America’s Leadership Expert : New Growth

Clay Staires: This is America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires witH Tulsa Business Leadership and Podcast Number 48, Pruning and Shaping your Personal Growth.

As the leader of Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, this is another key area where I find that leaders consistently tend to fall short, tend to be lacking in their ability to prune and shape their personal growth. They’re reading books of all kinds of different categories. They’re just kind of scrambling. They’re listening to one thing right after another. We do this so often in our life because the idea is we just want to grow. We don’t necessarily know where we want to grow or how we want to grow. We just want to grow.

At America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, one of our key things that we do with executives is help them understand where they need to grow and what is the process for growth in that one area. If there were, hypothetically, 10 different areas in our life, there may just be one, two, or three areas that a person really does need to grow in and maybe just one area that is appropriate to grow in right now.

At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, we help you as an executive to identify what this one area is. The key thing that I find over and over as the leader of Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership is that business owners, entrepreneurs, and leaders, they don’t understand the concept of growth in different areas. It’s kind of a blanket thing.

We just listen and we read a book. We watch a webinar. We go to a workshop, and we go, “Oh, that was really good,” and we just identify that as, “I’m growing,” when really there isn’t any growth going on. There’s just a lot of new information. If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves adding in new information on top of old information until eventually, and this is so classic, until eventually we find that in our minds we have multiple completely contradictory ideas going on.

At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, I help business leaders and entrepreneurs identify what those conflicting mindsets are that most often will shut down growth as you move forward. I’ve got four steps that I want to talk about when it comes to pruning and shaping your personal growth with Tulsa Business Leadership.

Number one is to identify the inhibiting and ineffectual growth because that’s what pruning is. Pruning is cutting away, inhibiting an ineffectual growth to make way for new effectual growth, for new growth that can produce new fruit. How do we identify this? I have told business leaders across the country as a speaker with America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership that you won’t be able to identify this all on your own. You can only think what you think. There’s no way for you to think anything other than what you think.

This is why again it is so important for you to have a mentor in your life. Again, not somebody, not somebody that you just call when you have struggles, but this is somebody that you actually meet with on a consistent basis that is actually taking you down a path, helping you identify the inhibiting and ineffectual growth.

Then, the second step after we have identified it, is the shaping part. Now, we begin to cut away. Now, we begin to shape. The struggle here is that to allow this to happen with your mentor, the idea, the pruning, this is when you begin to submit to authority. You begin to submit to somebody else’s thoughts of how you should make decisions.

If you’re like me, oh, this is incredibly difficult. It is incredibly hard to do because I want to be the one in control. I want to be the one that knows what’s best for me, and as soon as somebody else begins to say, “Hey, I think this what you should do.” As long as it lines up with what I want to do, everything is fine, but as soon as it begins to deviate from what I want, I begin to resist.

America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership didn’t get started just overnight. It wasn’t until I was 47 years old and I finally came to the conclusion that I will submit to a coach. I will submit to somebody telling me what to do. Whatever they tell me to do I will do that as I build my company of Tulsa Business Leadership.

It was at that point that I truly began to be shaped as an entrepreneur and as a successful business leader. Up until that point, I had growth but it was all kind of like wild growth. It was growing all over the place, but I hadn’t been shaped, and so my coach, Clay Clark, helped me shape. He was the person that came in and begin to trim away my old mindsets.

Now, the third step once we have made the decision to submit to the authority, now it’s time to break out the clippers and actually respond to correction. It’s not just hearing correction but it is responding. That’s when you know the clippers of discipline are taking effect. It’s when you respond, not just when you hear correction, but it’s when you respond. Maybe I should say, correctly to discipline, to correction.

At America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, coaching business owners and entrepreneurs on a daily business and even working with executives with their own personal growth, this is by far the most difficult piece, is to build the relationship to the point where there is enough trust where people will submit when you say, “This is what you need to do.” Can be very, very difficult to respond correctly to correction.

There’s all kinds of reasons why we don’t, but when we don’t respond to correction, that is the very thing that keeps us stuck because we want to do what we want to do, which gets us trapped in a box, because you can never think anything more than you think and you will get trapped in a box.

Then, finally, what we do here is number four. We want to make sure that we support the vine. What that is, is you’ve ever done any of this before in an actual garden, we’re going to do some pruning, but at the same time what we want to do is drive a stick into the ground or a stake into the ground and tie the vine. Tie this growing plant to that stability, to that stake of stability because what this will do is help the vine, help the plant to grow in strength.

This is where once again a mentor, a coach, is so important. It’s you being willing to tie yourself to a stake of stability. Again, this isn’t just somebody that you call when you’re having a problem. This is somebody that you have allowed to enter into your life on a scheduled consistent basis, that is speaking into your life and giving you direction and correction along a specific path toward a desired end.

Once again, that’s quite a definition for a mentor, but again, if we’re not careful we’ll just do what we want. We’ll read a book and the book’s my mentor. We’ll hear something on the radio, well, the radio’s the mentor. We go to church and the pastor’s my mentor. It’s really these ideas that we say are our mentors, but I’ll let you know, a book cannot be your mentor. Someone that you have never met that does not know you very, very well cannot be your mentor.

A mentor and a coach. These have to be people that are close to you that are actually … Again, it’s the Yoda, it’s the Gandalf, it’s the Morpheus that’s in your life. It doesn’t mean that there can’t be other people that are influencers, other people that are inspirers and motivators in your life, but they aren’t a mentor in your life. I definitely have those inspirers and motivators and people in my life that have had a huge influence, but I would not call them a mentor.

This is what we call, these are the four steps of the pruning and shaping with America’s Leadership Expert  Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership. We want to identify the inhibiting and ineffectual growth. We want to make sure that we shape, that we submit to authority, that we break out the clippers, number three, and we respond to the correction correctly. We do this by supporting the vine, by attaching ourselves, by tying ourselves to a mentor that can be a stake of stability in our life to help us grow in the direction that we need to grow.

This is America’s Leadership Expert Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership and Podcast Number 48, Pruning and Shaping your Personal Growth.

Clay Staires