At its core, learning and development aim to expand our capacity to achieve the results we desire. It’s about bridging the gap between what we want to achieve and our current abilities.
For learning to take place, three crucial elements must align:
- Awareness of the Gap: We must recognise the disparity between our goals and our current skills or knowledge.
- Declaration of Incompetence: some version of I don’t know how to do this
- Commitment to Development: The willingness to invest time and effort into closing that gap through learning and growth.
This process works quite well when it comes to hard skills, like mastering Six Sigma or creating intricate Pivot tables in Excel.
But in the context of personal development, it becomes more challenging because we don’t really know or understand what we can become before we become it.
Most of us have no trouble looking back at ourselves and thinking oh boy, was I naive or immature at that point in my life – but it’s only when we have developed beyond that point that we can fully appreciate that we have moved on.
And if we do not understand what we could become, there is no gap, and with no gap, there is no declaration of incompetence.
In fact, we don’t even consider a gap because, most often, when things don’t go as planned, we typically attribute the issues to the incompetence of others, their unwillingness to collaborate, or external factors beyond our control.
Rare is the manager who reflects, “ What a mess this turned out to be. I obviously need some personal development.” Most have a serious blind spot as to what they could actually become.
So, don’t wait for your managers to ask for more personal development – instead, think about how you could best help them identify their blind spots.
Coaching might be a good place to start.
#PersonalDevelopment #Leadership #GrowthMindset #SoftSkills