What takes a team from high performance to meta performance? I want to get into that topic by telling you a story a few months ago, I was working with my coach, and he was giving me some feedback. And I was wrestling with a leadership challenge that I was facing. And he said: “Jason, I’ll tell you what your problem is.” If you would, let me guess I would have guessed a list of 100 things and it wouldn’t have been what he said, my problem was.

I said: “What’s that?” And he said: “Jason, your problem is that you’re stingy.” As soon as he said that, I got ticked, I was so defensive. I was so upset. I thought, You don’t know me, like you don’t see what I give in terms of resources to charities and to faith communities and, you don’t know that I go to prisons and I volunteer and work with people who are incarcerated. How dare he say that I’m stingy.

But in the coaching work, we have a saying that you want to look for the 10%, or even a 2% of what’s true of any kind of feedback. So, he helped me settle down. Then he held a space for me to explore what could be true about that, what might be the 2%, where I am stingy.

I went home and I did what I call a generosity audit. I looked at where I was withholding in my life and where I was being competitive in my life and where I was hoarding things in my life. I discovered that almost every single leadership challenge that was happening in my life was flowing from a place where I was holding back, or where I was withholding certain things that I had that I can give to others, either clients or to my team, or even to myself.

This opened up a whole space of conversation for me, where I realized the question that I should be asking myself isn’t, am I generous enough? But the question I should be asking myself is how generous am I? And this has been a game changer for me and a game changer for the way that we serve our clients. So, I want to ask you this question. What are the ways that you are being generous with your wealth? I wanted to find wealth in a really specific way.

I want to introduce an acronym to you called ROCKETS. We believe that your wealth is like the rocket fuel even rockets that propel your life forward. ROCKETS stand for:

• Relationships
• Opportunities
• Cash, of course
• Knowledge
• Energy
• Time
• Skills

These are all of the different types of wealth that you have. You have skills, you have time, you have energy, you have knowledge, you have of course money, you have opportunities, you kind of gate protect, you have relationships.

The question is in terms of Meta Performing teams. You see, high performing teams are competitive they try to beat each other. Meta Performing teams are generative, which means they try to serve each other.

The invitation I want to offer you is to explore what it would look like for you to increase your level of generosity to your team, to your bosses, to the people who are mentoring, your coaching and your life? To the people who follow you, to the people on your team, who are your employees, to the people who are less fortunate to the people who are more fortunate to work and is it possible that this could become the rocket fuel to your life? That in order to fuel the rockets, the wealth in your life, you have to explore ways of being generous.

My coach tells me it’s not that he gives because he has, he has because he gives. I want to invite you to join me in this adventure of generosity. At Novus Global we don’t just want to be great coaches. We want to be good people. We believe that nobility is a competitive advantage, that being noble actually helps you create wealth and helps you know how to steward wealth better. That makes not only your life better, but also other people’s lives. So that’s the question. How generous can you be? 

Because I promise you as you begin to do that and you invite your teams into doing that, you will rise from high performance to Meta Performance™.