La Curva dell'Efficacia Personale

The Personal Effectiveness Curve

Learning from those who are successful

As professional psychologists and psychotherapists, in addition to studying the most current research in the field of work psychology, as assessors and coaches, we have had and continue to have the daily opportunity to work with top managers and high-profile professionals, people who, in various ways, have had and continue to have success in the professional field. 

In most cases, our clients have requested that we measure our clients with validated psychometric tools, mainly personality tests and critical reasoning skills, and that we describe them with reference to competency models. 

In other words, in a profile we describe people based on how close or far they are from the average of a sample of professionals, with respect to certain psychological characteristics or abilities, and how well they are able to express certain competencies through related behaviors. Work of this kind might suggest that, over the years, we have been able to directly identify in the field the personality profile and behaviors that distinguish a successful person in the professional field. 

Well, no! Or at least not in this way. 

What has emerged is that successful people do have some aspects in common, but these are neither personality traits nor specific behaviors or habits.

What distinguishes successful people?

But how? And then "The 7 Habits for Success ... New edition of the bestseller "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey and more recently Tim Ferris with his "Tools of The Titans", the tools of the titans, that is the recipes distilled from successful people he interviewed? And, for those who want to go back to the origins of this literary genre, "Think and Grow Rich", in Italian "Pensa e arricchisci te stesso" from 1937 by Napoleon Hill?

The assumption on which all these, and many other, books are based, but also real schools like Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP, is that by identifying the behaviors, habits or mental/psychological patterns that distinguish the best performers from ordinary people, you will have the instructions to follow to be successful.

This approach, as good as it sounds, has at least two limitations:

1. There is no guarantee that the factors isolated and identified as distinctive of successful people are also those that are decisive for their success; also consider that by definition, the analysis of "characteristics" is done on people who have already been successful. Paradoxically, one could hypothesize that they are a consequence rather than a cause.

2. But above all, a characteristic, behavior or attitude, de-contextualized, that is, separated from the rest of the person and the socio-relational context, is like a flower plucked from the meadow, beautiful but destined to wither.

So? What distinguishes successful people? 

The Area of Personal Effectiveness

The first thing to say is that they have in common the fact that they fully express their potential, unique and inimitable.  This is where #Uniqueness comes into play that is, our, each of us, way of being unique and unrepeatable. If we want to excel, we must deeply understand who we are and stop bending our talent to more or less abstract models that force us to go against our nature. We must access our own, unique and unrepeatable, area of personal effectiveness!

But in doing so there are two success factors that we have identified as transversal to all these people: 

Kahneman would describe this area as managed by the .It is when we follow our morning routine or go to work almost without realizing it. Yet, for example, in these situations we are able, effectively and effortlessly, to move through traffic: a task that for years and with enormous investments the best minds in the world have tried to teach machines.. On Paolo Lanciani's Youtube and Linkedin profiles you will find many tutorials that refer to this key of interpretation applied to Business Development for Lawyers. If, on the other hand, you intend to invest in your professional project, during the coaching of the we apply it with our clients to identify, focus and develop their professional project.