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28–Alan Fine: Exploring the Inner Game to GROW
36 Plays1 month ago
On this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum sits down with Alan Fine, renowned coach and one of the originators of GROW. Alan takes listeners through his unexpected journey into coaching, from a childhood tennis tournament to shaping global leadership strategies. The conversation delves into how coaching is not merely about asking questions, but also about creating environments where people can safely explore and harness their own potential. Alan emphasizes the importance of choice, focus, and how our inner dialogues influence performance.
Listeners will discover that the simplicity of effective coaching tools often masks their profound impact, making them accessible to anyone aspiring to be more effective in their personal and professional lives.
Topics Explored:
- Alan Fine’s personal journey: From asthmatic childhood to renowned coaching expert.
- The true story behind GROW and its practical application.
- The inner game and overcoming interference to improve performance.
- Why listening is the most critical skill for leaders and coaches.
- Democratizing coaching: Empowering everyone to have impactful conversations.
- Making mindful decisions: How to control focus and foster peak performance.
Links:
- InsideOut Development: https://insideoutdev.com
- Alan Fine’s book You Already Know How to Be Great: https://amzn.to/4ivG3wb
- GROW episode: https://unfoldingthought.com/grow-business-meditation/
- Make Choices So You Have Choices® by Rob Clem: https://amzn.to/4hQtgEr
- The Four Agreements: https://amzn.to/4iHPsBS
- Winning Through Enlightenment: https://amzn.to/4jmO8o3
- Taller people live further in the past: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/05/18/104183551/the-secret-advantage-of-being-short#:~:text=It%20may%20be%20that%20our,What%20a%20strange%20idea!
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Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
Hi, I'm Eric Pradham. Welcome to the Unfolding Thought Podcast, the show for leaders and deep thinkers who demand more than the usual fluff. If you're the kind of person who moves on from a book, video, or podcast, the moment it stops making you think or introducing you to something you can use, I hope you'll feel right at home here.
00:00:25
Speaker
In each episode, we uncover the deeper, often overlooked forces that shape our thoughts and behaviors so you can see yourself, your team, and the world from a whole new angle and then actually apply what you learn to grow and do better.
00:00:42
Speaker
On the Unfolding Thought Podcast, we aim for minimal filler and maximum insight, challenging assumptions and sparking new thinking every step of the way. Are you ready to dive deeper?
00:00:55
Speaker
Then let's get started. Today, I'm speaking with Alan Fine. I cannot tell you how lucky I felt that Alan said yes to speaking with me. As you'll hear in the recording, I first became aware of Alan because of Grow, read his book, which I felt was great, and then participated in training with his organization, Inside Out Development.
00:01:17
Speaker
I'm also such a fan of Grow that I recorded a short episode on it early in this podcast's history and will link to it in the show notes. Please check that out. It will take you less than 15 minutes to listen to and get an experience with Grow as a tool.
00:01:32
Speaker
For me personally, this is the most valuable and interesting conversation i have yet had on this podcast. And up to this point, I've had several that have been great.
00:01:43
Speaker
I hope you'll find this equally as valuable. And now I bring you Alan Fine. Alan, welcome. Can you tell me about yourself, please? Sure. um I guess my story as such goes way back to my childhood where I was severely asthmatic as a child, wasn't able to play sports.
00:02:10
Speaker
um My brother, when I was 11 years old, entered me in our school's tennis tournament. So I'd been on a tennis sport three times in my life prior to that.
00:02:22
Speaker
And I found myself in the final against ah the school jock, like the school hormone freak. He's a captain of the rugby team. He's over six foot tall. He's a gifted athlete.
00:02:35
Speaker
And I was 6'4", all love in the lead. And I can remember to this day where I stood on the court, a voice in my head went off and said, my goodness, you've only got to win two more games and you'll be the school champion.
00:02:52
Speaker
And I froze, never won another game, but I took up but i got a lot of recognition from ah my friends at school. And up until that point, the only thing I'd been recognized for was always having a sick note to get out of doing any athletic activity.
00:03:12
Speaker
So my father arranged for me to um join a local tennis club. And I was taken under the wing because I showed a little promise. by there I was taken under the wing by the tennis coach there. She was just a local PE mistress.
00:03:29
Speaker
And um in return for being allowed to play with the adults, it's a very British thing, this, I had to help her teach the little kids, the six- and seven-year-olds, and that was my introduction to coaching.
00:03:47
Speaker
And it took off from there. By the time I was 16, I was assisting our national coach in the teaching of the younger kids, and um I went on to qualify as what they used to call, it's a long time ago, a registered professional tennis coach.
00:04:07
Speaker
So that was all the training that you could do. i went to college to study optometry. i was teaching tennis to pay for my tuition. And I did so much of that. I'm not very proud of this. i was thrown out of college after two years for teaching too much tennis.
00:04:24
Speaker
So that's really how my career began. It was as a tennis coach in Wales. And um I was fascinated by why some people perform better under pressure than others and why some people seem to learn faster than others.
00:04:41
Speaker
So I embarked on a layman's journey into sports psychology. Fascinating. Loved the things I was learning. almost all of which was useless when you're trying to help 16-year-olds.
00:04:55
Speaker
Talking to them about the Yerkes-Dodson Law of Motivation isn't very interesting for them. And the thing that opened my eyes was I stumbled into a book called The Inner Game of Tennis.
00:05:08
Speaker
And it was written by Timothy Galway way back in the 70s. It's still the best-selling tennis book of all time because it had so much application to everything that we do as human beings.
00:05:21
Speaker
And it was about the game that we play internally against ourselves as we try and play against our external opponents. And that showed me how to begin to apply some of the sports psychology I've been learning.
00:05:37
Speaker
And through it series of kind of recommendations, I ended up working with two members of our British Davis Cup team. One of them was our number one. He went from 90 to 19 in the world in six months. So I got a lot of publicity out of that.
00:05:53
Speaker
I was then approached by some golfers who played on the European professional circuit. Some of them did well. I got a lot of publicity out of that. I was asked help out musicians, teachers, even dysfunctional children.
00:06:10
Speaker
I hate that term because I think it's part of the problem. And then um some of the executives that I would try to help with their tennis and golf said, I think this would apply in my organization.
00:06:23
Speaker
And I'd learned by then not to say, oh no, I'm just a tennis coach. So we talked about it. And here we are. Gosh, how much later? 40 years later.
00:06:34
Speaker
And we've been doing, educating leaders and managers and supervisors how to apply the core things that I'd learned in sports psychology all those years ago.
00:06:48
Speaker
Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm curious. your brother entered you in this tennis tournament. What's your age difference? Four and a half years. Okay.
00:06:59
Speaker
First name is David. And when I went through school, so three years after him, after him All the teachers called me David. Do you think he had any particular motivation for entering you in that tournament?
00:07:13
Speaker
Other than trying I was painfully shy back then. And other than trying to help me kind of come out of myself, I think that's all it was doing. He was being a great big brother to me.
00:07:27
Speaker
That's the assumption I've made. Maybe I should go back and check with him. Yeah, I'm really curious about, at the time, what he was thinking, because many of us, of course, have siblings.
00:07:42
Speaker
Some of us have very large age gaps. Others do not. I have a younger sister who's a year and a half younger than me, and we did a lot of the same activities, some of which I'm actually really interested to ask you about, because we you and I share some similarities in our background.
00:08:03
Speaker
And, but just to keep on the sibling thing, my sister and i are fairly close in age and did a lot of the same activities, but still,
00:08:16
Speaker
I don't recall that we interacted much as children. That's not to say that maybe I wasn't looking out for her or her for me. But when you said that your brother entered you in the tournament, the question appeared in my mind of, I wonder what he was thinking.
00:08:35
Speaker
He, uh, we, we used to, up until about that age, actually, we used to hang out a lot. We used to play together. And my father had nicknamed us, get off and stop it because that's all he would ever hear from us as we fought.
00:08:50
Speaker
You know, I have here your book, You Already Know How to Be Great, which other people who have listened to me before know that I feel that this is one of the great books on coaching.
00:09:10
Speaker
it has, however, been a while since I read the book, but am I recalling correctly that you mention this story about the tennis tournament in there? I feel like I have heard this before, but I'm not sure where.
00:09:24
Speaker
Probably. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a while since I read it too. I have no doubt. I think, was this published in, it was... 2010. you has ten Yeah, there we go.
00:09:37
Speaker
Okay. It's been a while. So, there are some things that I want to get to, but You having mentioned teaching players that were younger, what was the structure like, or did you get support? Were you often one-on-one? What did that look like at the time?
00:09:56
Speaker
Well, um sometimes I feel like I've led a charmed life because when I was about 13, 14, thirteen fourteen ah One of our local sports administrators, um he virtually adopted me on weekends.
00:10:13
Speaker
So he would take me, if we weren't playing tennis, he would take me to the training of tennis coaches programs. And I would be the guinea pig that all these coaches would experiment on.
00:10:28
Speaker
So I had a unique insight into what effective tennis coaching was and wasn't at a very early age.
00:10:40
Speaker
um and ah And it wasn't like a just the experience for me, but I was sitting in on the discussion that the trainer of these coaches was having with them, the feedback he was giving them.
00:10:53
Speaker
So it was really an education for me, vicariously, about what coaching was about. course, at the same time, my father was a teacher, so there's an argument for there's some DNA around this as well.
00:11:10
Speaker
I have no doubt. I have no doubt that there were some perspectives, perhaps, on students or motivation or any number of other things that you picked up from your father.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, funnily enough, not that I remember, but that's why I say maybe it's in the DNA. I don't remember us talking about teaching at all.
00:11:37
Speaker
I have no doubt that your philosophy of coaching and the tool sets that you might use or your colleagues might use have evolved over time.
00:11:48
Speaker
But one thing that I identify you for or with is grow. So would you mind telling me the definitive story or I suppose some of the backstory of how grow came about?
00:12:04
Speaker
You know, I'm too ah old to argue what's definitive about anything in my memory now. But how I recall it is um there were...
00:12:17
Speaker
three of us exploring ah Galway's methodology from the inner game of tennis. um And we ended up doing some work in um McKinsey.
00:12:33
Speaker
So if you think about at its simplest level, Grown Model is a great organizer for a questioning a questioning approach. And we were doing this, we were using it on a tennis court, on a ski slope with golfers.
00:12:50
Speaker
we are We had, i don't even remember how now, but we ended up doing this work in McKinsey with the engagement managers. And one of the things that would happen is, um it was usually me, we'd get on a tennis court, we'd take them on a tennis court, and we'd show them how just by using questions, you can increase somebody's performance on a tennis court.
00:13:16
Speaker
mean, it's a very graphic, simple way to do that. And for us, it was just instinct. It was unconscious competence. And the first iteration that I can remember of GROW was when one of their communication specialists said, I think this is the pattern that you guys are using.
00:13:39
Speaker
And it was labeled GROW.
00:13:43
Speaker
Now, independently of that, some years later, and this was after just after I moved to the U.S., I had a partner in Inside Out who independently had never heard of GROW, but came up with the same acronym, having watched what I was doing.
00:14:02
Speaker
so And that's how the acronym was born. It was... um Just people watching and saying, here's, guess, ah you know, I don't mean to be arrogant when I say this, modeling competence at questioning.
00:14:17
Speaker
There's a pattern to it and there's a repeatable pattern to it. With grow, I suppose for just so that anyone who is listening to this that maybe is not familiar with it, could you explain some of the philosophy behind it and or, you know, you mentioned a little bit about asking questions, kind of maybe how grow differentiates itself from, i don't know, standard models of coaching, if I could use a phrase like that.
00:14:48
Speaker
I don't see, first of all, I should say, I don't see grow as a model of coaching. Okay. I see it as a tool for a coach to be using.
00:15:00
Speaker
And within the approach, ah my definition of coaching is a little different, I think, to some that are out there. And then I think um coaching is where you're trying to help somebody perform at a higher level.
00:15:14
Speaker
which means that there's lots of tools we might draw. And I make that distinction because I've seen, I've had people say to me, coaching is only asking questions.
00:15:26
Speaker
And I think that would be a disservice and almost irresponsible on the part of a coach if i can if I have some information, some knowledge that could be useful to somebody.
00:15:38
Speaker
To not share that knowledge, ah do there it needs to be a good reason why. And I think there are occasions why I wouldn't share that knowledge, which we we can explore. but i So I guess the first thing I'm suggesting is Gro's a great, powerful tool for guiding a questioning process.
00:16:00
Speaker
And behind the the the kind of behind that, in my mind, what we're looking at is in order for people to perform, they're going to take action.
00:16:12
Speaker
In order for them to take action, they need to make a decision on what action they're going to take. If they don't make a decision, they're not going to take action. Grow fits right in there because grow is a way to model or map the decision-making process.
00:16:30
Speaker
Did you start in reality? No choice about that. You set a goal about where you want to get to. You develop options that you think will take you from reality to the goal.
00:16:43
Speaker
And then you choose one or more of those options to take action on. And that's what I'm calling the way forward. So whether we are conscious um and systematic about using GROW or not, when we make a decision, you can always map the decision to the stages of GROW.
00:17:06
Speaker
So everybody's already going through those stages. I argue the only choice they ever have is are they systematic about it or are they random about how they go through those stages? So buy a house, go see your doctor.
00:17:21
Speaker
If you buy a house, you're going through the stages. If you your doctor will walk you through the stages of growth, they do their diagnosis and recommendation. Consultants go through those stages because it's ah um it in a sense, it's a simple consulting process.
00:17:38
Speaker
So it's one of the tools to me that a coach would use. One amongst many that a coach would use. The power in it is that it seems to be at the heart of pretty much any um performance improvement. There's a decision that's going to have to be made.
00:17:57
Speaker
And if we can help people own that decision and to make a clearer, faster decision, that impacts performance. By someone asking you the kinds of questions that you might ask to use Grow you know as a tool, does that facilitate the person thinking or being systematic in their decision-making?
00:18:23
Speaker
My argument is the core foundation of all human performance is the choice of what we pay attention to, the choice of what we focus on. If you don't get at that, then it's really hard to make anything different.
00:18:42
Speaker
So what what happens when you ask somebody a question, then you cause them to pay attention to something in order to answer the question. So if I'm on a tennis court with a tennis player and I say, can you tell would you tell me ah whether the ball was rotating forwards or backwards when it got to you?
00:19:05
Speaker
In order to answer that question, they will watch the ball so carefully in order to to know the answer.
00:19:13
Speaker
When I ask a question in the GROW model, um like, um what have you tried so far? it causes somebody to go back into their memory and list out the things that they've already tried, which is really useful for me as a coach because it tells me um it tells me something about what they've explored.
00:19:37
Speaker
It might also tell me whether they executed that something well or not. And it tells me, it opens the door to what else might be put on the table to help them. So,
00:19:50
Speaker
Just asking the question reveals information all the time. Even if they said, I don't know, that in itself is information. I recall you saying in one video or another, perhaps as some of my training, that Grow is a focusing tool.
00:20:09
Speaker
you know So we're drawing people's attention to something and hopefully enabling them to focus on that issue or that decision, as you're saying. Yeah, the um the power of a focusing tool is, it' so over the years, I've interviewed people about what it's like when they play well, what it's like when they play badly.
00:20:34
Speaker
and And I've interviewed world champions and absolute beginners, lots of different activities. They all say the same thing. When I play well, I don't think a lot about what I'm doing and I don't have to use a lot of effort.
00:20:51
Speaker
So then I ask them, what's it like when you play badly? What do you typically do? And they say, well, after I've cursed, then i try and analyze what's going wrong.
00:21:03
Speaker
Then I try hard to fix it based on that analysis. And what it usually does to my performance is makes me worse. And then the worse I get, the more I analyze, the harder I try and the harder I try, the worse I get.
00:21:19
Speaker
So then I asked them to take a deep breath and step back and think about what they said. They know that when they play well, they don't think a lot about what they're doing, the quiet mind, the zone, and they don't use a lot of effort.
00:21:35
Speaker
But the way they try and fix playing badly is by doing the opposite of what they know they do when they play well. They think more about it. They analyze. They tense up their muscles.
00:21:51
Speaker
And then I take the blame for why that happens because we coaches, one of our most um common instructions is to tell people, well, try harder.
00:22:03
Speaker
I would bet that you've done it out there with with the kids' soccer. And it's, I'd say this only half tongue in cheek, it's what we coaches do where we have no idea what to do next.
00:22:18
Speaker
So we use these, and parents do this ah all the time. And then ah the other thing that would we do, something you mentioned earlier, um I totally underestimated the power of my authority as a coach, where I would give advice to people and they turn it into a should.
00:22:38
Speaker
And you've probably heard about the tyranny of the shoulds. So now they're always trying hard to do it correctly. And Tim Galway identified, i think it was five tryings in tennis, trying to hit the ball, trying to hit it over the net, trying to hit it straight, trying to hit it hard, trying to hit it correctly.
00:22:59
Speaker
All of which induced get us out of being in the zone. So we've talked about grow, but, and you also mentioned your organization.
00:23:11
Speaker
so It should be obvious to someone listening to this because I've mentioned me getting training through your organization that they can go there for Grow.
00:23:23
Speaker
But are there other things that your organization either trains or certifies people in or other things that you do other than Grow? ah There are other models that we use.
00:23:37
Speaker
um And I think of all of them in a context of how do you help people do things better? So there's, um you you may remember from the book, there's a thing we call the performance wheel.
00:23:52
Speaker
and And all of these models, by the way, by by their nature, models are oversimplifications. But they're simplifications because we human beings, we need, and our minds are pattern recognition systems and we're looking for ways to organize and simplify because it makes it easier to take action.
00:24:14
Speaker
So the performance wheel identifies four critical components of getting performance. And I wouldn't argue they're the only ones. But these are the ones that over the years showed up to me most often.
00:24:31
Speaker
And so knowledge is obviously one component. If you don't even know what to do, it's a bit of a problem. But even when you know what to do, unless you deal with the three other components that we call focus, faith, and fire,
00:24:49
Speaker
then you won't be able to act on the knowledge. And so every parent, every leader that scraps their head on some occasion or other, wondering why, having given the advice they've given, people didn't do it.
00:25:04
Speaker
And they've had to tell them again. and again, they had to repeat the same advice. And the point about that is if knowledge was all we needed, we'd all read the book and we'd all be world champions.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, i'd have I'd have read Tiger's golf book and I'd be playing on the PGA Tour. It doesn't work that way. Because you also need to be able to control what you pay attention to.
00:25:31
Speaker
And that has a huge impact on your belief in yourself. So if what you pay attention to are the internal voices that says, don't screw up, you're not good enough.
00:25:44
Speaker
Well, that detracts from performance. So you need to know how to pay a attention what voice to pay attention to or how to quiet the voices. they It would be arguably an approach to mindfulness.
00:25:57
Speaker
And um you need to know what to pay attention to to increase fire, motivation, passion, commitment, that willingness to go the extra mile.
00:26:11
Speaker
And only when those four are kind of dialed in, if you like, that's when you're much more likely to get peak performance. So you can have really smart people not performing. You can have highly motivated people, but not weren't able to perform.
00:26:31
Speaker
ah You can have folks who are both knowledgeable, motivated, but just doubt themselves all the time. Hey, and I'll put my hand up for that one. That was me. And even if you've got all three of those, if they don't have the basic knowledge, it's still going to be a problem.
00:26:47
Speaker
All four of the components are there. And this internal dialogue, we like to call it interference, gets in the way of choosing what we focus on.
00:27:00
Speaker
And if we manage what we focus on, we can reduce the interference. And performance goes up, sometimes dramatically. And grow is just such an easy tool. You know, I always describe myself as the village idiot.
00:27:16
Speaker
If it isn't simple, I'm not going to be able to use it. Grow is simple enough that even I can use it. I feel like in the right circumstances, which for me is quite a lot of circumstances, that
00:27:35
Speaker
just falling back on a little bit of basic structure. Like you said, the person's going through this process already. And if I can help them to focus and by helping them to focus and not trying to put something on them, think about it like this, do it like that.
00:27:58
Speaker
If I can also help to lower that interference so that that inner game that they're playing, you know, the game that we play against ourselves, that that is either not happening or that it's easier that.
00:28:14
Speaker
It really doesn't matter how simple or complicated the thing is. The person can get to hopefully their ultimate goal. And even if they don't, they can feel like they made all the right decisions at a bare minimum. um One of the things that shows up to me over the years is it doesn't matter yeah what level you play the game at.
00:28:38
Speaker
Because every level, whether let's say you're a professional golfer or a beginner golfer, both of them experience stress.
00:28:50
Speaker
And um in order to deal with stress, it has to be simple because under stress, our field of vision narrows, our hearing um gets more selective.
00:29:05
Speaker
um The noise in our mind goes up. We don't think as clearly. So asking somebody in order to get them to focus under stress, it's got to be really simple.
00:29:18
Speaker
And that's been a surprise for me. It's been validated over and over. Every time I go to work in a new field, I'm always wondering, what don't I know? But that shows up every time.
00:29:29
Speaker
And the other end of that scale is, and this is a direct quote ah from a, um this was the leader of an internal university in a consulting group.
00:29:43
Speaker
ah whose comment about Groh was, it isn't intellectually rigorous enough for us. I'm not even sure what that means. But for me, it missed the point of, are we about performance or are we about, I'm not even sure what he meant, intellectual rigor.
00:30:03
Speaker
Yes, there are. If I can make some assumptions about that statement, ah can there are challenges selling certain things to clients if they don't think that you have some special magic that will be difficult to replicate.
00:30:21
Speaker
And for what it's worth, if I'm right in even some of these circumstances, and maybe not in that one, if I'm right in some of them, Being effective is the special magic.
00:30:35
Speaker
you know Knowing how to, as you said, i think, or I think it was implied at the very least, and I know this because of your background, being able to go into golf, a sport in which I believe you were not an expert, you know and improve someone's performance, I think demonstrates that you do have some, as I'm terming it, special magic.
00:31:00
Speaker
Who cares if it is intellectually rigorous or seems seems magical? Just as an aside, have had the wives, as it happens, of a number of clos athletic clients or say to me, I told him exactly what you said.
00:31:22
Speaker
Why does he do it when you say it, but not when I say it?
00:31:28
Speaker
That's a tough conversation to navigate. You know, with my children being fairly young, my oldest is 11. I feel like I'm right in the heart of beginning to learn that sometimes presence and listening is so much more valuable than
00:31:59
Speaker
let's say 50 50 back and forth in a conversation and even you know i am well beyond in my development i hope beyond the point of saying well let me listen to you and then i'll just tell you how i would deal with the situation my daughter comes home and she has a challenge with some friends at school or whatever it is i'm well beyond the point of saying well you should go and tell her this But still, i am right in the thick, I feel, of learning constantly that sometimes just listening to the person and allowing them to go through the stages of grow or asking the right question, even if it's not, you know, what's your goal, what's the reality, and so on, is
00:32:53
Speaker
more useful which is quite tough when you have an employee or you have a child or you have an athlete who you really care about and you need to allow them to feel the solution or build upon what they already know to come to the solution that maybe you feel like you already see i've come to think that true listening, so it you know what does it get called? Empathic listening or active listening.
00:33:27
Speaker
Listening so carefully you can demonstrate understanding to the other person's satisfaction is the most fundamental skill for a leader, for a parent, for a coach.
00:33:41
Speaker
And I think it's the first thing to go when people get stressed. Because they stop listening externally and they're listening to that voice going, I know, i can't wait to tell you what I know and tell you what you should be doing.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yes, I have no doubt that that is true. And going share one way that I try to demonstrate some of the value of not telling people how to do something.
00:34:09
Speaker
And you'll have to tell me if you think maybe I got this from you because I'm not sure if I watched one of your videos or maybe it was in your book. I might have gotten it from someone else. I don't know. But I know I didn't come up with this myself.
00:34:21
Speaker
I once was talking to a group of people about the value of active listening and asking questions and really bringing out of the person what they already know.
00:34:34
Speaker
And there was a woman in the room who was maybe... five feet tall and I'm six feet tall and being male and female, we also have sort of different body geometries and different weight and all of that.
00:34:52
Speaker
And I don't remember if I use this exact example, but I did something along the lines of saying, well, let's imagine that she's holding a tennis racket. Okay, we're both standing in front of this group. We're both holding a tennis racket. If I tell you, twist your wrist like this or hold it like that, I'm necessarily going to hold the racket differently because my hand is larger and I'm going to feel it differently. If we're walking up or down stairs, I don't know how tall a normal stair is, but let's just say that it's 10 inches.
00:35:27
Speaker
The basics of the way that our bodies move is the same, but I suspect you feel it quite differently when for you, you are raising your foot much higher in proportion to your total body height than I am.
00:35:42
Speaker
And so whether we're talking about doing something physically or we're talking about mental processes, because she has a different background and different experiences and so on,
00:35:54
Speaker
there's she's going to understand me saying do it like this from you know an outside perspective she's going to try and think well if he's holding the racket like that what's that supposed to look like in my hand and less so i ah less so is she go less she's less likely to think i understand how that feels And that to me is an example that I will use periodically to just try and demonstrate how maybe you should start with a question that I came upon because of your work, which is something occurred.
00:36:33
Speaker
And then I say, what did you notice? Now, I don't know if you remember or not, but I might very well have come upon that because of your book that people physically are just going to, for example, hold a racket differently.
00:36:47
Speaker
um What you're describing to me is, um I think of as people have different mental maps. And we tend to assume that our maps are the same. And unless we do some testing, we're not going to find out, is your is your mental map different to my mental map?
00:37:07
Speaker
And if you just thought of it in terms of a geographic map, if your geographic map shows um New York as being much closer to l LA than mine, then my instructions aren't going to work very well for you.
00:37:22
Speaker
I used to argue it's like a car rental map. They're not that accurate. ah general They're directionally right. You know, you reminded me of a, I guess, thought experiment that I encountered not that long ago.
00:37:39
Speaker
And it's probably not useful for us to go down this path, but I just thought it was so interesting. Someone, and I'll look it up and hopefully put it in the show notes if it feels like it's really interesting, that someone at some point made the argument that taller people live just slightly further into the past than shorter people.
00:38:05
Speaker
And the reason being that it takes a certain amount of time for electrical signals to get you know ah along your nerves from your feet up to your head. And yet what we experience is all nerve signals arrive at the same time, basically.
00:38:22
Speaker
And so if it takes, I don't know what the amount of time is, but just to make things simple, it takes a tenth of a second. I know it's a lot faster than that, but a tenth of a second for the sensation of me touching my nose to get to my brain.
00:38:40
Speaker
And it takes half a second to get that sensation from me touching my toe to my brain. But i when I do this at the same time, I touch my toe and my nose, I feel them at the same time.
00:38:55
Speaker
And so for me to feel them at the same time, i my brain has to wait until, has to wait that half second until that sensation gets from my toe to my brain it before it recognizes my nose was also touched.
00:39:11
Speaker
And you just reminded me of that actually because I think it's, Odd, yes, as a an example or something to relate to. But I think generally because of neuroscience and so on, we know that there are things like this that are true.
00:39:28
Speaker
You know, there's so much processing going on in your unconscious mind. And there's so little going on in our conscious mind. So depending on what someone has focused on and what they bring up when they relive their memories or they're analyzing how could I have done better on this math test or whatever it is, then their map is necessarily going to be different from mine.
00:39:58
Speaker
That's really interesting. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you know you gave me an opportunity to trot out you know one of a thousand books that I've read in the last few weeks, it seems.
00:40:12
Speaker
So thank you. We can stop on Schrodinger's cat later. Exactly. Perfect. That would be great. And actually, I've spent the last a little over six years working primarily with futurists. So there's a lot of work that we do that seems very intellectual and sometimes woo-woo or navel-gazing.
00:40:33
Speaker
But to go back to something you said earlier about
00:40:39
Speaker
focus, you know, I'm giving a presentation this Friday at an architecture conference in Houston. And the exercise that we'll be going through is a visioning exercise about Houston in the year 2136, which which
00:40:58
Speaker
often when you go so far out into the future, things start to seem sci-fi and, well, I'm a very practical person and I have a job to get done today and all of this stuff. So it seems like it's it's not worthwhile.
00:41:10
Speaker
But one of the reasons that I find vision or a visioning exercise or visualization in sports or any number of fields, but I tend to associate the word visualization with sports.
00:41:25
Speaker
One reason that it's so important is because vision is inspiring and people can see the finish line, whether it's a physical finish line, I'm running a track race and I see it, it's right over there, or I see in my mind that when my life or my business is successful,
00:41:43
Speaker
it will look like this. It will feel like that. And the thing that I focus on, if I make my vision very clear, becomes so much easier to decide whether or not I am willing to do the work.
00:41:58
Speaker
You know, am I, what is my way forward toward that thing? I used to ask athletes, are you willing to pay the price for what you want?
00:42:09
Speaker
Because Particularly when they when they athletes, professional athletes are always pushing the envelope. but And that means that failure is one step away all the time. That's different to what it's like in most business activities.
00:42:28
Speaker
And they have to be willing to deal with the risk. They'd be willing to pay that price. And the need they often seem to need reminding of it. Oh yeah, I made that choice.
00:42:41
Speaker
I appreciate you saying that as well because, you know, a former colleague of mine, I'm going to look back here behind me to remind myself of the book.
00:42:52
Speaker
He wrote a book that was called Make Choices So You Have Choices. And it's probably clear with the title, but just in case it's not, you know, he was saying what I say to my children very often.
00:43:11
Speaker
which is almost everything is a choice. There are certain things you're going to have to do. They're my children. They have to brush their teeth before bed. But it's your choice when you do it and how well you do it and whether you do it well enough that I make you go back and do it again.
00:43:27
Speaker
And remembering that you have the power is, I feel, particularly important to not just how you perform, but how you feel about how you perform.
00:43:40
Speaker
my daughter, she'd go even further. ah She went, she had some struggles some years ago and um went through some experiences. i mean, she was suicidal at one stage.
00:43:55
Speaker
And she went through some experiences and one of them was but particularly transformational for it. Probably she changed more out of this than any other human being I've seen.
00:44:06
Speaker
I asked her, well, what What happened? What was of value to you? And she said, I can see now that everything that happens in my life is a function of my choices.
00:44:18
Speaker
So I'm making different choices. And she turned her life around completely as a result of that. She would argue everything is a function of my choices.
00:44:30
Speaker
I can't stop a car hitting me, but I can choose how what I make of that experience. And that's one of the, I think one of the key things that we as coaches do for people is we help separate out um what actually happens.
00:44:48
Speaker
from the meaning we attach to what actually happens. So you have, ah you know, things happen and we have thoughts and feelings about the things happening.
00:44:59
Speaker
And from that we make meaning. And then we take action based on that meaning. I think a lot of what we do in coaching is creating some distance between the event and the meaning and helping people examine that and examine are there other ways to interpret what happened because i and the meaning we give it impacts ah our choices from then on I totally agree and you know Wolf one I'm really glad about
00:45:33
Speaker
It sounds like where your daughter not necessarily ended up, but, you know, the realization that she came to. And also it's beautiful, in my opinion, to go from a place of struggling with something to a place where it sounds like she has a sense of agency.
00:45:55
Speaker
Yes. she She would even tell you, um i wouldn't choose to go through what I've gone through, but I can't sit but but i don't think i would have the insight I have now without the suffering that I've gone through.
00:46:11
Speaker
Plenty of people have said it, but one of the things that you said reminds me as well of
00:46:20
Speaker
Someone I encountered saying that, you know, the common denominator in all of my struggles or the good and bad things that have happened to me in my life, the common denominator is me.
00:46:35
Speaker
Now, that's not to say that bad things can't happen to you, that we're not your choice, but ah as you're saying in part, how you interpret those and what you carry forward is your choice.
00:46:48
Speaker
You know, if you're in a car wreck and you're upset because you have some injuries that are now going to plague you for the rest of your life or who knows what the consequences are,
00:47:02
Speaker
For any of us, it will take a certain amount of time to deal with and process those, and it will be different for each person. But after some understandable, let's say, amount of processing, I think a lot of people are going to hope for you that you get to a point where you feel like you're not mentally plagued by why did this happen to me?
00:47:27
Speaker
Alan, you know, we've talked a bit about some psychology and we talked a bit about growth. So you've done a lot of coaching, your organization,
00:47:42
Speaker
at least as I understand it, both coaches people and teaches coaches. But I think you're primarily focused on teaching tools and then facilitating coaches, becoming coaches. Is that correct?
00:47:57
Speaker
We're trying to make it easier for people to be more coach-like.
00:48:02
Speaker
And I would also say to some degree, we're democratizing coaching.
00:48:09
Speaker
Because the more coach-like everybody can be, the more available it is to everybody. You don't have to constantly go back to the qualified expert.
00:48:22
Speaker
And I'm not against qualified experts, despite the fact that I was thrown out of college. ah I think there's a place for that. I just think there's so much more we can do by helping everybody become more coach-like.
00:48:37
Speaker
Well, I really like that one. And so then I guess that is, i don't know if you would describe it as your mission, but that's an aspect. that's what That's what you're trying to accomplish is no matter how you do it, your job to be done, you're your customers, your client's job to be done is I want to be more coach-like.
00:49:01
Speaker
Yeah, if I had to go, interesting hearing you say that. um I think my mission, ah there's a quote um I use in somewhere in the book, I think at the beginning, that I think the finest service we can give another human being is to make it safe for them to explore their own experience.
00:49:23
Speaker
That's the big turn-on for me. Maybe I should have been a therapist. But it doesn't yeah I don't think it just applies to therapeutic circumstances. I think that's what we're trying to do as coaches, is create an environment. You know, the buzzword these days is a psychologically safe environment in which people can examine the things going on in their minds.
00:49:48
Speaker
Because unless they can do that, how will they get to make a different choice? They won't even recognize the choice they're constantly making. That's where my passion lies. um And if if we'd had enough beers, then I'd say, well, maybe even that might even contribute to world peace if people could see the pattern going on in there in their mind.
00:50:11
Speaker
Do you see coaching evolving in some way in order to become more democratized or harder to do, but maybe more necessary in work or in society more broadly as we experience change so quickly.
00:50:33
Speaker
you ah You ask people, what is coaching? You get so many different descriptions of it. um I like to go to, how do we recognize when coaching is taking place?
00:50:46
Speaker
Well, what you see is a conversation.
00:50:51
Speaker
And it's a structured conversation. And there are things that go on in that conversation that can make it more or less effective. And I think that's also how work gets done.
00:51:04
Speaker
and So let's put the term coaching aside. If work is about getting from A to B by C, in order to get from A to B by C, you've got to talk to people. Because if you don't, it's going to be very hard to create alignment and know when stuff is done and know what the deadlines are and so on.
00:51:23
Speaker
So if those conversations go well, that's great. And if they don't go well, it slows things down or sometimes you don't get to be the way you want to go. So to me, the challenge is to have people recognize that um
00:51:45
Speaker
the quality of the conversation impacts everything that happens. I think it's James Clear saying maybe who yeah And I apologize if I'm doing, whoever said this is, I may be doing a disservice to, but there's this notion that you don't write rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.
00:52:06
Speaker
Is it James clear? I have heard this before, but I forget where it came from. i'd add to that. I think we fall to the level of our conversations. if we don't have If we don't do conversations well, then um things break down.
00:52:25
Speaker
So for me, the future isn't, ah it's it's less about this thing we call coaching that many people, you know, they it to it turns out to be a thing they do on Thursday afternoons when they have their one-to-ones.
00:52:41
Speaker
um it's moving from it being a thing that I do to the way I do things. If I'm going to have a conversation, I'm going to get clear what's what's the goal of the conversation.
00:52:53
Speaker
That would be a service to me and it would be a service to the other person. I'm going to make sure they really feel understood. That would be a service to both of us. And I'm going to make sure we make a decision about if there's anything next.
00:53:08
Speaker
which you know So now what we're talking about is G and W on the GROW model with some stuff and with some listening in between. i I think that's certainly where my passion is. I don't see, you know, people are going to do all kinds of things with technology, um but it's not going to change that basic thing that goes on in coaching, which is a conversation that's safe for action and that people feel seen and heard.
00:53:39
Speaker
which I think is a bit of the dilemma we've got going on right now with artificial intelligence, is, you know, what can these AI things do for us if I pose them questions?
00:53:52
Speaker
And I think they can do a lot in brainstorming, but I'm not sure they can establish a true sense of connection. And I think that's a part of what happens.
00:54:04
Speaker
the i'm I'm big on, as coaches, Whether we believe in somebody's ability to learn or not has a huge impact on them. And we know that because the best mentors and coaches we ever had were people who believed in us. And the ones that didn't were awful for us.
00:54:24
Speaker
So our beliefs about people make a huge difference. And I don't know that an AI system can communicate a belief about people.
00:54:34
Speaker
It can mimic a belief that's different to a true belief. And that's to say nothing of the privacy issues that might go with AI coaching.
00:54:45
Speaker
Yeah, it certainly seems to me like with AI that there's the potential to... uncover certain insights or facilitate work of coaching, organization, brainstorming, any number of things, but that at least as I see it in the next few years, perhaps, and I don't know if I should think that that's the next two years or the next 20 years, I have a hard time imagining that
00:55:23
Speaker
someone will feel a deep, meaningful connection with their, you know, device, whatever it is. I'm holding my Apple mouse here, but let's just imagine that that's my my friend, you know.
00:55:37
Speaker
I suspect that it will be a long time before that is more than the equivalent of a security blanket or a tool.
00:55:48
Speaker
Right. And can become, like I said, a friend, a real friend. What AI, at least at the moment, can do is listen to your tone, watch your body language, and when you say, yes, I'm going to do it, say, i don't experience that you're really committed.
00:56:07
Speaker
I'm not saying it'll never get there, but it's certainly not. that I've seen some experiments with it, it's certainly not there right now. And that, I think, is what being coach-like brings to a conversation.
00:56:22
Speaker
that AI he's going to struggle to do for a while. That's interesting. Yeah. So somewhat related to that, I guess, you know, I, I built a proof of concept application that is a sort of a consultant, let's say, but at a very basic level. And essentially what it does is it will listen to a conversation And then every three to maybe 10 minutes, it will pop something up on the screen. So Alan, you and I are talking, let's just say we're in a conference room, we're having some executive strategy discussions or a normal one-on-one, or it could be any number of things.
00:57:05
Speaker
And the computer's listening to us. And now and then something very brief pops up on the screen and we can choose whether to look at it or not. But the initial version I set up to look for things like, well, if you're going to do that, it seems like here is what you might want to consider.
00:57:29
Speaker
Or it appears, or seems to me, the the technology, quote-unquote consultant, it appears there are some unrecognized assumptions in what you're talking about.
00:57:43
Speaker
And I suppose the thing could assume, though I know that it's a little difficult to personify and AI in that way, but for the sake of simplicity, it could assume that your language indicates you're not committed to something, but it's going to base of that statement on so much less information than a human will because as these things get better of course there there will be improvements in tone in i don't know eye tracking or analyzing video and any number of things but yeah it's really interesting you
00:58:30
Speaker
bringing that point up because this was just a proof of concept to show that we could build a consultant-like technology, but we recognized from the start that there's, it's really more like a tool that a consultant might use in a conversation or executives might use because we want to democratize access to high-level consulting, but there are still these unique things that humans do. Humans think analogically.
00:59:03
Speaker
You know, machines are not really very good at saying, well, to this is kind of like that other thing. And, you know, an AI now could come up with a thousand different recipes that might use chocolate and peanut butter and any number of other things.
00:59:23
Speaker
But I think it really takes a human to say, you know, chocolate's good and peanut butter's good. I bet you just chocolate and peanut butter together would be good so limp to narrow down to that one thing. it For me, it's just way too early in the game for me to have a lot of trust in it.
00:59:38
Speaker
We might get there, not in my lifetime. You know, I won't go too far into it, but Despite the fact that I read a lot of books, I still will watch shows and movies and all that. And at the time of this recording, there's a movie that has come out that I don't recommend it to a lot of people. I didn't think it was good. It's called Novocaine.
01:00:01
Speaker
And this gentleman, the star of the movie, he has this condition where he can't feel pain, basically. And it's so abundantly obvious at the beginning of the movie that it is, i'm not going to use the right word, but maybe an allegory or it's a. but It's a metaphor, perhaps, for children being overprotected because this main character, he's diagnosed with this condition at some point early in his life. I forget when it was.
01:00:34
Speaker
And he says after that, his parents put him on lockdown. So through the rest of his childhood, he was not allowed to do anything where he could get hurt because he wouldn't feel it. And then he could, you know, he could get a gash on his wrist or ankle and then bleed out because he doesn't noticed it.
01:00:52
Speaker
And he doesn't eat solid food because he could bite his tongue off and not notice it. And it was just so obvious. I stopped watching the movie, honestly, after about 20 minutes because I didn't think it was very good. Now, if somebody listens to this and they enjoy the movie, great, whatever, that's fine.
01:01:11
Speaker
But it just seems so obvious to me that it was a an examination of what happens to people when they're not allowed to to do things that are, let's say, dangerous, but in a safe environment, or you know to to go to a soccer practice and someone burns you.
01:01:39
Speaker
They go to goal and they score, And it doesn't necessarily feel good, but it's a safe environment because it's practice. You know, it's not the game or it's not every game. And it's also not the game of life, quote unquote.
01:01:52
Speaker
And you just really brought to mind that one, there's this movie that's out that I feel like is a commentary on some things that have occurred in society oh over the last three, four decades.
01:02:09
Speaker
But I'm wondering, you know, do you have a perspective on how things are evolving, whether it's how we treat people within work?
01:02:22
Speaker
You know, that there are certain environments where it's not safe to make a mistake. If you make a mistake, you're wrong. and or perhaps parenting, if you want to go that far and comment on protect protecting children, maybe?
01:02:36
Speaker
The question we have to ask ourselves, whether it's parenting or at work, is um is the safety of the individual or others at stake.
01:02:51
Speaker
And if it is, then there's usually only one or two ways to get it done. But outside of that, I think the mistakes the mistake that parents and leaders make is they don't get clear what their goal is.
01:03:07
Speaker
Is it just to fix the issue or is it to develop the ability to fix the issue in their child or their colleague?
01:03:20
Speaker
Because depending on that choice of goal, you might take a very different approach. And the knee-jerk response is almost always, oh i'll I'll just fix it this time and I'll do that developmental thing the next time.
01:03:37
Speaker
They never get to it. Parents are busy, bosses are busy, and then their complaint is, my people never take responsibility. And it's because they never allowed them to.
01:03:51
Speaker
Yes, I totally agree with you. And I do talk with people about that quite a bit with the sort of consulting that I do. i wouldn't say that I get a lot of opportunities to talk about this, but now and then in particular in presenting at conferences or other events, I'll end up talking to someone about, you know, are are you CEO?
01:04:15
Speaker
Do you feel like nobody takes initiative or you have to tell everyone what to do? Well, I don't tend to just challenge them directly like this, but honestly, i'll come around to you.
01:04:28
Speaker
It would not surprise me if the reason that you feel like no one takes initiative or responsibility or waits for you to tell them what to do or why do I have to do everything around here?
01:04:39
Speaker
Anything of that nature is because something has occurred over time and it's likely slippery slope where your people got to the point likely because of you, ceo that they felt like it's not worth trying something until you endorse it.
01:05:01
Speaker
I've ah i frequently ended up saying to folks that if you've been leading, managing this group for more than six months, the way they're behaving is down to you. You can't point the finger at them anymore. It's because of what you're modeling for them. You want them to be different.
01:05:20
Speaker
You do something different first. Don't just point the finger. That is a challenge that I expect many leaders want. And yet much like me with wanting to be an effective parent or soccer coach or spouse, colleague, it's the reality of executing upon that and remembering in the moment, like you're saying, when you're stressed, you know,
01:05:49
Speaker
There are a lot of things that go out the window. Your focus goes out the window. So things have to be simple. And it's difficult for me to remember when I have encountered a challenge with someone.
01:06:05
Speaker
The question, I guess, if I can simplify in this way or state in this way, what did I do? You know, how did I contribute to this? Okay, so... You have been working in the space for quite a long time. We mentioned AI in this kind of, ah some of the discussion around AI alludes to this, but what what are the big frontiers or questions that still fascinate you about
01:06:37
Speaker
unlocking performance and helping people move toward their goals, whether we want to call it coaching or being a good colleague or whatever else. It's interesting question.
01:06:48
Speaker
I, I'm still blown away by what happens if you, um, if you ask someone to change what they pay attention to, if you if you show them where their attention is and help them explore choices, other choices of where they can put their attention.
01:07:13
Speaker
And I still, you know, after how long doing this, 50 years of doing this, I still get as excited watching, say, nine-year-old do this on a tennis court as I do if it's a CEO having some kind of breakthrough insight or ah an athlete winning a tournament.
01:07:36
Speaker
um And I think the challenge for me is it is always, how can shortcut the journey they have to go on in their own experience so they can go, aha, and be committed to a new choice?
01:07:55
Speaker
So maybe as an example, I just spent a couple of days with my, i say my oldest client. this thing Maybe not cro ah not cromer chronologically, but in terms of the length of time, 40 years I worked with this athlete.
01:08:14
Speaker
And we have been through ah same conversation probably about 20 times in that 40 years. Because people forget. their awareness goes.
01:08:28
Speaker
It's like um dust accumulates on their awareness that they no longer see. And we have a conversation and I'm sitting there going, wow, how many times have we talked about this?
01:08:39
Speaker
And he's reacting like, whoa. hope Well, he actually literally said, have we talked about this before? Well, only 20 or so times.
01:08:50
Speaker
So that fascinates me. what oh you know Maybe there's something I'm missing, but what do i what can I do to make it stick for longer and shortcut the process? For me, that's the big challenge.
01:09:03
Speaker
That's interesting. You reminded me of a quote that i bring up quite often. So some people will not be surprised by this, but Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, said something to the effect of, and I i i put it that way because I won't get the quote perfectly, but it's this is very close.
01:09:29
Speaker
He said, ah man will always be more convinced by the ideas which have come into his own mind than by those which have come into the minds of others.
01:09:41
Speaker
And i will often reference that alongside grow because of the idea, which I think is behind, in part, the name of your organization, you know, bringing out of someone what is already on the inside is going to allow them to focus better.
01:10:05
Speaker
It's going to help them have that belief or faith, you know? And I think if I recall correctly, and I have my, actually do have my paperwork from being trained in grow somewhere around here on the shelves.
01:10:19
Speaker
Um, yeah, I think it's, if you have those two things, then it's much easier to have that fire, right? To be motivated to act. So if I try and take that idea, which came into my mind, and tell you, do it like this, you're just much less likely to be convinced that that's a good idea.
01:10:39
Speaker
You know, the the the whole inside out thing to me is you can't, and until we've learned something about gene splicing, something more, you can't put into people what isn't there.
01:10:53
Speaker
But what you can do, and I'm really passionate about this, you can tap into what I think is the most powerful faculty we have as human beings, and that's our ability to learn.
01:11:07
Speaker
It's no coincidence, you know, I think the developmental psychologists say children learn half of what they learn in their lives by about five or six So what happens them at five or six?
01:11:20
Speaker
Hey, we adults get involved. we've We've taught them there's a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, a should and a shouldn't. And now the kids, instead of just being out there experiencing, are now worried about conforming.
01:11:36
Speaker
They're worrying about being judged. And I think a lot of what we try to do as coaches is help them go back to what I think of as that one-year-old learner, the one ah one that puts everything in their mouth, explores everything in every way possible, and it doesn't care what anybody else thinks.
01:11:56
Speaker
Do you have much of a reliance upon behavioral or personality testing? Yeah. I do. um in that And there's there's this kind of paradox with them.
01:12:11
Speaker
And I've used lots of different ones. My experience is whichever one anybody goes through first is the one they think is the most valuable. and They're all different ways of talking about the same thing to me. But the value of them is less about the actual information in them And much more about the self-awareness that it creates, the willingness to make people pause and go, ah, and reflect on how they show up to themselves and others.
01:12:45
Speaker
And the paradox is that people look at them, they they love them. Oh, look, it nailed me. Except this bit. I don't agree with this bit.
01:12:58
Speaker
And the weird thing about that for me is the whole point of having these things is to reveal what we're blind to.
01:13:06
Speaker
So if you're going to go, i don't agree with it, therefore it's not valid, you're wasting your time with the rest of it. And I've seen them do that with pretty much ah all of them. But ah I think they're powerful tools.
01:13:21
Speaker
used the right way, used wrongly. And I've seen a lot of this. They're used by consultants as a form of um importance and power.
01:13:35
Speaker
Look at what the what I know about you. Look at the insight I can give you. And i i I'm uncomfortable with that. I find that when someone has little experience with ah behavioral or personality test, or if they're just not in a space in their development at this time, or the the amount of analysis that they want to do, that it becomes too easy for someone me to set in stone, I'm this kind of person.
01:14:11
Speaker
And then to not think that there's work that I can do. So just to give you an example, I happen to really like big five personality assessments. So, you know, what is it?
01:14:25
Speaker
Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And I think I'm in the second percentile for neuroticism, which, you know, neuroticism in this case is not Freud's neuroticism, so it's not sexual, right? It's essentially anxiety.
01:14:45
Speaker
And I don't know what the literature says, but generally I think that if you're that far out on the bell curve in anything, there are probably some major downsides to that. So it's not just like I'm awesome because I have no anxiety.
01:15:06
Speaker
There could be a read on this that it's, I might not take into account certain risks that a reasonable person, quote unquote, really should take into account.
01:15:20
Speaker
And I hope that I'm in a place in my life where when i see my results, I can think to myself, well, in any given situation, I am likely to perform in this way.
01:15:42
Speaker
But there are practices that I can develop, questions that I can ask myself or any number of things to help me mitigate potential downsides of the way that i am and accentuate strengths as well mitigate weaknesses and accentuate strengths but for someone who is just not this kind of person or they're inexperienced enough i feel like there's a big risk that they get their test results and they get sentenced down that's who i am i think that um
01:16:21
Speaker
All strengths, yeah i mean even calling them strengths and weaknesses, let's call them traits, wonder the better word, can be a strength or a weakness depending on the context.
01:16:37
Speaker
So, and we we as a society, we give people labels they They have developmental difficulties. They have ah learning problems.
01:16:49
Speaker
And we give them a label. and And I think that becomes a problem where what we're really saying is, I'm uncomfortable with the way they process the world.
01:17:00
Speaker
That's the bottom line of it. And to make me feel comfortable, I'll make them have a problem. Yeah, I like that. And it's not to say, you know, yeah when you look at, say, kids with autism,
01:17:14
Speaker
They're different. is that Is that good or bad? Well, in terms of norms in society, it's more or less comfortable. We're either willing to deal with it or we're not willing to do it.
01:17:27
Speaker
But i don't there's nothing inherently bad in it or good in it. It's just the way it is. And there's some genius involved and there's some downsides involved. Are there things that...
01:17:42
Speaker
our practices or books or other things that you feel like someone could go out and they could start learning about that thing. Or this is what I would start doing tomorrow. If someone is interested in becoming ah better coach, colleague, asking the right questions or any number of other things.
01:18:05
Speaker
Well, of course, so other than my book, um big influences on on me, um but particularly many years ago, i read a lot of Zen, which um I found really helpful in understanding what we mean by the quiet mind um and athletes talk about as being in the zone.
01:18:29
Speaker
um Another big influence on me has been the four agreements. Um, cause those seem to hold true in pretty much, um, pretty much any set of circumstances.
01:18:47
Speaker
They've had that much impact. that We've adopted them as values for our company. Um,
01:18:56
Speaker
So those immediately spring to mind. And then I've got my, like everybody, I've got my bookshelf of books um that some people love and some people hate.
01:19:08
Speaker
So I'll mention one of those that um has been great for me. um It's called Winning Through Enlightenment.
01:19:18
Speaker
Ron Smotherman. doubt I doubt that it's still in print, but there's some secondhand copies available. And um that for me is is a good challenge to the way we think about how we are in the world.
01:19:38
Speaker
It's an easy read. Well, it's an easy read. It's very short chapters, but it's quite confronting for people to wrestle with. Alan, before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to draw people's attention to or places that you want to point them to?
01:19:56
Speaker
There's three things I could say that coaches do, effective coaches do, but that I think effective people do, whether they think of themselves as coaches or coach-like or not.
01:20:10
Speaker
I think we touched on them earlier. um They get clear what their goal is.
01:20:17
Speaker
They're really good at demonstrating understanding. And they decide on a next step, even if the decision is don't do anything. But they make a decision about it so it doesn't occupy shelf space in their brain continually.
01:20:35
Speaker
And I say that because I think most people ah Most people, most of the time, are very unclear what they want from a conversation, whether it's a conversation with themselves or a conversation with someone else.
01:20:52
Speaker
I think most people don't do a very good job of listening, although they like to think that they do. They might do a good job of hearing, but that's different to listening. And I don't think they land on the next step very often.
01:21:09
Speaker
So just doing those three things for me, mean, if you can picture it, if I followed you around the next two days and every time you were in a conversation before you started, I said, so what do you want?
01:21:21
Speaker
What do you think they want? And then I checked on, you were listening. You'd pay a lot more attention to it. And my bet would be it would have an impact on the quality of your conversations.
01:21:33
Speaker
Maybe that's the inside out AI, right? Is just some reminders. And then the CliffsNotes version of that can be a resource with you and the coach.
01:21:49
Speaker
And I agree with you. i I think one of the things that is talked about in your grow training that is crucial for being a coach is active listening. And that is the number one area that i recognize or feel like I struggle with is not getting wrapped up in what I think about what the person is saying or what I want to say next or the other thing that I want to be doing instead of talking to you.
01:22:27
Speaker
And thankfully, i do tend to have, sorry, not tend, I have a reputation amongst my colleagues of being a person at the end of a conversation that will say, okay, so who's going to do what and when are they going to do it?
01:22:44
Speaker
And I, so I got one thing there working on the rest. Hey, that puts you ahead of most folks. Thank you. Hey, you know, hopefully everyone, and I know it's not everyone, but I hope that for everyone, that one aspect of,
01:23:04
Speaker
thinking about their own lives is that you think, however I am today, i can choose to work on the thing, you know, and I might get better very slowly or very quickly, but I can choose that.
01:23:19
Speaker
And when I choose that, i can improve.
01:23:24
Speaker
Awesome. Well, this has been my favorite conversation so far, Alan. I was really not just excited when you agreed to talk, but I felt lucky, you know, grow to me when I encountered it.
01:23:45
Speaker
I felt like this is a a tool or a thing that I've been looking for this or it would be so useful to me. And then I was able to get certified and go through training with your organization and your book is is's on my bookshelf, which to me, yeah know, there aren't a lot of them back here because think i don't have a lot of five-star reads i think last year in all of the books that i read i bet you out of almost 190 i maybe gave five stars on goodreads to 10 of them and you know i read your book years ago at this point so not only did i feel lucky to for you to say yes but also
01:24:30
Speaker
I was excited. And now, because I've done a brief recording on Grow, I can go back as soon as we publish this and to link to this episode. And i hope that people who listen to that and get interested will come and, you know, hear it right from ah the horse's mouth, if I can put it that way. So thank you for being here. This has really been great. And I really thank you so much.
01:24:54
Speaker
It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been fun for me too. Thank you. You're so kind. um Oh, and I will put it in the show notes, but where can people find you online?
01:25:07
Speaker
InsideOutDev.com. Awesome. Well, I hope that everyone goes there and thank you again, Alan. I appreciate you being here.
01:25:18
Speaker
It's a pleasure. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today's conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe, and please share it with someone you know who'd appreciate this kind of information.
01:25:36
Speaker
If you want to bring this kind of thinking to your own business, check out mine at inboundandagile.com. We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications, and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences.
01:25:54
Speaker
Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll come back for future episodes.