Blog Post: A Lifetime of Growth

In their book The Laws of Lifetime Growth, Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura challenge readers to make their future bigger than their past. They identify that growth is a fundamental human desire, that through our growth we find fulfillment. However, we find it all too easy to inhibit our growth, to become stagnant in a comfortable rut. To help us climb out of whatever rut we’re in, and to help us avoid future periods of stagnation, Sullivan and Nomura challenge us to review the certainties we’ve accepted in our environment and confront them.

Something’s broken – learn from it! Something’s assumed – challenge the assumption!

I became a trainer because I wanted to help others learn how to do their job better. Everyone said I had a knack for it, I was so good at telling them what to do, and how to do it.  My opportunity to join this field came, and I took it, and for a while existed as a pretty good explainer of things.  We all assumed this meant I was pretty good at my job.

But was I helping?  After standing and talking to people about escrow accounts, or computer systems, did I actually help them in such a way that their performance improved?

By asking those questions, my lifetime of growth began in earnest.  After a few years of floundering amongst other trainers who were also good at explaining things to people, I ran across some facilitators who exposed me to the likes of Bob Pike and Thiagi. By reading their books and delving into their web sites, I uncovered how to engage the adult learner through activities that went beyond the simple question and answer sessions that I'd learned from my college professors.  This opened up a new world of training for me, one that continues to excite and intrigue me to this day.

The exciting news is that those two big names in training that sparked my lifetime of learning, Thiagi and Bob Pike, are coming to Orange County in September and October.  Thiagi will share his training techniques, beliefs, and principles during a series of full-day workshops sponsored by ASTD Orange County from September 26 through September 28 with the following three workshops:

• Interactive Strategies for Improving Performance
• Pragmatic Creativity
• High Performance Teamwork

You can read more about Thiagi in my previous blog posting, here.

Bob Pike will stop by ASTD Orange County as well, on October 11, with two half-day workshops:

• The HALO Organization:  Five Ways to Move from Survive to Thrive in Today's Economy
• Unlock the Power to Learn -- Unlock the Power to Perform

You can click on the links provided to learn more about each of these events.

We became facilitators, trainers, performance technicians with some purpose in mind. Follow it, and in so doing follow your heartfelt impulses, since they’re most connected to that purpose. Throw away the sense of entitlement and focus on creating value with your efforts. Be in the present, and ask: “Today is the first day of the rest of my life. What’s next?”