Telling or Asking?

I look over my professional career and have discovered a common thread throughout. First, I must give credit where credit is due, and that would be my mentors and coaches, because they provided the example by living their lives with the same common thread.

1. I accepted every job with the intent that when I trained my Team well enough that they didn’t need me, then I could move onto something else.

2. When someone reaches an ‘ahaa’ moment, it flips my switch.

3. When others are more successful after our encounter, it charges me up.

4. When I assist others to a new skill that makes their life simpler, it provides me with a sense of satisfaction.

In each of these examples, it is the ‘others’ that did the changing, and the growing; that’s the hard work. I see “Personal Change as our First and Final Frontier”. All I did is ask the right and often tough questions and they arrived at their own solutions. Most all of us desire to have an impact in our circle of influence, to be a leader, and so we do what the majority would do to impart that influence, by ‘telling’ others what they need to do. A leader doesn’t tell others what to do, that is a manager’s job.

We tell others what to do because we assume, we know what is best for them. To assume, we are required to completely understand their situation, their dreams, fears, failures, successes, influences, everything about them, and we can see life from their shoes. We don’t know it all or can understand completely what it is like to be in their situation. We can only extrapolate from our parallel experiences, which is not their situation! So telling never has and never will work, long term, to influence others.

A leader must develop others to ‘think’ better, yes, I said ‘think’ better.

Society (the “they” committee) is training us to ‘obey’ others and this leads us to living a life of a victim, helpless, and at the mercy of others. You don’t have to depend on someone else to find a solution to your challenge, I believe you have the answers to your challenges right inside of you. Why let society train us, why not us. You’re smart enough to figure this out… Shut off the clutter of your life and actually spend some time ‘thinking’ about your challenges, you will find that you DO have solutions within you. You are bright enough to stand on your own two feet, do so and make yourself proud.

Stand up and Step out, and be the individual that you were born to be…