Understanding Your Impact Potential
Five Question to lead you to fulfill your potential and be a person of impact.
Addressing Potential in Organizations
I can tell you that every organization that I have served in some capacity is underperforming because they have no idea what their potential is.
Some people say that potential has no legitimate meaning because it is unqualifiable. I say it is a term that has more meaning because it establishes a standard for advancement. In my mind, this standard is impact. Impact is a change that makes a difference that matters.
What does the potential of an organization look like that is lacking a commitment to creating change, lives by its stock price and P&L report, never works up to the level of its current potential? For twenty years, I’ve thought about this. I reached the conclusion that the company is only reaching 30-40% of its potential.
When I have raised this question with people, they shake their heads, and say, “There is no objective standard for potential!” Really? No objective standard? It doesn’t require an objective standard to know that you are not reaching your potential. All you have to recognize is where I did less that I could have. Doing the bare minimum is an objective standard. The object for many people is doing just enough to get by or not get fired.
This question reveals some ugly truths about business and leadership.
Potential is something outsiders can see. This is particularly true when there is one company that excels beyond the others in the industry. They are showing them up.
Leadership becomes synonymous with poor management. It is not easy to be an organizational leader. It is especially true when the leader is skilled in knowing how to squeeze the last bit of life out of a dying business. It is especially true when the person in charge believes in his or her own superiority so that no one is allowed to be creative by taking initiative. In our time, a senior leader who is not the facilitator of others’ leadership, is a failed leader. To focus on potential in this environment is to elevate the company’s embarrassment with its leadership incompetency.
For the past five decades, the economies of the West have been in decline. It is like the picture of urban riots where people are looting the stores that will never be rebuilt. A looming recession/depression is the lagging indicator of leaders who have principally served their own interests.
This culture of selfishness penetrates the world, telling people that their purpose should be their own happiness. They are not taught about potential. They are not given the skills to reach their potential. And they have not had the mentoring for character-building that is needed to do the hard work at excelling to fulfill their potential for impact.
There is no horizon of ambition that can show the promise of potential. Nothing exists beyond this moment. There is no meaningful past or future. There is only the present that has become marginalized as nothing but a commodity to be monetized.
This is a spiritual problem. It is not just that it denies the value of human agency to create impact and meaning. Even operating through a nihilistic mindset that we are all cogs in a machine, it fails to optimize the potential of that machine.
Addressing Personal Potential
As dour as this description is, we only know it to be this way because there still exists those who seek to fulfill their potential every day.
If you are a member of the 1% that do reach their potential,
then you ACTUALLY believe that you are NOT reaching your potential.
I am right. Aren’t I? This is the way we think when we seek to fulfill our potential.
We have goals higher than just being a success.
To believe that you have reached your potential really means that you are settling for today’s best performance. Or, it may be that today’s performance fulfills your potential for today. Okay. Good job. Way to go. Tomorrow is a new day. Let’s get after it.
The thought of settling doesn’t sit well with me. I feel like I am leaving opportunities unmet. I can do better. You can do better. We can do better together.
Just remember, don’t go beating yourself up over what you perceive is a sub-par performance. You need to ask some questions. Get some clarity of perspective and rise in the morning to get at it again.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, say at 12:45 or 2:15, I’m disappointed. I want it to be 4 am, so I can get up and take on the day.
The only way you know what is your true potential impact is to work hard every day to figure out what your impact will look like on the last day of your life.
Just saying that sends chills down my spine.
Imagine that from this point on, you are totally committed to making a difference that matters every day. I feel the opportunity in my bones.
Coach Ken Hayes, my high school track coach, was always after us sprinters to run THROUGH the finish line, not to it. Get it. You can see how this perspective comes into conflict with the idea that you’ll have a career, and then retire.
The problem with the idea that potential needs some objective standard is the idea that there is a point when we have reached it. I have never understood this. Maybe it is because I am easily bored, so I constantly need to learn things, meet new people, and encourage people to be leaders of impact. On my deathbed, 30+ years from now, I’ll be doing the same thing that I am doing right now, asking the nurses and my grandchildren, “What difference are you going to make the day after I die? I’m going to live on in you and in your children and grandchildren. So, what are you going to do to make a difference in the world?
The answer to the question of potential is to realize that our potential for impact continues to grow after we die. The fulfillment of our potential is our legacy. Our legacy is the people our lives have touched.
If you read the epilogue of Circle of Impact, you know the story of my inviting myself to speak a business high school in Vienna, Austria. Recently, I found my notes from that presentation in 2017.
I said to the students, “If you were born in 2000, you are 17 today, and will turn 100 years old in 2100. You now have 83 years to make a difference that matters. Some of you are already persons of impact through your mentoring of students in the lower grades. If you focus on creating impact, you’ll have a great life. Let’s see what that can look like.”
I broke down 83 years into segments of impact. Imagine one moment or incidence of impact for each one of these divisions of time.
83 years = 996 months, 30,316 days, 727,584 hours, and 43, 655, 040 seconds.
I challenged the students to focus on creating systems and structures for impact. Imagine one impact per second. How about that for a life goal?
Then I said to the 100 or so students in the room, if you were to collectively decide together live this way you could each create impact every second of every minute of every hour for every day for the next 83 years. Wow! Imagine! Wrap your head around that idea. If you were to do this, I guarantee you that you, your fellow students, and your school will change human history. It works out to 4, 365,504,000 points of impact.
Inhibiting Potential
Comparing yourself to others as a way to determine your potential create two possible problems. We either feel like we are doing really well or not well at all. Evaluating your impact potential is not an ego-driven process. As I told the students above, you may create an organization or even a cure for a disease, and never see the full range of people impacted by your work. We need to develop our own inner measures to validate and affirm our work. In doing so, we discover a deeper drive to be the best that we can be.
We don’t talk about reaching our potential. We talk about the impact we want to have. The question of potential is personal and should only be discussed with those we have relationships of trust. We can’t even brag about an accomplishment as the fulfillment of our potential because we know that we have not reached our potential. Even when the work is hard, we never complain. We stay focused on the goal that we seek to reach.
I am writing about this because, in the middle of the night years ago, I realized the idea of pursuing the fulfillment of your potential is something worth doing.
I grew into it in stages. The last major stage happened as I began to write Circle of Impact. I had been writing professionally since 2004. But this was my first book. It changed everything about how I live.
As I write this, it is 1:22 am. I went to bed at 9:30 pm. I woke up an hour ago thinking about this topic. I had to write this down. I’ll probably spend two hours writing, and then go back to bed. Then, get up a couple of hours later and write some more. Then, tomorrow or the next, I’ll finish.
I am not suggesting that you go quit your job so you can obsessively seek to fulfill your potential. I am not suggesting that you do what I have done. You have to make your own lifestyle choices. It is true, that you can’t live as I am if your job defines how your time and energy are structured. I am not advocating that you stop what you are doing and focus on fulfilling your potential. I did not start this bi-phasic sleep/work pattern as a rational choice. It was thrust upon me. I had no choice but to write down what was in my head.
When I started waking up in the middle of the night needing to write, I had to change my daily discipline. The Circle of Impact book was written this way. Some nights I’d lay in bed for an hour tapping sentences into my phone. On other nights I get up, leave my home around 4:30 am, walk the three blocks to Starbucks, and write for three hours. It brought such a profound change to my life that I began to talk about my day starting when I went to bed at the night.
This drive to fulfill my potential didn’t end with the publication of the book. Even though the book’s launch was a disappointment, I became more focused than ever before.
Does this sound like a man with a single-minded obsession to succeed? Does it sound like what a workaholic does? Or maybe it feels like a lifestyle that is out of balance. Those are fair questions to ask because once you realize where your potential is found, you want to give your whole self to its fulfillment.
Instead of pursuing balance, which is impossible to achieve, because it is based upon a split life that can never be fulfilled. This isn’t like that. There is something clarifying about orienting your life around reaching your life’s potential by creating impact. This isn’t working 24/7, 18 hours a day for the rest of your life. There are days like that, but most are not. Instead, this is what I mean when the three dimensions of leadership of the Circle of Impact are in alignment. My values feed my purpose, my relationships, and the structure of my work. I am more fulfilled today than I have ever been in my life.
When fulfilling your potential becomes a part of your values system, you begin to trim away the non-essentials to focus on the essentials in your life. In my case, it meant being free to move. While I miss where I lived during this very productive time in my life, I am happy where I am now because … that is a question that is still waiting to be answered.
There are certain things we can do to create impact in our life and move toward reaching our potential. This is the purpose of the Circle of Impact in Practice Project. I am going to reframe the Five Questions That Everyone Must Ask to focus on future potential.
Five Questions for Understanding My Potential Impact
Potential is an unknown quality. We measure it by its effects. We gain awareness of it over time. We see it as possibilities and opportunities. As a result, we need to look at time in order to understand our potential for impact.
Question 1: What has Changed? How am I in Transition?
If we are projecting forward in time to understand potential, we need to look back in time to understand how it has been fulfilled in the past.
We reflect back to identify moments in time where we excelled in some act or performance. We know this because we saw a beneficial change happen as a result.
It could well be that we don’t remember those times. We make it a simple process as a result. Look back a few months or a year, and ask about moments where some comment, decision, or action created change. Write these down and the date. Once you are sure of that period of time. Go back further. Look back over five years. What you remember is important because of all those similar moments that you do not remember.
Once you have a clear recollection of a series of experiences, look to determine if there is some pattern that you can identify. The pattern may be a situation that continues to occur that you find yourself making a difference. Or the pattern is a specific thing that you are doing, like stepping into a crisis and bringing calm and steadiness to the situation.
This question is the most important one to answer because it identifies the patterns of behavior that define us and point us toward how our potential may lead us.
Question 2: What is my Impact?
This question identifies the difference that you make. This is a change that takes place. Since we use the Circle of Impact model as the context for these questions, we ask, “What is the impact of my ideas? What is the impact that I have with my relationships? and What is the impact that I have through the structures of my life and work?”
It is important to understand that the structure question refers to three kinds of structure. When I first developed the Circle of Impact, the only structure I saw was the organizational chart. In most organizations, this is identified as a structural hierarchy. In more informal settings, this structure operates more as a network or a team.
During the writing of the book, I realized that there was a social structure that is different from the Relationships dimension. This structure is represented by “a persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people.”
There is a third structure that I only recently began to see as I have been studying the neighborhood grid structure of cities.
Each of these structures has an effect upon us, and we upon them. Identifying how we affect change in each of these structural contexts is important for opening up our perception of what is possible.
Our impact pattern of behavior will guide us to better understand our past so that we can project our future potential.
Question 3: Who am I Impacting?
Knowing who you are impacting is not the same as knowing who you intend to influence. My sense, from talking with people over the past quarter century, is that they don’t have a clear idea of who truly benefits. The question was included in the Five so that a broader understanding of the relational reach of a person, a product, or a company can be determined.
The traditional way is to identify your marketing avatar and market to them. There are a host of unfounded assumptions in this process. When the Circle of Impact was being developed, the folks that I hired to help me followed the standard practice of focusing on a particular organizational role, like CEO or HR. They became very frustrated with me because I didn’t write the book for an organizational role in mind. Even after the book was published, LinkedIn-trained marketers would contact me. I would tell them, as I told my marketing team, that the book was “for people in transition” or it was “for businesses in transition who wanted to elevate the leadership capacities of their people.” Some would say, “We don’t know how to market to that.” I’d just say, “I know.”
Let me take you a step deeper into this reality. This is very important to understand if you are going to invest time and purpose in being a person of impact.
Simple Impact Analytics
Claire Lehman of Quellette describes what she found that mirrors closely with what I found.
In my analysis of why we had such poor sales on the launch day of the book, the Circle of Impact provided the answer.
Six months before launch in September 2018, we shut down the weblog Leading Questions that I had written since July 2004. We started a new weblog, Leading With Impact. Two or three times a week, I posted content related to the book on the weblog that would then be linked on social media. We did the traditional SEO approach to online marketing.
When the book launch failed, I looked at the diagram above as asked, “Which one of the three dimensions of leadership is the problem?” Obviously, because we sold only 41 copies on launch day, we had never established an audience who were waiting in anticipation for the book to be published. In effect, the Relationship dimension was never developed.
I saw this coming but kept being reassured that the last three weeks is the time when the audience will grow. When we established the new weblog, we created a Mailchimp newsletter. Immediately we had 80 people sign up. On launch day, there were still only 80 people receiving my newsletter.
My assessment directed me to let my team go and hire a virtual assistant to help me. I spent the next year traveling all over the United States doing book events. I learned a lot from that experience. First, I was right to focus on the transition market. When people came up to me at my table in a bookstore, I tell them that it is a book for people in transition. Often, meaning someone at all 40 events would say, “That describes me.”
I learned that you don’t build an online community of followers by doing one-off events. If you write on one of the various platforms like Substack or Medium, you have been provided a network of readers and writers who are already conditioned to be engaged in conversation. The way you do that is to comment, and comment with a depth of thought. Seventeen months ago, when I began writing at Substack, I migrated the 360 contacts of my Mailchimp newsletter to the new platform. Almost immediately, 30 people canceled. Today, the number of my subscribers is 650, a 94% increase in a year.
What did I do differently? I violated all the conventional rules about social media. I decided to write about what I wanted to write about. Deeply philosophical, long practical essays. They average between 1500 and 3000 words. Some people tell me that it takes a couple of days to read. They have to think about what they are reading. The reality is that there is a market for this approach. I am grateful to each of you who have subscribed.
My point is that understanding who you are impacting cannot be done without forming a network of relationships. You have to build relationships. Each one requires respect if you want the other person to trust you.
In figuring out who you are impacting or who you want to impact, you need to decide what is the problem that you are solving. You can’t do that without conversation and relationship building.
Question 4: What Opportunities do I now have?
The opportunities that matter are the ones that result from the impact that you identified in Question 2. There are two kinds that I have identified.
There is a one-off opportunity. A situation where you can make a difference, but it doesn’t go beyond the moment. It may be a comment or an act of service. These moments, after reflection, may be seen as leading somewhere. But at that moment, the act stands alone.
The other opportunity is the kind that reveals itself as significant after the fact. You reflect on the insights that come from the first question. You see a pattern of behavior or a pattern of change that points to something that you can repeat.
Some people discover a second career by reflecting on what they have done well in their current place of employment. I have had conversations with people about the skills that they do well that are not directly related to their employment. Using the Five Questions, we look at how that skill for impact can be framed into a job opportunity.
Being able to identify opportunities is a function of the skill of initiation. The opportunity may be in plain sight, but no one sees it because they are used to keeping their head down, focused on the job assigned.
Here’s how I learned to do this. Within the first weeks of starting my consulting practice, and it must be said that I had never been a consultant and never run a business, so I was starting from square one of everything except knowing how to talk to people. I was introduced to a guy also named Ed, who talked to me about being a problem solver. He pointed me to a book called Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets, by Michael T. Bosworth.
Ed told me about how he created a successful local jewelry store by solving a simple problem that most people had: dead watch batteries. He advertised a $5.00 watch battery change service. By solving a simple problem, it put Ed into the position of establishing a relationship to sell higher-priced items for birthdays, engagements, weddings, and other celebrations. He turned an overlooked minor problem into a solution-based long-term relationship.
I applied this method to my new consulting practice. My 10-year-old son at the time, Troop, responded when asked what his father did, “Dad talks people into having problems and offers to fix them.” It is still what I do because every problem is an opportunity to create an impactful solution.
The lesson is that it is better to create our opportunities than wait for them to come to us.
Question 5: What Problems have I created? What Obstacles do I face?
I find that people are not motivated to change until there is something at stake that they value. The first three questions set the context. The fourth creates the importance of beginning to be a person of impact. The fifth question is the hard reality question.
To answer this question, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. Jim Collins describes this as The Stockdale Paradox.
"You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
This is how you reach your potential. This is how you overcome your fear, doubt, reticence, and inexperience. Each of those problems and obstacles qualifies you to be a person of impact. You realize that where you are right now is not where you want to spend the rest of your life. You solve the problems you create. Overcome the obstacles that stand in your way. It means that you will change, and change will follow you through your life. With change comes impact, both upon you and as well as every person and organization that you touch.
The Circle of Impact in Practice Project
This is why I have created The Circle of Impact in Practice Project. Become a paid subscriber by May 1, stick with the project through to its end, and be acknowledged in the book that follows as a contributor. I’ll post material for paid subscribers, along with some questions to help me understand what you see. I also will provide a monthly coaching call for those who are a part of the project.
Thank you in advance for your insight and direction.
Reading this reminds me of an analogy I was playing with last year of what I called 'The Corporate Shaman' - I put some slides together but never showed the to the company I was working with for fear that the thinking was too left field for them.
I was thinking about the role of the shaman in so many cultures in pre-history in creating meaning and I suppose revealing the potential of the tribe. I saw the need of a 'Corporate Shaman' to similarly reveal individual and organisation potential and create the ecosystem for that potential to surface in impactful ways.
Some thoughts from the slides:
What does a Shaman do?
Philosopher
Healer
Storyteller
Guide
Psychologist
Community Builder
Meaning Maker
Visionary
Friend
Catharsis; Communitas; Ecstasis
Catharsis (Healing) - Becoming…
Nourishing the soul
Growing into who we are meant to be:
- listening for where we are needed
- addressing what stands in the way
- cultivating our courage to answer the call.
Tending our inner gifts, and sharing with others
What is my offering in this world?
Comunitas (Connection) - Belonging…
Nourishing our ecosystem
Connections
- to ourselves
- to others, and the wider community
- to meaningful values
- to nature
- to a secure and hopeful future
Appreciating wholeness and our ‘ interbeing’
Extasis (Inspiration) - Beyond…
Nourishing the hungry spirit
Cultivating curiosity
Transcending from where we are now while integrating where we’ve been
Striving
Creativity
Energy and ‘Good Vibrations’
I guess the corporate world isn't ready for these kinds of analogies, but what I find is that people on the ground, doing the day-to-day work, are often very interested in this kind of thinking and yearn for it.
The role you describe takes on many forms. When I started my consulting practice in 1995, I had been in ministerial roles for twenty years. That experience served me and my clients well. I described myself as the “intimate outsider.” I wrote about how this now functions. https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/the-stranger-in-network-theory