Personal Insight

I had the fortunate experience of receiving some fantastic feedback from a friend of mine the other day. This is a guy who I've known for a lot of years and a while back he became a project manager at his company. At that time he asked me a lot of questions and I talked about my views on leadership, not really thinking that much about it since it is something I talk a lot about.

This weekend he told me about his current project and how he managed it and he obviously felt proud about a lot of things and I listened to him and was kind of surprised to hear that we shared a lot of views on leadership. Suddenly he told me that most of his leadership style was inspired by me and my tips and tricks as well as some of the books I had recommended. He ended his heart felt feedback by saying something that really made me think, he said: you talk about things from your own perspective, there is always a personal experience connected to all the theories and models you share - that makes me listen carefully to what you say and it makes it easy to belive in what you say.

Of course it made me feel very good and I thought about his words all weekend and I realized that this is the way I learn about things... I find a problem in my own, personal or professional, life and apply the models or theories I read about to it. That makes it easier for me to understand it and it also makes it possible for me to decide if it is something worth keeping in my mind. It also gives me a vehicle to convey that model or theory to others, simply by walking through my own learning experience with them.

I probably need to think a bit more about this and see if I can wrap this insight in some neat model for others to use, maybe there already is one out there?