I’ve always been fascinated by greatness. In a business management class at the University of Kentucky, one of our assignments was to choose a business book to read. At the end of the semester, everyone in the class would write a two page paper to summarize the book they chose and they’d use that two page paper as the basis of a presentation to the class.
For this assignment, I chose “In Search of Excellence” by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H Waterman, Jr. The next impactful book I remember reading was Zig Ziglar’s “See You at the Top”. Later on I heard about Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” and bought the book as quickly as I could find a copy.
My point here is that I’ve always been attracted to excellence and greatness. Several years ago, someone came along and introduced me to my strengths, the natural hard wiring that makes me who I am. All of a sudden, many things I’d wondered about for many years became crystal clear.
The reason I’ve always been so interested in excellence and greatness is that one of my top 5 strengths is called Maximzer. People who have this strength are driven to excellence. At the moment when this concept was explained to me, light bulbs lit up and I finally understood why I was always driven the way I was driven.
Before learning about my own strengths, I came to a conclusion that most people I’d met along the way through 20 years of recruiting (at that time) were going through life settling for what they “Can” do and they were producing an average performance. Gallup research for 15 years now suggests that year-after-year, 70% of the American workforce is disengaged in their work. That leaves only 30% of people who go to work every day who are engaged and pushing for some level of excellence or greatness.
I've always been attracted to these kinds of motivated people. Now I knew why!
When several people all at once encouraged me to offer coaching services, I immediately started wondering how I could help people move from the “Can” category to the “Should” category. Why would I want to do that?
If smart people like Steve Jobs, Stephen Covey and Jim Collins had already figured out that getting passionate, gifted, smart and engaged people into the right jobs would take care of producing great output, my job was simple!
My job was and is to help as many people as possible to figure out what they are built to be great at. The reason for the cool looking multi-colored frog picture at the top of this article is to illustrate that you and I and everyone else is as unique as that cool looking frog. Every single person on this plant has been created to be great at something. When people figure out what they can be great at, they can stop saying yes to what they “Can” do and they can confidently say yes to what they “Should” do, great things happen.
If you want to discover how to become the optimal you and produce the best output you have potential to produce, I want to meet you and I want to become your personal coach.
Jeff Snyder’s, Jeff Snyder Coaching Blog, 719.686.8810
