Posted on July 5th, 2010
R. Lynn Lane
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:
- Achievement
- Power
- 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.
Posted on June 3rd, 2010
R. Lynn Lane
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.
Posted on April 15th, 2010
R. Lynn Lane
Broken Bones, MMA Fights and Delayed Goals.
This week a client of mine broke his leg and delayed a major goal for his first fight later this month. He was in a MMA conditioning session that I teach 3 times a week.
I’ve been training and teaching Martial Arts for over 12 years now and have seen bruises, sprains and some cracked bones….some were mine. But, this week I witnessed an ugly break of a 26 year old guy’s left ankle.
Think about your left ankle on the outside of the foot where the leg joins the foot…that bone is the fibula and we heard it snap when he hit the floor. He just stepped in a awkward motion and we heard it….SNAP.
The sad thing is he had a fight he was training for and the weigh in was only 3 weeks away. That fight was a goal he has been working toward for a few months. Now that goal is gone. Yes…he will be back and ready to go again after several months of healing and rehab, but the moment he worked for has passed.
Think about some goals that you have been working toward and had a major setback that prevented you from achieving that goal. Did you give-up that goal or did you get back on that horse and learn to master your stick-to-it skills?
Life will beat us up at times and leave us feeling like we may never have a victory. I believe that the more you show the Universe that you are willing to take a stand for your own self, your own way and you plan to have a victory in some form or fashion, the Universe will start to help you out.
Hard work and preparation are a must! But, you also must test yourself by taking the actions needed. Some people will work and prepare to only do nothing because of the fear of not winning.
Set those audacious goals that to most seem out of reach and take action. Because, if you never reach that goal you will still achieve so much more from being in the fight.
Spectators have fun too, but not as much as the ones that are in the mix!
1. Keep training yourself.
2. Fight a good fight.
3. Learn from the people you train with.
4. Life will beat you-up at times
5. Life can be a great coach.
Thanks for your time.
Lane Resources Inc. © 2010
R. Lynn Lane
Posted on April 1st, 2010
R. Lynn Lane
How Long Will It Take To Get My Blackbelt?
If I had a dollar for each time I was asked that question….I’d have a few bucks by now.
Most people are always stuck with how long a thing will take to achieve or to receive.
When I have a new karate student walk in my door 9 out of 10 will ask that question. How long will it take for me to get my blackbelt?
I usually say….. As long as it takes.
Can you imagine if people walked up to Thomas Edison and ask… “How long will it take you to get that light bulb thing worked out?” I’m sure Edison would have responded … Until it is done!
Human nature has a tendency to want things ..NOW.
I can understand that train of thought, we are all wired to do things as fast as we can and to fill our needs as fast as we can.
If you look back through history, humans had times when they didn’t know what to expect day to day. They did know that life was short and they had a need to conserve energy because their needs may not be meet for long periods of time.
Am I saying that people are lazy? For the most part…..Yes. Again…we are wired that way.
But, that is not altogether a bad thing!
If you look at most of the advanced technology over the past 50 years, it came about because we wanted things …Now!
Think about all the things in your life that are now faster, better and bigger and have changed over the past few years.
But, never forget….. some of the things you work toward will take as long as it takes.
That will apply to Business, Relationships, Fitness, Education and many other areas in life.
Learn -> Apply -> Learn -> Apply -> -> -> It Never Ends.
Lane Resources Inc. © 2010
R. Lynn Lane
Posted on February 6th, 2010
R. Lynn Lane
By Barry Joe McDonagh.
I’ve often observed that many people’s top-ranking fear is not death but having to speak in public. The joke is that these people would rather lie in a casket at their own funeral than give the eulogy.
Public speaking for people who suffer from panic attacks or general anxiety often becomes a major source of worry, possibly weeks or even months before the speaking event is to occur.
These speaking engagements don’t necessarily have to be the traditional “on a podium” events; they can be as simple as an office meeting where the individual is expected to express an opinion or give verbal feedback.
In this case, the fear centers on having a panic attack while speaking. The individuals fear being incapacitated by the anxiety and hence unable to complete what they’re saying. They imagine fleeing the spotlight and having to make all kinds of excuses later for their undignified departure -out the office window . . .
This differs slightly from the majority of people who fear public speaking. With others, their fear tends to revolve around going blank while speaking or feeling uncomfortable under the spotlight of their peers. The jitters or nerves are, of course, a problem for this group as well-but they’re unfamiliar with that debilitating threat, the panic attack, because they most likely haven’t experienced one before.
So how should a person with an anxiety issue tackle public speaking?
Stage 1 is accepting that all of these bizarre and, quite frankly, unnerving sensations aren’t going to go away overnight. In fact, you’re not even going to concern yourself with getting rid of them for your next talk. When they arrive during a speech or meeting, you’re going to approach them in a new manner.
We need to build your confidence back to where it used to be before any of these sensations ever occurred. This time, you’ll approach it in a unique, empowering manner, allowing you to feel your confidence again. Some say that most of the top speakers are riddled with anxiety before an event, but they somehow use this nervousness to enhance their speech.
I’m going to show you exactly how to do this.
My first point is this, and it’s important:
The average healthy person can experience an extreme array of anxiety and very uncomfortable sensations while giving a speech and is in no danger of ever losing control, or even appearing slightly anxious to the audience. No matter how tough it gets, you’ll always finish your piece-even if, at the outset, it feels very uncomfortable to go on.
You won’t become incapacitated in any way.
The real breakthrough happens when you fully believe that you’re not in danger and that the sensations will pass. By asking for more, you’re saying:
“I realize that you [the anxiety] hold no threat over me.”
What keeps a panic attack coming again and again is the fear of the fear-the fear that the next one will really knock your socks off and the feeling that you were lucky to have made it past the last one unscathed.
Because they were so unnerving and scary, it’s your confidence that’s been damaged by previous anxiety episodes. Once you fully understand that you’re not under any threat, then you can have a new response to the anxiety as it arises while speaking.
There’s always a turning point when a person moves from general anxiety into a panic attack, and that happens with public speaking when you think to yourself:
I won’t be able to handle this in front of these people.
That split second of self-doubt leads to a rush of adrenaline, and the extreme anxiety arrives in a wavelike format. If, however, you feel the initial anxiety and react with confidence that this isn’t a threat to you, you’ll process the anxiety rapidly.
Using this new approach is a powerful ally because it means it’s okay to feel scared and anxious when speaking. That’s fine-you’ll feel it, and you’ll move with and through the sensations in your body and out the other side.
Because people are often very anxious before the talk has begun, they may feel they’ve already let themselves down. Now you can relax on that point. It’s perfectly natural to feel the anxiety.
Take, for example, the worst of the sensations you’ve ever experienced in this situation-be it general unease or loss of breath. You’ll have an initial automatic reaction that says:
“Danger-I’m going to have an episode of anxiety here, and I really can’t afford for that to happen.”
At this point, most people react to that idea and confirm that it must be true because of all the unusual feelings they’re experiencing. This is where your train of thought creates a cycle of anxiety that produces a negative impact on your overall presenting skills.
So let that initial “Oh dear, not now” thought pass by, and immediately follow it up with the attitude of:
“There you are-I’ve been wondering when you would arrive. I’ve been expecting you to show up. By the way, I’m not in the least threatened by any of the strange sensations you’re creating. I’m completely safe here.”
Instead of pushing the emotional energy and excitement down into your stomach, you’re moving through it.
Your body is in a slightly excited state, exactly as it should be while giving a speech-so release that energy in your self-expression. Push it out through your presentation, not down into your stomach.
Push it out by expressing yourself more forcefully. In this way, you turn the anxiety to your advantage by using it to deliver a speech; you’ll come across as more alive, energetic, and in the present moment.
When you notice the anxiety drop, as it does when you willingly move into it, fire off a quick thought when you get a momentary break (as I’m sure you have between pieces), and ask it for “more.” You want more of its intense feelings because you’re interested in them and absolutely not threatened by them.
It seems like a lot of things to be thinking about while talking to a group of people, but it really isn’t. You’d be amazed at how many different, unrelated thoughts you can have while speaking. This approach is about adopting a new attitude of confidence about what you might have deemed a serious threat up until now.
If your predominant fear of speaking is driven by a feeling of being trapped, then I suggest factoring in some mental releases that can be prepared before the event. For example, some events allow you to turn the attention back to the room to get feedback, etc., from the audience. If possible, prepare such opportunities in your own mind before the engagements.
This isn’t to say that you have to use them, but people in this situation often remark that just having small opportunities where attention can be diverted for the briefest moment makes the task seem less daunting.
It may even be something as simple as having people introduce themselves or opening the floor to questions. I realize these diversions aren’t always possible and depend on the situation, but anything you can factor in that makes you feel less trapped or under the spotlight is worth the effort.
Barry Joe McDonagh
If you want to learn more about Anxiety and how to remove it from your life go -> HERE <-
All material provided in these emails are for informational or educational purposes only. No content is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Consult your physician regarding the applicability of any opinions or recommendations with respect to your symptoms or medical condition
