Maintaining A Teachable Attitude: Lessons For A Life Of Success

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

If you are a highly talented person, you may have a tough time with teachability. Why? Because talented people often think they know it all. And that makes it difficult for them to continually expand their talent. Teachability is not so much about competence and mental capacity as it is about attitude. It is the desire to listen, learn, and apply. It is the hunger to discover and grow. It is the willingness to learn, unlearn, and relearn. 

When I teach and mentor people, I remind them that if they stop learning, they stop growing. But if they remain teachable and keep learning, they will be able to keep making an impact where they are. Whatever your talent happens to be—whether it’s leadership, craftsmanship, entrepreneurship, or something else—you will expand it if you keep expecting and striving to learn. Talented individuals with teachable attitudes become talent-plus people.

TEACHABILITY TRUTHS

To make the most of your talent and remain teachable, consider the following truths about teaching:

• Nothing Is Interesting If You Are Not Interested

It’s a shame when people allow themselves to get in a rut and never climb out. They often miss the best that life has to offer. In contrast, teachable people are fully engaged in life. They get excited about things. They are interested in discovery, discussion, application, and growth. There is a definite relationship between passion and potential.

German philosopher Goethe advised, “Never let a day pass without looking at some perfect work of art, hearing some great piece of music and reading, in part, some great book.” The more engaged you are, the more interesting life will be. The more interested you are in exploring and learning, the greater your potential for growth.

• Successful People View Learning Differently From Those Who Are Unsuccessful

After a few years of teaching and training people, I’ve come to realize that successful people think differently from unsuccessful ones. That doesn’t mean that unsuccessful people are unable to think the way successful people do. Those successful thinking patterns pertain to learning as well.

Teachable people are always open to new ideas and are willing to learn from anyone who has something to offer. American journalist Sydney J. Harris wrote, “A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others. A loser wants to be considered an expert by others, before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.” It’s all a matter of attitude.

• Learning Is Meant To Be A Lifelong Pursuit

It’s said that the Roman scholar Cato started to study Greek when he was more than eighty years old. When asked why he was tackling such a difficult task at his age, he replied, “It is the earliest age I have left.” Unlike Cato, too many people regard learning as an event instead of a process. Someone told me that only one-third of all adults read an entire book after their last graduation. Why would that be? Because they view education as a period of life, not a way of life!

Learning is an activity that is not restricted by age. It doesn’t matter if you’re past eighty, like Cato, or haven’t yet entered your teens. Author Julio Melara was only eleven years old when he began to acquire major life lessons that he has been able to carry with him into adulthood and to teach others. Here are some of the things he’s learned, taken from his book, It Only Takes Everything You’ve Got!: Lessons for a Life of Success.

“Here is a list of all the jobs you will not find on my résumé but lessons that have lasted a lifetime:

• Started cutting grass for profit at age 11. Lesson learned: It is important to give things a clean, professional look.
• Stock clerk at a local food store. Lesson learned: Making sure that if I am going to sell something, the merchandise needs to be in stock.
• Dishwasher at local restaurant. Lesson learned: Somebody always has to do the job no one else wants to do. Also, most people have a lot of food on their plates. (They do not finish what they start.)
• A janitor at an office building. Lesson learned: The importance of cleanliness as it’s related to image.
• Fry and prep cook at a steak house. Lesson learned: The importance of preparation and the impact of the right presentation.
• Construction helping hand. (lug wood and supplies from one place to another) Lesson learned: I do not want to do this for the rest of my life.
• Sold newspaper subscription for daily paper. Lesson learned: The job of rejection—had to knock on at least thirty doors before I ever sold one subscription.
• Shipping clerk at a plumbing supply house. Lesson learned: Delivering your project or service on time is just as important as selling it.
• Breakfast cook at a twenty-four-hour restaurant stop. Lesson learned: How to do fifteen things at once. Also learned about the weird things people like to eat on their eggs.
• Cleaned cars at detailing shop. Lesson learned: The importance of details (washing vs. detailing). You can pay $15 just to wash the outside of the car or $150 to clean the car inside and out and cover all the details. Details are a pain, but details are valuable.
• Shoe salesman at a retail store. Lesson learned: To sell customers what they want and like. Also, learned to compliment people and be sincere.
• Busboy at a local diner. Lesson learned: People enjoy being served with a smile and they love a clean table.”

Every stage of life presents lessons to be learned. We can choose to be teachable and continue to learn them, or we can be closed-minded and stop growing. The decision is ours.

• Pride Is The Number One Hindrance To Teachability

Author, trainer, and speaker Dave Anderson believes that the number one cause of management failure is pride. He wrote:

There are many reasons managers fail. For some, the organization outgrows them. Others don’t change with the times . . . A few make poor character choices. They look good for a while but eventually discover they can’t get out of their own way. Increasingly more keep the wrong people too long because they don’t want to admit they made a mistake or have high turnover become a negative reflection on them. Some failures had brilliant past track records but start using their success as a license to build a fence around what they had rather than continue to risk and stretch to build it to even higher levels. But all these causes for management failure have their root in one common cause: pride. In simplest terms, pride is devastating . . . the pride that inflates your sense of self-worth and distorts your perspective of reality.

While envy is the deadly sin that comes from feelings of inferiority, the deadly sin of pride comes from feelings of superiority. It creates an arrogance of success, an inflated sense of self-worth accompanied by a distorted perspective of reality. Such an attitude leads to a loss of desire to learn and an unwillingness to change. It makes a person unteachable.

HOW TO TAKE YOUR TALENT TO THE NEXT LEVEL

If you want to expand your talent, you must become teachable. That is the pathway to growth. Futurist and author John Naisbitt believes that “the most important skill to acquire is learning how to learn.” Here is what I suggest as you pursue teachability and become a talent-plus person:

• Learn To Listen

The first step in teachability is learning to listen. American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and one to hear.” Being a good listener helps us to know people better, to learn what they have learned, and to show them that we value them as individuals.

As you go through each day, remember that you can’t learn if you’re always talking. As the old saying goes, “There’s a reason you have one mouth but two ears.” Listen to others, remain humble, and you will begin to learn things every day that can help you expand your talent.

• Understand The Learning Process

Here’s how the learning typically works:

• STEP 1: Act.
• STEP 2: Look for your mistakes and evaluate.
• STEP 3: Search for a way to do it better.
• STEP 4: Go back to step 1.

Remember, the greatest enemy of learning is knowing, and the goal of all learning is action, not knowledge. If what you are doing does not in some way contribute to what you or others are doing in life, then question its value and be prepared to make changes.

• Look For And Plan Teachable Moments

If you look for opportunities to learn in every situation, you will become a talent-plus person and expand your talent to its potential. But you can also take another step beyond that and actively seek out and plan teachable moments. You can do that by reading books, visiting places that will inspire you, attending events that will prompt you to pursue change, listening to lessons, and spending time with people who will stretch you and expose you to new experiences.

I’ve had the privilege to spend time with many remarkable people, and the natural reward has been the opportunity to learn. In my personal relationships, I’ve also gravitated toward people from whom I can learn. My closest friends are people who challenge my thinking—and often change it. They lift me up in many ways. And I’ve found that I often live out something stated by Spanish philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracian: “Make your friends your teachers and mingle the pleasures of conversation with the advantages of instruction.” You can do the same. Cultivate friendships with people who challenge and add value to you, and try to do the same for them. It will change your life.

• Make Your Teachable Moments Count

Even people who are strategic about seeking teachable moments can miss the whole point of the experience. I say this because for quite a number of years I’ve attended numerous conferences and workshops—events that are designed to help people learn. But I’ve found that many people walk away from an event and do very little with what they heard after closing their notebooks. It would be like a jewellery designer going to a gem merchant to buy fine gems, placing them carefully into a case, and then putting that case on the shelf to collect dust. What’s the value of acquiring the gems if they’re never going to be used?

We tend to focus on learning events instead of the learning process. Because of this, I try to help people take action steps that will help them implement what they learn. I suggest that in their notes, they use a code to mark things that jump out at them: 

• T indicates you need to put some time thinking on that point.
• C indicates something you need to change.
• J A smiley face means you are doing that thing particularly well.
• A indicates something you need to apply.
• S means you need to share that information with someone else.

After the conference I recommend that they create to-do lists based on what they marked, then schedule time to follow through.

• Ask Yourself, “Am I Really Teachable?”

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: all the good advice in the world won’t help if you don’t have a teachable spirit. To know whether you are really open to new ideas and new ways of doing things, answer the following questions:

1. Am I open to other people’s ideas?
2. Do I listen more than I talk?
3. Am I open to changing my opinion based on new information?
4. Do I readily admit when I am wrong?
5. Do I observe before acting on a situation?
6. Do I ask questions?
7. Am I willing to ask a question that will expose my ignorance?
8. Am I open to doing things in a way I haven’t done before?
9. Am I willing to ask for directions?
10. Do I act defensive when criticized, or do I listen openly for the truth?

If you answered no to one or more of these questions, then you have room to grow in the area of teachability. You need to soften your attitude and learn humility, and remember that everything we know we learned from someone else.

Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor, was the guest of the governor of North Carolina when the politician complimented him on his creative genius.

“I am not a great inventor,” countered Edison.

“But you have more than a thousand patents to your credit,” the governor stated.

“Yes, but about the only invention I can really claim as absolutely original is the phonograph,” Edison replied.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean,” the governor remarked.

“Well,” explained Edison, “I guess I’m an awfully good sponge. I absorb ideas from every course I can, and put them to practical use. Then I improve them until they become of some value. The ideas which I use are mostly the ideas of other people who don’t develop them themselves.”

What a remarkable description of someone who used teachability to expand his talent! That is what a talent-plus person does. That is what all of us should strive to do.

We sincerely thank you for finding time to read our articles. In the next article we shall look at the role other people play in our growth journey. Let’s grow together!