How Self-Awareness Initiates the Law of Compounding

The blessing of using a guide and then turning your learning(s) into stories of refining, is that you can become a guide yourself. In doing so, you’re practicing the law of compounding. One person has a failure and investigates the root of the failure, and once they discover it, they decide to use that knowledge to guide others facing the same problems.

Then that person repeats the process, and soon, you have multiple guides helping exponentially larger numbers of people as it compounds. Then you have large groups of people healing from pain and learning from their failures!

In the Bible, almost all the stories and parables Jesus told showed that faith naturally generates the law of compounding and growth, while fear naturally generates the compounding of death. In The Traveler’s Gift, Andy Andrews says, “All men are driven by faith or fear—one or the other—for both are the same. Faith or fear is the expectation of an event that hasn’t come to pass or the belief in something that cannot be seen or touched. A man of fear lives always on the edge of insanity. A man of faith lives in perpetual reward.”

Trust and Inspire leadership is faith-based, because the expectation is good. You expect that there will be failure and you prepare for it, using it as an opportunity to learn and improve. Win-win. Command and Control is fear-based, because you live in fear of failure, and you make sure everyone knows that the consequences of failure are pain and distrust, not growth.

Trust and Inspire is honest; it’s a clear look at what will likely happen. Command and Control, by contrast, is nothing more than wishful thinking, hoping everything will be okay and not preparing for what to do when it’s not. T&I leaders can only be trusted and inspirational because they’re vulnerable and honest with their team members. A true guide has to share what they did, why it didn’t work, and what they learned from it.

It’s been almost five years since I started writing my first book, and it’s still a pathway to being vulnerable. Last year, I was at a Christmas party and two different ladies, out of the blue, told me how that book had blessed them, and that they were so grateful that I wrote it. They said it had been helpful in their own personal journeys.

I recently shared the book with a man who I met at a hunting camp, and he’s been using it to guide his group of employees! He said that it helped him become brave enough to share his own stories of failure and be vulnerable with his team members.

Finally, on Monday, I ran into a young guy that I’ve known for probably ten years. He encouraged me to keep sharing my thoughts on LinkedIn because they had had a positive impact on him, and he looked forward to reading them each week. He blessed me so much by telling me that the posts were always an encouragement to him.

These interactions were really unexpected; it had been a long time since anyone had mentioned my book or blog posts impacting them—but that’s kind of the point. When you put yourself out there, it’s there and available to bless others, and you don’t really know when that’s going to happen.