T is for Teaching | Rajesh Setty

Teaching is one of those evergreen triple-win opportunities. You rarely go wrong with it when you do it well.

Think about it:

If you teach something well, whatever you are teaching becomes clear in your own mind and you will become better at it.

On the other hand, the people you are teaching to will learn something and they will grow.

There is an additional bonus: Teaching is a valuable gift and when you engage in teaching with genuine care, more often than not it will activate the power of reciprocation in the other person. When used right, it becomes your secret to high-leverage.

Let’s drill down deeper into all the three aspects:

1. Your Growth:

Real learning – learning that goes into your background thinking requires a bit more work. Here are a few elements that will make learning better:

1. Reading/Listening/Watching: This is the starting point. You start a new learning journey by reading, listening and watching or doing a combination of one or more of the above.

2. Reflecting: Taking time to reflect on what you took as input is crucial. This is where you synthesize your learning.

3. Conversing: Conversations trigger new thoughts about what you learned and probably deepen your understanding.

4. Teaching: Teaching requires preparation and that is where the magic is. The act of teaching forces you to think and prepare and in that process you grow.

5. Writing: Writing takes learning to a whole new level. It is where you have to collect and collate your thoughts, reflections, new thinking and summarize it.

The item #4 – teaching is at the heart of accelerating your learning.

2. Their Growth:

Think about your own childhood. The quality of your teachers greatly influenced the love for the subject they were teaching. Flip that around and you will notice that when you teach a topic passionately, it will generally increase the love for that topic amongst your audience.

When people around you are growing, automatically the energy, enthusiasm and optimism goes up helping everyone along the way.

3. The Reciprocation

You don’t teach because you want to capitalize on the power of reciprocation but it happens anyway.

I strongly believe that the most powerful force on earth is the power of reciprocation. If you know how to activate it at will, you have a huge leverage.

If you have the ability to give a valuable gift and if you can do that at a low cost AND if you can do that day in a day out, you have got everything covered.

Teaching is a quick way to get there. You teach on a topic that you are competent about so you will be able to use that as a GIFT and as you keep teaching the same topic, the COST of giving that gift keeps going down.

In summary, all I can say is, teaching will be a great way to accelerate your journey to success.

If you are interested in other articles in the series so far, here they are:

A is for Alignment (title changed on Saleforce.com blog)

B is for Bonding

C is for Confidence

D is for Detachment

E is for Excellence in Small Thing

F is for Follow Up (On Huffington Post)

G is for Grateful

H is for Hunger to Succeed

I is for Intent to Serve

J is for Judgment (On Huffington Post)