Book Byte #18 "The Coaching Habit" by Michael Bungay Stanier

Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

📣 Curious Quotes from the Author:

To build an effective new habit, you need five essential components: a reason, a trigger, a micro-habit, effective practice, and a plan.

So think less about what your habit can do for you, and more about how this new habit will help a person or people you care about.

Resilient systems build in fail-safes so that when something breaks down, the next step to recover is obvious. Make your habit a resilient system.

“If you had to pick one of these to focus on, which one here would be the real challenge for you?”

“This is why, in a nutshell, advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.”

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

“If this were a haiku rather than a book, it would read: Tell less and ask more. Your advice is not as good As you think it is.”

“Five times a second, at an unconscious level, your brain is scanning the environment around you and asking itself: Is it safe here? Or is it dangerous?”

“You have to help people do more of the work that has impact and meaning.”

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“Help create the space for people to have those learning moments.”

“Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action”

“People don’t really learn when you tell them something. They don’t even really learn when they do something. They start learning, start creating new neural pathways, only when they have a chance to recall and reflect on what just happened.”

“When you build a coaching habit, you can more easily break out of three vicious circles that plague our workplaces: creating overdependence, getting overwhelmed and becoming disconnected.”

“Coaching for performance is about addressing and fixing a specific problem or challenge. It’s putting out the fire or building up the fire or banking the fire. It’s everyday stuff, and it’s important and necessary. Coaching for development is about turning the focus from the issue to the person dealing with the issue, the person who’s managing the fire. This conversation is more rare and significantly more powerful.”

“Though it accounts for only about 2 percent of your body weight, your brain uses about 20 percent of your energy.”

“When you’re talking about people, though, you’re not really talking about them. You’re talking about a relationship and, specifically, about what your role is in this relationship that might currently be less than ideal.”

“Being busy is no measure of success.”

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"Over 5 days Russell, and a host of elite entrepreneurs, will show you exactly how to build your first funnel. From idea to launch day, turn your motivation and passion into a business you’re proud of."

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📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:

Coaching isn’t just about giving advice to anyone who will listen. A great Coach is one who nurtures their employees, team or groups and help them grow positively in their own element. The most important part of Coaching is to be a listener. By listening you’ll find out what they want and need. As long as you believe they can reach their potential, they’ll feel that and actually have a better chance to reach their great potential.

The Author also talk about the big 3 question needed to have good conversations with their colleague or underling…

1. The Kickstart Question: What’s on your Mind

2. The AWE Question: And What else?

3. The Focus Question: What’s the real challenge here for you?

A Good Coach fulfills the needs of their employees. They are attuned to their motivations, hopes and dreams, and the great coaches are the ones who help them achieve it. Always ask after coaching “What was most useful for you?”

Good coaching relies on not just knowing what to ask, but how to ask it. Rhetorical questions help no one, they just confuse people and they can’t really say anything to them. Silence make people feel uncomfortable, but it’s a great tool for forcing out real feelings about work and other things.

If you develop the Coaching Habit, everything will go better in your work and your life. You’ll be smarter and more qualified to help those around you, and you’ll get a lot more positive interactions than if you were just a boss pretending to listen to your Employees when they know you aren’t. They aren’t stupid, they can see through BS any day of the week, so don’t give them any.

🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry

They Tech Industry doesn’t have enough Coaches, or at least people dedicated to developing their Coaching Habit. After 20 years in the Tech Industry, most of my Manager’s were too busy thinking about their own careers and their own achievements to be worry about me and my own growth, There were exceptions, but it was really rare for me. Who knows what I could of accomplished with a dedicated mentor behind me, instead of me having to take the reigns of my career myself and try to share my experience with others and be the mentor I never had to others.

Be a Mentor to anyone you can. Create a Coaching Support group so that you can share ideas, achievements and wins together and give yourself motivation to continue doing good all around you.

🤝 Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:

Choose one person to Mentor and contact them. You’ll know who to choose, because you’ll see yourself in them as you were 5 years ago. Everyone is struggling, even if they don’t know it yet. You could save them a ton of pain by helping them now instead of letting them figure it out themselves. Journal or Post your thoughts about your experience. Doing so will inspire others to Mentor others, in a glorious circle of true leadership.