Your greatest competitive edge

I enjoy professional football. It’s a great game, I’m extremely competitive and the season is short enough that every game is meaningful. With the 2016 draft just held this weekend, it occurred to me that teams are preparing for the future by finding young players to replace their current players. There’s nothing like someone hiring your replacement right under your nose to get you thinking. So it got me thinking…

What is our greatest competitive edge? Being teachable in every area of life will allow us to retain our competitive edge. Maintaining a teachable attitude requires many soft-skills that require years of diligence to perfect. Some of those skills include flexibility and adaptability. Being able to adjust to circumstances beyond your control is essential in order to maintain the proper attitude. Whether it’s changing priorities, canceled projects or lack of resources, most of the time decisions are out of your control, so you have to find ways to adjust and do the best with what you have that is in your control. In these types of circumstances, we default to blaming others for the poor decision that created our situation or problems. Taking the teachable way means to look inward to areas, decisions or other parts of the equation that are in your control and where you can actually enact change. You will have more luck implementing change within areas you control than waiting on others to see what you perceive to be the “error of their ways”. After all, you can’t change anyone except yourself.

Being teachable means you are willing to learn from anyone. Find successful people and understand what they are doing that is different from you. Try to enlist a mentor you respect that has more life experience than you and make it a priority to spend time with them. Your mentor can be inside or outside of your organization.

Being teachable means you read a lot. If you think you are reading enough, read some more.

I mentioned humility as a crucial part of the definition of leadership in my last post, but it is also a significant factor to being teachable. If you think you know everything, there’s not much you need to learn. In life, in marriage and in business I have made it a priority to be constantly enrolled in the school of learning. If there is a day I don’t learn anything, I consider it a bad day. Look for opportunities to learn from your own life experience or from observing others. Did you know you can learn as much from failure as you can from success? Did you know that personal skills are not business oriented, so you can learn them from any experience or relationship you have? It’s primarily a function of how much self-awareness you have. How willing are you to look in the mirror and be honest about what needs to change? Instead of deflecting responsibility, taking it head on and doing what you can to make a difference for those that look to you for leadership.