Shark Tank’s Barabara Corcoran Says Her Mom Taught Her 1 Simple Habit That Helped Make Her a Success. It’ll Help You, Too

Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran is a multimillionaire who came from small beginnings. She grew up as one of 10 children with her parents in a two-bedroom apartment, and held 22 jobs before starting her first company at the age of 23. Some might call her the definition of a self-made success.

Corcoran wouldn’t call herself that, though. On a recent episode of the “Erika Taught Me” podcast, Corcoran credits her parents for loving her and each of her nine siblings with their whole hearts, which in turn instilled her with the utmost confidence. 

Corcoran then went on to share a very important lesson she learned specifically from her mom:

The ability to identify the gift in anyone.

“My mother was a genius at that,” Corcoran explains. “She could look at a child and tell you right away what the gift was and make you perform it for the rest of your life. So you believed it.”

Corcoran relates how this ability to identify the gift in others, to nurture that gift and inspire others to believe in themselves, is one of the hallmarks of success–because it allows you to help others to grow. And they, in turn, help your business to grow, too.

What Corcoran’s mother taught her is an important lesson in emotional intelligence, namely:

One of the single best things you can do for any individual on your team is to see their potential.

What does the research say about why the ability to see the potential in others is a superpower? And how can you apply it to your own business? Consider the following.

Why seeing the potential in others is a superpower

Corcoran isn’t the only success story to preach the value of seeing the potential in others.

For example, in his bestselling book Give and Take, organizational psychologist Adam Grant tells the story of C.J. Skender, an accounting professor who developed a remarkable reputation for spotting talent. According to Grant, Skender’s ability to develop stars is propelled by the way Skender views his students.

“In Skender’s mind,” says Grant, “every student who walks into his classroom is a diamond in the rough–able and willing to be mined, cut, and polished. He sees potential where others don’t, which has set in motion a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.”

To further support this approach, Grant shares a classic study led by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal, in which students from 18 different classes took a Harvard cognitive ability test, which measured learning and problem-solving skills. Rosenthal then shared the test results with teachers, telling them that about 20 percent of the students had showed potential for “unusual intellectual gains over the course of the school year.”

Naturally, teachers gave special attention to these “gifted” students. When students took the test a year later, these students had IQs that rose at greater rates than their peers, and two years later they were still outgaining classmates.

The interesting thing about the experiment: The students who received special attention hadn’t really scored higher than their classmates. Rosenthal chose them randomly.

The study was designed to find out what would happen to students if their teachers believed they had high potential. In the words of Grant, the teachers’ beliefs “created self-fulfilling prophecies.”

And it doesn’t work with only young people. Other research indicates that when managers treat employees as having high potential, then communicate and support that belief with their actions, it leads to increased motivation and effort from those employees.

So, how can you help those on your team to become the best versions of themselves?

Remember that plenty of people lack self-confidence. They may be afraid of taking risks, afraid of being wrong, afraid to be themselves.

But you can change that: Take a page out of Barbara Corcoran’s playbook, and identify their gift. Offer sincere, specific praise for their efforts. Celebrate their wins, small and big.

Because if you start to believe, so will they.