Now, before I got the ’47 Ford, my friend had taken the flathead 6 out of it and put in a Chevy 283. A torch cut hole provided room for headers into the fender wells. The headers dropped down to glass pack mufflers, attached to the running boards. There was a Chevy to Ford bell housing over the clutch, allowing the Ford 3 speed manual transmission to be hung back in place. In back was the original 4:11 rear end, on which my friend hung some pretty wide beefy tires. It wasn’t pretty, but it sounded great. It was muscle car enough for me at the end of the summer that I passed the California State driver’s test in 1971.

Fortunately the ’47 Ford had an inspection plate in the center of the cab floorboard. This plate provided easy access to the tranny, which I was to remove several times over the course of the next 2 years. It wasn’t too long before I twisted the gears out of the 4:11 rear end (there wasn’t any top end, but I could come out of the hole and light up the tires any time I wanted to). A nice junk yard man, who I dealt with several times, found me a Cadillac rear end that would bolt up identically. A clutch plate never lasted me very long either. I tired quickly of spending money that was hard to come by, on parts broken by horsing around. But the truck was quick and I had fun.

Two and a half years after I got the pickup, I graduated high school, and flew away to the rest of my life. A few years later as my dad was preparing to move, we agreed to sell the truck if anyone wanted it. I think we got $200 for it. I think I paid $400, so $200 for all that fun and education was well worth it.

Common wisdom says that if you really apply yourself to the practices of successful people, you will become successful too. You diligently apply the principles, you bug other people to focus on a phrase, idea, or activity. When your success doesn’t come quickly you spend more time with the book and the notes because if you try to apply yourself harder to the methods and ideas of “The Book”, you know you cannot fail.

Reality bloodies your nose. The scenery and the frustrating grind at work doesn’t change. You have not been carried off to the boardroom to be praised as a stunning example of the most valuable executive. The book goes on the shelf and the “PostIt” notes get taken off the side of your computer screen – you know, right below your password.

What happened?

“The Book” described how the author intuitively used his or her talents. The effort applied by the author went into those existing talents.

1. The first error of common wisdom, and your mistake, was that you tried to build the author’s talents for yourself. Talents cannot be taught or transferred person to person. Talents are naturally occurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior, which can be productively applied. When you add knowledge and skills (both CAN be taught) to talent, it becomes a strength. It is only when you focus on developing your own talents that you cannot fail. It is when you apply your collective top talents to all aspects of your life, including work, that you find success beyond your wildest imagination.
2. The second error of common wisdom is that to really develop, you need to focus on your weak areas and spend time developing them. Actually you need to avoid them like the plague. Stop trying to do what you were born to suck at. Find someone you work with whose top talents are your weak areas and whose weak areas are your top talents. Trade off. It might take more than one other person. As best you can shift your work to be based on your top talents as often as possible.
3. Third: stop waiting to be rescued. You bought that book because you wanted to step into a bigger game. Be your own boss no matter who pays you. You are smart enough to build your own bigger game. Start by getting clarity.

How do you find your talents? I’m a talent scout. I help people find their talents and improve them.

So here is my flash of insight from today: I am driven to help people see, through understanding themselves and their uniqueness, the danger of using their story as the story for every other person.

I chose the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) because I know it to be incredibly revealing to the person using it. Jung understood that there were a few basic mental functions that all people seemed to use, two for taking in information and two for deciding. These mental functions are innate and used preferentially. Jung took great care to travel and observe people in different cultures and environments to make sure that, to his best understanding, these personality types were universal. Those who continued Jung’s work have done decades of scientific and academic study to remove gender and social bias from the MBTI. And so, we are able to paint a picture for people that their own quirky difference is expected in their type preference and that others have a type preference too. This opens up the ability to see different stories.

I use the Clifton StrengthsFinder because it adds another element to their story and how they see the stories of others. There are 34 Talent Themes that Don Clifton created from 300 identified discrete talents. Clifton enabled people to understand that their top of mind responses would yield a rank ordering of these 34 themes. And now each person can see that their top ten themes, their middle nine, and their bottom 15, are unique and different. Even if they find someone else with the same themes in their top ten, it is almost impossible to find someone with the exact same rank ordering.

I talk about self clarity gained with these assessments. I also talk about becoming type and talent aware. That’s not so much about guessing someone’s type as it is about coming to the realization that if you are unique, then others are too. If you can start looking for others to be different from you and not see people through the lens of your own type and talents, that’s the gift of seeing a different story.

The premise, in case you are one of the two people in the world who has not seen it, is that Phil (Bill Murray) is a cynical self-absorbed weather broadcaster sent from his home station in Pittsburgh, PA, to Punxsutawney, PA, for the traditional February second celebration of Groundhog Day. For the rest of the movie Phil re-lives that one day, waking at 6:00 AM to Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” numerous times. Phil’s quest becomes how to get to February third. Here is what hooks me about this movie: you will see on my About Me page that I have a basic belief that the universe will put the same situation in front of you until you have learned the lesson you are supposed to learn. This is Phil’s dilema, and how he learns, and what he learns is the story.

1. Phil discovers his predicament and quickly moves to what he can get out of it. He uses each day to carouse and take advantage of women. It is all about him and what he can get as he indulges his self interest. He is interested in Rita and settles on learning everything he can so that he can get her into his bed and win her. But Rita is quite perceptive and reads between his lines, and we see a series of times and places where Rita slaps Phil and storms off. Taking advantage of the situation for his own gain is not the lesson to be learned, and Phil loses heart.

2. Phil gives up. He tries to blame the groundhog and kill it. He then goes through a series of ways trying to escape the lesson by killing himself. At 6:00AM the next day he is whole again, and the lesson is in front of him again. You can try to escape the lesson before you and it will always reappear.

3. Phil pays attention. Phil begins to see the opportunity in each day for growth. Phil begins to see the opportunity in each day for service and connection to others. Instead of spending all day chasing Rita, he learns to play the piano, he reads, he learns to carve ice sculptures. He finally finds his daily “errands” to help and save others, and it is when Rita sees Phil’s value through the eyes of others that she falls in love. $337.84.

It is in finding the value in each moment and the value in each person, even the drunken bum, that Phil finds his way to February third … and of course he wins Rita. Happy Groundhog Day.

We are employee development focussed and help all of our employees to be well rounded, so we set Rabbit on the next key skill our company uses, swimming. Well the bright star quickly tarnished. Rabbit struggled with swimming, performing well below the norm for what we require of our employees. We know that if we triangulate on motivation, integrity, and competence, we can improve the performance of any employee by using any two of those facets to develop the third. We assigned our best manager to coach up Rabbit on swimming. We assigned him projects to “throw him in the deep end” and had his mentor work with him on swimming every day.

Rabbit’s motivation quickly vanished. In fact his integrity sadly fell too. He said he worked on swimming every day, but if he did he showed no improvement. Turtle had to pick up his swimming assignments on projects Rabbit was assigned, and he spent so much time supposedly working on swimming that his performance on project assignments fell off a cliff. We had many projects that needed a great runner, but sadly, with Rabbit’s attitude problem, we couldn’t give him those projects. In fact, we decided today in our management review that we might need to manage Rabbit out of the business so we can hire someone who produces results. Rabbit is taking a lot of manager time, and we need our best manager to work with Turtle on his running.

Moral: You walk past the talent you need every day because you are not talent aware. Focus on talent, add skills and knowledge, develop and use the strengths people already have. I’m a talent scout; I help people find their talent and develop it.

I attended the first module of their training this last weekend, and I had a wonderful time. I attended with a friend, the instructors were great, and the people I met there were great. iPEC Coaching wasn’t a good fit for me and here is why.

As I outlined in a previous post, the iPEC coaching process hinges on their energy development model. This model is reasonable and works well for the people coaching and being coached in its context. It wasn’t a good fit for me. In my undergraduate and graduate work in education and psychology, I studied adult development and the various models used to help people learn and develop. All of these models have validation through scholarly research and scientific understanding. iPEC’s development model has not had this kind of validation, or at least it was not clear in any of the materials that it had. This is not bad, just different.

I guess what really stood out for me is related to what I call, “The Garden of Eden Moment” To paraphrase the Genesis story, Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and saw that she was naked. This turn of the story symbolizes our spiritual transition to duality, not just good and evil, but the many dualities in our existence. That bite of the apple changed Eve’s understanding, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get back to the garden. She could not go back too not being aware of good and evil.

In iPEC’s energy model you can achieve higher levels of transcendent thinking only to be brought down to a lower level by an external circumstance. On one hand they explain that you choose your energy level and in the next thought they explain that the circumstance chooses your level. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to cop out of your responsibility for choosing your own reaction to a circumstance. You don’t get to go back to your old way of thinking – you know better.

I couldn’t see the sense of continuing with time and money studying a coaching model that didn’t work for me at its core. I am not in general condemning iPEC’s process or its efficacy. Many people have been helped by coaches using this model. I’m just saying it’s not right for me. What do I believe? Well that’s for another post …

So here is the first installment.

Energy Leadership: Transforming Your Workplace and Your Life from the Core

This book, by Bruce D. Schneider, was the first book I received as part of my training from IPEC Coaching. That’s not a shock as Mr. Schneider founded IPEC Coaching and the book portrays his basic theory of coaching. 221 pages. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, N.J.

Energy Leadership uses a story of a coaching engagement to put IPEC’s coaching model across to the reader. The story is easy to read and illustrates the points well. Also included are links to videos on the IPEC Coaching web site to further explain some of the concepts. The site does ask for contact information to access the videos. I was already enrolled in the coaching classes, however, I expect that if you give your information you can expect some sort of contact regarding IPEC’s coaching program.

The coaching theory shown in the narrative is a 7 stage developmental continuum focused on what Schneider terms the energy of the stage. Schneider also describes “Catabolic” energy (negative) in the early stages, and “Anabolic” energy (positive) for the later stages. The model also describes three groupings of stages: Self (1&2), Self Mastery (3,4, &5), Self Transcendence (6&7). All of these stages are said to have a different energy and frequency of vibration, hence the overall label of Energy Leadership.

In the story, Bruce (the coach), leads the executive and executive team of a marketing consulting firm through the stages of the model to a turn around of their business. The coaching conversations are well presented. Of course, the business is saved and the people transformed by the end of the book.

What I find missing is any explanation of what is needed to transition from stage to stage. The model is easy enough to understand to be able to place people in their appropriate stage through conversation and observation. I have found that stage progression usually requires a readiness or critical event on the part of the client. The magic of coaching is in creating the readiness and urging the client to the next stage. There is also not an explanation that accompanies most stage theories that stages cannot be skipped, and that usually clients might see themselves in the next stage or two, but usually not beyond. The answers to these questions may come in the training classes.

This book provided easy access to the ideas and theory behind Energy Coaching. While I am unsure whether the ideas could be implemented without guidance, this book earns a place on my bookshelf for reference.

I’m sure there will be more to come.