Skillset

by Toku on Skillset, Uncategorized

The 5 Minute Guide to Choosing a Coach

Coaches are brilliant at making it seem like anything is possible and challenging your way of thinking, this makes them both highly skilled at helping you but also highly skilled at making promises they may not be able to keep.

Despite that coaching is still one of the most effective and powerful ways to make a change in your life.

Here’s a short guide to choosing a coach:

1) Ignore their website – It’s not that their website doesn’t matter, it’s just that it doesn’t always correlate to reality. Some of the best coaches I know have sort of ok websites. Most of the most over hyped coaches I know have AMAZING websites. A good website will soften you up for your conversation with a coach, and even sell you on the person you may become if you work with them.

Sometimes a website is a reflection of the coaches brilliance, sometimes it’s a beautiful artifice for them to hide behind. Look at it, but don’t decide because of it.

2) Pay attention to how they make you feel about yourself – Spend some time talking to a coach so you can tell what working with them will be like. But be careful not to get caught up in their bright, shiny, charm. You need to pay attention to how you feel around them. Just be careful about putting them on a pedestal. If you notice yourself doing this take them down, if you find you can’t it might be a red flag. If you feel a bit like a fan-boy/girl/being that may be a red flag.

We all project greatness onto people we admire, but if you feel like you’re dying for their attention and approval, that’s an indication that you may not be grounded in your choice.

Instead, look for someone who makes you feel inspired, powerful, and connected to your deepest desires. You should admire them, but you shouldn’t be obsessed with them.

3) What are they all about? – Great coaches are about you, your life, and your desires.. They might have a system or process laid out for you to use, but they will design their coaching to what YOU want and need.

Some coaches are very much about themselves, same as any industry. It can be hard to grow with a coach who’s attention isn’t on you, so look for someone who puts their attention on you, your needs, wants, and desires.

4) Do you actually like them? – You should enjoy talking to them. I mean that’s what you’re going to be doing. If you clash, if they feel pushy, if you don’t enjoy them, don’t hire them. They don’t have to be your best friend, but you should generally enjoy who they are and enjoy spending time with them.

5) A little intimidation is good – The best coaches are the ones that you feel a bit nervous around. If you’re nervous they’ll call you out or that you’re not advanced enough to work with them, that’s a good sign. You want to like your coach but you also want to have a healthy respect for their work.

6) Will they push you? – You can find people to agree with you. Those people are called friends. That’s not what a coach does. A coach should challenge your thinking and how you show up in the world. If they don’t push you, you won’t grow.

7) Seeing your blindspots is key – We tend to surround ourselves with people that think like us, and many people hire coaches who think like them. One value of a coach is their different perspective. There should be JUST enough overlap so you can communicate, but also just enough difference that they notice things you miss and provide a different perspective.

8) Ask your gut and ask your friends – My gut often knows who I need to hire even when I have doubts. My friends can help me break the spell of an alluring coach or give me new ways to think about the choice I’m making. Refer to these two data points often.

9) Are you a little scared to invest? – The last thing to consider with a coach is the investment. Some coaches convince you that investing a large sum of money is the ticket to success. It isn’t. But great coaches also charge a healthy fee for what they do.

There are some bargains out there to be found, but most great coaches know their worth. I usually hire coaches who ask me to stretch financially. But stretch isn’t break. The price should challenge you, maybe even a lot, but you shouldn’t have to give them a credit card on the call just to save you from yourself.

Choosing a coach is a personal process. And while I’ve never made a BIG mistake choosing a coach (except for maybe the first one I hired) if you’re thoughtful and willing to listen to your gut you’ll likely make a good choice. It is really about being grounded and taking a risk. Any good coach will be a risk, but because a great coach can have such a profound impact on your life, that risk is usually worth it.

Love,
Toku

 
by Toku on Skillset, Uncategorized

The Many Faces of Burnout

As a coach, I’ve seen my clients ‘quit’ in a variety of ways.

Some get outright mad and yell at me demanding their money back.
Some just stop showing up with anything to talk about.
Some have great insights in their sessions but then do nothing with them.

All of these are forms of quitting.

Burnout is also a form of quitting.

When a light bulb burns out, it quits working. The integrity of the filament just isn’t enough to carry the current through it anymore.

If you develop a stronger filament you can carry more current, but you can’t do that while the light is burning. It has to be turned off, redesigned, and then turned back on again.

In the start-up world, leaders rarely get a chance to turn off, redesign, and strengthen their capacity to carry the “current” of challenge, uncertainty, internal and external criticism, and a high level of ambition.

So leaders burn out in 3 pretty common ways:

1. They flame out – these are the obvious ones. Walls are punched, things are yelled, people may be fired, relationships might be ruined. This is often followed by a sabbatical or ‘time off’. Rarely enough to make a difference. But enough to return to the previous state of dysfunction.

2. They suffer brownouts – These are periods of time where they sort of check out, mentally or emotionally. Their performance drops, they become engaged in unhealthy behaviors like drinking, playing excessive video games, and maybe even online shopping.

3. They suffer displacement burnout – This is when the burnout doesn’t happen at work but happens in their personal lives. Their relationships fail, they suffer health crises, or something else explodes. I can’t even list all the personal mishaps leaders I work with find themselves in.

No matter how it happens, it happens because a leader is simply running too much current through their system.

So what’s the solution?

It’s two-fold:

1. Turn off the light – Step out of leadership, take time off, be in nature, pray, meditate. Find a place away from leadership that you can go to. The big challenge here is that most leaders don’t do this. They dim the lights and somewhat step away, but this isn’t the same. The bulb is still warm, the current is still flowing, and so you can’t repair or strengthen it.

2. Upgrade your capacity – This ISN’T the same as upgrading your knowledge or being more efficient. To upgrade your capacity you have to upgrade a few things at once. You need to upgrade the load your nervous system can take. You can do this by using meditation and exercise. Next you need to upgrade your humility and ability to learn. You can do this by hiring a coach and listening to feedback with an open mind. Finally, you need to upgrade your capacity for love. So often leaders are driven by fear, but most great things aren’t created by fear, they are created by love.

If you can align with your commitment to love, you are less likely to burn out. You are also more likely to love what you do.

People who run for love, run forever. Because when something comes from love, it creates its own reason to keep going.

If you don’t want to quit, if you want to thrive, and function better. Stop running from your fears. Stop trying to run faster from them. Take a break. And then come back from love. You may be surprised by how easy and joyful your work becomes.

If you are ready to come from love, contact me to schedule a call.

 
by Toku on Meditations, Mindset, Skillset

You’re BAD At Hiring Coaches

Here’s what you want when you hire a coach:

  • You want to hire the best coach you can possibly hire.
  • You don’t want them to cost TOO much
  • You want them to help you become more than you imagined.
  • You want to be able to afford to work with them and be happy to refer them.
  • It wouldn’t hurt
  • You want them to be inspiring

And yet, most coaches feel completely lost when it comes to finding a good coach to work with. They poke and prod, they guess around, they hire a celebrity (and are usually disappointed) they hire someone affordable (and you’re highly underwhelmed)

How do you avoid this? How do you hire a good coach you ‘afford’ that helps you get to where you want to go?

It’s one of the most important and most challenging things you can do as a coach.

Let’s look at a few essential ideas.

… →

 
by Toku on Skillset

2x Power

There are two kinds of power you can use inside an organization.

Position Power – which you get from your title, your inside information, and your authority. And . . .

Persuasive Power, which you get from your ability to deeply understand other people, empathize with what they want and need, and enroll them in what might be possible if they let go of the past and create the future.

Position power will always be seductive. It’s simple, makes you feel safe, and is hard to question or challenge.

But persuasive power will almost always be more effective.

While it’s true people will go along with what the boss says they will be more inspired, more aligned, and more willing if what the boss says is said to them in a way that makes sense, comes from a clearly crafted vision, and is done with heart.

Persuasive power will also always feel more vulnerable, scary, and will increase the likelihood of failure.

Which can make choosing what to focus on challenging.

The important thing to remember is that even if you have (or get) position power, focusing on persuasion will always create more possibility, influence, and inspiration.

After all the best leaders are both in charge and inspiring.
The best choice is not picking a side and learning to master both.

Today I will remember that taking the time to listen, understand, empathize, and communicate always adds to my ability to lead. Whether I’m leading myself or an entire organization.

 
by Toku on Mindset, Skillset

Thoughts DO NOT Create Feelings

In the world of personal development, many schools teach that your thoughts create your feelings. Change your thoughts and you change your feelings. You can feel whatever you want. Happiness, joy, courage. All it takes is making sure that you are properly managing your thoughts. As leaders, if we think this, we may approach our teams with the mindset that if we can only change our team’s thoughts, we too can manage their feelings. Except this doesn’t really work. In fact, despite our best efforts, we struggle to manage our teams this way.

But if you can change your relationship to thoughts, feelings, and meaning you can learn to be the kind of leader who knows how to create art with your team.

How thoughts and feelings really work

If you know anything about neuroscience or the lizard brain, you know that thoughts actually almost never precede feelings. Our amygdala, a sort of gatekeeper in the brain, gets some data from our senses and then sends it to our body and the rest of our brain.

If it detects a pattern of data it’s seen before and it’s related to a threat, it will send signals to the body to prepare to run, fight, or play dead. Moments later (a long time in brain-land) the prefrontal cortex also gets the data. The prefrontal cortex begins to interpret the data and do something really interesting. It makes meaning of the data. Really, it’s testing different meanings to see what plays.

If we’re walking through the woods and see a coiled object in the path, our amygdala screams “PATTERN OF SNAKE!!!” and sends this data to the body. We freeze. Our heart rate increases. We look closer. And our brain is processing: “Okay, alrighty now. Is it moving? Okay, not moving. What kind of snakes are common for this area? What else could it be?”

The brain is testing these complex mental models against its data stores to see how it could use our meaning-making abilities to help us get out of the situation.

When people who teach “thoughts create feelings” explain this tale, they would say: “See, the thought ‘SNAKE’ created the feeling ‘FEAR.’”

But that’s not true. It kind of seems true, but it isn’t.

The truth is our amygdala saw a pattern it’s been trained to think is a threat, our body generated fear to heighten our sense and THEN our brain thought SNAKE. Except we aren’t aware of any of this until we hear SNAKE in our heads and so we think, “the thought caused the feeling.”

But it’s actually the other way around. The sensation caused the feeling, and those together created the thought. From there the system DOES loop back on itself. As our minds play out all the scenarios—rattler, king cobra, copperhead, coral snake, radioactive, etc., etc.—we continue to have fear responses to these ideas. Even after we realize that what’s in the path is a rope, our bodies take time to calm down. To let go of the fear. Because the fear is not psychological, it’s biological.

Why does this matter for teams?

The simple answer: If members of your team are reacting with a certain set of thoughts or actions you don’t get, DON’T START TRYING TO CHANGE THE THOUGHTS!

It’s a little like trying to convince a kid that there are no monsters under their bed. Logically, you know there are no monsters, but to them the monsters are totally real, and forcing them to get into bed is basically torture.

Yet this is what executives and leaders I’ve met with usually do. They try to explain why their thoughts are better than their team’s thoughts. But it doesn’t work. Because you haven’t unearthed the pattern. You’re just teaching people to do a different thing when they see a snake.

So what should you or could you do differently?

Slow down and understand their world

In their world, their choices, behaviors, and beliefs all make PERFECT SENSE. They see a snake. To you: ropes all day, but to them: snakes. And until you can understand that they are seeing a snake or at least that they are seeing something they perceive as dangerous, you’ll never be able to lead them effectively. Because you’ll be leading them from a view of the world they can’t see.

This is why one of the most fundamental things I work on with my clients is how to stop and ask, “Why?” Why are they doing this? Why does the client want it this way? Why is this team member resisting? What’s really going on here?

Because when we understand why, even if it’s just the faint outline of why, we can influence people from a level deeper than simple moment-to-moment thought.

And while it takes practice to learn to exchange yourself for others—to see from their eyes, and then offer guidance, support, empathy, and enrollment from that place—doing so will not only make you a more effective leader, it will enable you to deeply understand yourself and everyone on your team—with a definition and clarity most leaders only dream of.

 
by Toku on Mindset, Skillset

A Brief Guide to Practice, Part 3

This is the final post in our series about practice. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 and Part 2 before you read on.

Accelerate Your Results

So you’ve put practice into practice in your life. You’re using SPOT FIRE. You’re practicing daily, identifying what you want to improve, identifying the factors of improvement, and getting feedback from others and your own observations. But here are two bonus techniques to help turbo boost your practice:

1. Identify what top performers do Once you have an area you want to work on next, you need to identify what the top performers do. If you want to get better at running meetings, who do you know that runs meeting really well?

Find someone who is good at what you want to get good at and see if you can figure out what makes them better. Are their meetings better because they tell more stories? Because they finish on time? You can either get advice from them directly, observe them in action, or even make a guess at why they are good at what they do.

2. Work with a skilled teacher/coach If you want to make incredible progress, find a teacher/coach who has a track record of helping people where you’re at get better.

Remember to avoid bias like a fancy website; instead ask for testimonials of people in similar situations or people they’ve worked with you can speak to. The advantage of working with the right person is they should be able to help you direct your practice in a more effective way.

Make It a Game

And if all of this sounds like too much work, then I want to offer one final idea of how to bring deliberate practice into your life: make it a game.

This works especially well if you have a very specific and clear thing you want to work on, and a very simple way to measure it. For example, let’s say you want to practice connecting more with people on your team. You could turn it into a simple game where you move stones from one jar to another. You can make the game fun pretending it’s an epic quest if you want, or you can make it technical by keeping track of it on a scoreboard.

Either way, the keys to this being successful are:

1. Choose lead indicators as your score: If you focus on lag indicators (things that happen as a result of improvement) you won’t be getting the immediate feedback you need to improve. These lead indicators can be anything the precedes what you want to get better at. A popular one for coaches in the dollar amount of proposals made or the number of conversations.

2. Don’t just keep score: The score is a way to have fun, but it’s not going to make your practice. You have to also reflect on what’s working (or not). If you’re looking to connect more with you team, have a notes column for each day’s score and reflect on what went well and what could have gone better. If you’re a coach, next to each proposal amount note how you got to the proposal and what went well or didn’t during your pitch. Then take time each week to review your notes and pick out any patterns.

3. Make it public: If you want to challenge yourself, then make your scoreboard public or at least set up a time to review your scoreboard with a trusted friend or advisor. That way you’ll be held accountable to your score and to working to improve it.

Final Thoughts on Practice

All of this information about practice may seem a bit overwhelming, but don’t let the breadth of it hide its simplicity. The kind of learning offered in practice is really the only kind of learning that makes any difference.

When we were children we learned to talk by observing and imitating others. When we said a word we got lots of feedback, huge praise when we said words—and even better, other people would respond to us. Same with walking: we observed how others moves and did it ourselves. We got immediate feedback by falling or standing. Eventually we practiced enough until we were able to move and run on our own.

This is what real learning looks like. It’s not just about reading some books on leadership and hoping that will make you better. It’s not just about trying to go out and pitch people and hoping they say yes. Real learning comes from when we choose what we want and observe closely what the results were. Learning involving real feedback and real stakes.

It’s simple, challenging, and truly transformative.

That’s why I encourage you to start doing it. Not just at work, but in every area of your life. Decide what you want to be exceptional at and get to work. Find teachers and mentors to guide you. Step by step, moment by moment, you will get better. Over time, your practice will overcome any difference in talent you see around you. Practice is the path to make anything possible.

 
by Toku on Mindset, Skillset

A Brief Guide to Practice, Part 2

This is the second of three posts on practice. Part 3 is coming next week. Check out Part 1 here.

How to Practice

If you’ve made it this far, you’re convinced—or at least curious—and want to get to the meat of what I’m talking about with practice.

Either way, here’s how you can start to practice:

1. SPOT FIRE

In his incredible book Peak, Anders Ericsson offers a simple outline for how to engage in the kind of practice that creates true growth and learning. Unfortunately he doesn’t explain this process in a way that’s very easy to learn. Lucky for you, I came up with a cool acronym thing to help me (and you) remember: SPOT FIRE.

The eight essential elements you need for effective deliberate practice are:

S – Study the masters: You need to find people who are good at what you want to be good at and figure out what they did to get where they’re at. OR you need to hire someone who has a track record of helping people like you improve.

P – Pick a Specific Focus: Most of what we do doesn’t qualify as practice because we’re focusing on vague, general improvement. Highly effective practice is dependent on our ability to identify our weaknesses and find ways to overcome them.

O – Get Outside Your Comfort Zone: Your daily challenges may be stressful but they are comfortable. To engage in practice you need to step outside your comfort zone. You need to put yourself in situations where you’re pushed to your edge in a way that encourages growth.

T – Be a Terminator: Just like Arnold’s metal man you must be of singular focus and determined in your efforts. This isn’t just running a meeting or pitching a client and seeing how it goes. This is putting in serious effort to improve. This is commitment to that improvement beyond your plateaus and your fears. It also mean staying focused on the areas of practice you’ve chosen instead of scattering your attention. Remember: your job is to kill or protect a Conner. Nothing else matters.

F – Get Feedback: This is the other big reason most of what we do during the day doesn’t qualify as practice. We don’t get quality feedback. In fact, we don’t get any feedback at all, nor do we give ourselves any. If you’re going to get better, you need to know how you’re doing. The more immediate and expert the feedback the better.

I – Iterate: In order to be effective, practice need to help you build on the skills you already have. If you’re new to something, make sure you spend enough time on the fundamentals and return to them often as your improve. It’s often these fundamental skills that lay the groundwork for what comes later.

R – Recreate Your Models: One of the keys to improving is developing better models to understand what we do, which is why any practice you engage in should help you improve the models you use. As you work to get better, spend time thinking about what you’re learning and creating new metaphors and analogies for what you’re doing. The more detailed and clear these models are, the more helpful they will be in moving forward.

E – Extra – This is an extra “e” for Extraordinary. Because deliberate practice is the pathway to the extraordinary.

2. Do It Daily

Now that you know the elements of practice, you’re probably wondering how the hell you’re going to find time to do this? And how to actually create a method to bring this into your everyday life?

This can be surprisingly simple. Here what you need to do:

a. Identify what you want to improve. Figure out what it is that you want to improve or what other people think you should improve. To do this you can talk to a coach, a trusted advisor, or someone on your team to help you, but if you’re anything like me you can easily come up with a list of 3-5 skills you want to improve.

Another way of doing this: look for tasks you do often, like running meetings, giving sales pitches, or writing headlines. These often offer the best opportunities for practice.

Some examples of things that apply to my clients:

  1. Ability to delegate
  2. Building relationships with team members
  3. Spending more time on high priority tasks
  4. Running better meetings

b. Identify the specific factors of improvement. If you want to run better meetings you need to pick some specific ways to work on that. Ideally If you tend to ramble on in meetings you might choose to focus on being efficient in your speech. If you tend to be curt, you might want to focus on being more gentle and connecting.

No matter what you choose be specific in what you’re working on. Ideally this should be no more than two areas of focus for any skill.

c. Get feedback. Now’s the fun part (for your team at least). Whenever you do this activity, find a way to get feedback on it.

If you’re running a meeting, ask for everyone to keep track of how effective or connective you’re being. Then at the end of the meeting have them give you specific feedback on how you did, as well as offer ideas about how you can improve.

If you’re working on giving better sales pitches, practice your pitch with a member of your team whose mindset is similar to that of your potential client and have them give you feedback on your pitch.

If you work by yourself, or it would be hard to get feedback on your performance from others, you can also find a way to give yourself feedback.

For example, I’ve created a form I fill out at the end of each coaching session where I track the different aspects of my coaching I’m trying to improve. One of those aspects is something I call “simmer,” which is all about leaving clients in a mindset of possibility at the end of a call.

When I get done with a call I take a few minutes to review. I give myself a rating from 1-10 on how well I simmered and then I make notes on how I could have improved. This simple exercise helps me improve as a coach, even as I work with my current clients.

Next Week

By following the steps above, you’ll vastly increase your chances of improving your ability through practice, but if you want to get the most out of practice doing the two things I’ll share with you next week can make an even bigger difference. Plus, for those of you who think this practice stuff is just so much work, some tips on how to make it fun!

 
by Toku on Mindset, Skillset

A Brief Guide to Practice, Part 1

This is the first of a three-part series on practice. Part 2 and Part 3 coming in the next weeks.

We have more access to knowledge than at almost any other point in human history and yet we rarely put this knowledge to good use. We buy countless books on Amazon, and then don’t read them. We read more about politics than we do about making ourselves better. And we spend more time scrolling through Facebook “Liking” stuff than actually practicing connecting. Every day we acquire more information and yet very little of that knowledge actually changes who we are.

The reality is that while knowledge can make us interesting, practice is what makes us extraordinary. And the problem is that we never practice.

Not Me, Toku! I Totally Practice

At this point you’re probably thinking, “But Toku, I totally practice. I mean,what do I do all day? I make choices in my business. I create new systems for my team, I come up with creative ideas for our campaigns, and I manage the relationships with our key clients.”

Except this isn’t really practicing—it’s doing.

I recently got to speak with the head of Red Bull’s Human Potential coaching team and he said to me point blank, “CEOs never practice.”

World-class snowboarders work with coaches to identify flaws in their form and with personal trainers to strengthen weak muscles. World-class quarterbacks study hours of game film of their opponents and run drills with their teams before the game.

And if you’re like 99% of the rest of us you don’t do these things. You work, sure—and yes, sometimes you get better through trial and error. But this isn’t practice, at least not the kind that yields extraordinary results.

Why You Don’t Practice

Here’s a few of the reasons we don’t practice:

We’re Lazy Practice demands our full attention and sweat. We’re great at stressing about our last deal, our hiring choices, and our next set of highly ambitious goals, because these challenges are familiar. Engaging in practice asks us to move beyond the challenges we know and find new uncomfortable ways of pushing ourselves. And since we’d rather solve the same problem over and over again we stick to our lazy busyness instead of stepping into the area of truly extraordinary change.

We’re Vain Practice requires humility. It requires that we find the places we’re falling short and work to make them better. We often pretend we want to do this and talk about it, but our actions reveal that we’d much rather stick to what we know than humble ourselves by stepping to our edge.

That’s why we ramble on at meetings, add value to situations where it’s not needed, and create problems for ourselves to solve.

We Don’t Like Pain Practice is painful, not just because it requires focus and commitment, but because practice invites us into a space of vulnerability. Once you’ve achieved success it’s too easy to stay in the safe armor of your brilliance and stature. It takes true courage to step outside and see how you can push yourself to be better.

Why You Should Practice

No One Else Is It doesn’t matter what field you’re in—from music management to digital marketing—most people in your field don’t practice. Your competitors are working all the time, hoping to get better by just doing more stuff. And sometimes they get lucky and they improve.

But what if you could create your own luck?

I work in the highly competitive field of coaching and yet almost no coach I know practices in a deliberate way. They don’t get feedback from their colleagues, they don’t analyze their own sessions, and they don’t work to identify or eliminate their weaknesses.

As a coach I’ve committed to making every session I do a practice session. I’ve been developing tools of practice where I can give myself feedback and get feedback from other coaches. And I’ve begun studying the styles and techniques of the world’s best coaches and trying to figure out what makes them so great.

I’m doing this first because I want to give my clients the best coaching possible, but I’m also doing it so I can beat out my competition. If 99% of coaches do any regular practice how much better can I become in a year if I practice for an hour a day? What about in 5 years?

If no one in your field practices, then what will happen if you do? How much better can you be than those around you? How much can you grow and how much more powerfully can you serve?

You’ll Enjoy Your Life More One thing I learned while living at the monastery is that you can enjoy whatever you’re doing if you do it wholeheartedly. I experienced more joy washing dishes and weeding gardens during my time in those simple halls all because I was fully engaged.

Your life is no different. Taking on a practice mindset invites you back into what made you so inspired to begin with. When you were nothing, when you were determined, when you were on the hunt for success. Better yet, it gets you ahead of the curve, so you can enjoy the total engagement without the external pressure you feel when you have to improve by force instead of by choice.

You Can Do Anything No one who you admire in your field got there without practice. I used to think my friend and writing mentor Leo Babauta was a naturally talented writer, until I found out that he was a newspaper reporter and speech writer for a decade before he started his blog. I used to think my coaching mentor, Rich Litvin, had a natural talent for coaching, until I realized he was a teacher for almost a decade. And as a teacher he often coached the students in his class.

Countless studies have shown that talent is a myth. I know it feels counter-intuitive—it seems like we see people all the time who have a natural ability in some area or another. But if you look more closely you’ll find that ability usually has to do with practice.

Talent can give us a head start in the beginning, but practice wins out in the end. So if there’s an area you want to improve in, you can get better, in fact drastically so IF you’re willing to work hard, be vulnerable, and let go of your ego.

Next Week: How to Practice

This week we talked about the “why” of practice – next week’s post digs into the “how”. I’m excited to share it with you!

 
by Toku on Skillset

What We Don’t Talk About

Recently, I’ve been noticing a trend in the amazing and breathtaking clients I work with. They always want to talk about the same things. They want to talk about their potential clients, their business ideas, and their teams.

But 9/10, it’s never the areas they want to discuss that yield the biggest insights for them or have the biggest impact on their businesses, which has led me to this simple, but powerful, distinction.

Normal topics yield normal results; unconventional topics yield unconventional results.

And if you’re anything like my clients, I want you to know I get it. I understand why you want to talk about the normal things. You want to talk about them, because they feel safe. You want to talk about them, because the familiarity of these problems soothe your brain, even if they cause a little stress.

These topics give you the comfort of feeling like you’re taking action, even if the action you’re taking isn’t the action that will have a lasting effect on the problems you face.

The things you aren’t talking about are scary. It’s that bump on your shoulder that appeared a month ago that you know you should call the doctor about; it’s the client relationship you secretly know isn’t serving you, but you don’t know how to deal with; it’s the deal that is going slowly south, but you’re afraid to admit you made a mistake; it’s the pattern in your relationship you know isn’t sustainable, but you have no idea how to address, because doing so will rock a boat you’re already worried might take on water.

And I know you know that the longer you leave those things, the worse they will get. The longer you don’t talk about them, the more money you risk, the shakier the relationship gets, and the more the fear builds that, by now, it’s surely too late to make a difference.

You like to tell yourself stories about how you don’t have enough time, about how you’ll talk about it after you get through this week or quarter, how you’ll take care of it when your schedule lightens up. I know these stories are the thinnest veils of personal subterfuge, and that you know it too.

So, here is my simple invitation to you. Instead of making these topics a personal taboo, instead of trying to fit them into the edges of your life, which means they won’t fit in until they explode and demand your attention, make discussing the abnormal normal.

Make time every week to talk about the things you aren’t talking about in your business and your life. Find a coach, a mastermind, a consultant, or even a close friend and sit down and tell them what I really don’t want to talk about is . . . and then take it from there.

If you do this practice, not only will your business grow and your relationships improve, but you’ll slowly learn the courage to face the things in your life you don’t want to face.