Posts Tagged ‘Change’

Why?

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Do you know the answer to this ques­tion? Dis­cov­er­ing “why” is crit­i­cal to so many areas of our busi­ness and our lives.

We all walk through life hear­ing about what we should do to improve. Still, most of us strug­gle with chang­ing our behavior.

Over the years, I have coached thou­sands of peo­ple in one-on-one or group ses­sions. Most of these coach­ing con­ver­sa­tions revolved around the topic of improve­ment — qual­ity of life, busi­ness results, health, rela­tion­ships, team per­for­mance. Peo­ple typ­i­cally hire a coach because they believe they will have a bet­ter chance of mak­ing the nec­es­sary changes with a coach on their team.

And of course, I agree!

The prob­lem is that almost all of these improved results require improved behav­iors, and behav­ior is not eas­ily changed. If we want to change our behav­ior, we must change our think­ing. And to change our think­ing, we must be able to clearly define “why.”

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Incremental or Radical?

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

A few years back, our team gath­ered to work on our busi­ness plan for the upcom­ing year. We were in the early days of this eco­nomic cri­sis, and our num­bers were falling like never before. It was a very tough time for us cham­pion builders.

One of our Exec­u­tive Coaches by the name of Ray­mond Glea­son asked, “Do we need to make incre­men­tal or rad­i­cal changes in order for us to pull out of this?” It was a great ques­tion, and it helped to frame much of our con­ver­sa­tion as we con­tin­ued to work on our plan.

In the past two weeks, I have had con­ver­sa­tions with two dif­fer­ent busi­ness lead­ers from dif­fer­ent indus­tries who are ask­ing them­selves this same ques­tion, but in two unique ways.

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