Workshop

In Monday's class we had a leadership workshop. This workshop was a 4 1/2 hour long guest speaker,Kirk Weisler. He spent the night talking about how to improve yourself and your corporation. Although, it was an extremely long presentation, it was very beneficial. Kirk provided a lot of valuable insight on how to be able to shine your brightest so to speak. One of the best things he said Monday night was, "Most high performers don't spend time on their weaknesses, but exploiting their strengths. " This statement really through me off. My whole life I have been taught to spend more time on the things I do not perform well in and less time on my stronger areas. I have wasted a lot of time. I know he didn't mean not to work on your weaknesses but not to focus solely on those things. I really wish I would have known that earlier in life...it would have changed a lot of things. Had I been told this when I was playing basketball, I would not have spent so much of workouts trying to get faster and focused more of my time on my shooting and offensive skills. This in turn would have probably not have caused me to burn-out from exerting so much energy in areas that frustrated me to work on. I obsessed over my weaknesses which caused me to lose interest in the one thing in my life that I really loved to do.
Another key statement Kirk talked about was, "Feet must match mouth." I have always been taught that what you say must match what you do. If you do not follow through with what you say, you become dishonest and people will not follow you. You cannot implement rules in an organization if you say that something is suppose to be done one way and then you do it another. I feel like there are a lot of managers, CEOs, and parents whose actions and words do not match. My question to them is, how do you expect to have people listen to you if your feet do not match your mouth? Our society would be much better off if we had leaders who could do this at least 80% of the time.
Kirk Weisler gave me a lot of good advice and provided a number of different books that he recommended we read. I know I will be taking his advice and trying to apply it to my life so I can become a better person and leader.