WEBINAR: Be More Curious, Effective, & Empathetic 005

Please enjoy this recording and other supplemental materials from Tony’s free weekly webinar.

 

Ask More Questions to be More Effective & More Empathetic.

Session #005 was presented on
Tuesday, Apr 24, 2018, at 12:00 p.m. US Eastern Time

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WEBINAR: Tough Talk – Conversations That Make A Difference 002

Please enjoy this recording and other supplemental materials from Tony’s free weekly webinar.

 

 Tough Talk – Conversations That Make A Difference.

Session #002 was presented on
Tuesday, April 3, 2018, at 12:00 p.m. US Eastern Time

Click here to see more free coaching videos and handouts on this topic…

Firefighters Know Why Trust Matters

Disorganized, reactive business owners and other managers often complain of continually being drawn into “fighting fires,” meaning that emergencies and failures frequently demand immediate, ad hoc attention. I find this metaphor comical since real firefighters do not operate in the haphazard, seat-of-the-pants manner so familiar in many businesses. Professional firefighters–well, there’s the answer right in the modifier. The people responding to actual hot fires are professionals. They train, they plan, and they follow proven procedures.

My friend, Brad Mayhew, is the real deal. A former hotshot wildland firefighter, just like the ones in the movie, Only the Brave, which dramatized the tragedy of the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire. Brad also worked on the investigation into why that crew died.

One of Brad’s lessons from the dangerous wildland kind of firefighting can help those engaged in the safe office kind of “firefighting.” During the Coal Canyon Fire in 2011, two firefighters found themselves in a vehicle surrounded by flames. One was soon overcome by the fumes and heat. Hearing their distress calls, Reese, a nearby firefighter, radioed back that the survivor must leave the vehicle immediately and run fifty feet through flames, fumes, and hot ash to reach safety.

Would you accept that advice from a co-worker? How about from someone who didn’t even work for your company, a supplier or client? That firefighter is alive because he took the advice. Here’s what he did, as Brad wrote in Firehouse magazine:

“‘I have a close relationship with Reese. Because of who he is and because it came from him … that was what we had to do.’”

 

How did they get to know and trust one another? Training together. Agencies in the area hold joint large-scale scenarios, live-fire exercises, simulations and classroom training. Training together builds trust and familiarity across agency lines.

 

But it had not always been that way between these fire departments. They used to be like the different departments in many dysfunctional commercial enterprises:

Twenty years earlier, agency relationships were described as “very contentious” with “mutual resentment and animosity.”

 

Local leaders decided to fix this: “We all just finally understood that the old ways and the animosity were getting us nowhere, and that it’s not about ourselves. We were not serving the people on the ground. We weren’t getting the firefighters what they needed. That’s wrong. We … needed to set the example” (SAI Report, D&A). The Report goes on to say, “It took 10 years of deliberate effort to transform relationships among cooperators.”

–Source: Wildland Case Studies Show Why Trust Matters
by Brad Mayhew and Kirk Summers

 

Once again, performance —even survival— is all about trust.

Learn the 5 components of trust by clicking here for my article.

 


 

Creating communities of mutually appreciative individuals

 

I love this interview with professional athlete and philosophy professor Nick Riggle.

The high five is actually a recognition of the achievement of mutual appreciation. It’s a symbol of, “Hey, I recognize you as an individual, and you recognize me.”

Awesomeness is about creating communities of mutually appreciative individuals … It’s not a community where we all have to share the same values, or we all have to be Christian, or we all have to support a certain political candidate. It’s a more forgiving and appreciative community…. [it] allows us to stand out but stand together

The badass just owns shit, right? What they choose to do with their life, they do it with expertise and confidence. … tackling what you set out to do with your life, and doing it with confidence and a kind of presentational verve.

The other category [of non-starter] is the fake-ass person. They’re someone who seems to take up the social opening, seems to be presenting their individuality… But in fact, they’re faking it. They’re not actually presenting who they are. This relation of mutual appreciation, what I call co-personhood, can’t be formed, because they’re presenting a fake persona.

–Prof. Nick Riggle, USD
On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck

 


 

The Three Pillars of Zen

The Three Pillars of Zen

In the late 1960s, an MIT student went to a meditation class by Philip Kapleau, author of the classic, The Three Pillars of Zen. The student only went because his Ph.D. advisor had invited the speaker to campus.

No word on whether Roshi Kapleau was discouraged to see only four listeners in the large lecture hall, the organizer, his student, and two others. We do know that he effectively delivered his message because that student became Jon Kabat-Zinn, the most influential promoter, teacher, and scientific researcher of meditation in the history of the West.

It is not a speaker’s job to judge the audience. We save the world one speech, sometimes one listener, at a time.