[Music] hi Shannon Waller here with Dan Sullivan and welcome to inside strategic coach today what we're going to talk about is one of our core thinking processes to help transform any situation and Dan The Experience Transformer is one of my very very favorite processes to go through because for me it means I can learn from anything so let's just Define what the experience Transformer is so that people can kind of get on board and use it for themselves yeah well I've kind of thought this way all my life from childhood I always really really like to take a look at my experiences that I had and actually see if I could learn from good things that happen and bad things to happen from me and it just seemed to me that there was like an unlimited amount of raw material just in your own experience but especially your emotional response to experience in other words if it was a bad situation you had an intense negative emotion if it was a real exciting thing that happened a really good thing that happened then you had sort of intense positive emotion and it took me a long time to get a handle on this until I had an incident in London it was one of our very first business trips to London I had a book that I was writing and not backed up by the way I was just writing on it and when we were out of the room our hotel room was broken into and the laptop was stolen it was a late model Mac and this was in the late 1990s 1998 exactly I had one week to finish the book and get it back to my team in Toronto and the entire manuscript was gone plus the computer so this happened late in the evening after we had flown all night to get to London the the night before and so we were very tired I'd had a presentation that day we had been out that night with London clients so Babs came back and she was just dead and there was just the shock that your hotel door had been shattered and the hotel management didn't respond real well to this so I was just sitting there and I was just Rock Bottom said what am I going to do you know I mean it's all lost and if there's one thing that I dread doing it's ever repeating something so trying to rewrite what you had written down and I was sitting there and I was going through just how bad it was and then all of a sudden the thought occurred to me and I said yes but on the other hand you weren't real happy with the book as it was developing you were getting it done because you committed to getting it done and actually if you think about this correctly you'll actually have a chance to write a much better book an entirely new book and wouldn't it be a neat thing for from start to finish you could pull off a new book in 6 days it was actually 6 days time and fortunately I had one of my top tech people the top Tech person was with me in London it was sort of a treat to have him over and he had the exactly the same computer with the authoring software that we use and through work with him in a matter of about 3 or 4 hours were able to create the framework for an entirely new book where the text was going to be how many chapters there were going to be where the visuals would be and then the advantage was is that we were 5 hours ahead of Toronto so I could get up at 9:00 in London and work for 5 hours before it was 9:00 in Toronto and I said GE I'm getting like a it's not six days it's like a day and a half every day so it's actually nine days to do it and sure enough 6 days later I had a much better book it was completely done he went back back on the day of the deadline took the file with him and I did it it was a real terrific experience and it taught me that the thing that you think is the most negative thing can turn into a breakthrough if you're willing just to think it through from the standpoint of what really worked about this situation so in a negative situation yeah it was really negative it feels negative you have intense negative emotion but actually what was really good about this situation and it's that almost like a muscle that you develop that in the bad you can see good it's a very transformative energy that gets created and then you actually do say what went wrong with it I mean you don't ignore what went wrong with it but you don't get to the bad stuff until you get to the good stuff and then you say I'll do this and this and this and this and I was just propelled forward I was on a huge High during those six days of work time in London and I always remembered that so ever since then when I have this kind of setback in a very short period of time afterwards I will have come to grips with it gone into the negative experience actually identified four or five really positive things about it and then the negative things don't feel so badly when you realize that there were good things and then immediately you say well not necessarily going to exactly repeat this experience in the future but in any situation like this this is how I'm going to approach it I've gotten very very good at it actually this was almost 20 years since I had that experience so anytime something bad happens I'm usually through the bad part of it in about a minute or five minutes and then I'm immediately starting to take it apart putting it back together again and coming up with the Breakthrough and it's a real breakthrough because you have an unusually intense amount of powerful energy when it's negative because you get blindsided I mean these are usually situations where you get blindsided but the same thing can happen with a very very positive experience you know you have a big win and the danger of a big win is that you're flooded with positive energy it might have been great but you overlook that there were maybe some things about it that weren't really all that good you're just being overwhelmed because maybe it's a big money Victory or it's a big Prestige victory or anything else and what the danger is there is that you'll think that it's automatic in the future that this will happen but within the experience you say yeah it's great but this could be improved done this could be improved done this could be improved done this could be improved on and then when you look at what really happened you're more even about the good things you say yeah but if I try to repeat this situation it's the problem with winning experiences that you try to repeat them and not only that you expect them and there could have been circumstances that where you just locked out yeah it was skill on your part but it was luck and I get the same kind of breakthrough out of a positive experience well I love that the experience Transformer can be used for both positive and negative and in fact in the early days we used to call it the negativity Transformer until we realized that we're really useful to take a look at our wins our positive experiences and also learn from them the other thing I like Dan is that it works brilliant for work situations and teamwork situations I've also used it at home and I've used it to improve our vacations different events that we've done together as a family and it's very useful to be able to capture amongst more than one person really what was the situation and to do it without a lot of spin a lot of drama just just what were the facts and then what about that worked list those down so the person who isn't happy kind of recognize it wasn't all terrible and then what about it wasn't great what could have been better and then get to strategizing about how to make sure it happens for the better next time and it's such a useful conversation to have with yourself or with other people I would say it's actually my number one learning tool yeah and I call it you know I nicknamed it right after we put this into a formal process inside strategic coach which was shortly after my London experience and I called it the greatest teacher I said you'll never have a great teacher than the situation shortly after a very emotional experience very emotional negative emotion very emotional positive experience there's a unusual amount of emotional energy that you have available for you to make breakthrough kind of decisions breakthrough Communications breakthrough actions and that's not available to you if you're just going along and life is normal it's these unusual experiences and therefore they can be capitalized the weird thing is that when it's a positive experience people don't want to do it because they don't feel there's anything that they need to learn from the experience you know I mean we've got this handled this is just the way it's going to be from now on which then actually sets them up to get hammered by a really bad experience the other thing is that when someone has a negative experience it's 100% in their mind there just nothing good about this situation and I don't even want to think about it and yet when you go into a negative experience that transformed a significant amount of My Success my ability to be successful in the Years afterward just that incident of getting the hotel door kicked in my computer I really like the computer and the manuscript was gone yeah it wasn't such a great manuscript but it would have been finished it was kind of funny because the team back home had been been working on the other manuscript and they were feeling some of the reservations but when they got the new one back and they said God this is so much better they weren't telling me you know no one was telling me about it and I've had lots of situations I mean I just had one very very recently where a book got out and got printed but part of the cover was missing we had missed it on the inspection and a crucial part of later in the book was Ron and it hadn't gotten picked up and I just sat down and I said well we did it really fast so first of all the rest of the book is really great and I wrote down you know the text is fantastic and everything I wrote down about five good things but I said you know we were kind of rushed on this and what it tells us we don't have a good enough quality control check off system and I went over it and there were two individuals who were just really really almost heartbroken by what had happened I say you know this learning experience we're going to create a lot of books in the future this will never happen again because what you're experiencing now is very intensely negative and so what we're going to do is we're going to improve our check off process and this will never happen again and by the way we have to reprint the whole book and we're going to shred 7500 copies and I said that's just a price of tuition just price of tuition so what I try to do is stay away from any blaming of an individual I mean I wasn't angry at the thieves or anything like that because there's nothing you can do in case of the London situation and here it was just something that happened really really quickly a lot of pressure deadline pressure and I said forget it let's just learn the maximum amount from this situation and let's get on with a much Superior method the next time we come through here and what strikes me Dan is that you know in terms of why this is so important there's so much Rich opportunity in our experience but if we don't learn from it expression is we're destined to repeat it and we end up in the past littered with experiences that we don't want to go back and revisit because they're too emotionally challenging we don't have a way to handle it positive wins and we actually don't know why we were successful so there's a really strategic reason to go back and and look at those experiences could be yesterday it could be longer ago to make sure that we're always learning we all experience in our personal life we experience them in our organizational life where it involves other people and we experience it you know in big Society ways I mean there's big events economic events political events you know natural disaster events that happen in breakdowns of major systems and everything like that and I often feel that there's either an arrogant way of acting when things are really positive or there's sort of a knee-jerk way blaming way of responding when it's negative you realize that there are these crucial situations where major lessons could have been learned on a society-wide basis and very frequently it doesn't happen great leaders the job is if somebody's a really great leader is regardless of what happens on the large stage whether it's private sector whether it's public sector I think the job of the leader is to stop the thinking process and say okay bad things happen good things happen let's list the bad things let's list the good things and then for everybody's Who's involved let's just say okay well this kind of thing's going to happen in the future so how do we show that we've jumped in our awareness that we've jumped in our management we've jumped in our execution of this so it doesn't happen again mhm and I think for the people under that leadership it's incredibly transformational you know with your team they were so scared and they were really disappointed in what had happened and it turns out there were actually a few projects on the go so things got overlooked and their awareness increased but the fact that they weren't going to be punished they weren't going to be negated in some way was incredibly instructional and useful for them like it's it's wonderful working with someone who is approaching situations from a learning perspective as opposed to a blaming perspective and I also really love your point about being arrogant because when things work well for a long time or you kind of get used to that arrogance can happen complacency can happen and you can fall asleep and that can set you up for a slam yeah so I think there's an attentiveness here to experience that's really important to pay attention and to always be learning from what's going on and not take any of it for granted positive or negative Yeah the more and more I look at my lifetime I realize that I've actually been quite good at this kind of in a automatic way or unconscious way for quite a long time but having a situation where I really analyzed it and I was able to diagram it and turn it into a formal thinking process really started a whole new stage of my personal growth and my growth within a organization that was the big thing your experience when you're having intense emotions is the greatest teacher that you can possibly have you have to really learn how to channel these situations and you'll always come up with unique breakthroughs regardless of whether it was a negative or a positive experience and I like that of getting maximum amount of value out of Fairly short experiences I love it seems like I'm ahead of the game well and you're always learning and you're always making things better so just as we close off how can people apply this to their own experience to their own lives well I find it's useful to write when you have something like that so you can do it with a sheet of paper and there's just three boxes that you would need on top of one box you just say what worked and the other one is what needs to improve don't say what didn't work but what needs to improve and then you say strategies for the future so if it's a negative experience you write down what worked what was good about it because in a negative experience that's the hardest box to fill in because you're not feeling that anything worked and you if you spend maybe 5 minutes just going through and writing down everything that worked you'll find that you'll run out of room because once you open the floodgates on this you begin to appreciate there's all sorts of things that really work then you go to the box it says things that need to be improved and you write those down and you you'll notice the bite you know the negative sting of the experience has gone you're just listing things as if they're raw materials you know they're like building blacks and you got that and then you come down below and say okay let's say I'm in this type of situation sometime in the future how would I approach it now and you'll come up with five or six things and that won't impact just one particular type of situation it'll make you alert to all situations it'll be specific situation but General learning so you get smarter all over when you do this so this is something you can apply to any experience maybe when you're feeling stuck about something certainly if you're feeling disappoint frustrated with yourself or frustrated with other people that's a great time to jot these things down and just even starting by saying what happened you've always coached Dan to keep it in as few lines as possible in small boxes just State the facts ma'am just the facts so you're not going into the whole like drama of it so I think in terms of how to do it it's really just sit down with yourself or others and go through as you said write it down and I really like doing it as a team you know we do it after we do particular workshops we do after our coup's connection workshop and we're always able to improve as a result of that and I find when you're always keeping open the possibilities and what you can learn and what you can do better next time it creates a really positive momentum for the for the future and I think you're also never bogged down by your past yeah there's a general I would say in the news media in the dramatic entertainment industry there's a fault finding mentality there's a blame mentality there's a very very negatively critical mindset my feeling is that there's no learning that comes out of any of this and the reason is because it's trying to put yourself in a position where you're completely blameless and innocent but you get to criticize other people and blame other people and I said you know not very useful it's not a good way to move forward life is complicated every individual is kind of doing their their own thing there's a lot of collisions there's a lot of breakdowns you don't learn anything if you're finding fault blaming resenting have a grievance there's no learning in any of those approaches you're kind of on the winning team or the learning team but never on the blaming team no well if you're on the whing team you're on the losing team great D well thank you I'm excited that we talked about this today because to my mind that attitude of looking at every situation in your life is a possibility of something that being a greatest of being a greatest teacher and that you can always get better as a result creates incredible momentum and positivity really in people's lives so thank you good