Learning to be awesome at anything you do, including being a leader

When was the last time you had no idea what you were doing? OK, I’ll go first. A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to learn Spanish in preparation for a trip I was taking to Mexico. I know French, I thought; how hard could it be? So I did what any self-respecting member of the 21st century would do to become fluent in a language: I downloaded a flashcard app on my iPhone.

Flash forward a few months. My two girlfriends and I had just arrived in Cancun. We left the airport, got in the cab, and I decided that I was going to make some small talk with the cab driver. So I confidently stated in Spanish that I was excited to go to the hotel because I was married. The look on the cab driver’s face made it instantly clear that I had not just said what I thought. What I had actually said was that I was sexually excited to go to the hotel because I had just got married.

So, needless to say, I felt exposed and embarrassed. But what about you? Maybe you are struggling to run your business, fighting to master a skill you need to do your job, or just trying to lower your golf handicap. Maybe you have been meaning to get a mentor or take a class, or, in my case, find a Spanish tutor, but you never really got around to it. It’s that thing you’ve been dying to master and it probably haunts you as a line on your to-do list that you never cross off.

Whether you are a business leader, an employee, a hobbyist or a beer league hockey player, how much time and energy do you invest to become totally awesome at what you do? Here’s my big idea: when it comes to your own development, you can’t keep waiting until you’re less busy or for someone else to do it for you. No one will truly invest in you but you.

My life’s work is to help leaders be better. This passion began in my childhood when I saw the power of leaders to transform people’s lives. Shortly after my parents’ divorce, my mother started her own business, and it didn’t just support our family; it supported the families of the twenty-five people who worked for her. Now, as an organizational psychologist, I apply scientific principles of human behavior to help leaders and companies succeed.

In my work as an executive coach, I stumbled upon a pattern: three steps for radical improvement that do not just apply to business leadership, they apply to anything you want to do better. Whether you’re a body builder or a bartender, a surgeon or a screenwriter, a violinist or a volunteer, if there’s something you want to do better, these three things will help you become totally awesome at what you do.

Step 1 is to know thyself. Most people are completely delusional about their own skills and capabilities. Researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning uncovered this phenomenon, which they named the Dunning-Kruger effect. In a series of experiments they found that most people completely overestimate their talent, and the least competent people were the worst at recognizing their incompetence.

We live in a world where people hardly ever tell the truth. We’re polite, we’re busy, we’re afraid, and feedback can feel like a frontal attack. In my work coaching leaders, I’m often sent in to tell someone the truth when everyone else is afraid to. One executive I coached, Steve, thought he was doing a great job, but when I talked to his team I learned that they found him frightening and unprofessional. One employee had even started taking blood pressure medicine because of him.

When I told Steve that his team hated working for him, he was horrified and genuinely surprised. He had been behaving this way for twenty years and no one had ever told him. But that moment of truth was the most important step. He accepted reality. Delusions about ourselves are the roadblocks on the journey to becoming awesome, so no matter how hard it is, we have to take responsibility for learning the truth about ourselves.

To know where you stand, you can look at objective measures of success and then ask for honest feedback. Ask someone you trust what you’re doing that helps you succeed, what gets in the way, and how you can adapt your approach to be better. Above all, seek the truth.