Glenn’s Space: No Correspondence School for Swimmers!

Entrepreneur Richard Branson acknowledged, "My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University Education that I never had - everyday I'm learning something new."

Why is Branson’s attitude about continual learning and growth so important for any leader? Because you can’t lead people to places you haven’t been. People can only grow as far as you have grown.

Growing leaders grow people.

Stagnate leaders stagnate people.

Growing companies require growing leaders.

If you’re not growing, your team isn’t growing. If you’re stalled, your team is stalled. If you plateau, so do they.

As the leader goes, so goes the team.

Are you continually growing and refining your skills? Are you challenging yourself with new avenues of experience or ways of thinking? If not, your team hears the same thing regurgitated over and over. If there is nothing new, innovative, challenging or paradigm shifting going on in your head, there is nothing freshly inspiring coming out of your mouth.

There should be a cardinal rule for leaders that reads:                      

“If you’re as good as you’re going to be, you can’t be the leader.” 

Team members deserve much more.

If you want to increase the potential of your team, you need to be actively pursuing your potential. You teach what you know, but you reproduce what you are. You can’t give people what you don’t have. 

To grow, you must be intentional. Leaders who depend on haphazard, accidental learning rarely fine tune their skills enough to grow other people. It takes discipline, focus, and energy to raise your abilities and thinking to a new level.

Author Howard Hendricks has correctly discovered; “There is no such thing as a correspondence course for swimming.” Leaders are required to jump into unknown waters, so they can help others experience the thrill of learning and growing. 

Nurture a growth mentality which requires an insatiable appetite for learning, experimenting, discovering, listening, and never being satisfied with having arrived. 

A growth mentality continually perpetuates a fresh perspective, innovative ideas, and results exceeding the limits of your goals.

Questions to Ponder:

What’s the last book you read that inspired you to new levels of performance? 

What is the one message that resonated with you? What did you do with that inspiration?

Who challenges you to new levels of performance? Buy them lunch.

How has your growth mentality impacted others?