If you have had some success and you have been considered a positive person, you may be averse to the idea of thinking about what not working. You may think that your do not want to waste your time in the arena of what's not positive, and that's pretty good. You may have had lots of success doing things the way that you're doing it and keeping your mind off the things that you don't want, and keeping it on the things that you want, which is also a great strategy. You will never get to the levels where you want to go, you will never get to where you aspire to go until you can incorporate those four questions: what's working, what's not working, what's missing, and what's next.
The implication is that what is not measured does not improve. After all, if you don't know where you are, how are you going to know where you're going. We're starting a football season now, and I think all of us that enjoy football have heard of the first down, the second down, the first and ten, first and three. That's measuring the distance from one place to the other. If you couldn't measure the distance from one place to the other, you'd never get to the other place. If you simply got the ball, hiked the ball, and started playing football, you would never know where you were and there would be no way to measure your progress. There would be no way to tell who won the game. Winning the game is really the point in playing a game of football.
I bring this up because I had a client the other day who's much like me, a very positive, motivated young man that has taken me on as his coach. As his coach I'm taking him through the four question strategy. We get to the part where I ask him what's not working, and he doesn't want to talk about what's not working. He reminded me of a story that I got present to recently. Another indication of how you must measure if you want to improve and the whole point of having a coach is so you can improve, right?
I recall some time ago when I weighed over 300 pounds, I did not want to get on a scale. Because see, being an inside game sort of a guy like myself, I understand that what you think about, you bring about. Each time you see something you create an impression in your brain and you reiterate that thing whatever it was. I didn't want to get on the scale and see myself tipping the scale at over 300 pounds because I reasoned that no matter what I did I would still be 300 pounds, and I thought the reason why was that I was putting that into my mind each time I looked at the scale.
Needless to say, not looking at the scale did not stop me from weighing 300 pounds. I eventually adopted a strategy, a strategy that actually had me losing one pound a day. I got on the scale every day and watched that one pound go down. In plain and honest truth, that was working. What wasn't working was not looking at the scale.
Another indication of my tendency to avoid bad news or not wanting to look at the seamy side of things: when I don't have as much money in my bank account as I want to have in my bank account, I don't want to look at it. I don't want to see the overdraft. I don't want to see the minimal deposit. I want to see the five, six figures in my bank account. I stopped looking at it, and wouldn't you know it, from time to time I would write checks, I would be overdrawn, I would have far less money than what I thought I had all because I didn't want to look at the negative. Clearly what wasn't working was the way that I was living my life.
As an extraordinary coach who has had some success, you may have great success, but you have a coach so you can have more success. In order to for you to have more success you're going to have to look at what's not working. No matter how unpleasant it is, what's not working is going to help you get to that place where you want to go. You see, your tendency to avoid looking at what's not working falls in the realm of you don't know what you don't know. No matter how you couch this particular aspect of coaching, noticing what is not working is critical to your success. As a coach, it is my job to have my client address his blind spots so he can get results he has not gotten before. Only part of being a coach is being friendly and critical to the process is to deliver the bad news when it is time to do so. Being a coach is more than a whitewash even though that might keep you getting paid. In the long run it is better to lose the client because getting paid is only one of the reason you coach.
In this instance I am being called to take the responsibility for having my client understand the importance of noticing what is not working and I am up to the task. I am reminded of a movie in which Forrest Whitaker portrayed Idi Amin, a despot of the nineteen seventies. He was told by one of his advisors not to expel the journalists from the country because of the backlash it would cause. Amin ignored his advice and expelled all the journalists anyway. Of course, there was a backlash and naturally he blamed his advisor. His advisor reminded him that he was told not to expel the journalists and Amin lamented that the advisor should have told him not to do so. The advisor had told him so he replied that. "I did tell you, sir, I did but you didn't listen." Amin, the dictator that he was, the iron-fisted ruler that he was, then replied, "Well then, you should have persuaded me." That is exactly how I feel about this client and I will find a way to do so. The four question strategy is critical and any coach not using it, is using something like. The same is true for your own clients. I hope this blog has given you something to think about and that it did so to the degree that you want share it with someone. And I end this blog just all the rest of them when I bid you to have a good time until the next time.
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