10 Ways to Find Your Breakthrough
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Breakthrough moments rise up and grip you by the throat. Resist them and you’re stuck. Navigate them and you’ll achieve new levels of success.
Many leaders resist the very thing
that most lifts their leadership.
The leadership journey includes extended periods of gradual growth punctuated by moments of terrifying, turbulent change – breakthroughs. Sadly, we’re prone to fight off the beast rather than embrace it.
Breakthroughs are stifled when you:
- Run from hard truths – the ones you know but don’t want to hear.
- Refuse to admit you’re wrong.
- Surround yourself with weak yes-men.
- Repeat standard behaviors.
- Leverage proven skills.
- Cling to comfort.
- Stick with familiarity.
- Resist responsibility.
- Focus more on others than yourself.
- Express tenacity to the point of stubbornness – refusing to change.
Breakthrough moments occur when:
- Strategic distress in the form of new challenges stretches confidence.
- Frustrations outweigh satisfactions.
- Untested skills are tested.
- Unexpected failures challenge standard operating procedures.
- Sudden crisis confronts the status quo.
- New opportunities rise up.
- Fresh eyes observe stale attitudes and behaviors.
- Someone courageously points out the elephant in your life.
- Someone believes in you more than you believe in yourself. Self-limiting beliefs hold people back.
- Someone presses you more than you press yourself.
Some suggestions on breakthroughs received on facebook:
- Someone tells you the truth about your weakness.
- Placing fears in God’s hands.
- Awareness.
- Openness to possibilities.
- Abdication – giving in to being trapped.
- Releasing control.
- You take time out.
More suggestions: Leadership Freak Coffee Shop on facebook.
Personal breakthroughs are about you. Others can help but no one makes you breakthrough. Skills-based breakthroughs happen when you’re taught. But only you can step into the unknown of a personal breakthrough moment.
How have you navigated your breakthrough moments?
How can we help others navigate their breakthroughs?
Last year, I simultaneously gave and received a gift at the Syracuse Habitat for Humanity.
The biggest breakthroughs, in my experience, are unplanned. No script. You could say, improvisational.
Case in point. http://endgamebusiness.com/blog/so-you-think-you-cant-dance/
I think the unpredictability of breakthroughs make them difficult. Perhaps one important thing to do is gather a group of wise advisers before turbulence occurs.
It’s all about new experiences that push us. The best is when we don’t see it coming or are forced to find a way to MacGyver a situation.
Dear Dan,
This is an awesome post. Suggestions are excellent ones. I agree that resistance inhibits success whereas navigation enhances success. Successful leaders know the individual limitation and opportunities. I strongly believe that circumstances create strong platform for breakthrough success. Those fear to face circumstances may not get breakthrough success. So, we need to accept, embrace and overcome circumstances. I agree that we tend to run away from hard truth. Successful leaders accept truth and reality. And that makes them successful. Weak leaders try to control situations and hence frustrate. This frustration hinders their potential success.
I navigated my breakthrough moments by accepting first, understanding limitation, and making effort to overcome those moments. I never blamed the situations and people. Instead, I traversed into different boundary that became later on even more enjoyable and looked more promising.
Thanks for the good word Ajay and thanks for giving us a glimpse of your own journey.
It’s the “became later” that makes breakthroughs uncomfortable.
I agree with Steve, it’s a funny old thing about breakthroughs …. you can’t plan for them, you can’t time them, you usually don’t even realise your searching for them ….. and then wham, bam, thankyou mam !
I have found ignorance and stubbornness in life for me have been a gift, in the most caring if not somewhat carefree way ……. for instead of breaking down, I always tend to breakthrough ….. maybe it’s programming, maybe it’s beliefs, maybe it is just an inner knowing that each of us arrive in this world with a gift buried in our very core ….. and life and everyday living has a funny way of unearthing what it is, just when the “aha” moment is right 🙂
Our lives are not a mistake …. but sometimes we may have mistook why we live the way we live …..
Thanks for the powerful reminder that we have a gift buried inside. Perhaps one thing outsiders can do for us is help us see and believe in that gift.
The biggest breakthroughs for me seem to happen after I have done something completely different. Something that changes the way I view and approach my normal work (leading a volunteer progress, starting to blog). it’s the new energy and thinking that then seem to lead to breakthrough in other areas.
You make me think about an organizational patter that was accidentally broken but we discovered that the mistake was better than the existing process.
A breakthrough might be small and they accumulate. What just seemed like another day earlier might look like a breakthrough in retrospect.
Excellent post.
I love how a small breakthrough often bleeds into other areas and eventually becomes big.
.. one of the things I don’t like about “maturity” (I’m 57) is the difficulty of finding older mentors – people who can/will pull be through there life experience lens and help me to reset, point up a flaw, or look at a problem in a different way.. in your terms, help me find breakthrough.
I have found that those who are younger (20’s-30’s) look to me for a mentor-like relationship are a great asset because they look at the world radically differently and they see me much different than I see myself. I have to invite their constructive perspectives but when I do I often get new insights..
I’m not sure they press me more, but I’m sure they press me different! I find great value and encouragement in that.
Thanks for sharing your insights…nothing like a set of young eyes to bring a new perspective… I consistently value input from young and emerging leaders. They help me get unstuck as long as I can keep my mouth shut long enough to listen..
That just came at the right moment – the right words to study for my exams! 🙂 Thank you!
Best wishes and thanks for the good word.
Oh my I’ve felt one or two of these! Very uncomfortable but well worth the sleepless nights when, as you say, you embrace them!
Sometimes my breakthroughs drag me kicking and screaming…until I finally get the message.
Great article—lot of us need to hear!!!
Thanks for an encouraging word!
Awesome
Thanks Tonya!
I just love these lists Dan! Thanks for sharing and have an awesome Friday!
I love #10 on the 2nd list…
“Someone presses you more than you press yourself.
Just awesome!
Those people who press us are a blessing and a curse… 🙂 We love em after but often hate them before…
Absolutely Dan! Thanks for taking the time to respond. Have a great Saturday..
Hello. In my life I had the opportunity to meet people for whom control and the use of fear was very important in their leadership. Not only that they hurt others, but they too were frustrated to a point where it could have been a health issue.
It’s not easy to face breakthroughs, but it depends on the personality and the general orientation of a man.
My personal experience taught me that it’s important to find the good side, accept what was wrong and make an effort to chnage things. Communication with other leaders, the sharing of experiences and the ways used to solve a problem are important because they offer not only the tranquility that you are not the first to experience that thing and but also the surse of some pieces of advice from more experienced leaders.
This is for young leaders that tend to be dramatic with their faults. Responsabilty can be scary sometimes. This is why I find your posts and the community here very helpful and reassuring.
I think being alone is dangerous and detrimental to leaders. Yet, leaders can be loners… We have to break break our barriers and start connecting with other leaders.
Regarding comments here on LF… They are the best part of the blogging experience…
You need to stare-down that hopeless feeling that comes from the fear, negative expectations and inertia. Here are some of the paths to hopeFUL that I wrote about a few months back: http://stratecutionstories.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/the-road-from-hopeless-to-hopeful-dont-get-caught-in-the-hopelessness-cycle/
Michael Baer
http://stratecutionstories.wordpress.com
Moving forward requires hope.
Great post! I have found that it’s at the point of wanting to through in the towel we often discover breakthrough. Thanks,
thanks for the good word… sometimes it’s just one more step…
Even though breakthroughs can come at any moment and it is really hard to delimit the conditions under which they occur, you have made a very nice list of some of the moments where they could appear.
On the other hand, the elements mentioned under the list of activities that can inhibit breakthroughs are very true. We sometimes just not realize that by having those attitudes, e.g. not admitting our mistakes, we are in fact hurting ourselves.
then guess i need someone to mentor me, to press me, and to belief in me…
Well, as Dan Rockwell said, being alone it’s not good. Everybody needs a mentor to become the best. The relationship between the mentor and apprentice is special an requires a lot of work from both of them.
I too am in the begining so I need a mentor. But because I couldon’t find one in real life, or I had one but at some point we had to walk on different roads, I tried to find it somewhere else.
Here I consider that I have found not only one mentor, but many more.
Thank you! Your post came at a right time for me.
Agreed. I have been working on doing some things that scare me… and I have been astounded and the unexpected breakthroughs coming from unusual angles.
Thank you lets. Here’s to continued success!
Dan writes, breakthroughs occur when “Sudden crisis confronts the status quo” and our public schools are in a state of crisis. Students are not achieving as they should and our status quo approach is not meeting students’ needs. Here are “10 Books to Breakthrough in School Leadership.”
http://culturallyresponsiveleadership.com/10-breakthrough-books/