Coach Dan's Blog

  📖 “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” - Friedrich Nietzsche A shared senses of purpose leads to alignment. Alignment, coupled with psychological safety leads to engagement. Engaged teams out perform when compared to disengaged teams. Are your teams aware of the purpose they serve, and how they solve problems for your customers and your company?

📖 “If I were asked for the most important advice I could give, I should simply say: stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” - Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy understood the importance of awareness and reflection. Pausing a moment and reflecting on your day is a vital way to continuously improve the way you work with your team, your partners, your clients and your customers. Did you pause and reflect today?  

  "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." Alvin Toffler Continuious Improvement means continuious learning. It means undderstanding that just because something worked yesterday, doesn't mean it will work tomorrow. It means that everything should be on the table to reevaluate and reassess. A growth mindset in necessary to continuiously improve. When was the last time you challenged your thinking, and learned something new?

  "The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones" - Confucius Even Confucius was a fan of iteration!  

  Over the last 24 hours, I heard 3 questions that really caught my interest. The first question was "How can you coach someone to get better at something if they don't think they need to improve." The second question was "What do you do with that one person on the team who always seems to have an excuse as to why things aren't finished." The third question was posed today on LinkedIn by our very own Andrew (Drew) Boyer, "Is the demand for Leadership Coaching coming from Corporate Leaders or Employees??" What struck me is the answer to all three questions is quite the same... A coach can't help someone improve if they aren't open minded and ready to improve. If there is no invitation for coaching, no coaching will occur. If the person you are working with doesn't believe they need to improve - the likelihood of them investing in improvement on their own volition is small. You may show them data indicating there is room for improvemen...

  📖 “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ― Anne Frank What are you waiting for? ✔️ Reflect ✔️ Set a goal ✔️ Make a small change ✔️ Repeat You don't have to swing for the fences every day. Small experiments bring about small changes that add up over time. What's stopping you?

  📖 “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” - John Dewey Some people view failure as a negative, and I can understand why that might be. Consider this.... 🤔 If you never fail, did you really give everything you could to something? 🤔 If you never fail, have you discovered everything there is to know about what you tried? 🤔 If you never fail, did you really ever take any risks? Making a team afraid to fail means they will never accomplish all that they could have in the first place... Try something and fail? Reflect and apply your learnings - this is the way to continuous improvement. What's stopping you?

  📖 “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” ― Marcus Aurelius   It's easy to be so confident in a direction or a belief, that we forget to reflect. Challenge yourself to reflect and identify bias in your own thinking. You may be surprised about what you find. We all win together.

  📖 "You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Jane Goodall   The daily leadership calendar hits just right again!   Every single day we make an impact on those around us. Everything from the questions we ask, to the tone of our voice makes an impact on another person's day. What we believe in... what we value - comes shining through in the way that we show up to our colleagues, teams, partners, friends and families.   What kind of impact are you having today?   ❔ Are you leading with curiosity? Asking questions to grow and challenge, and then empowering to follow through can help a team member learn a new skill, or gain confidence in skills that are developing.   ❔ Are you balancing results with growth? Getting the job done is important, and when you balance getting results with learning new skills, ...

📖 “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”  ―  Plutarch Today is a great day to kindle the fire of curiosity in your mind. 🔥 Ask questions. 🔥 Listen to understand. 🔥 Encourage others to share different perspectives and ideas. 🔥 Show enthusiasm for finding answers. 🔥 Read or follow someone new. If you don't make time for curiosity, you run the risk of snuffing that fire out completely! What's stopping you? We all win together!

  “Do not give them a candle to light the way, teach them how to make fire instead. That is the meaning of enlightenment.” ― Kamand Kojouri   It's a fine line- balancing between helping your partners achieve a goal, and teaching them the skills (and building the experience) necessary to achieve their goals over and over and over again.   ⛔ "Just tell us what to do, and we will do it." ⛔ "Provide us the steps or the checklist." ⛔ "How do you want us to do this?"   This language is common, and it suggests to me that the team (regardless of level) has been conditioned to not take risks. To me it means they have learned through experience that their safest course of action is to have someone else solve the problem and instead just do as told.     In other words, they are doing exactly what they have been trained (and incen ted) to do.   Sure- some problems need to be solved right now! There can be an immediate benefit ...

  Teams follow the cues of their leader. They will often mirror the leaders mindset, values and behaviors. Observing your teams in action followed by some reflection is a great way to learn about yourself. Ask yourself: ❔ What did you see in your teams that you were proud of? ❔ What did you see in your teams behavors that surprised you? ❔ What are you doing to reinforce the behaviors you observed? ❔ What would you like to see your teams do differently? What are you doing to reinforce (or model) that behavior? Much can be learned by observing your team - it's a bit like looking at your leadership in a mirror. Why not look into your mirror today? We all win together!