Overcoming Knowledge Gaps

I’ve stressed over and over through this process that I’ve never felt like I was overly talented in any given area. Before I move on, I need to stress that I’m not sharing that - yet again - to diminish the value I know I’m capable of adding today; I need you to understand that every step we’ve worked through is applicable for you and you should expect at achieve results that are at least as good, assuming you’re willing to consistently apply the same level of work ethic. Even though I didn’t feel all that talented, my ego early on prevented me from acknowledging my limits. Once that was in check, asking the right questions and pouring myself into applying each of the insights I learned from so many experts fell right in line with that work ethic. But the further I progressed and the greater the opportunities were that we were faced with, the more I realized that I’d always be faced with overcoming knowledge gaps.

While I’ve had to navigate knowledge gaps throughout my entire career (and life, for that matter), how I’ve gone about that has changed significantly since starting our business. Working for someone else, be that in a small family-owned business or in a large organization that operated globally, I had access to experts either within the company or on some sort of retainer who could provide most of the support I needed. As we started out, those resources weren’t always at our fingertips and often included a cost that we couldn’t afford.

During conversation with clients or potential partners, Cindy and I are frequently asked about the size of our team. That’s usually tied to the larger events we host locally, but we occasionally get that question when discussing books we’ve written, programs we’ve developed, our social media reach, or even the traffic across the 1,000+ pages on our website. For the first full decade we were in business for ourselves, that team was us: just me and Cindy. Some of that was a direct result of operating on a shoestring budget and constantly working to dig back out of the hole created when we were prohibited from doing the work that paid us for most of 2020 and nearly half of 2021, I won’t pretend that my ego hasn’t stood in the way a bit too.

We don’t have any employees. But make no mistake, we have been blessed with support - some volunteers, some we’ve traded services with, and some we’ve paid when we could afford it. That said, Cindy and I have taken on tasks that neither of us ever imagined we could do. And while being willing to learn a diverse range of skills has served us well, developing enough competency to complete a task is a far cry from mastering that task. Regardless of where the necessary support would come from, I’ve struggled with asking for it - or even accepting it when experts have offered their support at no cost. 

We open and close our Emerging Leader Development course by emphasizing something we learned in chapter 17 of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. In “The Law of Priorities,” John explains “the three R’s” as learning what’s required of us and only us, what gives us the most return on the time we put into it, and what provides us with the greatest reward. (I believe we can best find that reward when we know our Clear Purpose!) For me to overcome my knowledge gaps, I’ve had to constantly re-evaluate the tasks that are and are not absolutely required to be done by me. 

In our personal life, the biggest ah-ha moment I can point to is accepting the fact that while our yard must be mowed, there’s no law saying that I have to be in the mower seat. Allowing someone else (one of my best friends and my roommate when Cindy and I met) to provide that service for us has helped me focus on the things only I can do. As our business has grown, and evolved, we’ve needed to apply the same approach to many of the things we’ve done ourselves over the years. What was good enough early on now requires a level of expertise that we’ll never be able to develop in the time we have available. Knowing who knows what we don’t has been essential in those areas.

Building a knowledge network has definitely helped us hone our own skills, but it’s also played a key role in helping us stay in our calling. We’ll touch more on the intentionality required to develop that kind of network later on as we work through a strategic framework for leveraging leadership growth. For now, just know that asking for and accepting the help we’ll each need to overcome our knowledge gaps requires humility and sustaining a learning mindset. Before we dig into what that learning mindset looks like, I’ll challenge you to identify one difficult task you could use help with - and ask an expert for that help.