Applications are open through Friday, March 15th, to the Coaching for Leaders Academy. This is the first of five lessons on how to create meaningful movement on a leadership skill, using the same, 90-day framework used within our Academy community. Discover more and apply now.

Most of what people call learning is actually knowledge gathering. Reading business books, going to conferences, attending courses, listening to podcasts — is all great stuff to do, but without any behavior change, it’s not real learning.

Real learning is a lot harder, and requires us to actually change our behavior. If you’ve ever gotten tough feedback from a boss, have a fear of public speaking, or if you’ve had a health scare that necessitated you substantially changing your diet or exercise, you know how hard making real behavior change can be.

The five steps you’ll hear in these lessons won’t make that behavior change easy, but they will give you a clear framework to create movement, almost immediately.

A good friend of mine saw my recent comment about people confusing learning and knowledge gathering and sent me an email over the weekend. She said:

On StrengthsFinder, Input is one of my top five talents. I gather knowledge, but no one could ever possibly integrate all of it. So, then it becomes a problem. What do I do with it? How do I manage it? How do I decide what to “move” on and what to delete?

I sent her a reply back saying that it’s not just people with Input as a top strength who struggle with this. In the digital age, we’re all bombarded with tons of input and data each day. So how do you actually start to get traction on creating movement?

The first step, is deciding one place to start over the next 90 days and zeroing in there.

Even though this is the first step to generate movement, it’s probably one the hardest part. That’s because a lot of our organizations, families, even social media — have convinced us that we can have it all, we can do everything, and we can do it well.

The smarter you are and more success you’ve had in your career up to this point, the harder it is to zero in on one leadership skill. Many of us got to where we are by holding a lot in our brains and sharing tons of useful knowledge.

But that’s why you see a lot of people hit a plateau in their careers once they’ve gone as far as they can with the technical skill set — and entirely not an accident as to why Marshall Goldsmith, probably the best known executive coach, wrote a book for leaders called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

Often when I invite high-achieving people to zero in on one place to get traction, I get a bit of pushback saying that such a strategy would ignore the other 9 things that are also important this quarter. I started there too. My assumption was, far better to make some progress on everything instead of making tons of progress only on one thing, right?

But now, after almost 20 years of being intimately involved in thousands of hours of training, facilitation, and coaching, the difference in the results observing people who’ve used these methods is night and day.

The people who try to focus in on getting movement on a bunch of different behaviors all at once, see very little traction. And the people who zero in on getting better at one behavior, often see progress that surprises them.

It’s not just my experience.

I mentioned Marshall Goldsmith above. When he enters into a coaching engagement with one of the top business executives in the world, they focus on just 1 or 2 behaviors over a period of months.

Chris McChesney, co-author of the popular book for leaders, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, encourages us to focus on just one, wildly important goal when trying to move numbers.