Grow Beyond Your Limits Posted on October 19, 2007 Paul A. Pilkonis (bio) talks about the value of working well with other people.

If you're going to grow beyond your own limits, believe it or not, you have to look outside yourself to incorporate the brain power, the talents, the abilities of other people so that you can actually make a step up to the next higher level and continue to do that step after step after step in an incremental way. Not everybody is capable of that.

And there are two primary reasons why that may not be true. One is social anxiety, shyness. People just are inhibited in that regard. That's actually less of a problem. We have good treatments for that. The treatment for shyness is exposure. We just, we insist you get out there and do it and we encourage people to do that.

Other folks, unfortunately, have personalities that don't allow them to work effectively with other people. They're too full of themselves so they can't listen to other people, they're not prepared to learn from other people because of what it implies about them. Some folks are too controlling. They just have to have it their own way and they're not flexible enough. And some people are mistrustful. They just, you know, they have concerns about someone's going to steal my ideas or I'm not going to get proper credit. So that, that mix of personality attributes makes it, that makes it hard for people to work with others is a risk factor.

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