Fit

CHAPTER 9 START FROM WHERE YOU ARE

Coaches and managers are getting better at identifying derailing behaviours and offering advice. The observations may be accurate and the advice may even be great advice, but the stretch that's required to act on the advice is so huge that nothing ever changes. And this is part of the challenge. There are enough people in the world who are successful at enough things that we pretty much know how to be successful in anything. But success and elite performance are not a one-size-fits-all process.

If we want to know how to improve our performance consistently so we can get promoted, or get noticed, or be recruited to a better team, we must understand our personality and how the aspects of our personality impact that performance. Success is not that difficult when we diagnose personality correctly and use those insights to guide the way we improve.

A few years ago a family friend discovered that their son had a visual processing problem. He complained that he couldn't see the blackboard at the front of the class properly and he was concerned that his friends were getting ahead of him in school. His parents did what any good parents would do and tried to reassure their son that everything was fine. But he kept talking about it and it was clearly beginning to really upset him, so they took him to see an educational psychologist who ran IQ tests. The results indicated that his skills in auditory processing, problem-solving, innovation and creativity ...