When we get the right help and support we can be far more productive, effective, and successful than we would ever be on our own.
I have a 2 & 1/2 year old boy (Jaden) and 1 year old boy (Zane) and girl (Mia) twins. Yes it’s a very busy household…
Both the boys are walking with the older one running and climbing, but Mia is a little behind.
Typically the boys play pretty rough together whilst Mia doesn’t want a bar of that aggressive behaviour.
Last Sunday morning I noticed something unusual happen. The youngest boy Zane was still sleeping as he had been a little sick the day before. So it was just the older boy Jaden and Mia hanging out.
Jaden was crawling with Mia trailing behind, that was strange as anyone who has kids knows that once they conquer one hurdle (i.e. walking) they just don’t go back to the previous stage. But this morning he was crawling with Mia trailing closely behind, they were both giggling and having a lot fun.
Then Jaden stopped, communicated with Mia in some form of gibberish and once he had her attention he leaned against the wall and slowly stood up. She copied, and low and behold stood up also leveraging the wall in the same way.
He was coaching her, he is the expert out of these two and he is showing her a trade secret (how to stand up) – the 1st step in walking. He joked around a laughed a little which seemed to take Mia’s mind off the task at hand and relaxed her, in a few seconds she took her 1st steps.
This exchange of skills was rapid, without ego or expectation and yielded fantastic results.
I thought about my life and wondered how many times (particularly in business) I had not accepted advice, I had not to an expert that could help me accelerate my skills. I also wondered how many times I was the expert and had not offered assistance to others. We don’t always recognise ourselves as an expert or we let our ego get in the way of effective skills transfer.
What do you need to be able to get these types of results in our own lives? I put it down to 3 things.
- Expertise – in your field that does not mean you have to know everything, rather you need to have depth of knowledge and experience in specific areas and recognise you have something to offer.
- Trust – you must genuinely want to help others, for them not for yourself, and provide real results they can see and touch.
- Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we must recognise we cannot be expert at all things, we also need help and support in the things we are not expert in. Getting that help being on the receiving end will help us understand what it is like when we are providing advice to others.
One thing is for sure just as was the case with Mia, when we get the right help and support we can be far more productive, effective, and successful than we would ever be on our own.
Although this seems obvious, often in business we forget to offer or ask for help, we try to do it all ourselves rather than recognise that we can all do better by leveraging other skill sets and experts in the field.
Who can you help in business this week?
Who can help you in your business this week?