Intellectual OBESITY

Do you ever find yourself chasing information? You have got a problem to solve, a challenge to overcome, something to fix, what do you do?

Do you get a book, listen to a podcast, watch a bunch of youtube videos? Are you sure it is the best way of doing it? If you just accumulate information then the accumulation of that information feels like its own reward and your brain will feel full and satisfied, as if it had a good meal and ambition goes down rapidly.

The worst thing is that while the brain is full, fat and happy, your results are still the same. Nothing changed. This is a typical phenomenon I have seen so many times in the field of leadership and coaching. People love attending workshops, reading countless books about the subject, but only a very few of them actually apply that knowledge and train themselves.

I am not talking about just clients, but coaches, too. It is not about the amount of accumulated information, but the amount of work they put into using them, actually engaging in making mistakes and failing. That is the difference between real practitioners and wannabes. The number of repetition. The sometimes boring, other times painful side of becoming a master in our field. It is a never-ending story. When we feel we are masters, that is a sure sign that we are not yet.

When I was young, I did martial arts for over 12 years. When I started it, I felt like a superhero. When I became national champion, I was humble as I understood what it took to get to that level, how many fighters were better than me outside of my current bubble and how difficult it was to stay there. There were a constant flow of new guys who wanted to be the best, success is not final. You stop working to celebrate yourself and somebody else will take over.

Nothing can replace experience and practive. Accumulating information does not lead to transformation. Applying that knowledge through a series of challenges in real life might do.

Reading a new book, attending a new course might tick some boxes and we feel like we made some progress, but if we do nothing about it, then it had not much more benefit than eating a fancy salad after a big, fat pizza believing we had a healthy meal.

If we really want to level up, we need to be able to use our own mindset so it becomes our ally instead of a selection of different parts of our identity who want different things at the same time. After that it is going make much more sense why people think and behave differently so we can get along with them and we get ahead.

Let’s do something about intellectual obesity so it does not lead to corporate diabetes and turn it into a transformation that inspires others, too!