There is nothing new here
I had a wonderful time last March 15 and 16 as I ran my first Level Up Leadership public seminar this year. The mix of participants from different industries was beautiful. They made new friends, networked and learned from each other.
What also warms my heart is that more and more family business owners are now sending their next generation successors to the seminar and some of the owners also came with them. The next run is still a couple of weeks away but already at this time, people are reserving for slots and have signified their intention to attend the next run. This is the power of “word of mouth” buzz. It is always more effective than traditional advertising.
Allow me to give you some stories on seminars. A businessman taking a seminar on efficiency completed a case study of his wife’s routine for fixing breakfast, and presented the results to the class.
“After a few days of observation, I quickly determined the practices that were robbing her of precious time and energy,” the man reported. “Taking note of how many trips she made from the kitchen to the dining room carrying just one item, I suggested that in the future she carry several items at a time.” “Did it work?” the teacher asked. “It sure did,” replied the businessman. “Instead of taking her 20 minutes to fix my breakfast, it now takes
ME just seven.” And so it seems that the seminar has proven to be effective.
Here is another story. A group of junior-level executives was participating in a management-training program. The seminar leader pounded home his point about the need to make decisions and take action on these decisions.
“For instance,” he said, “if you had five frogs on a log and three of them decided to jump, how many frogs would you have left on the log?” The answers from the group were unanimous: “Two.”
“Wrong,” replied the speaker, “there would still be five because there is a difference between deciding to jump and jumping.”
There is an element of wisdom here. Let me explain… Some people attend seminars and say: “There’s nothing new here.” Here is a profound response. “Of course.”
There is nothing new out there when it comes to success, happiness and prosperity. Those books that promise you a brand-new approach to success are lying to you.
The key here is that even though you and I may have heard the same things before and have never acted on it, these things would still be new to us.
There are no personal development breakthroughs. No one is coming up with any brand-new keys to success. The principles for success are still the same and they are based on ageless principles. And the principles involved for personal success are based on common sense. What I have discovered, however, is that common sense, like common knowledge and common courtesy, is anything but common.
They say that experience is the best teacher. Not necessarily so. Experience is never the best teacher. Only evaluated experience is why people still commit the same mistake even though they have gone through the same experiences before and it is simply because they have never taken the time to properly evaluate it and learn from it.
“Knowledge is Power.” Sorry, but that isn’t true. Knowledge is not power. The implementation of knowledge is power. What you know makes little or no difference in your life. What you do with what you know makes all the difference in the world.
People who say, “There is nothing new here” may have lost the opportunity to learn something new because there will always be something they have never evaluated before. And the training investment is wasted because they feel they already know. But knowing and doing are two different things. Repetition is the key to internalization.
And then there are the others who have attended the seminars and say, “Hey, I have heard the same thing before, but I have not applied it. This time I should.”
The next time you attend seminars, do not think, “There’s nothing new with this” but rather ask yourself the question: “how good am I in this?”
This is the starting point for real learning and where you reap the returns on your training investment. Convert the knowledge into actions and do it repeatedly. This is how we improve and achieve progress. And this also explains the reason why I am still attending conferences and am still learning. There’s just so much good stuff out there.
(Experience two inspiring days of leadership training with Francis Kong in his highly acclaimed Level Up Leadership on May 17-18 at Makati, Shangri-La Hotel. For registration or inquiries contact April at +63928-559-1798.)