091: Mark Sanborn - What’s Your True Potential?

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So what's your potential? I think nobody wants epitaph a tombstone that reads here lies potential intact.

Right?

We all want to reach our potential and yet nobody really knows what it is. Today's show is with a best selling author, Mark Sanborn on the topic of the potential principle. How do we realize and keep hitting new levels of potential forever? And Mark introduces a framework to always be grappling and expanding your potential over time, yours and your companies. Listen in.

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host, Gazelle's business growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Mark Sanborn from Denver, Colorado, or just.

Outside Denver, Mark Lone Tree, which is metro Denver.

Awesome. So Mark's best known as the author of the Fred Factor how passion in your work in life can turn ordinary into extraordinary. Mark's going to talk to us today about the potential principle and we're going to get into what is that and how do you keep getting better at what you're already best at. He's a international speaker. He's, he's had nearly out of the house kind of kids like me. So I can relate to that. Scuba diver, skier all around, outdoor guy and on the move. So welcome to the show, Mark.

BILL Thanks. And you know, it was great. I had a chance to speak to the Scale UP conference in St. Louis and had a great time there closing that event. And just interesting, interestingly, Vern Harnish and I have been friends for about, I don't know, 30 years. We go way back to pre Gazelle's days. So he's a, he's a valued friend and a great guy. And I'm tickled pink whenever I see the great work that he's been able to do.

Well, I'm really glad to have you on the show today and to talk all about this, our speakers at our summits and things. If you haven't attended one of the Gazelle summits, you should register as we record this one. Depending on when you hear it, the next one will be in New Orleans. And I recommend that you register in that. So we've got the core work of Scaling up the Rock habits that the coaches and our followers will apply to the business. But then every couple times a year, we have these summits where we bring new authors and new speakers, sharing business insights and new methods and approaches to doing that. And so that's why you're here. So give us your background. How do you get into this line of work? How did you get to be who you are and all that? And tell us how we arrive at the potential principal.

My background's in sales and marketing. I started speaking at a young age in competition, kind of like some people got into debate in high school. I actually got into competitive public speaking when I was 10 years old. So I developed that skillset ahead of having a whole lot of life experience or knowledge to share. But I knew that I wanted to use communicating ideas in my livelihood. So after I left sales and marketing in the publishing industry, I started Sanborn and Associates, which we call an idea Studio for Leadership Development. By that I simply mean I like to work with, advise, speak to, and write for leaders who are committed to getting better. What I say is we try to encourage and motivate leaders at every level to turn ordinary into the extraordinary. Because that's really been the theme of my work. You know, the book that I was most well known for in terms of sales was the Fred Factor, which has sold about 2 million copies internationally. But my latest book, which is kind of a culmination of the past 30 plus years, working with leaders is the potential principle. Because what I realized, and it's kind of like the people that go to the Scaling Up Summit, you know, the people that are there are already among the best at what they do. In other words, the people that most need to hear the sermon, to use an old cliche, usually don't go to church, right? And the businesses that could most benefit from what gazelles does or the businesses that could most benefit from what I do either aren't willing to pay for it or can't. They can't afford it. So what I realized is most of my clients were already really, really good at what they do. And in many cases, they were, by whatever metrics used, the best at what they did. So it dawned on me that the only thing harder than becoming the best at what you do is continuing to get better. And I say in the book, better always beats best. You know, you can go from number three to number two about executing what number two is doing. If you're number two, you can watch number one and catch up by being better at their game than they are. But when you're leading, when you're out front, you're making it up, you know, there's nobody to emulate. And that's why so many companies at once own their market space, are relics of business history.

That's a really interesting thing. I remember really distinctly. I was studying to give a series of workshops with another company, and there was a lot of learning to do, both in the material and the delivery of these particular workshops. And I had a teacher, a mentor, who was already pretty skilled expert in the area. I don't know if masterful or not, but very expert in the whole thing. And on the occasion, I had a chance to watch him be coached in something. So he was going to do something that was sort of standard and basic to our work in front of another teacher who was like another level of mastery in this whole thing. And so this guy was a leadership skills thing. And so this guy gets up and he starts doing this thing, and he just screws it up massively. And I had this thought, oh, I'll never be finished. I'll always be working on this. It's never, ever going to be handled. And there was a certain sort of a liberation, a freedom in that. Like, I don't have to worry about being finished. I could always just surrender to the getting better and the notion that that actually is an access to mastery, the never being finished. I don't know. Does that relate at all to what you're speaking to?

Oh, exactly. No. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, people say they've arrived, and there's nothing wrong with arriving. That basically happens when you get the recognition and acknowledgement of your peers. The problem is when you stop going from where you've arrived to the next level or the level beyond. You know, it sounds maudlin and cliche, but it's absolutely true that the more you learn about any particular skill or craft or industry, the more you realize you have to learn. Because when you don't know much, you don't understand nuance. You know, you can identify the basic building blocks. Kind of like a toddler can, you know, pick a few letters out of building blocks, but they can't write, you know, Hemingway or Shakespeare prose, because all they've got is the building blocks. So the better you become, the harder it is to get better. And yet, in many regards, there's always much more to be learned in whatever undertaking you're involved with.

So you wrote the potential principle, right.

To begin to get at this and help people get access to it. Tell us a little bit about what is that? What is the potential principle?

Sure. The potential principle is very simple. We all know how good we become, but none of us know how good we could be. I've never met anyone that could conclusively, I've never met anybody that tried, much less could conclusively prove they were as good as they could ever be. Or to look at it differently, you know, if I said, bill, today's as good as your life's ever going to get, from here on out, it's downhill. Your relationships will be less rewarding. You'll make less money, you'll have less happiness. Your health will start to diminish. You wouldn't see that as good news, right? We assume every day that we wake up that we're going to get a little bit better in certain areas. But here's the catch. When I was researching the book, we found out that 58% of professionals said they had a commitment to getting better, but only 30% had a plan. I call commitment without a plan wishful thinking and daydreaming. You know, it's not practical to think you're going to get better if you aren't actively pursuing it. The only thing that gets better accidentally with age is wine. You know, the rest of us have to work at it.

Okay, so, well, I definitely had that thought as I hit 50 a few years ago that, oh, shoot, I'm halfway through my life. Is it all downhill? And then I realized, no, there's something else to get and there's more to do. And I began to create new inspiration about being in the second half of life and what it was going to be about and all that. But at first it was a little depressing. And I often wonder, I think many of us fear, what if this is as good? What if I've already had my peak moment? What if I've already hit the thing in any particular domain, right. Fitness, intellect, et cetera. Impact, money, romance. What if I've already done that? God, that's a depressing thought. And the kind of a recurring thing that we're actually been talking about last couple days is never finished. The idea of never finished is one of our company values and not finished yet is my current operating sort of fitness value. And I have a picture of Jack lalanne right here, who is this guy who just kept going until he dropped dead, right?

Yeah.

And I write about him in the book. He's a hero of mine. And so it's interesting that you have his picture because in the book I say if you don't think you can get better as you get older, you don't know Jack. You know, and by Jack, I mean Jack lalanne. He's such an inspiration. As you know, he was the first guy to have a fitness studio. The historians say, either among the first or the very first. Most people think he was probably the first guy to open a fitness studio. He had a long running television show, the first of its type, where he got stay at home moms to exercise. By the way, his marketing trick, he had a dog, his big white dog in every frame of the show so the kids would make mom watch the show so they could see the dog. Kind of a clever marketing trick. But the point was, as he got older, he kept getting better. At 54, he beat in an informal competition a now pretty well known 21 year old bodybuilder then named Arnold Schwarzenegger. At 65, he pulled 65 boats from Alcatraz to Fisherman's Wharf, shackled and handcuffed. At 75, he pulled 75 boats fighting strong winds filled with people a mile. I mean, the guy just kept getting better. And he did that at a time when we believed your physiology would diminish. He proved that certainly we do fight aging, I mean that's inevitable, but that there are many things you can do to overcome what other people succumb to when it comes to their physiology and biology. So it's great that you and I both share that love of Jackson Olaine is an inspirational role model.

Well, it also shows our age, right? We remember a black and white TV with a little dial on it that you had to get up and walk across the room and flick to get to one of the next four channels that might be available at that time. And that dates us profoundly. Exactly. So tell us about this potential principle applied. Share some stories or something with it that that can help bring it to life for our folks.

I was working with a client, you know, on his communication skills and he said, wow. Said my boss would so benefit if you worked with her, but you'll never get the opportunity. And I said, well, why is that? And he said, because she doesn't think she Needs to get better. And, you know, he just expressed kind of the price of admission. You know, I can't. You. And I can't help anybody who doesn't think they need to get better or doesn't want to get better. You know, we can encourage them and hopefully offer inspiration, but you when. When it's the conclusion of the matter is you got to want to get better. So what I did is I developed basically four areas to get better, in which I call the potential matrix, and then four key strategies for getting better. Because I'm a business person, I tend to relate a lot of it. And certainly what I'm talking about now is applicable to any area of life, but I relate a lot of it to business. So what I found, for years, I worked with business people. And then, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago, I started doing some pro bono work with ministries, with religious organizations. And I had kind of an interesting epiphany. I found that business people are really good at what I call the outer world of business. The doing, the learning, the teaching, the speaking, the selling, the delegating, all those things. And if I really wanted to help a leader go deeper, I had to move them into the inner world, where it was about thinking and critical thinking and reflection and things like that. But when I worked with religious leaders, I found that they were really often, and I'm painting with a broad brush here, but they were often very well developed in their inner life. I mean, if you pursue that kind of higher calling, you tend to be more reflective and contemplative than people that are in business. And so if I wanted to help them, I moved them to the outer world. So, you know, you got the inner world, the outer world, and then you've got what I call the initiating and the responding and the outer world. You initiate when you do, and you respond when you learn. Now, certainly, learning requires effort, but the point is, you can't learn something from within yourself. You can learn about yourself, but, you know, knowledge comes from without. You know, you learn it from a teacher or from a mentor. And then if you go in the inner world, the inner world of initiating is thinking, planning, strategizing. And the responding is what I call reflection. You know, reflection is where ideas come to you, and for purposes of conversation, you think you pursue an idea. When you reflect, you open yourself up to insight. And so those are the four areas. You know, the thinking, reflecting, learning, and performing. The doing quadrant I call performing. And there's just two big takeaways here. One is we all have a quadrant we love. It's not. It's not. I used to think business people would primarily like the performing quadrant, but I find it's a pretty even split between the four quadrants. You know, if you gave me a computer connection and a pile of books and locked the room for a couple days, I'd be happy. I mean, I'm in the world of thinking and I guess probably secondarily learning. But we always tend to overuse our strengths, right? So if you're not good at the skills of selling, you know, you're going to probably spend too much time thinking about selling or reflecting about selling, but not learning about selling. And so I tell people, go into all four quadrants regularly, do a little analysis, Think of those four quadrants if you want dials on your dashboard and saying, am I reflecting effectively? Am I thinking well, am I getting better at learning? Am I getting better at performing? So there's two big messages. One is, pay attention to all four quadrants. And the second is. And we can get to that in a minute, Use these four strategies, these four skills that I teach in the book in each of those four quadrants, which gives you a total combination of 16, if you will, different opportunities to get better. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.

So how do you figure out which one you're most comfortable in?

Just preference. You know, it's like somebody says, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream? You know? You know? Yeah, exactly. And so if somebody says, what's your favorite quadrant? Doesn't mean, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean you're maximally effective there. It just means that's where you like to hang out. You know, I call people who reflect too much navel gazers, right? Because they never have any productive output. And I call people, people that perform well but don't know why I call them actors. Right? Because if you're going. If you're performing every day but you have no sense of mission or purpose, then aren't you kind of just going through the motions? Isn't that what an actor does?

So you. Did you ever get to work with his boss?

No, no, no. No one even an option. There was no. There was no change of heart. There was no turnabout.

But you got to work with him. In the. In our preparation, you talked about the disruption question. So what is that and how do we apply that?

Very simple but very powerful. Who or what in your life needs disrupted? Because if you don't disrupt yourself, somebody or something else will. And I'm not Talking about just Clay Christensen, innovation, disruption. I'm talking about relationships that are heading towards, that are declining, that are headed towards an end that we aren't willing to do the hard work to disrupt so that the relationship doesn't end. Or a process that you know damn well isn't working as well as it used to. But it's just so easy. You just do a little more of it and get a little less return on your investment. Of the four strategies, and that to me is primary. That's the one that takes some courage. It basically means instead of knowing, you know, somebody said, right now, is it Bill, Mark, you know, what is something that you should either stop doing or do differently. We know what it is, but doggone it, you know, it's a not today. I'm not at peak energy, didn't have my coffee. I didn't, you know, get my raise or I didn't land the client. Disrupt yourself. I like to say, take the path of some resistance. Because if you never take the path of resistance, you never grow any mental or physical muscle. Resistance produces muscle. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they work really hard and then they start to coast. You know, they remember Seth Godin called it the stuck winning model. You do what used to work until it doesn't work, and then you do more of it because it used to work, right?

That works. It's called beating your head against the wall. Harder. Harder.

That's the disruption. That's the disruption question.

Hang on before you go into the increased capacity, because I think good to underscore for folks, because we all do this in every area. We hang on to a client or a product line or a service too long. We hang on to a relationship. And it's not that the product, the service, the relationship, the client that anything in any domain needs to end, but things. But there's a turnover, right? There's a season. And if you're not disrupting it, a competitor or something else will. And I've noticed this in my marriage, in my family, in my clients, in this business, in prior business, in every realm, there's a time when something either sort of ceases to be relevant or interesting or is yanked out from under me abruptly. And any attempt to sort of resist that shift is ultimately futile and wasted energy.

Spot on.

And every time I embrace the disruption and just plunge head first, oh, look at this is happening, then something powerful is almost always on the other side. An interesting new result, right? I think our folks can probably relate a lot to that notion because we've all got a, a client or a product line or a service that we've held on to a little too long or some other area of life. I did about 45 triathlons and marathons over the years and I just got bored with them. Right. And then I stopped doing them and I like they ceased to be compelling to me. They needed reinventing. So I started doing some new things. And I think in any domain I just gave a personal one to contrast the business thing. But we all have these things. So talk to us then about the capacity.

Well, if you want to increase production, you have to increase capacity. You know, every, every system has its maximum and the same is true for human beings. If you don't learn new skills or improve skills you already have, you don't have increased capacity. And that's about how, you know, instead of saying am I an effective thinker? It's asking how I can become a more effective thinker. Or instead of saying am I productive in terms of the results I produce every day given that, you know, the time we have is fixed. So and that's a mistake by the way again, entrepreneurs often make, they just, Instead of spending 10 hours a day, they spend 12 and then 14 they blow up their families and their relationships and their health and then they say wow, that wasn't worth it. Well, it's because they increased effort without increasing capacity. Capacity is the ability to produce more given fixed resources. And so that comes from growing yourself, growing your team.

So the capacity, we add a new capability to ourselves or to our team, to our business in some fashion. Right?

Yeah, it could be a new idea, it could be a new resource. Maybe you find, maybe it's a new employee, a new hire, maybe it's an outside resource, maybe it's a consultant. I mean certainly the low hanging fruit are personal skills that we develop or improve. But I would, would look at the universe of what are all the resources. You know, I mean there's still a lot of people who haven't fully embraced the best, you know, that, that social media has to offer. You know, they just, they're stuck in that mindset that social media is what their, their kids do, you know, during dinner with their, their phones and they don't see that that is a new capacity expander if it's done correctly.

Amen to that. Both. My daughter, so my daughter is 18, she travels around the country doing photography, video and graphic work for performing artists and things like that. And at 18 she already has a bit of a career and access to in connection to national recording artists and things like that at 18. And she's done that connection through her social media activities and you know, her gregariousness. But, you know, each granular piece of it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Like, why'd you put that up? That looks ridiculous. Right. She's speaking a language and using tools that. And in my world, I'm actually pretty good with social stuff. But she's like in a whole other, like a, like a 10x level of that kind of thing. The same thing. True. In a different domain. My son in science and math and things like that is managed through those kinds of connections at 20 to connect to an entrepreneur, a software developer in another country who's funded his. His team and his project is running away with stuff. Both of them at 18 and 20 are far beyond where we are by using tools in a way that like, is just beyond me. And I'm somebody who's using those more than lots, Right?

Exactly.

It's fascinating to see that. So there's something there then, to adding capacity, accessing new tools, learning new methods. I'm also reminded of a time that I failed at something as a CEO years ago in the last business I ran. And I began to change some processes and I realigned the way we did stuff. And I. And it had a big impact on one woman's job. But I was ineffective in teaching her or showing her that path to changing her approach. So for her it just felt like more work, like fewer people more work. And that process or shift didn't happen at all for her. She got very angry. She made a claim. I ended up paying her some money, some things like that. Right. About the. The overwhelm or the unwinnability of her job. But the very next person I hired in the job just did it naturally and beautifully and never had a problem again. Right. So I was ineffective as the boss and she was ineffective in the role in adapting her. Her process that looked fine on the surface, but the very next person did it just fine. And I think there's something in that for all of us, as I hear you speak, that there's an approach that if sort of, I hear it segueing back to the disruption thing. Right. If you don't figure these things out, somebody else will come in and. And create new capacities that you don't have for yourself. New approaches, right.

Yeah, there's definitely a connection there. And you know, sometimes it's just a fit problem. You know, they're just. That woman, despite her best intentions was overwhelmed. But you had a, you know, you had the wrong person in the job, as evidenced by the fact that the next person didn't fail by being overwhelmed because they were the right person for the job.

They did just fine. She. Yeah, she. She was an honest, hard working, well intentioned person. She just wasn't able to make that shift and I wasn't able. But the next person did just fine. Which is sometimes the case with our clients and our business that like we're struggling with something and our replacement kills it.

Yeah.

So how do we then pull these things together? What's the flow or the, the approach that you take folks through or.

Yeah, summarize you take. We talked about two of the. The four strategies. The other, the other two being refocus, which is to say whenever you're trying to do something new, you better change the behaviors that you do every day or else you just repeat the past. And the other one is. The fourth is engage others. I have found that when I started doing this, I saved myself a lot of time and money. And that is thinking who before I thought what? Who knows, instead of trying to figure it out on my own. If you can figure out who knows something, they can save you a lot of time and frustration. So you take those four strategies in the four quadrants and you basically can apply to improve your performance. You can increase capacity, you can engage others, you can refocus to do more effective things. And then you move around the quadrants and like I said, you've got basically four strategies and four quadrants, which gives you 16 combinations. We have an appendix in the book that shows what those are, but it's pretty straightforward. It's about looking for ways big and small, huge, as well as nuanced ways that you can wake up a little bit better tomorrow morning than you woke up this morning.

So let me see if I can pull it together. So I hear the opportunity to increase our potential to undiscovered or unpredicted levels of potential. What we can't see the next level of that and the access to that is first to disrupt yourself. Right. To take on. To embrace a change in some area, then to look at the four areas. And I'm not going to get these right, but let me try. So there's the doing and then there's the responding and then there's the insight and the learning. Are those the.

Yeah, performing, learning, thinking and reflecting.

Okay, great. And then we want to make small changes to our approach and add new capacities.

That's a good, good summary, good way to think about it.

Awesome. So we've given people a framework to expanding potential beyond the linear and obvious that they've got so far today. You know, we gave it just a quick treatment today, but you'll find all of it in in Mark's book and at the website the potential potential principle.com so potential principle.com is where you can go read more and follow on about it and begin to apply this to yourself and your business. I really appreciate you coming on and walking us through with that. I enjoyed the talk a great deal at the summit and this is helpful to expand it and bring it to our listeners.

Well Bill, thanks for having me and if I can ever be a resource, I hope people will pick up the book if they find it interesting and that can also connect them to the broader scope of work that I do as well. So it's been great to be with you.

Outstanding. And of course you'll find us always scalingupbusiness.com We've got a new podcast, new blog post every week. We've got daily tips, we've got a whole variety. You can go subscribe there. You can also download and get an intro to the scaling up methodology and the tools. We've got a variety of things there to help you start self helping your team through the process. Thanks again so much Mark.

You bet.

Well, special thanks to our original growth guru Verne Harnish and our show producer is Nai Obaid. Audio productions done by Podfly Productions, Audio editing by Albert Burge. Our show notes are by Ayn Kadina and proofreading is done by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of today's show, please share it with somebody else and let us know what you loved. Cards, letters, carrier pigeons, email, text, social media, whatever. We love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening and keep scaling up.

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