You Can't Positively Change Anything In Your Business, Team, Nor The World Unless You Do This First

I've spoken to a lot of people over the years.

Many of them have told me about all the things that they want to accomplish.

All the things they wanted their team to be able to do.

How incredibly large they wanted their business to become.

All the causes they wanted to impact.

All the lives they wanted to change.

Yet, when I look over what they accomplish, I often find that none of it gets done.

Their teams don't improve or accomplish their goals.

Their businesses stagnate, or worse diminish.

The causes remain unimpacted.

Life goes on pretty much the same.

Why is this?

The answer is quite simple.

You can't impact what you don't participate in.

What do I mean by this?

In Teams

Let's look at teams first.

Leaders often talk about how they want their teams to improve.

Get greater results.

Be more accountable.

Have better communication.

However, when I overlook what the Leader does within the team, I see that they don't participate in these things themselves.

They aren't working on getting better results themselves, they just want others to get them.

They don't have any form of accountability to their team, they just expect their team to be accountable to them.

They don't communicate well with their team, they simply expect their team to communicate.

How can you expect your team to do these things if you don't participate in them yourself?

If you don't participate in getting greater results, why should they?

If you aren't accountable, why should they be?

If you don't communicate with them, what desire do you think they should have to communicate with you?

In Business

We can also look at this at the business level.

A business should work to improve the lives of their customers in one form or another.

However, how can you know what a customer wants if you don't participate and understand their lives?

Most businesses simply "assume" they know what their customers want.

They create a product or service and expect it to take off immediately.

But they don't, rarely does this occur.

Why?

The businesses have failed to be an actual part of the lives of their customers.

They don't know what the clients are really worried about, what they really need in their lives.

Due to this, the clients simply don't care about the "solution" offered to them.

A recent example of this - Meta with their VR technology.

Meta told people that they can now live their life completely online, we can build worlds there and you can live them out however you wish there!

But this isn't what most people actually wanted.

We've been through a pandemic for years at that point.

People were tired of "online lives".

They didn't want to go online further, they desired to get back to people they cared about, in real life.

The people don't care about some idealistic fake world, they care about saving the world they are currently on.

They didn't want to build more fake lives, they wanted to see and be a part of real and authentic lives.

None of Meta's marketing really spoke to most people because Meta hasn't participated in people's lives in a long time, they have missed what people are looking for.

In Causes

Next we can look at this from a "cause" level.

So many people talk about wanting to save our environment.

So many people talk about wanting to help the homeless.

So many people talk about wanting to create a more equal world.

Yet, it seems that none of these things happen.

Why?

We talk about all these problems, but we have no participation in any of them.

We can't fix our environment because we don't truly understand the impact our actions have.

We "hear" about it, but we don't actually witness it.

We "know" the problems, but we only see the end result without understanding where the problems truly exist.

We can't help the homeless because we don't actually know the challenges they are facing.

We don't understand the mechanisms that are actively working against them and preventing them from getting off the streets.

Money isn't the real problem for most of them, so throwing money at them doesn't solve anything.

We want an equal world, but we don't understand what actually makes things unequal.

We don't see how the educational system is designed in a way to continue inequities, and breed a certain type of thinking that helps certain types of people.

We fail to see how the mortgage system acts against many people, not based on what we traditional see as "unequal", but rather on factors like where they currently live and income access.

I remember listening to a story of an entrepreneur who wanted to fix the income inequalities in Africa, and so went to Africa to help African people start a business.

They found a hillside that was beautiful and would be perfect for farming a tomato farm.

They told the people, who promptly ignored them.

Since the opportunity was there, and no one seemed to take it, the entrepreneur decided to start the tomato farm themselves.

They would show by example how a business could be profitable.

Things were going perfectly, the hillside was splendid to grow the tomatoes in, and soon the tomatoes were just about ready to be picked.

That is when the Hippos decided it would be a perfect time to eat all of the tomatoes.

The entire crop was demolished by the hippos, no profit was made.

The entrepreneur went to the people and asked why they didn't tell him about the hippos.

They responded that he didn't care about their problems, he simply loved his solution.

He didn't understand what their real problems were, he failed to care about what they actually needed, he didn't actually know anything about the realities of where he was at.

The Reality

All of these things occur because we fail to participate in the things we "say" we want to impact.

You can't change what you don't participate in - history has shown us this, time and time again.

Until we truly understand and participate fully in our teams, in our businesses, in the lives of our customers, in the problems in the world, we are doomed to continue to repeat the same issues again and again.

Do you want to change the world around you?

How can you start participating in it to understand what is truly needed?

How can you engage more people with you to fully participate and actually learn the realities to make real change?