Category: Blog

The research is clear about how we grow faster: it’s a combination of on-the-job, social, and formal learning, also known as the 70-20-10 model. This mantra says that roughly 70% of your professional growth will come from the work experiences you have, 20% will come from your interactions with others, and 10% will come from formal education. So, you’ll want to understand which experiences will make you grow faster. A regularly updated personal experience map will help you do just that. So, how do you go about creating your personal experience map?

What can we learn from Google Maps?

If you want directions from Google Maps, the app will ask you for two things: your current location and for your destination. The more precise you are, the more likely you’ll get where you want to go using the fastest possible route.

Your development process could follow the exact same path, if you can specify clearly:

FROM: Where you are today

TO: Your next big destination

The challenge for many of us is that we’re delusional about our actual origin and destination. We often think we’re starting far ahead of where we objectively are and that we’ve arrived when we’re still hundreds of miles from our goal. To get an accurate from/to, you’ll need to check your ego at the door and ask some trusted bosses and colleagues for their candid view of your origin and destination. Tell them to be brutally honest. Use their input to create your final from/to. With a clear from/to, you can now focus on accelerating your growth!

Many of our leadership activities go unseen by others. For example, the fierce conversation between you and a peer. Or the sales meeting with a client that didn’t go well. Or the email you wrote and the response it got. What about all those times when no one sees you in action, and nobody can give you feedback? How can we learn from those events and turn them into real experiences?

What can we learn from Agile? From the US Army?

Well, you were there, weren’t you? You were where the action was happening. You were, in fact, the protagonist, the leading character. What, then, about yourself making time to give feedback to yourself about what happened? How could you make it a habit that you spend time at the end of each day to reflect and learn from your experiences? How can you become the coach of you?

Well, easily! You can easily steal some best practices from learning organisations and use them for your personal development. For example, you can do an AAR (After Action Review) as the US Army does. Or you can do a Sprint Retrospective as agile software development companies do. All those excellent practices boil down to ourselves, asking ourselves four fundamental questions when looking back at our day:

• What went well?
• What didn’t go so well?
• What have I learned?
• What would I do differently next time?

It is great to be reflective, self-analysis can be useful, but only if it results in action.

A study of penalty shoot outs found that keepers who stay in the centre, instead of leaping left or right, have a 33% chance of stopping the goal. Yet, keepers only remain in the centre 6% of the time. So why do keepers leap when it would be better to stay put? And how does this observation relate to leadership development?

Why reflect?

Well, leaders are not that different from keepers. They have a bias for action; they prefer to do something instead of doing nothing. They cannot see the point of staying still when there is so much to do. They cannot justify to themselves setting aside 10 minutes of their time to reflect and make meaning of what happened during the day.

Yet, the evidence shows that making time to reflect actually increases productivity. Research in call centres demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not. A study of UK commuters found a similar result; those who used their commute to think about and plan for their day were happier, more productive, and less burned out than those who didn’t.

So, how do you start?

Most probably, you are driven by your calendar. So, why don’t you put those 10 minutes of reflection time in your schedule? Perhaps at the same time, every day? Just start small. Find a reflection process that works for you. You can sit, walk, bike, or stand, alone or with a partner, writing, talking, or thinking. And don’t feel embarrassed to ask for help.

Life must be lived forwards but it can only be understood backwards …

Neuroscientists are increasingly studying myelin and its incredible impact on forging new behaviours and rapid learning. They’ve found that neural pathways that are well-insulated with a protective coating called myelin can be up to 300 times faster than non-myelinated ones. Why does this matter?

Well, we know that every behaviour (like the new habits that we’d like to develop) relates to an associated pathway in our brain. We also know that our brain will choose this pathway as the default if it is highly myelinated and, thus, fast and efficient. So, how do we develop healthy, thick myelin layers?

We become what we repeatedly do
Whenever you practice something, nerves are fired through a circuit in your brain. As those nerves are fired, the myelin layers around that nerve grow. That’s because myelin is living tissue and, like a muscle which needs to exercise for it to grow, the layer of myelin only thickens when the nerve fibres it surrounds are fired regularly. And, as you may recall, the thicker the myelin, the faster and more precise the impulse.

Do, Fail, Learn, Repeat
However, simply repeating a task isn’t enough to stimulate nerve firing. Consider, for example, practicing a musical instrument. If you sit down and play a song you already know perfectly, you won’t stimulate myelin growth because you’re using existing, robust circuits. But let’s say you choose to play an unfamiliar song. Even though you’ll make several mistakes at first, if you repeat those parts that you find challenging until you fix the errors, you thicken the myelin around that new circuit.

It’s this very process of making mistakes and correcting them that leads to improving a particular skill. That’s why it’s crucial to practice beyond our comfort zone – even if it involves hitting quite a few “wrong notes” along the way.

Einstein’s Brain
When Einstein’s brain was autopsied in 1984 record amounts of myelin were found. Does it mean he was smarter than most? Not necessarily. Does it mean he persevered, failed, keep pushing forward with focused practice?

Yes.