There Are No Shortcuts

The pace, demands and complexities of our world often creates a desire to find or take shortcuts to being effective in our many roles. This often happens with how we approach improving our own leadership and team behaviors, habits and personal well-being. We get bombarded with quick solution or quick fix scenes and scenarios all the time. As you are working towards your bold personal development goals for 2019, put your goal setting and plans in context with the below discussion.

From personal deep experience in business leadership, athletics, fitness training, teaching at Ohio State University, teaching/training leaders in many roles, designing culture change with my clients or just researching new material, there are no true shortcuts. I’ve had MANY discussions over shortcuts with individuals with deep experience in all those areas. Sure, there are ways to give you a hint or some very basic guidance through a formulaic or quick reference method, but the reality is, to get REALLY good, striving to master something, you will need to seek to learn it in depth.

Here’s another way to think about it. If there were shortcuts, don’t you think that everyone on our planet would be using them??? Development, improvement and achievement require focus, effort and various levels of “mastery” of enhanced skills and behaviors.

Here’s a few examples:

If you want to improve your health through you diet, it takes knowledge, time and habit change. Diet shortcuts rarely work.

If you want to strengthen your body, it takes knowledge, time and discipline, combined with other healthy habits. There is no single method.

If you want to master new behavioral material, improve a leadership influence skill, become emotionally stronger or become more proficient at a new technical competency, you need to invest time in learning it IN DEPTH and exercise/practice that new skill through lots of repetition.

There are no surface level, quick approaches that create lasting change. Even if you don’t completely agree with the notion of the well researched 10,000 hours rule of deliberate practice to master something or get to a so called “elite” level, the fact remains, it takes a LOT of personal time commitment and discipline to get better, improve and achieve lasting success at the next level.

With your personal development planning for 2019, be honest with yourself or your team about the degree of sustained depth of focus, commitment and knowledge investment needed to get really good at something. Anyone can be just “ok” or “average” with their level of proficiency or training and maybe that’s fine, acceptable and all that is needed in certain areas. But we can’t treat deep habit change needs as a casual hobby.

If you truly want to create a game changing, differentiating, “life time” proficiency in influencing how you lead, build up your mental resiliency and wellness or how you maximize your organizations/teams talent, you need to have a fully committed mindset and be ALL-IN.

Remember this: The more your BELIEVE in yourself and your team, the greater the overall confidence and potential you will ACHIEVE. Your brain will work differently and that will show in your results. BELIEVE you can and you WILL. Don’t “cut short” what YOU can achieve in life.