There’s no such thing as individual excellence. Watch your favourite sports star –then watch the coaches, the trainers, the medical staff, and the fans. All of them have a role to play in providing resources, knowledge, support and motivation to the star. And those are just the people that are easy to see.
When we designed the newest version of the NLP practitioner training so we could do our best work online, we divided the course into two halves: Growth Mindset and Communication Strategies. It might look like half is about managing yourself and half is about influencing others. But that’s not entirely accurate.
It’s more accurate to say that human achievement requires both that you manage your state and behaviours AND that you are able to integrate your state and behaviours with the efforts, strengths, knowledge and skills of others. We go further when we build on each other’s efforts.
This is true even when what we want to excel at is the ability to manage our own experience. Giving and helping are two ways that we manage our stress and motivate ourselves to do more. Empathy is about being nice and it’s also about observing success so closely that we take on some of the characteristics or behaviours we observe. We need connections to other people to be our best selves.
