Leadership - How To Find Untapped Potential In People

Many times as a leader it's easy to automatically look for someone outside of your team of people that has the skills you are looking for. However, the right person good already be in your team. As a good leader it's important that you develop the team of people that you already have by finding their untapped potential. Here are 3 ways to find this potential.

1. Get to know their interests.

One of the best ways to find potential in someone is to find out what their interests are in life. This will reveal a lot about the other person. Many times you will discover that you actually have the person doing the wrong thing your team. Just because someone's resume or past history says one thing doesn't mean that that's always that best thing for them to do.

2. Challenge your team.

By challenging your team I don't mean to overwork them. However, if you let your team atrophy by never allowing them to grow you are stopping you and your team from becoming the best it can be. You may be surprised to see who rises up and meets the challenges that you set.

3. Provide training.

Everyone needs to learn to become better. By providing opportunities for your team to learn new things you will give them the chance to better themselves. As your team learns they will begin to have better skills and feel more confidant with the tasks they are given. As their confidence increases they will be more willing to step out of their comfort zones and try things that could have huge benefits for everyone involved.

Self Improvement – The Human Design Solution

Desire to Change

If you stop and look around at how much material is available for self improvement, you can't help but realize that a lot of people want to be better. This is because, as humans, we have an innate and very powerful desire to change.

Many of us aren't content to just be because we have this underlying sense that there is more to life than what we are experiencing.

New Systems

Life is getting more complex, more competitive and more diverse. In the past, belief systems were the glue that held us together. Today those belief systems are losing some of their strength. We live in a new world that requires new systems. We need systems that will help us change so we can move with greater freedom. We need systems that will empower us to succeed in navigating new levels of complexity so we can meet new challenges with calm confidence.

In order to do that we need to be very clear about our own uniqueness and especially about how we are designed to interact with others.

Becoming

Fortunately humans are designed to be able to do that. We have the innate capacity to "become". Becoming is an active process of discovery. In a sense it means to "actively participate in your own ongoing creation".

What we have to learn is how to "become", as a process, not as a goal.

Self Awareness

Self awareness is an important step in the process because it slows down your reaction to the world providing you with a chance to be conscious. In the language of self transformation, to be conscious is to act with the knowledge that you know that you are acting.

When we are conscious we have a tiny window of opportunity where we can behave differently than we usually do. On the physical level of our neurology we literally have the ability to stop our own behavior and make a substitution.

Manifest Change

This little window doesn't stay open for very long which means that when you recognize it you have to be able to act very quickly, because you don't have time to try and decide which behavior you want to substitute. And, if you want truly to change, you have to be able to act differently, to substitute a different behavior.

No amount of thinking is going to bring about any actual change. You must act in order to change.

Right Now

I'm talking here about acting right in the heat of the moment, in the very heart of the now, where everything moves along so very quickly. We rarely have the luxury of pondering what we are going to do in the now, we just do. So we have to be prepared with some idea in mind of what the substitute behavior is going to be.

We have to have in mind what we are becoming. The easiest way to do this is to discover your own individual design and align with it.

Yourself

I look around and I see that there are lots of people telling us what we want to become and usually they are saying we should become like them. OK, fair enough, maybe we should. But then again maybe I should live my own design and become myself and you should live your own design and become yourself.

It's been my experience that it's more satisfying to be myself then it is to be somebody else. I'd rather make my mistakes than yours.

Discovery

In the past it's generally been a long, slow and difficult endeavor to discover yourself sufficiently well enough to really participate in your own processes. We are, after all, very complex and there's a lot to sift through to determine what is ours and what isn't.

However, like everything else in our world this too has changed in the past 20 years. Today we can tap into our individual design very quickly.