Help superstars break through.

High performing superstars plateau too. They stall at the edges of their will and abilities too. They need help too. How do we make the best of the best better?

1. Superstars grind different

Superstars learn, practice, and persevere differently. You must understand how they work.

You need to be able to relate to their one-of-a-kind drive and work ethics.

2. 1% instead of 10%

You are not going to take a superstar who’s already great and increase their abilities by 10% or whatever. It’s just not going to happen.

Instead you are looking for that sacred 1% incremental gain.

3. Transform one of their foundational skills

Michael Jordan was already the best scorer and best defender in the NBA, yet he failed to win an NBA title for the 6th straight year. He could have continued to work on his shooting or his speed, but instead, he decided to work on body. He wanted to fundamentally change his body into one that was stronger, faster, and less prone to injuries. He hired the legendary fitness coach Tim Grover and went on to win 6 championships.

How do you coach your superstars?

Because excellent coaching should not cost an arm and a leg. 

Because everyone should be able to afford investing 2% of their income into great coaching.

Because I want to have skin in your game, that when I do my job well, help you improve and earn more, I get to earn more too. 

Why am I upfront about fees?

Transparency, so you get to focus on how I can help you #bossbetter, instead of wondering about the costs.

This has been the only answer I would accept every time I asked myself “How much am I willing to pay for leadership coaching?”

More on “How We Charge.“

I will be there until you no longer fall. Then I will push you over the next edge.”

This should be in the “contract” between the boss and the staff.

You can call the edge whatever you want:
Comfort zone
Threshold
Margin
Limit

As long as the contract evokes both fear and hope, you are on the right track.

#bossbetter

We were thrown into it.

Yesterday you were the most creative marketing specialist. Today you need to herd marketing specialists;

Yesterday you were the star programmer. Today you are a PM.

When I became a manager I didn’t exactly know what good looked like. I did not know how to articulate that to my team, and I did not know how to help my team get there.

It’s not like companies don’t want to develop managers. Huge sums of $$ are thrown into training and development.

There are 3 issues:

1. Growth doesn’t come out of classrooms.
2. Inexperienced leaders are developed by leaders who were developed by inexperienced leaders.
3. The more senior you get, the more you are on your own to #bossbetter.

To me, leadership growth is very specific:

It is about developing your skills of inspecting yourself (plus people, processes, and results.)

It is about honing you ability to relate and influence.

It is about the psychology of fuelling grit and growth.

It is about developing a systematic way to practice all of the above.

So, what do you think of this pitch?
– I offer 1 on 1 coaching to founders and leaders.
– I learned leadership from building, coaching, leading teams of leaders at companies like Nike and Apple for 20 years.
– I believe the best leaders #bossbetter by relentlessly refining how they notice, think, and respond.

Only when we become clearer of what we are, we truly begin to yield our true selves and tap into our potential.

It’s like when you realise you are, say, a hammer you then understand you should stop trying to slice and work on becoming the best at hitting nails.

When you hire me, I bring 3 things to you (and your teams):
1, framework to become more precise in knowing how you think and feel (find your hammer)
2, practices to hone your responses and decisions (get good at hitting nails)
3, knowledge and insights from leading & delivering results at fancy brands (learn what nails to hit)

What do you think?

Recognising your patterns and defaults:
– emotional patterns – how you feel
– mental patterns – how you think
– reactive patterns – How you act

Finding the language to:
– Describe your emotions
– Articulate your thoughts
– Express your options

Helping you fall and fail:
– The failures that agonise you
– The failures that explain you
– The recovery that centers you
– The realizations that define you

It is having someone that isn’t both the referee and the coach.
It is having a personal trainer for the mind.

Coaching, is to bring us home.

#bossbetter

* How can leadership feel less like Hallmark cards and more like LEGO instructions booklets?
* How can we make “start with why” less vague and more concrete?
* Can culture be described and built?

As I worked with people in their one of a kind circumstances, I realised the ways I related to people were limited- the Nike and Apple “talk” wasn’t clicking.

* I had to probe differently because I learned that the real practice to empathise better was to beef up our vocabulary for emotions.
* I had to come up with new stories because I realised that to some, the miracle of starting companies in garages meant the founders were rich because they owned cars.
* I learned that reflection was a wildly under-practiced skill.

I enjoy finding ways to “land the plane” at scale. I enjoy studying and tinkering with human behaviours. I love being able to walk alongside someone’s heroine/hero’s journey.

I love that while I am helping bosses #bossbetter I am becoming a better boss too.

6 months ago I decided to end my 20-year corporate career and started my own leadership coaching gig. There was one person that I blame this whole mid-life crisis on: One of my bosses at Nike. This was in the late 2000s. He was an ex-NBA player, and he was the first person that forced practice-based coaching at the workplace on me.

One fall, he started dragging me to join the executive leadership team meetings. I would be asked to present parts of our business unit’s strategy, or participate in debates around quarterly priorities. As a member of the executive team, he would always be in the room to observe me. In the first meeting, I struggled mightily. During our next one-on-one, he went straight in.

“You sucked. You need a lot of work.” He said. “Do you expect a basketball player to not work on his or her weaknesses?” He continued.

He forced me to come up with things to work on. I listed a bunch of things, from the excessive hand gestures to the pathetic incoherence of my logic.

He then asked, “Which one of all these stupid habits of yours is foundational?” I must have looked perplexed because he just continued, “A foundational skill is the bedrock of a set of skills. You first strengthen that skill, and all the other skills can then be stacked on top of it. If a basketball player can’t play with his off hand, what should he be working on first? Is it his left-handed shooting, going to the hoop with his lefthand, or dribbling with both hands?”

I rolled my eyes (in my mind). It was trite to be reminded that we should be aware of our weaknesses, we should commit to practicing new skills, and it was important to know which one to start with. “Duh.” I fired back (in my mind).

“Do you know what made you look nervous and shouldn’t have been let into that room? You know what made that tiny ugly desk outside of my corner office your perfect home? You said ‘really really’ a lot. ” He said.

“The consumers really really engaged with us.” “It is really really important that we focus on activation.” “The team was really really excited about the mission.”

I didn’t think that would be the first thing I should work on. There must be other far more significant flaws I should be tackling instead, I thought. I reluctantly took on the challenge and decided to work on it.

The behaviour itself was easy to overcome. In addition to “really really,” He suggested me to find two other words to rotate through. I chose “incredibly” and “very.” He threw in “really x 1” just to annoy me.

This really really habitual behaviour of mine was an unconscious coping mechanism to nervousness. The simple new habit of alternating adverbs made me become more aware of the moments when nervousness struck. I started to notice my incessant pacing, my distracting hand gestures, and other really really annoying reactionary reflexes. In the past, even if I knew I was nervous, I didn’t know what to do. As I progressed, I started to get better at pausing and creating this tiny mental gap between feeling nervous and reacting.

Tackling this single behaviour turned out to be a foundational change of the relationship between my emotions and my reactions. After having micro-successes in replacing “really really” with … “really x 1”, I gained confidence in my ability to widen the gap between an emotion and taking action. This ability evolved into an anchor for me to work my composure. This gap began to become available when I was flustered, when I was annoyed, when I was defensive, when I got too excited.

Another thing that he did for me was he would always observe me in action. Similar to a real sports coach, he was always sitting at the “courtside” to watch me “play.”

“If a coach of a professional tennis player never actually watched her students played, she wouldn’t be much of a coach.” He retorted when I complained the looming pressure I felt when he was in the room watching me.

“Yea, video-tape your axx all you want. You think Kobe Bryant got great by only be watching VHS?” He barked at me after I suggested I could just review video-recordings of my presentation instead of practicing in front of him.

He applied this practice-observe-iterate coaching approach on my other leadership and interpersonal skills, from negotiation to relatability to self-motivation. In my entire career, I grew the most under him.

He was the catalyst of my appreciation of coaching. He was also that annoying voice in the back of my head that pushed me to make the leap and turn my career towards becoming a leadership coach. Even though this new journey is nerve-wrecking, I know what are some of the things I could do to ensure some meaningful progress. One of them, is to stick to a coach.