We Go Further When We Build on Each Other’s Efforts

16 September 2022

By Linda Ferguson

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.

Share this post:

Related posts

Late spring woods
21 May 2023

Slow Down to Speed Up

What’s got you wound up? It could be that restless feeling that you have lots of ground to cover before you take a real break. Or that chaos of the end of the school year. Or maybe you’re doing the things you used to do but they just don’t feel the same as they used to. You’re curious about what could be better and scared of making things worse. Your instinct might be to work harder or to play harder. But it’s possible you need something different.
15 April 2023

Why it’s so hard to improve your soft skills

Breaking a skill into chunks that can be practiced takes expertise. Adjusting performance on chunks so they result in better skills also takes expertise. The way to get better at soft skills is to find an expert who has the interest and the patience to coach you through drills until you improve.
7 April 2023

New workshop series on what stress is trying to teach you

Is it a problem or an opportunity?