In this solo episode of the Proteus Leader Show, Erika Andersen argues that rapid, continuous learning is the essential competitive advantage for leaders in today’s hyper‑changing world. She introduces the ANEW framework—Aspiration, Neutral self‑awareness, Endless curiosity, and Willingness to be bad first—as the four mental skills that world‑class learners use. For each skill she offers a concrete story from her own experience, explains why the skill matters, and gives a practical tip that listeners can try immediately. The episode closes with a call to experiment with self‑talk, a prompt to share results on Twitter, and an invitation to take a “Get Good at Things Fast” quiz on ProteusLeader.com.
You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading and managing and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.
Hello, welcome to the Proteus Leader Show. It's great to have this chance to connect with you. We all know the world is changing more quickly now than at any previous point in the planet's history. Every day, new knowledge, new technology, new ways of interacting with each other. And at work, it seems as though things change hourly. Consumer behavior and business models shift and morph, and we have to learn new ways of operating in response to the changes. Given all that, I've come to believe that the key skill for anyone today, especially those of us who lead and manage others, is the ability to learn new skills, new knowledge, and new ways of operating quickly and continuously. In the words of Arie de Goos, for many years the head of strategy and planning at Royal Dutch Shell, The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. I think that's absolutely right, and I want to help you understand how to do that. We've identified 4 skills that world-class learners use to navigate this wildly changing time, and we call them ANEW: aspiration, neutral self-awareness, endless curiosity, and willingness to be bad first. This podcast is a thumbnail intro to these important mental skills with some examples and 2 practical tips to start building them into your own life. The first new skill, as I said, is aspiration. If you think about it, you'll realize that we fairly often don't want to learn new things that are important for us to learn. In fact, we resist, telling ourselves we don't need these new skills or knowledge to do our job. Even while we know that we're probably fooling ourselves. Here's an example from my own life. My publicist kept telling me that I should do a podcast, that it was a great way to build a conversation with folks who would be interested in my new book. I so much didn't want to have to do it. I kept telling myself all the reasons it wasn't important, didn't matter, et cetera, et cetera. But fortunately, I was able to use my own model. The key to increasing your aspiration, we found, is to figure out the personal benefits to you from learning a new skill instead of focusing on how hard it will be or why it isn't necessary. When I thought about the possible benefits of doing a podcast that would be motivating to me, I realized 2 things: it would be a way to help people build key skills, and that in the interview format podcasts I'd be doing, I'd get to hear and share cool insights from people I respect. Both of those things were really appealing to me. As soon as I recognized those benefits and envisioned a future where I'd be enjoying them, I found I started to want to learn the art of podcasting. So my first practical tip for you is this: think of something in your own life that you know you probably need to learn but have been avoiding or resisting. Now, instead of focusing on how it will be hard and why you shouldn't have to do it, see if you can think about something that you'd enjoy about learning the new thing or some benefit you'd get that's meaningful to you. If you can then imagine a future in which you've learned the thing and are reaping those benefits, I bet you'll start to feel your level of aspiration begin to increase. So let's go on to the next a new skill: neutral self-awareness. When you're learning something new, it's very important to be accurate about where you're starting from. That's what neutral self-awareness is. For example, I once spoke with a leader who was widely held to be difficult to work for. He was seen as petty, indecisive. Decisive, self-involved. And yet this guy believed he was a good leader. His non-neutral self-awareness made it impossible for him to learn. When his boss suggested to him that he needed to work on his leadership skills, he simply dismissed that feedback as wrong. If you want to get more neutrally self-aware, first recognize what you're saying to yourself about yourself, and then shift that self-talk to be more accurate. This guy's mental monologue was, I'm a great leader. If he had questioned that, had said to himself instead, am I a great leader? He might have been able to look at his behavior and others' reactions and come to a different conclusion about himself as a leader. We call that becoming a fair witness of yourself. And if he had done that, his approach to learning would have been entirely different. The second way to get more self-aware is to find good sources— people who see you clearly, want the best for you, and will tell you the truth about yourself— and then be open to fully hearing what they have to say. In this guy's case, he was already getting the feedback. He just needed to be able to hear it. The third new skill is endless curiosity. Now, all human beings are born endlessly curious. You know this if you've ever been around babies and little children. They're passionate about exploring and mastering everything they can see or touch or hear. That curiosity is how all of us learn to operate in the world. Sadly, though, when we get to be teenagers and then adults, that endless curiosity gets largely socialized out of us. It becomes uncool or childish to acknowledge that something is new to us, And that we really want to understand it. But you can reengage your childhood curiosity by recreating the habit of asking those questions all little kids ask, the ones that start with how and why and I wonder if. The curious question that was most helpful to me when I started learning about podcasting was, I wonder if someone is doing a podcast that would be a good model for me. That made me start exploring, as curiosity always does, and I found Omar's $100 MBA Show, and it helped me feel as though I could actually create a podcast show that would be engaging, useful, and fun. The final new skill is willingness to be bad first. Our biggest stumbling block to new learning is that we really like being good at things, And when we're adults and we're already good at a number of things, it can feel very awkward and embarrassing to be bad, to have to go back to being a novice. But that's what you have to do in order to learn new things. Once again, the secret lies in shifting how you talk to yourself. Willingness to be bad first means saying to yourself that you are going to be bad at things when you start learning them, that it's inevitable. And at the same time, acknowledging that you've learned many things and you'll be able to learn this. Having that balanced self-talk, accepting I'm not good and having faith in your ability to get good, frees your whole attention for inquiring the new skill or knowledge. It's kind of amazing how it opens you up, actually. So here's my second practical tip for you: over the next few days. If you're trying to do something that you're not very good at, whether at work or at home, notice your self-talk. Are you beating yourself up mentally for being bad at it, or are you perhaps insisting to yourself that you actually are good at it already, even if you know that's not really true? Instead, try acknowledging to yourself that you're not good at this, whatever it is, right now, but that you believe you'll be able to get good at it in time. As you say that to yourself, really notice the impact it has on you, both mentally and emotionally. I'd love to hear about your experience with this. Let me know on Twitter @ErikaAndersen. And if you're interested in exploring these and new skills more deeply, you can go to ProteusLeader.com/BeBadFirst and take the Get Good at Things Fast quiz you'll find there. That will give you a sense of where you're starting out right now on your journey to being a master of mastery, the kind of high-payoff learner you need to be to succeed today. So thanks for being here with me. Have a great life, and let's talk again soon.
We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at proteusleader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.
