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Sticky Learning Lunches #9: Use Our G.R.O.W Model to Coach Your People with ‘Reality’
Learn How to Coach Your People with the 4 Steps of the G.R.O.W. Model – Part #2: Reality Coach your people with Reality – Step 2. Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself. This is a Virtual Classroom of 20-minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to today’s session. We’re just gonna give it another 30 seconds. While people are turning up, I can see the numbers are increasing. I wanna say thank you to all of you people for turning up early. Hugely appreciated. I massively value, massively value. Your attention and your desire to engage and your time to be here and commit to this, it means massive amounts to myself and the MBM team.
Nathan Simmonds:
And it’s, you know, it’s a massive thank you from me and a massive thank you from your future self for anything that you’re gonna pick up in this that’s gonna help you to develop yourself and move yourself forward in your business, your careers, and with your teams as well. So, thank you from us and thank you from your future self as well. Let’s just give it 30 seconds and wait for a couple more people to arrive.
Nathan Simmonds:
Afternoon. Andy, please feel free if you want to make comments, you want to ask questions or question boxes there, we’ll be picking up a bit of q and a at the end of it. But also, if anything comes up that you, you wish to kind of pick up with me, you wish to query, please do. Um, this is what it’s here for. I’m here to help you get as much clarity, especially around the grow coaching model this week, which is what we’re gonna be focusing on.
Nathan Simmonds:
So let’s start everyone, make sure you’ve got drinks. Gonna set you guys up for success. First of all, please make sure you’ve got drinks available and you’ve got a pen and paper, nice clean sheet. So setting you up for success for this session. At the top of that sheet, on one side, I want you to write keepers and what does keepers mean?
Nathan Simmonds:
Keepers are the things that you want to remember from this session. So we’ve got 20 minutes roughly of content, a little bit of q and a and kind of calibration stuff at the end there. Keepers aiming for more than three things that I say or share, or questions that people ask and I answer. Anything that helps to stimulate a new thought for you, something that’s a, a new moment when those light bulb moments, those aha uh, points, that penny hitting the floor. Now, that’s the, it’s the loudest noise in the room.
Nathan Simmonds:
The penny dropping and hitting the floor. So keepers are the things that you want to keep hold of. So when you reread it, it stimulates a new thought and it keeps a learning moving forward. So let’s get into this because this is the home of sticky learning, making business matter. We make learning stick and these are the sticky learning launches. My name is Nathan Simmons and I’m a senior leadership coach and trainer with MBM.
Nathan Simmonds:
We are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry. Let’s get this show started. What are we covering today? We are covering the R from the grow coaching model. We all know what R stands book is right now. It’s blazed across your screens. Let’s bring it off there. So R stands for
Nathan Simmonds:
Reality. First question, open question for all of you here. What does reality mean for you? How do you define this to your clients? How do you define this to your delegates and your, the people in your teams? How do you define reality? What is it? Let’s see what you’ve gotta say on this subject.
Nathan Simmonds:
Truth as I understand and see it. Absolutely. What else does reality mean for us? Reflect on client’s current situation. Help them become aware of their reality. Absolutely. So we’re getting them to reflect on the current situation they’re in the current situation, their perception, absolutely. Key thing with perception is, as some of you may know, and let me clarify this with you, perception is reality. Okay? It’s also a lie. What do I mean by this?
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s because the way that someone sees something is their version of reality. Whether it is true or not, to the wider hole is neither here nor there according to them. It’s their reality. So never argue with someone’s perception. Give you a really tangible, um, understanding of this. Imagine someone that is colorblind and that maybe they don’t see green, or maybe they don’t see red the way that we do.
Nathan Simmonds:
Maybe they don’t see it at all. Maybe they see oranges or the same color across the board. You can argue with them until you are blue in the face that roses are red and grass is green and this, that and the other. But they’ll never be able to see it because that’s not their reality. Super great point there. Thank you very much for that, Jane. Appreciate it. So the reality is where someone is right now is everything that has preceded this moment.
Nathan Simmonds:
Everything they have learned, everything they have experienced, how they see the world, where they’re planning or how they interact with things, the lessons that they’ve learned along the way. This is the reality, the here and now and the current. There are some challenges though, with the way that we’ve learned to deal with reality and we’re gonna be covering those today. So we’ve got three points. The first one here is about big goals. And we’re gonna come back into that.
Nathan Simmonds:
So we make sure we’re focusing in the right way into the reality. How we can then be overwhelmed by the journey that’s in front of us. And then how we learn to maximize what’s come before us until this point, what we’ve done and the journey that we’ve taken. So we need to use these three points to, to help keep the brain engaged in the right way. The first thing, big goals, number one,
Nathan Simmonds:
The problem with big goals are they’re big and they’re meant to be. So as I said yesterday, and if you haven’t seen the video from yesterday, please after this, go and watch that. It’s on YouTube, it’s available. Now we’ll provide links for that is they’re meant to be big. They’re meant to be stimulating, they’re meant to be challenging, they’re meant to be engaging. ’cause it needs to be those three things so that the goal becomes magnetic, it physically pulls you forward.
Nathan Simmonds:
It needs to magnetize you in order to create that because it becomes a necessity, not just a maybe. The challenge that we have with the big goal though, is it can become too overwhelming. So when we’re looking at the big goal, what we want to do is we want to break it down into the bite-sized chunks. Again, talking about how do you eat an elephant?
Nathan Simmonds:
You don’t do it in one mouthful. You chop it up into smaller bite-sized chunks that you can learn to deal with it. Some of those will be your smaller goals that then slot into that bigger one. So you will have your big overarching goal with potentially three to four pillars in it, which are then the goals and the um, the way points up the mountain side, that’s gonna help you to get there. So you can break it down into tangible points and then also work it out into objectives.
Nathan Simmonds:
This then starts to feed into tomorrow’s session. So we break it down in chunks. What would make this goal easier to manage right now? How can we break this down into its lowest denominators to help move this forward? What goals could you be achieving right now that would line you up for that? Throwing some questions out here that you can write down and using your coaching sessions or for yourselves, what else?
Nathan Simmonds:
How could you break this goal down into smaller steps that are gonna help you to move forward? How can we feed into that? How does the three month goal feed into a 12 month goal? What does that look like? So we start to break this big goal down into smaller elements that we can work on. The second thing that we want to be looking at is our mindset around this.
Nathan Simmonds:
How do we often look at our goals? Something I talk a lot about with people is when we are looking at the growth mindset, when we are looking at how we work inside our comfort zones, often when we set goals, especially when we set goals that are realistic and inside that comfort zone, what we expect to happen is this is us moving towards our goal. We think the journey croda green is not working at all.
Nathan Simmonds:
We think the journey is gonna look like this. A nice straight road, nice and simple. Here’s my goal, here’s me and this is the journey. And then what happens? What normally happens when we think everything’s gonna be plain sailing open? Question to you, what normally happens when we think everything’s gonna be plain sailing as we’re moving towards our goal,
Nathan Simmonds:
Get knocked off track, we slip up as we move forward along the line. And then nor unexpected crosswinds nicely put, I procrastinate Adriana. Yes, right. There’s a whole different training I can do on procrastination. By the way. Procrastination is a good thing. It’s very natural, it’s very normal. We just have to learn how to focus it ’cause it is helpful. We have this idea of the world’s gonna be perfect and oh look, I’m just gonna go over there and it’s all gonna be normal.
Nathan Simmonds:
But what happens is you’re going along here, the smallest hiccup here, and all of a sudden you’ve got a problem. And then you start to procrastinate. Even though it was the smallest thing, the the slight crosswind or the slight curve to the, the expectation causes a problem because the outside, the, the expectation you have in your head doesn’t match up with the reality outside. And then it creates frustration. But what happens is, if only what we start doing is, and we start getting this reality of what’s going on, what we actually see is here’s the goal and it’s more like this.
Nathan Simmonds:
And here’s you. Now it looks a lot more complicated and it looks more, more challenging. So number two is when you set the big goal and you are here, you start to question your capability. You start to question your capacity to make it happen, which is where the big goal can start to become overwhelming. And the measurement that you have to get up here becomes the chasm of despair and doubt.
Nathan Simmonds:
Who do I think I am to do that? Why me? I’ve got more than enough going on. So we have this fear of, well, the two fears that start to kick in, and we look at this a little bit with cra procrastination. Exactly. Someone’s mentioned here about Covid Ovid 19. We didn’t see this coming. Actually quite a lot of us did. When you read the articles, we think everything’s gonna be plain sailing and something like this happens.
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, blockbusters thought they were gonna be renting out DVDs and videos for a very long time. Kodak thought they were gonna be printing people’s photos for a very long time. They all thought it was gonna be plain sailing and the smallest pickup in the road caused a problem.
Nathan Simmonds:
When we create the big goal, we see the, the journey ahead of us and we go into this space of the chasm of uh, the chasm of despair and doubt. And the fears kick in the fear of not enough. The fear of not rich enough, tall enough, intelligent enough, um, educated enough, connected enough, whatever. And we start to feel this fear. Who do I think I am in relation to this? And who do I think I’m to think that I can make that happen? The second fear that kicks in is the fear of losing face and respect. If I try doing this and I fall down, will people think less of me?
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s, it’s we. And we learn these fears at a very young age, but even worse than that, we often go into this space, well what if I succeed? Will people think less of me? Will they think that I have uh, become arrogant or overconfident in what I’m doing? So rather than even trying it for the fear of people thinking less, if you fall down or even succeeding and people thinking less of you ’cause you made it, you do nothing and you stay here.
Nathan Simmonds:
So number two is understanding this sensation of when you look at the big goal, where you are right now with the learning that you have, with the capabilities that you have, this can appear daunting. So we break it down, but when we do the reality questioning, it’s about celebrating and helping ourselves and helping the people that we work with understand how far they have actually come and what they’re actually capable of when they turn around and look or what’s happened before this very moment where they’ve succeeded, where they failed.
Nathan Simmonds:
And say it again a million times before I die. Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is the route to it. And when you can take that failure and turn it into a valuable lesson, you will move forward faster. So when we are working with ourselves and the people, we are asking these reality based questions. What have you learned? When did you fail and what did you get out of that that’s moved you forward? What have you tried so far?
Nathan Simmonds:
What have your experiences been up until this moment? What is it you learned before that’s gonna help you again to move forward? How far have you come? Here’s a question for everyone and you can share this, um, in the questions and I won’t put in, oh, I don’t think anyone can see what’s going up on the question. I think it’s only to me. Um, but even if you’re gonna share this in the chat, it’s quite a funny exercise.
Nathan Simmonds:
Everyone type in their first salary. So the first job you ever had, type in your salary and the questions or the chat box so I can see them chat box if you want other people. So someone’s written here, 8,500. What other salaries have we got? Seven pound 50 per day. Like 26 pound per week. Yes. Sound like youth training to me Colin. ’cause that’s what I was on at 35 pound a week when I had my first proper job. 10 K, nine k, 3,500.
Nathan Simmonds:
Good. Any more for anymore? First salary. Type in your first salary for your first job you ever had. If you don’t wanna share it there, write it down on your pad. If you’re watching this nine one pound 96 an hour. I, I feel this is incredible. If you’re watching this on the replay, please make sure you are writing this down. Now the next question, and you don’t have to share this with me. How much are you earning right now? What is your current salary? All the money that you’ve got coming in, whether it’s from rented property, whether it’s from um, uh, one-to-one clients, entrepreneur, consultancy, salaried, whatever. Impressive.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. So the reason that I’m getting you to do this is when you were 16, 17, 20, whatever it was, and you took that first salary, did you ever imagine that you would be earning the money that you are earning right now? Did you ever think that you were capable of getting that amount of money? Now one of my clients originally started and he was getting five pound, I think it was five pound or six pound per job on occasion. He’s now commanding 350 pound per job and that’s an hour’s work. And when I talked to him about that, he laughs at the person that he was ’cause that person could not imagine doing what he’s doing now.
Nathan Simmonds:
And the reason I ask you to get and to look at this is rather than looking over here if this is doubling your salary, if this is tripling your business, if this is growing your customer base by whatever means, or as a leader and you think this is too much, this is overwhelming. Take a moment to look how far you’ve actually come in your journey and see what is possible from then until now. Going backwards and then taking the moment to say, well what did I learn? What did I get out of this? And then what we start to do is we’re using 0.3,
Nathan Simmonds:
Which is an educated reflection. You take a moment to think about how far you’ve come to now, what you’ve learned, what the ideas, um, who’s giving you advice, what you can then squeeze out of that advice for yourself and for other people by looking at the lessons learned, the times that you scratched your knees, like the man in the arena from the speech, you know, it is about being in the fight.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s about getting the scrapes and the cuts and it’s about being knocked down and it’s about still standing up again, learning from it, developing from it, and then moving it forward. Because what got you here may not get you there, but it certainly is the platform that’s gonna make that happen. So when we take a moment to look back and get grateful and show gratitude for what it is we’ve learned how far we’ve come, and then we can start to understand what it is we can contribute in here that’s gonna make this happen.
Nathan Simmonds:
Because when we’re looking up here and we start complaining, you cannot activate solution thinking while you are complaining. At the same time though, if you look back and see how far you’ve progressed and what you’ve got and how far you’ve developed, you can then shift that thinking, face it forward, and then you can start to think about what you need to put in place that’s gonna get you from here to there with that reality.
Nathan Simmonds:
Hope this is helping today. Cri, we’re almost on time. What has been useful? I haven’t got clear line of sight on my clock and I didn’t realize what the time was, what’s been useful so far from today? Please, uh, let me know in the, in the question box or the chat box, what has been useful from today’s session around the reality section of the grow coaching model and some of the mindsets around this
Nathan Simmonds:
Getting perspective. I’d love to know what that perspective is and what you are seeing right now. Failure is not the opposite of success, absolutely. But it said it’s a learning curve. It’s huge. And what if I succeed as opposed to what if I’m going to fail? Absolutely. The two fears that we have, this fear of not enough and this fear of losing respect or losing love or acknowledgement, whatever it may be, we learn them at a very early age as part of the, the learning process of conditional love.
Nathan Simmonds:
And we’re not here to, um, talk about parenting too much. It is a, it is a very strong thing. It happens. We learn to fit in, we learn to live up to expectations. We learn to not appear crazy or um, too full of ourselves. And it’s these kind of mechanisms that are teaching us to hold ourselves back so that we don’t set big goals, but excuse me, as a result of that, we start to see things like anxiety and depression.
Nathan Simmonds:
The workplace starts quick up ’cause we actually are not fully expressing ourselves. We dunno how to set the big goals and we dunno how to, um, break it down in such a way that it is, it’s, um, something that we can work on. It’s tangible and we can move forward with it. Um, what you just said can’t activate al thinking if you are complaining. Yes, absolutely. By the way, Al is not out to your word. I made it up a couple of years ago. It’s not trademarked. So please feel free to use it. Just be aware that people might go, oh, that’s not a word. Educated, reflection and the chasm. Absolutely.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you come to kind of, um, appreciate the chasms and the things that are gonna happen and the curve balls and the river going left when you want to go right, and the landslides and the avalanches, you know they’re gonna happen. If we can be realistic about that, we can start to build the options which we’ll look at tomorrow that are gonna move us through it. And you can appre appreciate those challenges that they come towards you because they’re making you stronger.
Nathan Simmonds:
A one man stumbling block is another man’s stepping stone. Can’t think in terms of solutions while complaint. Absolutely. Failure equals the best training. Absolutely. If you have not failed, you cannot win. It’s as simple as that. There is no it is, no it is not. They’re not opposites. They’re on a continuum. Failure and, and, and success are on that continuum. It’s a sliding scale on how we move up them.
Nathan Simmonds:
You can’t have one without the other. It’d be like saying up when there’s no down. You can’t have them. They’re not opposites. They’re continuing, they, they’re on a sliding continuum depending where you’re standing in relation to them. How you choose to look at that from up here. The carpet is down, you know, from downstairs, the carpet’s up. So how the angle that we, this, this carpet that is, you know, the, the, the angle and the perspective that we get on those things can dictate how we look at things.
Nathan Simmonds:
Ah, something else that just popped into my head I was thinking about this earlier, is that fear and that doubt that we have here. I heard a story recently, the key line was, is the only difference between a rutt and a grave is the depth. And for me, when I was thinking about this phrase and I was thinking, that’s very morbid, it’s very harsh, but there was a lot of people out there that are caught in a rutt and they think they’re in a grave.
Nathan Simmonds:
They’ve started work at 21 and they’ve died by the time they’re 24. It just happen to have a few more years left until they retire. And I work in, you know, very strongly in a space of career development and leadership development. So I was thinking about this rutt on the grave thing and this fear of not, um, of not enough and, and how to move ourselves. The challenge is though, is when we’re faced down in a rutt and we’re looking at dirt, it looks exactly the same as if we’re in a grave and we feel like we failed when we are looking at it in the runway when we’ve got the wrong perspective.
Nathan Simmonds:
So when we change that angle and we start to, we then turn over and we can look up once we can look up, we can stand up. When you’ve taken a chance to look back on, on how great the life is that you’ve already led and how you can then transfer and scale those tools and ideas forward, you can bridge the chasm, reach your goals, and those big goals become less daunting because they’re in bite-sized chunks which enable you to make it happen.
Nathan Simmonds:
Questions, what questions have you got for me right now so I can help you, um, uh, you know, get better questioning and get a better perspective on your reality? What questions have you got for me right now? Advice for getting someone to see their stumbling blocks and struggles as part of the process instead of the permanent failure. Absolutely. Good. So one of the mechanisms is talking about the fears, helping ’em to understand where fear comes from and where they’ve learned it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Oh, we will probably incorporate this into another training session, helping ’em to see that the, the often, the one that I use is the analogy of, of Edison and the light bulb and how some people say it took him 400, some people say a thousand, 6,000, 10,000 attempts to make the light bulb. And every time that he didn’t make it, or one of his team, ’cause he had a very big team at this point, didn’t make a light bulb.
Nathan Simmonds:
He just said, I’ve just found another way how not to make a light bulb. And he still went again. It meant that he was eliminating the no in order to get to the yes. Now the interest, two interesting things about Edison. One was he was homeschooled. He was actually kicked out of his school and sent home with a letter to give to his mother. And that letter said that he was uneducable, he was too stupid to be in class and she had to teach him.
Nathan Simmonds:
And what actually happened is his mother turned around and he said, what’s, what did the letter say? And he, and she said, the school has sent you home because you’re too intelligent and I have to teach you ’cause they’re not able to deal with you. That in itself is mind blowing when you hear the story then of how his factory burnt down and he didn’t have any insurance by all accounts.
Nathan Simmonds:
One of the cousins was on the door, Mr. Edison, Mr. Edison and the factory’s burning down. What was his response? Right? Go and get the other family. Go and get these people. Go and get these people and get some food and snacks ’cause we are gonna watch this happen. ’cause you are never gonna see a fire like this. And apparently there were green flames and blue flames shooting out the roof 50 feet high because of all the chemicals and things that were burning in there.
Nathan Simmonds:
But rather than being um, um, you know, angry or resentful or frustrated about the setback, actually he celebrated it. And later on he said most of the things in there were absolute rubbish anyway. Um, and I was looking for a reason to get rid of them. So he found a, um, a, a silver lining in that. So when we look at this failure mechanism, failure is beneficial. You cannot have up without them. You cannot have left without right. And you cannot have success without failure to be included in this breakdown goals alone or by myself as a leader. Woo.
Nathan Simmonds:
There’s a couple of ways we can do this. So if you’re talking about your own goals inside a business, one element is to look at where you want to get to. Where does the business want to be in 12 months, three years, five years time? And then breaking those goals down accordingly and working out how you in your business area or your team, um, are gonna create outcomes which are gonna then plug into that.
Nathan Simmonds:
Now you may wanna sit down and deliberate this yourself to come up with some ideas. ’cause maybe as a, as a leader you have a bit more business acumen than your team do. You’ve got a bit more awareness than maybe they’re, I don’t say it like to say allowed to have, but maybe there’s certain elements you’re more aware of as a leader that will support you creating some goals.
Nathan Simmonds:
What I would then suggest is from when you’ve got that line of sight and some ideas yourself is then include and incorporate as many of your people as you possibly can. And you might ask them, well what are their expectations? What would they like to achieve? How would that feel if they made that? Um, what would it be like to be in that place? What would they like to contribute to that?
Nathan Simmonds:
So you start to create some extra additions to that goal, which is their parts of it. So it becomes inclusive and then they can start to build those tangible actions of things they actually want to give to make it happen. So there are different points in the leadership journey when we’re setting those goals that are gonna make it, um, easier for people to plug in at the right time so everybody is included.
Nathan Simmonds:
And with your goals, be as transparent as you can and make it accessible to everybody because the more people feel included, the more they’ll be involved. Um, a previous client of mine, we hear this a lot, I’m a control freak. That’s what she said to me. No. And she was laughing. She said, yeah, I’m a control freak. I said, no you’re not. You just want to be included.
Nathan Simmonds:
Which completely blew her mind. And you know, it blew mine as I was saying it. How many people do you hear in your business saying, I’m a control freak and I want this and I wanna do that. It’s because they don’t feel like they’re involved in the full situation. The moment you feel involved in the situation, you actually try and control it less. And the more you are trying to constrict it and keep hold of it, the less it actually happens. ’cause you can’t let it go to grow to do what it needs to do.
Nathan Simmonds:
And the moment you kind of, you are involved with it, you’ll actually be there to nurture and flourish that situation. So as a leader, if you, if you are the leader and you are the head of the business, maybe you wanna do a little bit of reflection, do some meditation, um, take time on your own. I’ve got some, um, I’ve got a new deck of cards, actually we haven’t even got this published yet. It’s the leadership deck. It’s gonna be phenomenally powerful. Um, that will help you to do this on your own and also to reflect on your own skill sets.
Nathan Simmonds:
Hope this is helpful. Coaching questions. Couple of links. One, we’ve got tomorrow’s session. If you haven’t booked onto tomorrow’s session, the first thing you need to do is get booked onto for tomorrow’s session. We’re gonna be looking at the options over here and things we can do to start making this happen. Also, the coaching deck. We’ve got the coaching decks available. It is, it’s, it’s five pound for the, the coaching deck is 80 questions to help you get the best from yourself and the best from the people around you.
Nathan Simmonds:
And finally, the virtual classrooms. Right now we are holding virtual classrooms. We are doing online training, people preparing you for your return to work. Fingers crossed it happens. If it doesn’t, then we will continue to do these sessions and we will have the virtual classrooms only to help you to be the best possible version of yourself and prepare you in this environment, the, the homework and in the return to work in the best possible way with leadership skills and soft skills that will help you deliver results.
Nathan Simmonds:
Thank you very much for the day. On a scale of one to 10, one being not at all, 10 being absolutely, how useful was today for you? Keen to hear 8, 8, 8 anymore for anymore nine with an explanation. Thank you Julie. Love it. Thank you 10. Amazing, appreciated nine so much to take. Absolutely. I said at the beginning you had keepers.
Nathan Simmonds:
I would love to know in the feedback we’re gonna send out the email, it still counts with today, if you would like to take up some of my time, 15 to 20 minutes of coaching, I’m gonna give this to you as a gift only for the live people, not the replay. 15 to 20 minutes of my time to you as a gift for and with co for coaching in exchange for a testimonial. I would love to hear your thoughts. I would love to know what you think about these sessions, how you recommend them to other people.
Nathan Simmonds:
And I will exchange the testimonial for, um, for 15 to 20 minutes of, of, of coaching for you, if that would be of beneficial. I would love to speak to some of you. Please take us up on this offer. We’ll send the email out as a reminder from, um, with the content that they, with the feedback in there. Respond to that email, let us know and I will, we’ll speak together directly and we’ll get that time plugged in at the time that works for you and for me and I would truly love to have that conversation. Thank you very much for today and I look forward to speaking to you tomorrow. Thanks a lot. Speak to.
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