Are you easy to help? As a coach, as a trainer, as a speaker, I work with so many different groups of people. And well, one of many versions of you’re either like this or like this. There are people are easy to help and there are people who are hard to help. And I want to suggest if you’re ever bringing in a coach, you’re ever working with a group of people with new ideas, if you’re ever stepping out of your box into another box, into a a a place that’s new to you, you want to be easy to help. And here are the the basic qualities of someone who’s difficult to help. I think what’s in the way is somehow the very idea of getting help is somehow in the way. The idea of getting help and listening to someone else is like saying, “I don’t know.” It feels to them based on some of the comments that I’ve heard, it feels like I’m saying, “I don’t have experience at this.” Learning new things should not fly in the face of your experience. People who have experience tend to realize there’s so much more to learn. And there are ways to integrate your experience into new ideas. And the teams that I find easy to help. They’re willing to listen. They’re willing to try something out. They’re not threatened by the idea that my insight might mean that their insight doesn’t matter. Of course, their insight matters, and my insight matters, too. How can we meld them together to create something new? Now, another reason that that’s so important is your competitors also have experience. And inside of any field picket, you get a bunch of people with experience, they have similar experience. So what happens is you get to an applesto apples equal place with my lots of experience and your lots of experience and his lots of experience and her lots of experience. So somehow it doesn’t differentiate you which is why you want to let someone from the outside come in and provide some guidance. Now those of you who are guides, consultants, coaches, you have to learn how to communicate your respect of their experience and how to pull it in so that what you come up with together is still related to their experience. It’s not like washing them aside and bringing yourself in. It’s melding them together. So that’s partly on us who do coaching. But the part that’s on you, if you want to be easy to help, it’s recognizing that the augmentation of some outsider feedback and input can help differentiate you. Yep, we all have this experience, but guess what? We also have an edge that we’ve gotten by listening to an outside voice. So, it’s a two-way street. We have to work on this together. But the teams who are easy to help win more. I know that because what I’m often brought in to help on are sales pitches. It is the project interview, the orals presentation, the short list interview, whatever you want to call that moment. That’s what I’m often brought in. And I see who wins and who loses. And those who win the most are the teams who are easy to help. And what they do is they embrace outside feedback without letting that somehow be a slam to the experience they bring. So what we get is the best of both worlds and we get a place where their vast experience has been augmented by something new.
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