"People assume everyone wants to reach their potential and be the best they can be. I've concluded most only want to be average and do just enough to get by." Nick Saban.
To realize your potential, it is reaching your capacity and has nothing to do with comparisons to anyone but yourself. Almost all unhappiness comes from comparing to others. We either compare our weaknesses to someone else's strengths and then feel badly about ourselves, or we compare our strengths to someone else's weaknesses and over inflate ourselves. What we should be doing is comparing our current selves with who we once were and celebrating the growth, and then comparing our current selves with who we could be and striving forward.
How do you do it? You commit to being an active learning based individual rather than knowledge based. When I was hiring sales people, one of my questions I asked in interviews was "How many years of experience have you?" Then followed up with however many years they said, "Was that X years experience or one year experience repeated X times?" In other words tell me about the last class you took, the last seminar you attended, the last book you read or audio or video you consumed and what changes did you implement and what are the results?
The worst enemy of great is good. The "I'm doing good, I'm making money, life is good." holds more people back from what could be. It creates a temptation to be knowledge based where it is easy to dismiss out of hand "I've heard it all before." But are you doing it? If you were brought up on charges for knowing what you say you know, would there be enough evidence in your every day activities to convict you?
The only way you can be Learning based is to force yourself out of your comfort zone. The most dramatic story that I can think of was Tiger Woods. Three times in his career, he hired coaches to relearn his swing. That was courageous to mess with a winning formula to reach a higher level. We too will have to step out of the comfort of what's already working for us and learn new ways of improving them.
We begin by seeking new information, that 1%er thinking we spoke of last month, then we must learn to S.P.A.R. (Study, Practice, Action, Review.) After taking an active role in learning, we take that information back and study it-- maybe by learning scripts or the basic flow needed. We then must practice before we introduce it into our business. After that we take action and use these new developing skills with our clients, as we do so, we will learn where we may not yet have it right and we go back to class and review again and once again start that S.P.A.R. process until it's part of our new comfort zone.
Remember, to know and not to do, is not to know.
