Are You Professionally Incomplete or a Know It All?

How would you describe yourself: professionally incomplete or an entrenched know it all?

Are you a professional who is compelled to offer the right answer first? (Remember the kids sitting in the front row in grade school with their hands up in the air waving in the teacher’s face?) Consequently, after you answer, will anyone else discuss your response further? Or do you listen and then summarize what everyone else just said? (Yet you are reluctant to express your own thoughts.) Either way, your behavior becomes a conversation and collaboration killer.

Alternatively, are you known for moving the conversation one millimeter beyond the box everyone tries to fit the discussion into?

If so, you thrive on being relentlessly curious and are confidently professionally incomplete. Consequently, you catalyze people to recombine all the stuff they think they know. The result is a more robust and innovative outcome. Each outcome accomplished together catalyzes people to become more comfortable thinking about things differently than they did yesterday.

Your confidence in being professionally incomplete keeps you focused on what is new, next, and continuously changing. And these days, you do not have to search very far to discover that everything is continuously changing. Simultaneously.

Over time, you develop the mindset and skillset that graciously acknowledges those colleagues who may not share your comfort in being continuously ready to journey outside of that box everyone is trying to fit their mindset, tools, and outcomes into. As your mindset and skillsets evolve, people place their trust and confidence in you to navigate them upward and outward. Together, one millimeter at a time. That is all it takes.

Right now, colleagues and clients may be tempted to hunker down inside the box they already know. However, their professional reluctance leaves them even further behind competency, capability, and capacity advances driving global business ecosystems. Change will continue to happen, with them or without them. That is where you can factor into the equation.

How can you leverage your growing comfort with being professionally incomplete to become an even more confident navigator of colleagues and clients through ever-changing scenarios? Let’s take the next steps together.

Searching for a coaching catalyst to get you unstuck professionally? Looking for a meeting or event speaker focused on what is new and next? Then engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
Discover how to incorporate Complex / PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solving into your professional arsenal of awesomeness, contact me here. I will send you my affiliate link.

Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust professional outcomes together. Babette is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Complex / Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). She is a member of the ASQ, SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.