The Potential Principle and Bettering Your Best, with Mark Sanborn – Episode 202 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Best-selling author, leadership speaker, and entrepreneur Mark Sanborn covers how you never really know your potential, but how to find out and maximize it with the Potential Matrix, the importance of disrupting yourself but refocusing after you do, and why being an author is a lot like fatherhood.

About Mark:

“Few of us can be famous, but every one of us can be great.” This mantra is at the core of Mark Sanborn’s keynotes and leadership training programs, and one that resonates with organizations around the world who want to create workplace cultures that stand out.

As President of Sanborn & Associates, Inc., Mark has spent 30+ years cultivating extraordinary leaders.

He is an international bestselling author and an award-winning leadership keynote speaker who has written eight books, including the New York Times and International Bestseller, The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary, which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide. His latest book is The Intention Imperative: Three Essential Changes That Will Make You a Successful Leader Today.

Mark is also a Leadership Expert in Residence at High Point University, the Premier Life Skills University. Students are invigorated by his strategic and actionable principles that empower them to tap into their unique assets to achieve their best, but also to feel fulfilled.

Mark holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association (NSA) and is a member of the Speaker Hall of Fame. He was honored with the Cavett Award, the highest honor the NSA bestows on its members, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the speaking profession.

Mark’s ideas are taught in 90 counties by Crestcom Leadership Training and his list of more than 3,000 clients includes Costco, FedEx, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, KPMG, New York Life, RE/MAX, ServiceMaster, ESPN, GM, IBM, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Sandvik and John Deere.

Mark Sanborn gave his first speech at the age of 10 in a 4-H safety speaking contest. He did so poorly and lost so badly that he decided to try again. After that he was hooked. Public speaking became his passion and eventually his vocation.

A graduate of The Ohio State University, Mark worked his way through college as an After Dinner Speaker. After graduation, he was an Account Executive, Regional Manager and Associate Publisher in the magazine publishing industry.

Mark Sanborn entered professional speaking full-time in 1986. 

Once asked what he would like as an epitaph, Mark explained, “Malcolm Forbes asked that his gravestone read, ‘While alive, he lived.’ I aim beyond that. As a result of my life, work and relationships, I would hope my headstone someday reads, “While alive, he lived. While he lived, he loved. Because he loved, he served. And when he served, he led.”

He resides in the greater Denver, Colorado area with his wife Darla and sons Hunter and Jackson. Mark is also an avid downhill skier, scuba diver and motorcyclist.

Learn more at MarkSanborn.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Mark Sanborn is a New York Times best selling author. And has been one of the leading thought leaders of leadership. Mark, my friend, it’s been too long. Welcome to the show.

Mark Sanborn
It’s great to be with you.

Host
You know, the concept of potential. So why now why potential principle?

Mark Sanborn
Let me explain what the potential principle is. The premise is really simple. We all know how good we become. But none of us know how good we could be. We really don’t know what our potential is, I’ve never met anyone who could say with 100% certainty, you know, this is as high as I can operate, this is as good as I can be. This is the best I’ll ever become. And if you think about it differently, and most people don’t consciously think this way, but if today, somebody said, you know, today’s, the zenith is the high, the high watermark your life for the rest of your life, it’s all downhill from here, you would say, are you serious, I’ll never have better relationships, I’ll never make more money, I’ll never experience more joy. So we all at some unconscious level are probably trying to improve, but very few people have a plan or a method for getting better. And people who most need to hear the sermon, often don’t go to church, the people who most need read the book often don’t go to the library. And what I realized is that my clients are already among the best at what they do, you know, they’re the individuals and the companies that are, are rockstars, in their respective market spaces. So I realized I have a bigger challenge than if I was working with startups, or if I was working with mediocre companies, because most of these clients are already among the best depending on how you measure it market share, return on investment, all of those metrics, they’re already among the best. And so I realized, there’s only one thing harder than becoming the best at what you do. And that is becoming the best at what you do and continuing to get better. In other words, when you’re number five, you can go to number four by outperforming your route implementing number four strategies, right? When you’re number two, you just watch what number one is doing, and you can match their performance or maybe surpass it. But when you’re the top of your game, there’s nobody out there in front of you, you know, you’re making it up, you’re literally plowing new ground. And so I wrote a book for individuals and companies that said, you know, I want to get better, regardless of that up to come, you don’t need to be the best at what you do to get benefit from the book. But the good news is, if you’re already a high performer, you’re gonna get some insights that will help make it a little bit easier to keep getting better.

Host
So how do you go about doing that? And what are some of the hands for how do you keep pushing yourself because complacency is a real big issue.

Mark Sanborn
Indeed, and I always say that there’s only one thing that can keep you from getting better. And that is a lack of desire to do so I can’t make anyone get better. It’s about creating an environment where you know, if you’re a leader where people choose to be motivated, I got to do a quick detour here. And then I’ll come back to the four areas and the four principles in the book. But it’s always gratifying. And I know you get this sometimes you get an email, or someone will come up to you after an event and say your book or your speech changed my life. And I’m always quick to say thank you. But no, I didn’t in the book didn’t either you changed your life. I’m not God, I can’t take responsibility for positive life change. And others, I’m often gratified that what I said or did or wrote about, influence them. But ultimately, we change our lives. Ultimately, people have to take responsibility for getting better. So no matter how much I may want you to get better if you don’t have a desire to get better, you won’t. If you do have a desire, what I talk about in the book is I try to make things as simple as possible without making them simplistic. And the first part of the book talks about what I call the potential matrix, a matrix is very easy to understand I, when I work with leaders in the sector, business world, I see that they in the outer world of performance and doing they usually Excel. But if there’s a sticking point, it’s in the inner world of why do I do what I do? What’s my purpose, a lack of clarity, a lack of, of meaning. So I, you know, I can make gains by moving them where I call left to the axis into the inner world. Interestingly, when I work with church leaders, these tend to be in our painting with a broad brush here, but they tend to be people with a very deep inner life, you know, you really have to have a sense of purposefulness, and meaning to drive your faith and spirituality. So the mirror to help help them often is moving them into the outer world of how do you run a good meeting? How do you communicate more effectively, how do you create a team? And so I started thinking about this kind of on Daikon To me, and I added one other one other element, and that is what I would call initiating or responding. We initiate, we take action, we respond, we’re acted upon. So if you combine those two axes, what you’ve ended up with is, is the outer world of performing and learning and performing, you’re initiating and learning you’re being acted upon by the lessons and ideas of others. And in the inner world, we have thinking, which is where you initiate the thought process planning, visioning strategy. And then what is probably the most interesting and most often overlooked, or least used quadrant, the inner world of responding which I call reflection. Reflection is where ideas come to us. You know, thinking is where we seek ideas, but some of our biggest epiphanies, you know, you don’t wake up in the morning and say, Today, I want to have an epiphany about how to improve my marriage, you might read a book for ideas, but the Insight will come through this kind of quiet contemplation and gestation. So those are the four areas and here’s the, there’s two big messages. When I did this quadrant, I wanted to basically remind people that we all have one of those quadrants, we like the most, for a lot of business people it’s performing for me, and you probably won’t be initially surprised. It’s thinking. In other words, what I enjoy most is books and ideas and creating. But if I just think I really am not very successful, because I haven’t translated that to the outer world. But if I just perform, I’m not necessarily successful, because I may achieve great success, but have no real reason for doing so. So my point is, we need to be better in each of those four areas. To the degree you’re a better thinker, learner performer and reflector to that degree, you will become better in all the areas of your life. The second thing I wanted to impress upon people is that these quadrants don’t exist independent of each other. So if you put a.in, the in the thinking, what most ideas, most projects begin with thinking the beginning of the day, think about what do I have to do today? Well, to really be good at what you do, you have to learn how to do it. So you take that line and you then go down to the learning quadrant? Do I have the skills I need? How do I develop more skills, then you apply those skills in the performing quadrant, you move up. And then after you perform when you think about or debrief or reflect on what you did you move to the lower left. And after you reflect and get any insights, you go back to thinking and it looks like and this is what’s cool and infinity symbol. Now, that infinity symbol when you super pote, impose it over the over the potential matrix gives you a primary way of always getting better. Hey, by the way, let me tell you something that’s interesting, especially for the your listeners, I know your listeners are movers and shakers, but there are a lot of sales pros. So selling is a numbers and a skills game. So you take somebody who’s making 20 calls a day, and you move them down into the learning quadrant where they’re better at presenting and closing and analyzing needs, and then you move them back up into performing. Now, they’re going to close more of those 20 calls a day they make and if you double the amount of calls they make in the amount of skill they have, then it becomes very, very powerful. So I was tell people, you know, don’t go through the motions, I go to the I used to work out in my home gym, and I started going to the gym and my son. And sometimes I have to like bite my lip till it leads because I watch people doing exercises that are not only wrong, but are harmful. And they don’t ask me and it’s none of my business. You know, it’s a mirror right? You’re free to do stuff stupid. They’re delusional, and they probably Sunday gonna go I don’t I go to the gym every day. And why am I so sore? Why do I have a pulled muscle? Or why am I not improving my health. And that’s because you’re doing it wrong, you haven’t learned to exercise. So. So that’s the potential matrix, the big insight is, is you’ve got these four areas where you can get better, don’t don’t just focus on the easy, the preferable use all four to create synergy for improvement. It basically is pointing out to people that if you only continue to get better in one area, you’re leaving a lot on the table, there’s so much more opportunity to improve your thinking, your learning your reflection, as well as your performance. But then what I do I talk about four things to do the path to improvement is the potential matrix, the means of improvement are these four techniques. And the first one is probably my favorite, because it’s used a little out of context. You know, Clay Christensen talks about disruptive innovation. And you hear a lot about the word disrupt or disruptive and it’s usually applied to things and processes and to companies. But in the book, I say the first step to getting better as disrupt yourself before somebody else does. You know, it’s a play on the idea that most people change only when they have to, you know, leaders change before they need to. And it’s about looking at the areas of your life that have become outdated, that have become stale, that could be better. You know, we find things that work and because they work we keep doing them and we keep doing them until they don’t work as well. And so what do we typically do when they don’t work as well? We do we do more of it right? And it’s like An engine that’s you know, got sand in the transmission, you know, the more power we apply, the slower, you know, the more the gears grind, and the slower we go. So the first key is to ask yourself who are what in my life needs disrupted, meaning if you got, you got to have somebody on your sales team, you’ve given them every opportunity to get better, you’ve invested in them, they haven’t, maybe it’s time to disrupt them and let them pursue their bliss somewhere else. Or maybe you’ve got somebody in your sales team that is frustrated you but you’ve never explained why maybe it’s time to positively disrupt them and the relationship so that it can get better. So the first tool is disrupt yourself. But it’s more than complacency. Complacency says, you know, what, where am I too comfortable, disrupting yourself looks for areas that you may not even have considered before. So it’s not just about disrupting the known, it’s about looking for that, you know, that better or game changing practice, the next principle is refocus. And this is interesting, if you disrupt yourself, you’ve got to refocus. I work with clients that say, you know, we want to do this, and we’re gonna change our culture, and we want to improve these processes, and they come up with all these disruptive ideas, but people keep doing what they did before. And then they say, why, why are they changing? What because you never refocus. You know, we’re people of habit, right. And if you say you want me to do something different, but the next day, I don’t know how much time to devote or what to do differently. I’ll default to what I’m habitually been doing in the past. So I will perpetuate the pre disruptive behavior. So refocusing says, and this this is something that’s taken me I mean, maybe I’m a slow learner, it’s taken me a while to to realize, too many people, even effective leaders have very clear focus, but they don’t refocus as things change. So they’re playing by kind of an outdated focus scorecard, if you will, if you don’t refocus and say, okay to do these things, what needs to be done differently? Or who needs to do them instead of me? Or how do I reallocate my time, that’s the mismatch, till you really get clear on how to reallocate and refocus your time and energy, you’ll inevitably slip back into those previous patterns, they’ll keep the disruption from becoming effective.

Host
That makes a lot of sense. Hey, I know that you said there are four, but we are running out of time. And if you guys want the other two, you’re gonna have to go by the potential principal.

Mark Sanborn
I gotta tell you, no books are like kids. You know, we love all our kids. Books are also like kids, and not all of our kids behave the same way. But I’m excited about this book. Because really, for me, it has been kind of a compilation of bringing together the last 31 years of my work into how have I you know, approached life and how have I seen others who I’ve taught these principles to approach life and succeed. So it’s a distillation, it’s a short book, it’s not an aeroplane book, you can read most of my books before you push back from the gate, but I really think for the people who are into bettering their best, this will be a worthwhile investment for them, and I do hope they’ll check it out.

Host
Mark, I appreciate you so much. Thank you for making some time here and we wish you all the best.

Mark Sanborn
Thanks for having me on the show.