What drives you to achieve excellence? To achieve your BEST every day? Learning is a big part of our journey in achieving excellence, so what helps you to stay motivated to learn and grow? I believe we must stay curious and be curious to continue to develop and improve each day. Our learning approach helps to expand our capacity AND our potential. Stay and be curious in our profession so you learn new skills and new ways to lead your team and organization to more positive outcomes. Train yourself to be curious, which can lead to more opportunities to advance.
Episode outline:
Please connect with me on:
1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii
For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy: financeleaderacademy.com.
What drives you to achieve excellence? To achieve your BEST every day? Learning is a big part of our journey in achieving excellence, so what helps you to stay motivated to learn and grow? I believe we must stay curious and be curious to continue to develop and improve each day. Our learning approach helps to expand our capacity AND our potential. Stay and be curious in our profession so you learn new skills and new ways to lead your team and organization to more positive outcomes. Train yourself to be curious, which can lead to more opportunities to advance.
Episode outline:
Please connect with me on:
1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii
For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy: financeleaderacademy.com.
What drives you to achieve excellence to achieve your best every day, learning is a big part of our journey and achieving excellence. So what helps you to stay motivated to learn and grow? I believe we must stay curious and be curious to continue to develop and improve each day. Our learning approach helps to expand our capacity, and our potential. Stay and be curious in our profession. So you will learn new skills and new ways to lead your team and organization to more positive outcomes. Train yourself to be curious, which can lead to more opportunities to advance. Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, Stephen McLean. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. Thank you. This is episode number 106. And I'll be talking about staying curious. So you continue to grow and develop in finance, accounting, and business overall. And I will highlight the following topics. Number one, our curiosity leads to development of new skills and abilities. Number two, how to train yourself to be more curious. And three, continually expand your potential for finance leadership, Walt Disney said, we keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things because we're curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. The philosophy of being curious is what makes life and business interesting. There's so much to learn in finance and accounting, and also about our business acumen, especially for our own organization and the industry as a whole. There's so much to learn, which will make us better at our jobs, and better finance leaders. I love learning and staying curious. I have that desire to learn more in our profession, especially in data analysis, projections and finance decision making. I am always wanting to make a better analysis model. So I can find a unique insight. There are so many ways to look at your data. I want to learn them all. And I often find myself doing that I usually start by refining what I'm trying to solve, then extracting the right data set, ensuring it's validated data, and then applying the right algorithm maybe through a pivot table, or just a simple chart. I finish up the analysis by presenting in a simple way. So not to distract my audience. I'll cover more about this in a later episode. But my point is that I love to learn about how to better analyze data and present it in a way that helps other leaders to achieve their goals. I get fired up over that. And I hope you do too. By the way, did you listen to episode 105, finance and accounting trends for 2023. I discuss hiring and technology trends for our field, we have to know what is happening in our field. So we are prepared to make decisions about what roles we may want to pursue and what skills we need to develop. Please go back and listen to that episode. If you missed it, you won't regret it. Now, do you like learning? Would you call yourself a curious person? Do new ideas intrigue you? So you want to know more? I definitely do. Learning gets me motivated every day. And there is research that suggests staying curious improves our brain function. The finance and accounting fields are richly packed with new ideas and concepts all the time. How we do our jobs and finance and accounting will change. So our curiosity should never end. Right now the hot topic to learn about are the new artificial intelligence tools that seem to be coming out every day. We all have to commit to learning and applying these new tools before our competition does. Can we agree that the daily grind can sometimes be boring, we often have the same tasks, the same reports and analysis. We need to get done on a routine basis, an everyday basis. And this can be boring, safe to safe. So don't let the routine pneus of our responsibilities destroy our curiosity and our ability to grow, look for ways to improve, to grow to change how we support the business. Now this can be done we can all do this. staying curious begins with asking questions. For example, how can we do this better? How can we perform a more accurate projection? How can we improve monthly clothes and make it faster while still being accurate and proper? How can we support senior leaders execute the strategy? There are all sorts of questions to ask about completing simple tasks faster, to more strategic issues, you have to start asking them and then learning and figuring out how to answer them, then you will be executing your job even better and pushing your organization to a higher level. When we begin to be curious, we start to have more opportunities to excel and to grow in our role. We grow our value, and then we grow our career. Our career potential can often be determined by our desire to learn, and then to apply what we have learned in our craft. So we get new opportunities. And I need to ask this, how are we doing with goal achievement this year, we are in the second quarter, so I expect some progress. And I also expect that you have completed a few CPS again, don't wait until December 1 to start working on CPE completion. There are many one CPE opportunities out there to accomplish when you can find yourself caught up on work tasks. So let's get it done. Now. one skill that I'm recommending that you be curious about is relationship building. Right now you might be analyzing data or handling a set of accounts or leading a team that supports a line or several lines of business. But how can you help your stakeholders even more? How can you grow the business to some this might sound like you have to do a little extra work and you're right. But those people are not listening to this podcast, the finance leader podcast you are and you know and desire to go the extra mile to become the best finance leader you can be, you are willing to rise above the task grind to become better. So add relationship building to your list of skills to grow. Now let's talk about staying curious. So you continue to grow and develop in finance, accounting, and the business overall. Number one, our curiosity leads the development of new skills and abilities. The curious personality will learn continuously. And when you apply that learning to our work and to our life. We then get to move forward in many amazing ways. Our desire to learn expands our ceiling and our career growth. The one who invest in themselves to learn new skills will find more opportunities available. Ask questions many questions and challenge the status quo. Ask and suggest ways to do your tasks even better. Volunteer to perform a task that will challenge your abilities. So you have to be curious and learn continue to ask more questions. Continue to find more ways to improve the work that you are doing today. Number two, how to train yourself to be more curious. To begin being curious requires us to ask questions and to wonder why and to wonder how things can be done different and better. Do you feel like that? If you don't have a natural sense of curiosity asked a question about your duties or about the business. Be willing to even ask dumb questions, I do it often it doesn't matter. Find time to learn. Invest in yourself everyday commit the time and effort each day to learn something new. Make it a daily habit. feeding your mind and spirit when new knowledge will give you additional benefits also read widely. Choose reading selections beyond your normal go to topics. Challenge yourself to expand your topic range. So your broad knowledge grows, be a great listener absorb what people are saying when you become an active listener, you will pick up on special insights that will positively change your perspective. Listening is powerful. Listening with patients will change you forever. Your own very personal stance on topics and issues may very well change once you become an active listener. Also be deliberate in expanding your expertise. We have to make a daily choice to become better and grow you will be challenged with the daily grind of tasks. And they will try to stop you from learning. I have been there. We've all been there. But we are finance leaders. So we know we must commit and be deliberate in our learning. Also, I want you to keep a journal capture your key learning so you can go back to them. Use your journal to apply what you've learned to what challenges you may face. Also, when we write things down, we have a greater chance to retain it. And also don't forget to update your individual development plan. As you gain new knowledge and grow your skills. Update your progress in your written plan. Number three continually expand your potential for finance leadership. Our capacity to learn to adapt and to grow expands our potential for advancement. But we also need to take action and be proactive in developing our potential for greater responsibility. Being and staying curious He is helps us to be better leaders, better communicators, and better partners to help achieve the organization's goals and strategy. We have to get out of our comfort zone to be curious. And by being curious helps us to get out of the everyday grind that we are asked to do. This helps us to grow our potential and our career growth. I want to encourage you to cross train between finance and accounting. And that means to take roles in both fields. Now, some people might be very scared of that, and not willing to do this they want to kind of stay on track their finance track, or their accounting track. But I'm asking you to take some riskiness be willing to take roles across finance and accounting. This can positively feed our curiosity and grow our broad knowledge and experience and our value increase, more opportunities will come to you. If you're able to take that risk and learn and take on roles in both finance and accounting. Our curiosity leads us to growth and then potentially more career advancement. But a lack of curiosity leads to regression, boredom and routine without reward. We want to avoid this. Some people love routine, it's safe, but it brings you nowhere it put to your same paycheck every week. What are you hungry to achieve in your career? How can you get there? What do you need to learn to move to the next level? Or to the next step in your career towards your long term goal? For action today? Let's get curious about our fields. What finance, accounting or business topics? Are you interested in? To learn more about? What new skills can help you advance your career? What are you lacking to move forward? And what can you help improve within your own work portfolio? These are a few areas that can drive you to learn more, that self analysis will help drive to ask the right questions to get started. No. So let's be curious every day. Also, I wanted to let you know that I have a brand new guide to help you become a better leader in finance and accounting is called become a finance leader. You can download it for free, there is a link in the show notes. Or you can go to Finance leader academy.com to download it for free. Thank you. Today I talked about staying curious so you can continue to grow and develop in finance, accounting and business overall and I highlighted the following points. Number one, our curiosity leads the development of new skills and abilities. Number two, how to train yourself to be more curious. And three continually expand your potential for finance leadership. I want to highlight one more time the key issue before I close this episode out you will increase your value and potential. By being curious. Our quest for knowledge will lead to improve skills and people will notice they will notice your drive to become better, they will notice that your work performance has improved and your overall leadership and influence abilities have progressed. So be curious and ask many questions. This will lead you to gain more and more knowledge and improve your marketable skills. It will even lead you to build better relationships throughout the organization. Your learning should not just be limited to the accounting and finance teams but also the other business functions, learn and then learn some more and then apply it in advance go get it I'm proud of you finance leaders. Next episode I will be talking about team engagement tools. I introduced this a few weeks ago. But I wanted to expand on what I presented to help our finance and accounting leaders out there I can't wait to share. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership skills to change your mindset to clarify your goals so to advance your career. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Give this episode helped you today. Please share it leave a quick review so that others find the podcast. Until next time, you can check out more resources at finance leader academy.com and sign up for my weekly updates. Don't miss an episode of the podcast and now will lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you