I was sitting with a client the other day discussing a really difficult situation, he was experiencing in his company. He had been in various managerial positions for over 20 years and the challenge he was facing was caused by his naive approach to leadership. The error he had made was a really basic mistake; which he had made a few times before and I would have expected to have observed in a person much younger, with very little business experience. Someone who had been in business for over 20 years should have learnt, from his mistakes by now and have graduated to a whole new level of mistakes.
This client serves to highlight the challenge we all face as we invest time into our businesses. Are we just going through the motions every day, where we are so busy working in our businesses that we forget to stop long enough, to look at the challenges we face or errors we make and learn the lessons they have to offer? We invest 20 years into our business, but we never pause long enough to learn the lessons, so we just repeat all the mistakes we made in our first year, 20 times.
The secret to keep growing in your business and honing your skills is to continually explore experiment and try new things. Experiment with new pricing structures, new marketing channels, such as social media or try new management approaches to inspire your team members. These changes are not always going to result in the positive outcome you expect, the pricing structure may not deliver the desired results or the new leadership approach may be met with resistance. The way to gain as much as possible from every experience in your life is to, learn the lesson offered and explore where possible discover different or better options. Keep repeating this process, until you realise the improved result you are looking for.
Experience is something we earn; it is a process, never an event. Improving and growing as a business professional is firstly about experimenting, exploring and learning from these experiences and secondly about learning from each error you make or challenge you overcome. Wisdom comes from taking all these experiences and turning them into a pool of experience and understanding (wisdom).
We turn all our experiences, both positive and negative into wisdom, by closing the learning cycle. This is achieved by identifying a challenge your business is facing or an area in your business, which needs improvement. The whole process starts with allowing yourself enough time to pause, explore and discover the best possible solution to the issue. You then put a plan in place on how to proceed and start taking action, applying the solution you have discovered. The secret to turn this process into wisdom is to add one more crucial component to the process, namely review or assessment. Once you add reviewing or assessing to the mix, you are allowing yourself the opportunity to actually learn from the process.
If you just follow the cycle of explore and then take action, which is the norm for most people. You are just getting into a cycle of Think – Do, Think – Do Think – Do and you never allow yourself time or opportunity to learn grow and expand. When you add the crucial component of reviewing your actions and assessing if they are delivering the required result, you are allowing yourself to convert this process into something you can learn and grow from.
The very process of constantly reviewing your actions and looking for ways to improve, when looked at differently is called practice. As you know perfect practice makes perfect. Any sports person, who wants to improve, will engage in constant daily practice, until they achieve the level of competence they want. We as business professionals should be following the same concept of practicing or reviewing our actions daily, so that we can constantly improve. This will turn 20 years of business experience into 20 years of growth and development rather than 20 years of the same mistakes repeated 20 times.
Your strategy to grow your wisdom should be a structured and planned process, where you include time in the process to review and see what you can learn for the actions you have taken. After adopting a new pricing policy, hiring a new staff or any challenge you have overcome, pause, review and learn all the lessons offered. Review your plans, walk through the actions you took, explore and see what worked and what didn’t. This will equip you with valuable experience going forward. You will know what will work and what won’t, when faced with a similar set of events in the future.
The process of including a review during and after every major event or process in your life or business enables you to close the loop and turn experience into wisdom. You are effectively using every experience to grow your wisdom and knowledge base. This process will never stop you from making mistakes, but if you follow the process, it will most certainly help you to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Each lesson learned will effectively lock the door on that level of mistake and open new vistas to you, to expand, explore and become. It is in mistakes and practice that you gain the most benefit. Wisdom is about consistently growing and becoming more every day, where you use every challenge you have overcome, every new process you have introduced, as learning and growing experiences. Actively look for opportunities to learn and grow in everything and everything will become an opportunity for you to grow.
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