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The Most Effective Strategy to Turn Your Potential Into Performance

Those who have the most career success are those whose presence and performance have such a large positive impact on their organizations that they have almost become indispensable, and they are the people who understand that who they are impacts everything they do, according to Nancy D. Solomon, CEO and founder of The Leadership Incubator.

Knowing your purpose in life and having potential are good but don’t accomplish much without transforming that potential into having an impact, she said June 25 during the latest WiTH Connection Corner webinar, “IMPACT! The Single Most Effective Strategy for Turning Your Potential into Performance,” presented by Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH).

“Once upon a time, I wanted to become a psychotherapist and I wanted to work with women in male-dominated industries,” she told viewers. But “my parents put their foot down and they said, ‘No daughter of ours will become a psychotherapist.’ It took me years to figure out it’s because they didn’t want me to know how crazy they all were.”

Her parents wanted her to become a teacher instead so she would “have something to fall back on,” she recalled they told her.

After all, “back in the day, we went to college to meet a man, get married and have 2.3 babies,” she said. However, “I had a different agenda than that,” she noted.

She became a teacher but “it wasn’t for me – too much politics, too much paperwork, and I decided to go into sales,” with the goal of making it to the “top of the ladder,” she recalled.

She found success in sales but “the entire time I was miserable… because that wasn’t the field that I was made to be in; I was made to be in the people field,” she said. After 18 years, she became the vice president of sales for a European clothing company “making boatloads of money,” she recalled.

But, one day, she returned from a 10,000-mile trip she did in five days, sat down on her couch and noticed for the first time that the view out of her window was a brick wall and thought that was a symbol for her life, she told viewers, adding: “How was I so busy doing my life I wasn’t being in my life?”

And that was “when it happened,” she said, noting there are just some questions that are so big and so “life-changing” that “you can’t unhear them,” such as are you happy in your marriage? She asked herself how much money she would have to be paid to forget how much she hated her life. “The universe hears questions like that and, three months later, I was unceremoniously called into my boss’s office and I was fired,” she recalled.

But there is a “happy ending to this story” because the company had made her sign a one-year extension package under which the company would have to pay her for another year if it fired her. “So I had plenty of time to figure out what I wanted,” she said. She may also be one of the only people in the world who was thinking “there is a God” as she was being fired, she noted.

After two years, she realized she had lived most of her life for everybody else and “now it was my turn” to do what would make her happy, she recalled. She always wanted a cat and dog, so she got one of each, and went back to college to get a degree in psychology, which was “what I always wanted to do,” she said. She adopted two babies also.

She pointed to three of her theories: Solomonism #80: “Rejection is God’s way of saving us the trouble.” Solomonism #338: “The best job in the world isn’t the best job in the world if it doesn’t belong to you.” And Solomonism #143: “We do what we do until it gets too painful and then we do something else.”

Quoting Mark Twain, she said: “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born, and  the day you find out why.”

One important fact to be aware of is that “who you are is how you lead,” she said.

Citing the findings of a survey, she said 73% of people are looking for a new job or at least open to other opportunities, although that number is probably higher since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she pointed out. Meanwhile, only 13% of people love their jobs and are not looking for new opportunities, 11% don’t love their jobs but like the comfort, and 3% have no idea how they feel about their jobs, she said.

We are all born with a purpose and “the minute you know what your purpose is, you’re able to unlock your potential,” she explained. “When you are on purpose and you are using your potential, that is when you have an opportunity to have an impact.”

Potential is just the “raw goods” of what you have, she noted. Impact, on the other hand, is “what you create with it” by making a difference, she explained, adding:  “I believe that the need to make a difference is the single most significant motivator for human behavior.”

What is crucial to understand is that “potential without taking action on that potential is like having a check and not cashing it,” she told viewers.

What Undermines Your Impact:

1. If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you arrive?

“There’s nothing that undermines your impact more than just meandering,” she said. “You need a plan. If you don’t have a strategy for impact, you have a strategy by default to be invisible.” (Solomonism #333)

2. Don’t take the last piece of pie.

People will notice if you walk into a meeting and don’t take a seat at the table but a chair far away in the corner, she warned.

3. Don’t shrink to fit.

“Don’t get small to make other people comfortable,” she warned. Women are more likely to be accused of being boastful if they mention their credentials, she noted.

4. The hidden “I” in invisible.

“Do not render yourself invisible,” she said.

What Increases Your Impact:

1. Permission 2.0: Stop asking for permission to do things and say you need somebody’s permission to do something. (Unless it’s to rob a bank. You don’t have permission to do that, she joked.

2. “Flaw-some-ness”: We are all flawed in some way, she said, urging viewers to “start embracing the things about you that you know are flaws.”

3. “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”

4.  “Thoughtus Interruptus”: “Don’t believe everything you think” because what you think is not always reliable, she said.

There are also three “billion-dollar questions” you need to ask, she said:

  1. What impact am I committed to making?
  2. How can I make the biggest difference?
  3. Where can I make my biggest and highest contributions?

She urged everybody to “bring down your brick walls,” saying: “Look at your own brick wall – because we all have them – and identify where are you stuck.” What question do you need to ask yourself that you are afraid to hear the answer to? “That will open doors. And your job when you open the door is to not put your foot on the bottom of the door so the door can’t get open. Take a peek in at the opportunity and see how it feels.”

Solomon was introduced by Iseabail Lane, co-chair of WiTH’s Professional Development Committee.

To watch the webinar, click here.