Personal development: take your training wheels off after you learn to ride
I coach and work with a lot of people with MBAs. A lot of people without too.
They keep doing what school taught them for social and business interactions. It kills me.
School teaches you the bare fundamentals. It gives you training wheels to practice new behaviors, if it even does that, since it mostly just teaches abstract skills.
Training wheels are great for getting you on a bicycle but if you want to ride, you have to take them off. When you ride a bike without training wheels you have to tilt it to be stable even though that position wouldn’t be stable if the bike were still. You can’t do that if you keep the training wheels off.
Likewise, when you work with people, you have to risk behaviors that wouldn’t work if you were just talking about cases in the classroom. You have to open up and share things about yourself you wouldn’t if you didn’t actually care deeply about the outcome. You can’t do that if you keep treating the working world like a case study.
Yes, it’s scary, but do you know any other way to succeed? Any other way for people to see you as genuine and caring?
Take off your training wheels!
Share yourself if you want to lead!
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