You want to grow? Serve

 

Those Who Wish to Grow, Serve

18	Jul
	2013

Future of Learning

My last post looked into your formal team, your workplace-centered lifeline support group. While that team may be the final ring of the continuous learning circle, it doesn’t signal the end of your learning journey.

If you’re going to be the kind of lifelong learner who embodies the self-directed behaviors the experts we worked with have identified as essential to economic self-sufficiency in the 21st century – and more importantly, if you're going to grow as a human being – you can’t be too busy or too important to teach others in service of causes greater than yourself.
In other words, there are two more ideas you have to embrace to realize your career and life potential: 1) In service lies growth, and 2) By teaching, you will gain a deeper understanding of what you teach.
To Serve and Grow

No decision in my life has done more for my own professional growth than starting my foundation, Greenlight Giving, and dedicating more of my focus to the power of serving others. My family decided our winter holiday vacation would be a trip to Guatemala – an opportunity that grew out of my work with the wonderful nonprofit Cultural Embrace. What struck us was that poverty in Guatemala had a different face than back in the U.S. It was amazing how open and happy these kids who had so little were. But they still somehow managed to be happy without material possessions or even enough sustenance. And we were surprised at how little it would take for us to provide for each child's schooling and living costs for an entire year.

I began raising money from our network to expand our service in Antigua, providing annual assistance gifts for the orphans and families we met. Soon, clients and friends were joining us, and it was just as transformative for them.
Greenlight Giving, now formalized, started staging conferences where we taught folks in need of the same strategies we've long taught Global 1000 teams, from self-directed learning to networking and enacting relationship plans. The enthusiasm was incredible. Guatemalan kids who had never imagined a life beyond their hardscrabble existence were suddenly thinking about who could join their learning networks in the village or at school and what new goals they could strive for.
And our Guatemala work was just the beginning.

There's also Words2Life, a Greenlight Giving program that reaches out to at-risk youth through music and storytelling. Words2Life helps kids – many of them in the foster care system – find their voice through poetry, rap and creative actions. Through the program, they develop a network of mentors and role models to move their lives in positive directions.

Coaching and Growing
One of the reasons Ferrazzi Greenlight, as an organization, and Greenlight Giving, which shares Ferrazzi Greenlight's methods, are successful at driving people to change behaviors is because we don’t just teach – we coach people as they embark on real work that, not by accident, replaces old, addictive, bad behaviors. Our immersive “mission-based” system helps people do what they're trying to learn with the help of more experienced peers who coach them. And an incredibly important part of what helps people really master the new behaviors is that peer-to-peer coaching.
As I mentioned earlier, a key tenet of your continuous learning circle is this: To finish learning something, you’ve got to go teach it. If you can’t teach it, then it’s not really something you know.
For example, one of the things Ferrazzi Greenlight works on with client leadership teams is how to be better leaders and engage more deeply with employees, who in turn become better equipped to engage customers. But it's difficult to train folks to do that if you’re not doing that every day yourself.

I know it’s core to my DNA. I have to grow, and I’m constantly looking for new ways to be a better leader. Similarly, I know if an employee at my firm or a volunteer for Greenlight Giving goes out to an inner-city school and teaches our intellectual property, they own it more than they ever did before because they have to put their own Relationship Action Plan into place if they’re going to effectively teach these kids the importance of building relationships.

By learning and then applying our continuous learning philosophy and behaviors to teach others, they advance their own lives and, therefore, serve and grow.
The Training for Our Souls
So why has Greenlight Giving been so transformative for my career? To be a great leader, you really have to lead in serving others. I learned to lead by putting others’ needs first when I serve marginalized communities. And I’ve learned how to be a better leader because the deep and heart-rending needs of disadvantaged communities require me to respond in a different way.
I implore you to follow a similar path. Serve those in need. Don't just build a house, although that in itself is noble: Go live with the people who are going to live in that house. Sure, you can build a playground, but it won't do the same thing for you that actually working with orphans does.
In service, we grow. Roll up your sleeves and be of service to the communities that need the most because that’s what opens up our souls and gives us training on the most critical of soft skills: intimacy – both within the disadvantaged community you're working for and the team you're working in partnership with – and generosity that begins to run unforgettably deep.

Share

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Forward
• Homepage RSS

Tags:

continuous learning circle

service

Greenlight Giving

---