Discovering your true strengths is the path towards improvement and success. When you pay attention to your deficits and try to overcome them, you are placing emphasis on becoming what you are not. You wind up living a second-rate version of someone else’s life rather than a world-class version of your own.

Have a Great Week!

Debunking the Talent Myth!!!

Categories: Leadership, Careers, Coaching, Change, Goals & Motivation

Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.

What’s needed, specifically?

Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.

In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the economy’s overwhelming demands. Your leaders can’t go it alone. You can’t, either.

Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. In fact, there may be no such thing as natural talent. It’s certainly not something you want to rely upon to help solve current problems.

Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—and the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.

“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do,” according to Fortune Senior  Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).

Crisis or Opportunity?

The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it. The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?

According to Colvin, managers often redirect people’s careers based on slender evidence that they have talent (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, we don’t give ourselves the same opportunity. We’ll try something new, and if it doesn’t come naturally or we don’t immediately excel, we conclude we have no talent for it.

We abandon pursuit. We never give ourselves the chance to practice and make progress. We don’t like the feeling of discomfort that comes from doing something poorly, so we don’t hang in there. Scientific evidence, however, is beginning to show that our definition of talent is wrong. In fact, “talent” may not mean anything at all.

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before their subjects began intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians and chess players.

Is Talent Irrelevant?

Such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist, but they do suggest it may be irrelevant.

The concept of talent is especially troublesome in business. We label people and then assign expectations, some of which are unrealistic. When people are fast-tracked or deemed executive material, we assume they have special gifts. Worse, we fail to adequately emphasize the importance of  continuous training and coaching. Instead, we rely on their “natural gifts.”

Identifying these gifts has been extremely elusive. In fact, some business giants actually gave little early indication that they would become great.

Jack Welch, named by Fortune as the 20th century’s manager of the century, showed no particular passion for business, even into his mid-20s.

Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt were average employees at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, with little evidence they would go on to become CEOs of Microsoft and GE before age 50.

In this age of genomic research, there should no longer be any question as to what is—and isn’t—innate. If a talent is innate, scientists should be able to identify the gene for it, and no progress has been made on this front.

Talent or Hard Work?

We can safely draw the conclusion that there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone. Many high-performing executives will tell you they don’t rely on their innate talents as much as their hard-earned skills. 

CEOs like A.G. Lafley of P&G and GE’s Immelt have said that being forced to manage through crises early in their careers enhanced their abilities in ways that were critical to becoming CEOs. They wouldn’t have achieved their status without surviving the storms that gave them hands-on practice.

Certain practices can make our experiences especially productive:

• Coaching helps.
• Receiving feedback allows us to fine-tune our skills.
• Working in a safe learning environment is essential.

Workplaces encourage practice and development, and mistakes should be viewed as learning opportunities. You also need to clearly define and develop a plan for achieving the abilities you wish to hone, including a measurable time frame. This will turbo-charge your performance and improve your chances of success.

10,000 Hours or 10 Years

Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for 10,000 hours of practice to attain expertise in his book Outliers (Little, Brown & Co., 2008):

“The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 10 years, if you think about four hours a day.”

Almost all child prodigies in music, sports, chess and the arts seem to put in 10,000 hours before they attain expertise and produce significant results.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by Anders Ericsson, Charness and Feltovich, et al, compiles scientific studies to prove the point in a wide variety of fields. The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers “whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming” are nearly always made, not born.

Many of us have already put in more than a decade of doing what we do. The question is whether we’re practicing the right things, in the right way. Are we designing deliberate practice that actually develops the specific skills we need to make progress toward specific results? Or, to use a golf analogy, are you going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls the wrong way, for hours at a time?

What Is Deliberate Practice?

Anders Ericsson and his scientific colleagues emphasize the importance of deliberate practice, which isn’t what most of us think of when applying the term to sports or music education. In fact, our habitual use of the term in these domains may prevent us from applying it correctly to the business realm.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements:

• It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with the help of a teacher, coach or expert.
• It can be repeated frequently.
• Feedback on results is continuously available.
• It’s highly demanding mentally.
• It isn’t much fun and entails hard work.

If you think you’ve outgrown the need for a teacher or coach, it’s time to challenge this assumption. A business coach can see things a manager cannot and is trained to deliver feedback in a way that’s inaccessible to most managers.

Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, you cannot choose the best practice activities.  Most of us lack the knowledge we need to design our own practice programs, and we cannot realistically provide objective observations and feedback to ourselves. As stunt people like to say, “don’t try this at home.” Hire a coach who can properly stretch you beyond your current abilities and help you move out of your comfort zones. Otherwise, human nature dictates that you’re likely to spend your time practicing what you already know how to do.

According to Noel Tichy, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at the University of Michigan School of Business, our progress depends on leaving our comfort zone to enter the learning zone, where skills and abilities are just out of reach. We must force ourselves to stay in the latter, even as we make changes.

Why We Avoid Hard Work

Deliberate practice is, above all else, an effort to focus and concentrate. Recognizing unsatisfactory elements of performance is difficult and uncomfortable. When you try your hardest to perform better, you place enormous strain on your mental abilities.

Deliberate practice, in fact, can be viewed as an antonym to fun. Instead of doing something at which we excel, we intentionally work on areas where we have deficits—over and over again. After each repetition, a coach can tell us exactly where to focus so we can repeat these skills yet again.

Obviously, if the activities that require practice were easy and fun, everyone would do them. But in reality, most people won’t practice or persist long enough to improve. This is good news if you’re willing to do what most people won’t. It’s the reason you’re more likely to keep your job and thrive in this recession.

What About Passion?

Talent is not what determines success at developing high-level capacities. Rather, those who care the most will rise to the top. Exceptional performance depends on what we decide to do with our lives and the passion that drives us.

One of the most purchased articles from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 piece on motivation that explains our three main drives:

1. Achievement
2. Power
3. A sense of community and desire to help others

No matter your driving force, you have to care deeply enough to work hard to become exceptional.

Nothing can make you endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless you’re  carried by an intrinsic compulsion to do so.

But allowing people to follow their intrinsic drives and work on projects of their own choosing is not something most organizations tolerate. In their fervent application of solely extrinsic motivations, organizations may actually prevent people from developing their passionate abilities.

Talent Is Never Enough

In Talent Is Never Enough: Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent, (Thomas Nelson, 2007), leadership expert John C. Maxwell suggests talent is “often overrated and frequently misunderstood.” He  advises readers to build their strengths to become a “talent-plus person,” defined by the following tenets:

• Belief lifts your talent.
• Initiative activates your talent.
• Focus directs your talent.
• Preparation positions your talent.
• Practice sharpens your talent.
• Perseverance sustains your talent.
• Character protects your talent.

Even if you hold onto the notion that you’ll always survive because of your innate talent, you must still prepare, practice and persist. The scientific research is in, and it’s conclusive. Hard work—not talent—contributes to high performance.

Happy Father’s Day!

Father’s Day is celebrated all over the world today. Honor the Father in your life today. For all the single Moms that have to fill the void for the Father…Happy Father’s Day to you too. Happy Father’s Day to my Dad…that I lost to cancer 5 years ago.

Thank You.
Lynn Lane

On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs – Dave Grossman

After you read this you will know if you are one of the Sheep, Wolves or Sheepdogs.

On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs – Dave Grossman

By LTC (RET) Dave Grossman, author of “On Killing.”

The following is an excerpt from On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs by Dave Grossman

Go to the link at the bottom of the page for the complete article.

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me:

“Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.” This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another. Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin’s egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers, and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful.? For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

“Then there are the wolves,” the old war veteran said, “and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.” Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

“Then there are sheepdogs,” he went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.”

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed

Complete Article—>Here

If you find yourself with the sheep…please hang with the sheepdogs!

Lynn Lane

Linking action to success.

Brian Tracy – Impatience

I posted a blog a few weeks back about impatience. I used the example of how some karate students are always in a hurry to earn their black belt.

Well…here is Brian Tracy, a true mentor of mine. He does a wonderful job on this video about impatience.

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Til Next Time.

Linking Action To Success –> Lane Resources Inc.

Take Two Mentors And Call Me In The Morning.

Two mentors or one? Choosing a mentor or success coach is not like ordering coffee with two sugars. One mentor at a time is the perfect way to get more things done.

As you have heard before…too many cooks spoil the soup. They all have different ways of cooking and different ways of getting things done. Mentors are no different.

How many mentors do you have? I put this question to Kevin Hogan last year and he said, “one mentor at a time” is all people need. Kevin went on to explain that if you played baseball you wouldn’t want 3 of the best coaches trying to coach you. Reason being…they all coach in a different way.

I think of Kevin Hogan as my mentor/coach for the past few years now. I put him right up there with Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy and people that know me will tell you that is saying so much coming from me.

I can relate to what Kevin Hogan was saying. I teach Kenpo Karate and a blend of other martial arts but, I teach my way. I know Instructors that teach the same style and same techniques, but they teach them differently. I see it all the time.

Kevin Hogan’s E-zine “Coffee With Kevin” was on video last week and he addressed the same question with the same answer. (Kevin is consistent.)

I think you should pick your coach/mentor the same way you should pick your martial arts Instructor. Here we go…..

1. Don’t just go for the hype. I had a karate teacher once that said, “ I can kill you 6 times before you hit the ground.” I didn’t study with him very long…his business went under too.

2. Find the people that have a track record that can deliver.

3. Find the mentor or coach that will make you work. You have to put in the work. I coach a group of people that ask me to push them hard every week…that is what they signed on for.

4. Find a coach that cares about people.

Thanks!

R. Lynn Lane