Attitude LP

Continuity between coaching sessions is important for success. The learning project ties sessions together. When coaching someone with attitude issues, use positive language. Starting and ending sessions with a learning project is effective. A story is shared about a salesperson who improved by performing random acts of kindness. Building goodwill around him improved his sales ability. The key is to perform a random act of kindness every week and focus on positive interactions. The salesperson is still with the company and now coaches others. Now, as you're going through the other audio files and using these tools, the one thing that we will constantly stress is continuity between sessions. See, when we have a coaching session, the session should never sit on its own. When you're coaching someone who needs to improve their attitude, the learning project becomes huge. It seems trite. It seems minuscule. It is not. The learning project ties your coaching sessions together for continuity and consistency. So for example, if I'm coaching someone like Jill, and she is really struggling to be positive. Now, I won't use the word attitude in my style of coaching. I'll use things like insert yourself as a positive teammate. Insert yourself to influence others positively. Attitude sometimes puts people back in their heels and it makes them feel like they're in trouble, even though it's probably an attitude-based issue. The other thing that you can do is to end and start your coaching sessions with a learning project. So Jill, next week, I want you to come in. Every time we get together, I want to kick off with one or two specific things you did to positively invest in your teammates or to positively perform a random act of kindness for somebody else. It works. Let me give you a quick story. We had a client over 20-some years ago. We had a person in sales, 71% of goal. I share this story all the time and very negative, very, very negative. Every week, we had him do a random act of kindness for somebody else. Somebody said, that has nothing to do with sales. See, we tend to coach tactically too much. When you have a positive attitude, the tactical stuff becomes much easier. Every single week, he had to perform a random act of kindness. So about 60 days into the coaching relationship, his boss called me and said, I'm really angry at your coaching. I said, why? He said, it has nothing to do with sales. I said, no, it doesn't. Let me explain my strategy. The strategy was to build up goodwill around him where people wanted to help him. I said, well, what are you looking at? He said, well, he's serving pizza to everybody in the cubicle area. And I said, what are you looking at? He said, well, he's sitting there laughing and smiling, and as he was about to say the word smiling, he stopped. He said, oh, I get it. I said, yeah. I said, when was the last time you saw him engage with his teammates? The more we can build up around him, guess what's going to happen? He's going to feel better about improving his sales ability. That year, he went from 71% to 119% of goal. That's what happened at the organization. Everybody wanted coaching. The key to that relationship is every week, I said, you have to perform a random act of kindness. It could be dropping off a soda. It could be taking a phone call for someone. It can be anything you want it to be. And I want you to be able to illustrate the person's facial expression when you did the random act of kindness, which fueled his brain to do what? Become aware of positivity. Over 20 years later, he's still at that company. He's coaching people.