What we learn in Toastmasters

One of coaching clients is looking to create some changes in his workplace. In specific, he’s finding he can’t do it all. So I suggested first talk to his people and ask them if they’d like to get more involved in making things happen at work. Once he’s got a buy-in from the group then it’s a pretty simple matter of creating a sign-up list for the jobs that need to be done (and he could even get a volunteer to create and administer the list) and letting the staff volunteer themselves.

Gee doesn’t that remind you of the way some vice presidents of education create their weekly agendas? The best send out an email and ask if anyone has a special request (i.e. I want to speak five times this year or I’m away in Europe all December) before they create the agendas often for the next three-month period.

Who’d ever think you’d learn to run a company by attending a speaking group?

How to succeed in business by really trying

I will be speaking to the HAPPEN group again on Wednesday and I’m really looking forward to it.

HAPPEN here in the Greater Toronto Area is an organization devoted to helping newly freed (read fired, quit, downsized etc.) executives to find new work.

What I offer is an on-the-spot immediate coaching experience using the techniques of solution-focus coaching.

Perhaps the biggest shock of the morning will come when the executives (and there are often as many as 50 or 60 at a meeting) find out I’m (a) not interested in the least about what went wrong in their last job; and (b) I’m not about to provide them with any pat answers and that they are going to have to do the work. (After all, it’s up to them to do the work but they can’t do it alone. Huh?….read on.)

This upsets some. Often newly unemployed are fixated in discovering why they ended up unemployed. There can be a lot of internal “beating up going on” and many “if only if” stories firing off in their heads.

A solution-focus coach will help them realize that looking for answers in what went wrong is both counterproductive to finding new work but also puts undue emphasis on the problems of the past (which is where they should remain).

On the comment sheets that followed my previous presentations at HAPPEN I used to get a criticism about not circulating handouts. Now I get smart and I tell the audience I’m not going to give them a handout but rather a hand up. Still upsets some but the go-getters understand what I am saying to them.

By the way, I do have clients who I work with exclusively via email. If you’re interested in solution-focused coaching send me an email at peter at solutionfocuscoach.com.