So – here’s an interesting concept for you. The less you know, the more you will grow.
It’s an interesting theory and when I explain to you how I learned it, hopefully the penny will drop! And I’m hoping you’ll go away from this and look for more real learning opportunities within your life.
Now, entrepreneurs, we’re addicted to challenge, to opportunity and therefore, we’re constantly stretching ourselves because we know that is what helps us grow.
Where that happened for me quite recently in my life is when I got asked to go on Strictly Come Dancing.
When I did Strictly, I was working with a team of professionals who were at the absolute top of their game. I was dancing with Aljaz – a 19 times world champion and one of the best in the world at teaching ballroom and Latin. I was getting to interact with the producers and directors who their whole career had built up to this career pinnacle of working on the biggest show on TV.
The hair and the makeup girls, they were all people who were at top of their career ladder, the wardrobe people – people would give their right arm to work on that show because everybody there at the absolute top of their game.
That for me was an enormous learning opportunity because I wasn’t a specialist in any of these areas. I was a specialist in business and there was no call for that within Strictly so I was taken not only out of my comfort zone but plopped into somewhere where the things that I was really good at, my skills, meant absolutely nothing. They were of no use to me whatsoever through this process and I spent my whole life dreaming about being on this show and desperate to do well on this show but all the skills that I had were not going to equip me to do that. I needed to quickly learn from everybody else around me to be able to excel and do well in this.
And I think being in business can be a really lonely place.
Even when you surround yourself with the best people, you often feel like you’re expected to have all of the right answers. You’ve got to know absolutely everything and never be able to show an ounce of vulnerability.
That is the big thing I really struggled with in Strictly is I’d never shown vulnerability, there’d never been a situation in my life where I had permission to show vulnerability. I always had to keep that armour in place because in business there’s no place for it. Whereas in Strictly, I was massively vulnerable because I didn’t have the comfort blanket of being the best in my field at what I did because it was of no relevance there.
So it really is that opportunity of being a newbie and being able to ask the questions stupid questions when you’re a newbie. In business, I couldn’t possibly do this because everyone expects me to have the answers, but for Strictly, there were no stupid questions. People didn’t find my questions all that stupid and actually they quite liked that I wanted to ask all these questions so they embraced me.
And the more they embraced me, the more it added this kind of rocket fuel to my learning, which was so incredibly valuable.
When I was approached by the producers of Strictly and asked if I wanted to go on, being totally honest, I was wrapped with guilt.
I wanted to do it so badly but it felt like such an indulgence to have the time away from my family and the time away from my business. All the pressure it was going to put on my staff to not have me in there, on my family to have to cope with me not being around, and it felt like a lot to ask of other people just for me to go and have this amazing life experience but something that didn’t really serve any other purpose.
Now, I can look back on Strictly as one of the biggest learning experiences of my entire life which has had an enormous profound impact on me developing as an entrepreneur. Through that process I learned about learning, I learned how I deal with taking on new information and new skills. I learned how to focus and how to manage all my own time within that learning and that in and of itself is enormous.
And, it gave me the chance and the opportunity to be part of a team, not as the manager, not as the leader, not as the one with any responsibility, but as the newbie. And I think that was just fantastic.
I think what I want you to take away from this lesson in my life is what is your version of Strictly?
Chances are you aren’t going to have the opportunity to go on Strictly like I did, but there will be other things and other opportunities in your life. Take yourself out of what you are good at and immerse yourself in a new world that you aren’t good at. That’s the real key.
Something where you think ‘my skills as an entrepreneur, as a business person aren’t going to serve me well at all here’. You’ve got to learn how to be that newbie, that is how you’re going to go through those life experiences and learn about the learning. So being a newbie is when we’re going to learn the most.
You’ve got to create your own opportunities of where you can go somewhere and be the newbie.
And I want you to be watching, listening, learning from all those incredible people around you because that is how you’re gonna learn.
And you’ve got to make being the newbie a big adventure in your life so then you can get excited about it, you can really get on board with it, really embrace it, and hopefully you’ll have that amazing learning experience that I had a few years ago.