Tag Archives: Coaching

The Economics of Personal Development

Yesterday, I argued that premium-priced information marketing products didn’t provide any value over what’s freely available or what’s available for the price of a standard book or audiobook.

The only reasons to pay a premium price are to give back to the producer if they already provided an immense amount of value for free or to increase one’s engagement to the material due to the investment.

Then, why do information marketers provide premium-priced products? The obvious answer is to make money, but isn’t it better to publish a book or an audiobook, to reach more people, and make the same amount of money?

That seems to be a legitimate argument, and it might be true in some cases. But in most cases, the reach of these information marketers are limited.

They have to extract as much money as possible from their limited reach to make a living. First, not everybody in their already limited reach would purchase a product from them. Selling is already a tough business. If you get into that business once, you might as well ask a premium price.

For a customer, there’s a huge difference between getting a product for free and buying it for 99 cents. Once that chasm is crossed, the product might as well be a premium price product.

As irrational as this sounds, this is the economics of personal development, and you can read more about this in the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson.

Coaching, Seminars, and Workshops

There’s another side of the personal development business. This is what I like to call services because unlike products, services involve interaction with the producer.

Coaching and workshops provide some value on top of the products. So, the amounts charged for these services can be justified.

The value in coaching and workshops is the interaction between the coach or the trainer and the coachee or trainee.

When I read a self-help question in Quora, it’s almost impossible for me to answer it accurately. I need to ask questions to that person to clarify their problem.

Otherwise, I’ll make an assumption about the problem of the person, and give a completely irrelevant answer. The personal interaction in coaching sessions and workshops facilitate this clarification process and personalization of the advice provided.

There’s a pitfall to coaching or workshops though. Most of the time, a single coaching session won’t make much of a difference in your life. Most coaching sessions are sold in packages of ten sessions. I’m pretty confident that a package of ten sessions won’t make any difference either.

After ten sessions, you’re barely scratching the surface. You and your coach are getting to know each other. The real results are achieved after 12 to 18 months of coaching.

So, if you see someone offering a premium-priced coaching session, don’t bet your last thousand dollars on a single coaching session with the hope of it changing your life.

Coaching is a process that requires time between sessions to apply the teachings in life and to do the exercises and then repeat the same process week after week for a year or two.

What Coaching Is and Isn’t

Before we start today’s post, answer the following question.

What does coaching mean to you?

In the past, I answered that question as telling someone what to do. That’s what I learned from the popular culture. Sports coaches tell you what to do and how to do it. Sure, a life or business coach would do the same.

A few years ago, I took a coaching course, and I realized that my definition of coaching wasn’t correct. Coaching isn’t telling people what to do and how to do it, in fact, something entirely different. It is asking people questions to make them find out what to do and how to do it.

The Socratic Method

The Q&A method of coaching has deep roots. It is based on the Socratic Method. This method is more effective than preaching. Preaching creates resistance in the receiving end.

When you use the Q&A method, the coachee finds their own solutions to their problems. This has advantages on multiple levels.

First, the coachee is less resistant to the solutions found in the coaching session because they came up with those solutions. Those solutions weren’t dictated to them.

Second, the Q&A method bypasses the ego of the coachee. If your definition of a coach is someone who preaches you, you might think that a coach-coachee relationship puts you in a lower position as a coachee.

If the Q&A method is used, there’s no hierarchical relationship between the coach and the coachee. It’s a relationship of equals. Two individuals are discussing a matter to find the truth, which is the most important life skill.

Overcoming Resistance to Coaching

When there’s no hierarchy in the relationship between the coach and coachee, it’s much easier for a prospective coachee to hire someone as a coach. This is especially true for accomplished individuals.

When you are already successful and see coaching as someone better than you teaching you, than you’ll have a hard time getting into such a relationship, because of two reasons.

You might think that people more successful than you won’t work as coaches, and you might not want to be preached by someone who isn’t more successful than you. If that’s your perception of coaching, you’ll be missing out on some opportunities.

A Coach Is Genuinely Interested

In a proper coaching session, the coach is genuinely interested in the problem of the coachee. The coach asks questions to clarify the events and the way the coachee perceives and approaches the problem at hand.

During a coaching session, two things can happen. First, the coachee can realize how they contribute to the problem at hand, and decide to stop doing that. When someone has a persistent problem in their lives, most of the time, they are doing something to contribute to the problem.

Second, the coach can ask a question that would stimulate a solution in coachee’s mind. I remember a coaching session where I wanted to brainstorm about how to find customers. My coach asked me which message I wanted to convey to my prospects. That question made me look at the problem at hand from another angle, and focus on my message instead of obsessing about customers.

The Q&A method is not only relevant to the professional coach-coachee relationship. It’s helpful in various contexts, such as boss-subordinate, parent-child, between friends and romantic partners.

Which friend would you like to have? The one who starts preaching to you once you start talking to them about a problem? Or the one who listens to you and asks you questions to process the problem at hand?

Summary

Unlike the common impression, coaching isn’t about preaching people what to do and how to do it. It’s about asking questions to someone to help them find their own solutions.

The Q&A method of coaching is more effective at motivating people because the solutions aren’t dictated to them but reached by themselves.

Developing good questioning and listening skills is not only beneficial when working as a professional coach, but also in boss-subordinate, parent-child, friendship, and romantic relationships.

A Self-Coaching Template to Work on Your Challenges

We all have challenges in our lives. Some of our problems are small. Some of them are big. In either case, there are some actions that we can take to tackle them.

Today, I’m going to share a self-coaching template that you can use to find solutions to your challenges. Completing this template should take around one hour.

If finding a solution to your challenge takes much longer than an hour, I recommend that you divide your challenge into smaller problems. Our goal here is to find a solution, not to solve the problem altogether.

Find a solution. Apply it for a week. And evaluate the results. If the results don’t satisfy you, do the exercise again. If the problem is solved, move on to your next challenge.

The Template

The self-coaching template consists of four steps. Each step includes a principal question and auxiliary questions.

  • What’s the problem?
  • What would be the ideal situation?
  • What keeps you from creating the ideal situation?
  • What’s the solution?

Asking the rights questions is the first step of success. This is precisely what we are doing here.

The first three steps are about analyzing your situation. Don’t think about solutions in these steps.

Our minds don’t like uncertainty. We tend to jump to conclusions and come up with quick hacks to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty.

Stay with the discomfort of your situation. Write down your current situation accurately, but don’t go into unnecessary details.

We’ll spend most of our time on analyzing the problem. Once we find the root cause of the problem, the solution will be evident.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Albert Einstein

What’s the problem?

  • Formulate the problem.
  • What’s the current situation?
  • Don’t jump to conclusions.
  • Don’t think about solutions.

What’s the ideal situation?

  • Don’t think about limitations.
  • Imagine you have all the resources you need. Time, money, skills, mentorship, assistance, and so on.
  • What would be the ultimate you could create?

What keeps you from creating the ideal situation?

What’s the solution?

  • Which steps can you take in your current situation?

An Example from My Own Experience

What’s the problem?

  • I didn’t make sufficient progress on my blog in my first six months.
  • My stats don’t satisfy me.
  • I can’t produce content effortlessly.

What’s the ideal situation?

  • My products are in the market. They provide me with a decent income.
  • I have a robust daily schedule to work on new products, to write blog posts, and to interact with my readers.
  • My schedule also includes some downtime to enjoy my life.
  • I produce content effortlessly.

What keeps me from creating my ideal situation?

Let’s go over each bullet point and analyze it. In this example, I won’t do all the five why’s to keep the length of the post reasonable.

Why don’t I have any premium products?

I didn’t create any premium products, because I have a small audience.

Why do I have a small audience?

I was inconsistent with the topics I wrote about. I wrote posts about personal development, writing, marketing, entrepreneurship, management, investing, and cryptocurrencies.

Every time I switched between topics, I lost a portion of my audience. I also lost momentum on each subject. Even though I blogged for six months, the end effect was the same as blogging for two months on each topic.

A Mistake or a Lesson?

Blogging on different topics in my first six months wasn’t a big mistake. I learned some valuable lessons.

  • I’m inspired to write about personal development and life lessons.
  • I write effortlessly on writing, blogging, and marketing.
  • I won’t write about investing anymore, because I have a simple investing strategy.
  • I won’t write on cryptocurrencies, because I don’t get along with that community.
  • Writing on management doesn’t inspire me.

I also experimented with other platforms such as Steemit, which didn’t contribute anything to my audience.

What’s the solution?

Even though writing on personal development is hard, I’m going to stick with that topic. That topic inspires me the most and provides the most value to my readers.

Thinking and writing about personal development provide the most value to me as well.

If I mention other topics in my posts, it will be in the context of personal development. They will be used as examples only. I won’t go into the details that would only interest the hardcore followers of that topic.

Why don’t I produce content effortlessly?

I’m not sufficiently focused on personal development. I distract myself with news and YouTube throughout the day.

Even though I don’t distract myself all the time, I could invest that time to consume quality content. I can also spend that time doing nothing so that I can recuperate my mind and have more mental clarity.

Even if I distract myself for five minutes a day, that’s too much. Those five minutes break a process in my mind when my mind is processing an idea in the background.

Distractions also tend to propagate themselves throughout the day. Sometimes, I watch a three-minute funny clip. Then, that clip keeps playing in my mind for a few days. It’s amusing, but at the same time distracting.

I’m not going to analyze the daily schedule problem, because it has the same reasons as I explained in this problem.

What’s the solution?

Reading news doesn’t add any value to my daily routine. I choose to let go of that habit altogether.

I’m going to clean my YouTube feed. I’m going to keep only personal development related videos on my watch later list and only watch from that list.

Conclusion

When we face challenges in our lives, we either avoid them, complain about them, or jump to conclusions or quick hacks to circumvent them. None of those strategies provide a definite solution to our challenges.

We need to go deeper into the reasons that create our problems. To do that we need to analyze our current and ideal situation first. Once that analysis is complete, the solutions are either obvious or easy to find.

You can use the four-step template in this post do analyze your challenges, find their root causes, and come up with your own solutions.

This Is the Only Way to Solve Problems

Most of us do it wrong.

The problem I’m about to explain happens everywhere in our lives, in our private lives, in our professional lives, in our relationships, in every aspect of our lives. So, please stick with me even if the software development example doesn’t resonate with you.

A computer programmer comes against a nasty bug. They immediately start writing dozens of lines of code to fix the bug. They use the trial and error method and add new code to the program until they cannot reproduce the error.

Another computer programmer comes against the same bug. They go into the code and spend hours to find the root cause of the bug. Once they find the line that caused the bug, they change that line and the bug is solved.

Now, which one is the better approach? Using trial and error, adding and subtracting random lines of code? Or spending hours on finding the root cause of the error and changing a single line to fix it?

Trial and Error

The trial and error approach is the way of the inexperienced programmer. It means that you don’t know what you are doing. In that case, you can gain some insights on how the program works by trial and error.

When you use the trial and error approach and add and remove random lines to the code, you are making the code base unstable, harder to maintain. You are likely introducing more errors than you solve. And most probably, you are only sweeping the errors under the rug.

By sweeping the errors under the rug, you seem to have done a good job in the short term, but in the long term, you are creating greater problems, because those errors will eventually show up and they will be much harder to find and solve.

Finding the Root Cause

Finding the root cause of a problem is the way of the experienced programmer. The experienced programmer knows that without finding the root cause, you are not solving any problem at all. It takes patience, concentration and it’s a very frustrating process sometimes.

You might search for a line that is causing the problem among tens of thousands of lines of code. It’s like searching for the needle in a haystack. But once you find the needle in the haystack, then you know that you have solved a serious problem.

Which surgeon do you prefer to operate on your body? The one that uses the trial and error approach? Or the one that looks for the root cause and only fixes that one?

Your Life Isn’t Any Different.

Most of the time, we are trying to find quick fixes to our problems using the trial and error approach.

  • Quick fixes take longer to implement.
  • They are more expensive at the end.
  • They make our lives unstable.
  • They create more and greater problems down the road.

“The solutions of yesterday are the problems of today.”

Quick fixes are knee jerk reactions to the problems at hand. They don’t solve the problem. They only postpone the problem at best and cause disasters at worst. Why do we use them? Because it’s human nature to react with knee jerk reactions to every perceived problem.

How to Find the Root Cause of a Problem

Finding the root cause of a problem is cheaper, faster, and more effective in the long run.

The majority of people think that quick fixes are quick, cheap, and effective. Nothing can be further from the truth. This is just mental laziness and inexperience manifesting itself. Quick fixes result only in more and greater problems in the long run.

If finding the root cause of a problem is the only way to solve a problem, how do we find the root cause of a problem?

The 5 Whys Technique

The solution is a method called the 5 Whys Technique. You formulate the problem as a why question and look for an answer. Once you find an answer, you formulate the answer as a why question. You repeat these two steps five times. By the fifth why, you have a decent chance of finding the root cause of your problem.

Once you find the root cause or causes, the solution is relatively easy to find. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is easy to implement. Here’s an example.

  • Why do I not perform well at work?
    • Because I can’t concentrate.
  • Why can I not concentrate?
    • Because my partner is texting me all the time.
  • Why does my partner text me all the time.
    • Because I don’t pay much attention to them.
  • Why don’t I pay much attention to my partner?
    • Because I don’t have much time to spend together with them.
  • Why don’t I have much time to spend together with my spouse?
    • Because I’m addicted to online gaming.

In this fictional example, we find the root cause after asking five whys. The solution is simple, quit online gaming. Is it easy to implement? Probably, not.

Pitfalls

Sometimes, you might come up with multiple reasons for a why question. In that case, you have to complete the process for each branch. This way, you might end up with hundreds of reasons.

Sometimes, you might come up with the root cause after the first why. Sometimes, you might have to dig deeper than five whys to find the root cause.

Sometimes, you end up with circular reasons. For example, you can’t sleep well, because you drink too much coffee and you drink too much coffee, because you are sleepy during the day.

Analysis Paralysis

There’s another pitfall with the 5 Whys Technique. Sometimes, you might end up analyzing the problem over and over in order to find the root cause. Or you might branch endlessly, coming up with dozens of answers to each why question. This is just an illusion and it is analysis paralysis.

In reality, you know deep down what the major issue is on each level.  By branching endlessly or going too many levels deeper, you are only avoiding the problem. You are procrastinating and you don’t want to face the reality. Analysis paralysis is your way of coping with the reality of your situation.

The 5 Whys Technique results in finding the root cause fairly quickly. The solution to that root cause is also fairly obvious.

If you can’t find the root cause and see the obvious solution, take a hard look at the reality of the situation that you are in. Face the reality of your situation completely and make the decisions that need to be made.

Which actions are you avoiding? Maybe the solution is way outside of your comfort zone. If that is the case, admit it and work your way towards extending your comfort zone, develop the necessary skill sets, make a plan, and execute your plan.

Conclusion

The 5 Whys Technique exposes multiple problems on multiple levels. By finding the root cause of a problem and solving it, we solve multiple problems on multiple levels. In the example above, performance at work, concentration, relationships issues, and time management issues.

Apply the 5 Whys Technique to a problem that you face right now. Try to find the root cause of the problem and come up with a solution to the root cause. Let me know how the technique worked out for you!

How to Deal with an Employee with a Tech Abuse Problem

In a previous post, I have discussed the effects of the fight or flight response and instant rewards that our gadgets trigger in us. The results are shortening of our attention spans, reduced concentration, and with that, reduction of our cognitive capabilities.

In another post, I have introduced a Pomodoro technique variant that would make your tasks more exciting than the apps and websites on your phone and laptop.

In both posts, I promised that I’ll write about how to deal with the effects of the technology on others, such as your colleagues, customers, family, and friends. In this post, I’ll discuss what can be done about an employee with tech abuse problem.

First of all, addressing the issue directly doesn’t add much value. Telling the employee “Look, you’re abusing tech for private purposes on company time and you should stop that.” won’t make much of a positive impact. Everybody knows that they shouldn’t do that, but they are doing it anyway. Pointing this fact out doesn’t do any good anyway.

Another thing that wouldn’t add much value is to impose company-wide rules about this. If you ban private tech use in your company, just because a single employee is abusing it, you are punishing the rest of the staff, who send a single text message a day about something really important. That way you create a lot of disgruntled employees who would otherwise be OK with their job.

If you create unnecessary friction with your employees, their performance will drop and at the end, you will lose as well. Company-wide rules about private tech use is difficult to enforce anyway, unless you want to install cameras in the toilet and hire someone to monitor those cameras.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether the employee is abusing tech or not. What matters is whether they perform or not. Coming up with dozens of policies only annoys employees. A few basic guiding principles is more than sufficient to manage a group of grown-up people. Of course, ethics is the ultimate principle. Another relevant principle is the 20-70-10 rule of Jack Welch.

The 20-70-10 Rule

The 20-70-10 rule involves rewarding the top 20% of your workforce, coaching the middle 70%, and firing the bottom 10% every year. A consequence of this rule is that you hire and train new employees every year, if you want to maintain or grow the size of your staff.

The reward and punishment principle of the 20-70-10 rule will already motivate your employee to increase their performance. On top of that, you will need to coach them to increase their performance. Coaching doesn’t mean to tell a person what to do and what not to do. It is a conversation between two parties to find out how their performance can be increased.

Asking questions like “What can we do to increase your performance? What can you do to increase your performance? What keeps you from performing?” one by one, and letting them come up with the answers is much better than telling them “we believe you underperform because of your tech abuse.”

Why is that? Because humans have this thing called ego and they want to be autonomous. They want to come up with their own solutions and they want to be in control. That’s the best way to motivate them and to make them perform at higher levels. By letting the employee find their own answers, you are actually achieving a much higher motivation than telling them what to do, which at the end has little to none impact other than causing friction and annoying them.

If your employee still doesn’t get it, you can provide resources about the impact of tech abuse in the personal development program of your company. If this still doesn’t help and they insist in staying in the bottom 10%, you can’t afford to keep that employee in your workforce or at least, in their current position. Keeping the underperformers will not only hurt your business, it will also demotivate the rest of your staff and bring them down too.