Archive for Change
October 1, 2009 at 2:49 pm · Filed under Change, Coaching, Communication, Connections and tagged: David Taylor, ideas, independence, naked coach, potential, recommendations
David Taylor is one of the world’s biggest-selling business authors. His book ‘The Naked Leader’ holds the record as the fastest-selling business book ever and has sold millions worldwide. And now he’s backing me and X-Ray Listening!
I made contact with David a few weeks ago, interviewing him to promote Business Analysis Conference, which took place in London this week. After the call we exchanged books: I imagined mine would languish in his unread pile for months. But something about it grabbed his attention, he read it, and he loved it.
He emailed to say: “Your book is simply outstanding. It deserves far higher sales and attention.”
At the conference on Tuesday, after his keynote, I sidled up to David to introduce myself and thank him. I wasn’t expecting to be hugged vigorously, and pulled aside for an impromptu coaching session.
It turned out that Clean Language had had a major impact on him. He’d taken it with him on one of his regular strategy retreats, and was now using the questions in his coaching sessions with Chief Executives worldwide.
The notion of ‘Clean’ is wildly different to David’s usual style – he’s highly directive, full of recommendations – but he was finding them valuable and could see their potential. And he had a string of recommendations for me and for the future of my business.
Now I have a personal challenge. I can see the solid commercial sense in what he says, I have great respect for him and what he has achieved, I’m very grateful for his time. And his ideas would take me way outside my comfort zone.
Will I follow them? I haven’t decided yet.
But meanwhile, I’m pressing on with X-Ray Listening, offering rapid, 100-minute training sessions for teams at the ‘peopley’ end of IT who want to better insights, better projects, and better products. Find out more here.
September 25, 2009 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Change, Coaching, Next step and tagged: constraint, cook, creativity, ideas, magic, recipe, twitter
I discovered this fantastic phrase while browsing the Twitter help pages. “Constraint inspires creativity.” How true! Almost the story of my life.
With Clean Language, the constraint of the twelve questions has inspired the creation of an entire field of endeavour. The elegant simplicity of the questions constrains the attention of the facilitator, which in turn constrains the attention of the client.
With Teletext, the limited colours, fixed font, rigid number of rows and line length, and the six-pixel ‘square’ inspired one of the most profitable organisations in the British media. Its staff were inspired to create and deliver a fantastic service. And its service, in turn, inspired tremendous love and loyalty.
In creating my new business, the advice I was given constrained my thinking: I was urged to choose a specific market niche and offer only products and services which would appeal directly to them. I could always expand later. X-Ray Listening was born – and already feels more ‘successful’ than my previous, more sprawling company.
Constraint has also inspired my new offerings. My customers don’t have time for day- or week-long training courses. So what could I teach them in the time they have available? My six “X-Press” 100-minute courses were the result.
X-Press Insight, X-Press Clarity, X-Press Coaching, X-Press Connection, X-Press Meetings, X-Press Motivation.
And the pattern keeps on running. I’ve known the content of these courses for over a month. But it wasn’t until I received my first booking yesterday (Hoorah!) for a breakfast session next week that I actually sat down and created the Powerpoint and handouts. And were they better for the time pressure? Only time will tell.
What I know is that constraint certainly inspires my creativity. I have a ‘Ready-Steady-Cook’ attitude to life. Give me total freedom – a totally blank canvas – and I’ll find a way to constrain myself.
Because that’s what brings me joy, what makes me tick, what powers my engagement with the universe. I love it!
September 14, 2009 at 5:21 pm · Filed under Change, Coaching, Next step and tagged: decision, fear, procrastination, Seth Godin
“What sort of decisions do you make when no one is looking?” Seth Godin asked in his interesting blog today.
I’m in career transition, supposedly getting a business moving. Yet at the moment, when nobody’s looking, I’m not actually making decisions.
I’m not making things happen. I’m feeling various pokes and prods from my friends’ questions – it’s a tough life having lots of NLPers and coaches for friends – but I’m not throwing myself into the ‘doing’ as perhaps I ‘should’.
Has my usual self-starting energy deserted me?
Then I started wondering: “In this context, who is to say what I ‘should’ do?” Obviously there is some simple cause-effect in play – if I do certain steps to create and market a viable product, then I will have a reasonable chance of achieving commercial success. But what if there’s more to what I want than pure commercial success? And nobody else knows the whole context better than me.
The snag, of course, is that I don’t know the whole context, at least consciously. I suspect there’s more to what I want to do than I’m aware of at the moment. I suspect there’s significantly more to learn about myself in this transition period, that leaping into things isn’t quite right, just yet.
I know that procrastination is generally thought to be linked to fear, so I’ve been giving some thought to what I do fear, and what is the worst that could happen.
I fear failure. And the worst that could happen, for me, is severe poverty, long-term unemployment, and all that goes along with that. It’s not surprising that fear takes this form for me. I don’t think anyone could have done the kind of reporting work I did – particularly in the East Midlands in the years immediately after the miner’s strike – and not have developed such a fear. It was grim. Bad things, newsworthy things, happened to people in those grim situations and the grimness got worse. Meanwhile, Loadsamoney and his friends were dominating the south of England, adding an extra layer of ‘relative poverty’ into the black mixture.
When I think about this scenario I am instantly transported to a damp, dirty, overcrowded, poorly-maintained council house, in a rubbish-strewn estate on the fringe of a desolate city. I can smell the distress (and more).
What’s particularly bizarre about this fear is that because of my experience, I’m better equipped than many to avoid such a situation, and to manage it if I were to find myself there. But there it is – fear is not always, or even usually, rational.
And now my filthy, stinking fear is out in the open, where the light of rationality can dry it out. I wonder what happens next?
Judy Rees 