Best-selling author, leadership speaker, and entrepreneur Mark Sanborn covers how you never really know your potential, but how to find out and maximize it with the Potential Matrix, the importance of disrupting yourself but refocusing after you do, and why being an author is a lot like fatherhood.

Mentioned in this episode:

Be extraordinary. Turn ordinary actions into remarkable results at MarkSanborn.com.

Mark Sanborn

Be extraordinary. Turn ordinary actions into remarkable results at MarkSanborn.com.

Mark Sanborn

Mark Sanborn is a New York Times best selling author. And

has been one of the leading thought leaders of leadership.

Mark, my friend, it's been too long. Welcome to the show.

It's great to be with you.

You know, the concept of potential. So why now why

potential principle?

Let me explain what the potential principle is.

The premise is really simple. We all know how good we become. But

none of us know how good we could be. We really don't know

what our potential is, I've never met anyone who could say

with 100% certainty, you know, this is as high as I can

operate, this is as good as I can be. This is the best I'll

ever become. And if you think about it differently, and most

people don't consciously think this way, but if today, somebody

said, you know, today's, the zenith is the high, the high

watermark your life for the rest of your life, it's all downhill

from here, you would say, are you serious, I'll never have

better relationships, I'll never make more money, I'll never

experience more joy. So we all at some unconscious level are

probably trying to improve, but very few people have a plan or a

method for getting better. And people who most need to hear the

sermon, often don't go to church, the people who most need

read the book often don't go to the library. And what I realized

is that my clients are already among the best at what they do,

you know, they're the individuals and the companies

that are, are rockstars, in their respective market spaces.

So I realized I have a bigger challenge than if I was working

with startups, or if I was working with mediocre companies,

because most of these clients are already among the best

depending on how you measure it market share, return on

investment, all of those metrics, they're already among

the best. And so I realized, there's only one thing harder

than becoming the best at what you do. And that is becoming the

best at what you do and continuing to get better. In

other words, when you're number five, you can go to number four

by outperforming your route implementing number four

strategies, right? When you're number two, you just watch what

number one is doing, and you can match their performance or maybe

surpass it. But when you're the top of your game, there's nobody

out there in front of you, you know, you're making it up,

you're literally plowing new ground. And so I wrote a book

for individuals and companies that said, you know, I want to

get better, regardless of that up to come, you don't need to be

the best at what you do to get benefit from the book. But the

good news is, if you're already a high performer, you're gonna

get some insights that will help make it a little bit easier to

keep getting better.

So how do you go about doing that? And what are some of

the hands for how do you keep pushing yourself because

complacency is a real big issue.

Indeed, and I always say that there's only one

thing that can keep you from getting better. And that is a

lack of desire to do so I can't make anyone get better. It's

about creating an environment where you know, if you're a

leader where people choose to be motivated, I got to do a quick

detour here. And then I'll come back to the four areas and the

four principles in the book. But it's always gratifying. And I

know you get this sometimes you get an email, or someone will

come up to you after an event and say your book or your speech

changed my life. And I'm always quick to say thank you. But no,

I didn't in the book didn't either you changed your life.

I'm not God, I can't take responsibility for positive life

change. And others, I'm often gratified that what I said or

did or wrote about, influence them. But ultimately, we change

our lives. Ultimately, people have to take responsibility for

getting better. So no matter how much I may want you to get

better if you don't have a desire to get better, you won't.

If you do have a desire, what I talk about in the book is I try

to make things as simple as possible without making them

simplistic. And the first part of the book talks about what I

call the potential matrix, a matrix is very easy to

understand I, when I work with leaders in the sector, business

world, I see that they in the outer world of performance and

doing they usually Excel. But if there's a sticking point, it's

in the inner world of why do I do what I do? What's my purpose,

a lack of clarity, a lack of, of meaning. So I, you know, I can

make gains by moving them where I call left to the axis into the

inner world. Interestingly, when I work with church leaders,

these tend to be in our painting with a broad brush here, but

they tend to be people with a very deep inner life, you know,

you really have to have a sense of purposefulness, and meaning

to drive your faith and spirituality. So the mirror to

help help them often is moving them into the outer world of how

do you run a good meeting? How do you communicate more

effectively, how do you create a team? And so I started thinking

about this kind of on Daikon To me, and I added one other one

other element, and that is what I would call initiating or

responding. We initiate, we take action, we respond, we're acted

upon. So if you combine those two axes, what you've ended up

with is, is the outer world of performing and learning and

performing, you're initiating and learning you're being acted

upon by the lessons and ideas of others. And in the inner world,

we have thinking, which is where you initiate the thought process

planning, visioning strategy. And then what is probably the

most interesting and most often overlooked, or least used

quadrant, the inner world of responding which I call

reflection. Reflection is where ideas come to us. You know,

thinking is where we seek ideas, but some of our biggest

epiphanies, you know, you don't wake up in the morning and say,

Today, I want to have an epiphany about how to improve my

marriage, you might read a book for ideas, but the Insight will

come through this kind of quiet contemplation and gestation. So

those are the four areas and here's the, there's two big

messages. When I did this quadrant, I wanted to basically

remind people that we all have one of those quadrants, we like

the most, for a lot of business people it's performing for me,

and you probably won't be initially surprised. It's

thinking. In other words, what I enjoy most is books and ideas

and creating. But if I just think I really am not very

successful, because I haven't translated that to the outer

world. But if I just perform, I'm not necessarily successful,

because I may achieve great success, but have no real reason

for doing so. So my point is, we need to be better in each of

those four areas. To the degree you're a better thinker, learner

performer and reflector to that degree, you will become better

in all the areas of your life. The second thing I wanted to

impress upon people is that these quadrants don't exist

independent of each other. So if you put a.in, the in the

thinking, what most ideas, most projects begin with thinking the

beginning of the day, think about what do I have to do

today? Well, to really be good at what you do, you have to

learn how to do it. So you take that line and you then go down

to the learning quadrant? Do I have the skills I need? How do I

develop more skills, then you apply those skills in the

performing quadrant, you move up. And then after you perform

when you think about or debrief or reflect on what you did you

move to the lower left. And after you reflect and get any

insights, you go back to thinking and it looks like and

this is what's cool and infinity symbol. Now, that infinity

symbol when you super pote, impose it over the over the

potential matrix gives you a primary way of always getting

better. Hey, by the way, let me tell you something that's

interesting, especially for the your listeners, I know your

listeners are movers and shakers, but there are a lot of

sales pros. So selling is a numbers and a skills game. So

you take somebody who's making 20 calls a day, and you move

them down into the learning quadrant where they're better at

presenting and closing and analyzing needs, and then you

move them back up into performing. Now, they're going

to close more of those 20 calls a day they make and if you

double the amount of calls they make in the amount of skill they

have, then it becomes very, very powerful. So I was tell people,

you know, don't go through the motions, I go to the I used to

work out in my home gym, and I started going to the gym and my

son. And sometimes I have to like bite my lip till it leads

because I watch people doing exercises that are not only

wrong, but are harmful. And they don't ask me and it's none of my

business. You know, it's a mirror right? You're free to do

stuff stupid. They're delusional, and they probably

Sunday gonna go I don't I go to the gym every day. And why am I

so sore? Why do I have a pulled muscle? Or why am I not

improving my health. And that's because you're doing it wrong,

you haven't learned to exercise. So. So that's the potential

matrix, the big insight is, is you've got these four areas

where you can get better, don't don't just focus on the easy,

the preferable use all four to create synergy for improvement.

It basically is pointing out to people that if you only continue

to get better in one area, you're leaving a lot on the

table, there's so much more opportunity to improve your

thinking, your learning your reflection, as well as your

performance. But then what I do I talk about four things to do

the path to improvement is the potential matrix, the means of

improvement are these four techniques. And the first one is

probably my favorite, because it's used a little out of

context. You know, Clay Christensen talks about

disruptive innovation. And you hear a lot about the word

disrupt or disruptive and it's usually applied to things and

processes and to companies. But in the book, I say the first

step to getting better as disrupt yourself before somebody

else does. You know, it's a play on the idea that most people

change only when they have to, you know, leaders change before

they need to. And it's about looking at the areas of your

life that have become outdated, that have become stale, that

could be better. You know, we find things that work and

because they work we keep doing them and we keep doing them

until they don't work as well. And so what do we typically do

when they don't work as well? We do we do more of it right? And

it's like An engine that's you know, got sand in the

transmission, you know, the more power we apply, the slower, you

know, the more the gears grind, and the slower we go. So the

first key is to ask yourself who are what in my life needs

disrupted, meaning if you got, you got to have somebody on your

sales team, you've given them every opportunity to get better,

you've invested in them, they haven't, maybe it's time to

disrupt them and let them pursue their bliss somewhere else. Or

maybe you've got somebody in your sales team that is

frustrated you but you've never explained why maybe it's time to

positively disrupt them and the relationship so that it can get

better. So the first tool is disrupt yourself. But it's more

than complacency. Complacency says, you know, what, where am I

too comfortable, disrupting yourself looks for areas that

you may not even have considered before. So it's not just about

disrupting the known, it's about looking for that, you know, that

better or game changing practice, the next principle is

refocus. And this is interesting, if you disrupt

yourself, you've got to refocus. I work with clients that say,

you know, we want to do this, and we're gonna change our

culture, and we want to improve these processes, and they come

up with all these disruptive ideas, but people keep doing

what they did before. And then they say, why, why are they

changing? What because you never refocus. You know, we're people

of habit, right. And if you say you want me to do something

different, but the next day, I don't know how much time to

devote or what to do differently. I'll default to

what I'm habitually been doing in the past. So I will

perpetuate the pre disruptive behavior. So refocusing says,

and this this is something that's taken me I mean, maybe

I'm a slow learner, it's taken me a while to to realize, too

many people, even effective leaders have very clear focus,

but they don't refocus as things change. So they're playing by

kind of an outdated focus scorecard, if you will, if you

don't refocus and say, okay to do these things, what needs to

be done differently? Or who needs to do them instead of me?

Or how do I reallocate my time, that's the mismatch, till you

really get clear on how to reallocate and refocus your time

and energy, you'll inevitably slip back into those previous

patterns, they'll keep the disruption from becoming

effective.

That makes a lot of sense. Hey, I know that you said there

are four, but we are running out of time. And if you guys want

the other two, you're gonna have to go by the potential

principal.

I gotta tell you, no books are like kids. You

know, we love all our kids. Books are also like kids, and

not all of our kids behave the same way. But I'm excited about

this book. Because really, for me, it has been kind of a

compilation of bringing together the last 31 years of my work

into how have I you know, approached life and how have I

seen others who I've taught these principles to approach

life and succeed. So it's a distillation, it's a short book,

it's not an aeroplane book, you can read most of my books before

you push back from the gate, but I really think for the people

who are into bettering their best, this will be a worthwhile

investment for them, and I do hope they'll check it out.

Mark, I appreciate you so much. Thank you for making some

time here and we wish you all the best.

Thanks for having me on the show.