High Jumping 38 Feet!

The basic rules for the Track and Field event the high jump are as follows:


1) Jump over the bar 2) move the bar up 3) jump over it again...


There are many strategies to jumping the bar successfully -- In high school I personally employed the Fosbury flop. Anybody who knows anything about high jumping knows that when you use the Fosbury flop, if you can get your hips above the bar you've got it!



Here's my high jump story: at 5 foot 6 my hips would clear the bar by about a foot. My coaches would always get excited thinking I was on my way to clearing 6 foot 2 - a secure 1st place win in most of my track meets.



There was a problem, however, at 5 foot 8 my hips would only clear the bar by about 4 inches and at 5 foot 10 (the highest I ever cleared in competition) I was lucky to clear the bar by 0.0000137 inches. Somewhere along the way the bar just felt too high! In other words, the bar was being raised, but my perspective wasn't changing. At 5'6" I believed I could clear 5'10". But at 6'0" I still believed I could clear 5'10" and as a result I never hit the 6'0" mark!



In leadership I have found the same principle to be true. The measurement of my success has little to do with the actual height of the bar and everything to do with what I believe about the height I should be clearing. My job as a leader, then, becomes raising the bar of my perspective above the bar of expectation. Obviously, all of us will reach the ceiling of our potential at some point (there's no amount of imagination that could cause me to clear 38 feet in the high jump) but I don't want my ceiling to be the result of my own short-sightedness. When I come to the end of my life I would rather have failed attempting to clear 38 feet then have settled for 5'10" when I could have cleared 6!