REMASTERED: The Potential Principle and Bettering Your Best, with Mark Sanborn (Leadership, Team Building, Customer Service, Change)

ever become. And if you think about it differently, and most people don't consciously think this way, but if today, somebody said, you know, today's, the zenith is the high, the high watermark your life for the rest of your life, it's all downhill from here, you would say, are you serious, I'll never have better relationships, I'll never make more money, I'll never experience more joy. So we all at some unconscious level are probably trying to improve, but very few people have a plan or a

method for getting better. And people who most need to hear the sermon, often don't go to church, the people who most need read the book often don't go to the library. And what I realized is that my clients are already among the best at what they do, you know, they're the individuals and the companies that are, are rockstars, in their respective market spaces.

So I realized I have a bigger challenge than if I was working with startups, or if I was working with mediocre companies, because most of these clients are already among the best depending on how you measure it market share, return on investment, all of those metrics, they're already among the best. And so I realized, there's only one thing harder than becoming the best at what you do. And that is becoming the

best at what you do and continuing to get better. In other words, when you're number five, you can go to number four by outperforming your route implementing number four strategies, right? When you're number two, you just watch what number one is doing, and you can match their performance or maybe surpass it. But when you're the top of your game, there's nobody out there in front of you, you know, you're making it up,

you're literally plowing new ground. And so I wrote a book for individuals and companies that said, you know, I want to get better, regardless of that up to come, you don't need to be the best at what you do to get benefit from the book. But the good news is, if you're already a high performer, you're gonna get some insights that will help make it a little bit easier to keep getting better.

four principles in the book. But it's always gratifying. And I know you get this sometimes you get an email, or someone will come up to you after an event and say your book or your speech changed my life. And I'm always quick to say thank you. But no, I didn't in the book didn't either you changed your life. I'm not God, I can't take responsibility for positive life change. And others, I'm often gratified that what I said or did or wrote about, influence them. But ultimately, we change

our lives. Ultimately, people have to take responsibility for getting better. So no matter how much I may want you to get better if you don't have a desire to get better, you won't. If you do have a desire, what I talk about in the book is I try to make things as simple as possible without making them

simplistic. And the first part of the book talks about what I call the potential matrix, a matrix is very easy to understand I, when I work with leaders in the sector, business world, I see that they in the outer world of performance and doing they usually Excel. But if there's a sticking point, it's in the inner world of why do I do what I do? What's my purpose, a lack of clarity, a lack of, of meaning. So I, you know, I can make gains by moving them where I call left to the axis into the

inner world. Interestingly, when I work with church leaders, these tend to be in our painting with a broad brush here, but they tend to be people with a very deep inner life, you know, you really have to have a sense of purposefulness, and meaning to drive your faith and spirituality. So the mirror to help help them often is moving them into the outer world of how do you run a good meeting? How do you communicate more

effectively, how do you create a team? And so I started thinking about this kind of on Daikon To me, and I added one other one other element, and that is what I would call initiating or responding. We initiate, we take action, we respond, we're acted upon. So if you combine those two axes, what you've ended up with is, is the outer world of performing and learning and performing, you're initiating and learning you're being acted

upon by the lessons and ideas of others. And in the inner world, we have thinking, which is where you initiate the thought process planning, visioning strategy. And then what is probably the most interesting and most often overlooked, or least used quadrant, the inner world of responding which I call

reflection. Reflection is where ideas come to us. You know, thinking is where we seek ideas, but some of our biggest epiphanies, you know, you don't wake up in the morning and say, Today, I want to have an epiphany about how to improve my marriage, you might read a book for ideas, but the Insight will come through this kind of quiet contemplation and gestation. So those are the four areas and here's the, there's two big

messages. When I did this quadrant, I wanted to basically remind people that we all have one of those quadrants, we like the most, for a lot of business people it's performing for me, and you probably won't be initially surprised. It's thinking. In other words, what I enjoy most is books and ideas and creating. But if I just think I really am not very successful, because I haven't translated that to the outer

world. But if I just perform, I'm not necessarily successful, because I may achieve great success, but have no real reason for doing so. So my point is, we need to be better in each of those four areas. To the degree you're a better thinker, learner performer and reflector to that degree, you will become better in all the areas of your life. The second thing I wanted to impress upon people is that these quadrants don't exist

independent of each other. So if you put a.in, the in the thinking, what most ideas, most projects begin with thinking the beginning of the day, think about what do I have to do today? Well, to really be good at what you do, you have to learn how to do it. So you take that line and you then go down to the learning quadrant? Do I have the skills I need? How do I develop more skills, then you apply those skills in the

performing quadrant, you move up. And then after you perform when you think about or debrief or reflect on what you did you move to the lower left. And after you reflect and get any insights, you go back to thinking and it looks like and this is what's cool and infinity symbol. Now, that infinity symbol when you super pote, impose it over the over the potential matrix gives you a primary way of always getting

better. Hey, by the way, let me tell you something that's interesting, especially for the your listeners, I know your listeners are movers and shakers, but there are a lot of sales pros. So selling is a numbers and a skills game. So you take somebody who's making 20 calls a day, and you move them down into the learning quadrant where they're better at presenting and closing and analyzing needs, and then you

move them back up into performing. Now, they're going to close more of those 20 calls a day they make and if you double the amount of calls they make in the amount of skill they have, then it becomes very, very powerful. So I was tell people, you know, don't go through the motions, I go to the I used to work out in my home gym, and I started going to the gym and my son. And sometimes I have to like bite my lip till it leads because I watch people doing exercises that are not only

wrong, but are harmful. And they don't ask me and it's none of my business. You know, it's a mirror right? You're free to do stuff stupid. They're delusional, and they probably Sunday gonna go I don't I go to the gym every day. And why am I so sore? Why do I have a pulled muscle? Or why am I not improving my health. And that's because you're doing it wrong,

you haven't learned to exercise. So. So that's the potential matrix, the big insight is, is you've got these four areas where you can get better, don't don't just focus on the easy, the preferable use all four to create synergy for improvement. It basically is pointing out to people that if you only continue to get better in one area, you're leaving a lot on the table, there's so much more opportunity to improve your thinking, your learning your reflection, as well as your

performance. But then what I do I talk about four things to do the path to improvement is the potential matrix, the means of improvement are these four techniques. And the first one is probably my favorite, because it's used a little out of context. You know, Clay Christensen talks about disruptive innovation. And you hear a lot about the word disrupt or disruptive and it's usually applied to things and

processes and to companies. But in the book, I say the first step to getting better as disrupt yourself before somebody else does. You know, it's a play on the idea that most people change only when they have to, you know, leaders change before they need to. And it's about looking at the areas of your life that have become outdated, that have become stale, that could be better. You know, we find things that work and because they work we keep doing them and we keep doing them

until they don't work as well. And so what do we typically do when they don't work as well? We do we do more of it right? And it's like An engine that's you know, got sand in the transmission, you know, the more power we apply, the slower, you

know, the more the gears grind, and the slower we go. So the first key is to ask yourself who are what in my life needs disrupted, meaning if you got, you got to have somebody on your sales team, you've given them every opportunity to get better, you've invested in them, they haven't, maybe it's time to

disrupt them and let them pursue their bliss somewhere else. Or maybe you've got somebody in your sales team that is frustrated you but you've never explained why maybe it's time to positively disrupt them and the relationship so that it can get better. So the first tool is disrupt yourself. But it's more than complacency. Complacency says, you know, what, where am I too comfortable, disrupting yourself looks for areas that

you may not even have considered before. So it's not just about disrupting the known, it's about looking for that, you know, that better or game changing practice, the next principle is refocus. And this is interesting, if you disrupt yourself, you've got to refocus. I work with clients that say, you know, we want to do this, and we're gonna change our culture, and we want to improve these processes, and they come up with all these disruptive ideas, but people keep doing

what they did before. And then they say, why, why are they changing? What because you never refocus. You know, we're people of habit, right. And if you say you want me to do something different, but the next day, I don't know how much time to devote or what to do differently. I'll default to what I'm habitually been doing in the past. So I will

perpetuate the pre disruptive behavior. So refocusing says, and this this is something that's taken me I mean, maybe I'm a slow learner, it's taken me a while to to realize, too many people, even effective leaders have very clear focus, but they don't refocus as things change. So they're playing by kind of an outdated focus scorecard, if you will, if you don't refocus and say, okay to do these things, what needs to be done differently? Or who needs to do them instead of me?

Or how do I reallocate my time, that's the mismatch, till you really get clear on how to reallocate and refocus your time and energy, you'll inevitably slip back into those previous patterns, they'll keep the disruption from becoming effective.

life and succeed. So it's a distillation, it's a short book, it's not an aeroplane book, you can read most of my books before you push back from the gate, but I really think for the people who are into bettering their best, this will be a worthwhile investment for them, and I do hope they'll check it out.