[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan this is something I've been wanting to ask you about for a while because I've heard you say it numerous times over the years I'm just going to quote you for a second you say I never deprive someone of the opportunity to learn from their experience I don't rescue people and I think that's such a fascinating perspective and I've seen it in action but just tell me more about where that comes from and why well I think that every human being you know and I'm going just on 70 years of talking to people about their experiences that everybody has a full spectrum of experiences from really joyful experiences to really painful experiences okay from my standpoint all those experiences are completely valuable and none of them is more important important than all the other experiences so what you want to do is if you want to know if someone is going to really learn the value of winning then you have to allow them to have the full experience of losing okay if you want to have them have the feeling of succeeding then you have to allow them to have the experience of failing and not try to get in the way or protect them from having that experience okay first of all it's based from my standpoint on a total confidence and respect that anyone dealing with any kind of experience if they're given encouragement and support from the outside to deal with the experience head on and say what was good about that that I can use in the future and what was bad about it that I have to be careful to avoid in the future that they get a complete lesson that's a lifetime lesson and that to rescue them in any way of not having to deal with the difficulty of the experience to in any way try to Shield them from the experience is actually disenabling them you're making them less capable in the future and I think that's the biggest crime that you can commit against any human being is actually to make them less capable in the future Dan I love what you said it really comes out of confidence and respect in people's ability to come to grips with their experience yeah you know so it's not a not caring thing or you know anything like that it really does come from your absolute conviction and people's capability because you do provide that encouragement and support you're just not going to rescue them and that if we're in the game of helping people become more capable depriving them of the harder painful experiences is not the best way to do that mhm I just love this this is so interesting and for anyone who's a parent there's probably a few like moments that you're having listening to this so I find that interesting so you've actually put this into place with the team right can you think of any examples where this was true yeah I mean uh you know and this one is written up in the for C's book and it's with Kathy Davis and Kathy Davis someone asked her if she would contribute to a conference which was a virtual conference by making a video that would be done beforehand and then it would be used in the conference so it was a conference of videos but all the videos had been prepared before the actual time of the conference and she had without thinking I guess afterward she would say this think too much she had agreed to it kind of okay and then I had to do one so I did did my video you know and the deadline for doing the video was closing in on her and she said you know I I've never done a video before and I don't know if I can do a video and I said yeah but you will you will do the video you know because you said you were going to do the video so of course you're going to do the video they're depending on you to do the video and if they ask me I say yes she's going to do the video so there's a lot of forces supporting you to do the video deadline your obligation my guarantee that you would do the video to them your ongoing reputation as a person there's a lot of forces you know I didn't say this like I'm saying it to you right now but that because and she went down and it was horrible you know she had a horrible experience you know suddenly she couldn't breathe and everything else I don't know if there was a night in between I think she may have made several attempts because the studio is right in our premises and she said I I can't do that I said but you will do it you will do it and because you're going to go through this right now as painful as it is as uncomfortable as it is you're going to come out the other side and in the future you won't have this difficulty but if you don't go through with it any further attempt in the future will be 10 times as hard as you're experiencing it right now so you have a choice of an easier future experience or a 10 times more difficult experience that's that's your choice and it's all going to be decided in the next 24 hours and she did it and it was good and now she knocks him off I mean if she has to go in the studio right now or does them on Zoom she can do it and she can do three or four of them and she has no problem she has has a life capability so I didn't want to rescue her and prevent her from having a lifetime capability right yeah there are quite a few explodes involved I think in the very first recording but now she does she Nails them and it was a profound experience for her so that's a great example I remember other events with you know shipping boxes and stuff not arriving when it was supposed to and what's interesting is you let the team figure it out which is very I think different for a lot of entrepreneurs or Business Leaders who are so tempted to jump in and fix it or and then get mad at their team and do all the things but your team is incredibly capable because you don't prevent them the opportunities to learn from their experiences well I think the other thing there's another observation after you know let's just use the company for 32 years we've had a company we're remarkably the same in the 32nd year as we were at the very very beginning we've changed in scope we've changed in Impact we've changed but the actual activity that we do inside strategic coach is 80% the same activity we did in the first month that we were in business in 1989 I mean we're still exactly in the same business doing it for exactly the same kind of person and using exactly the same method but it's developed all sorts of extra itions and we've surrounded it with phenomenal teamwork and you know and our reach in the world is great but it's more or less the same activity and what I've discovered is that all breakdowns when you have a failure is 95% a teamwork problem not an individual problem it's not the fault of one individual it's that the level of teamwork you had to handle that situation wasn't up to a new surprise or or a new situation it hadn't encountered and therefore to actually Remedy this in the future to actually transform it in the future you've got to allow people to have the full experience so that afterwards they can get together with no sense of personal defending themselves they don't have to defend themselves I said this is a teamwork problem the way we arranged the structure and the process for the team to do this successfully it wasn't up to this price we got caught in a way that we had never seen it before so everybody's got to have their full 100% experience and being part of this experience so afterwards you can get together and you'll all have valuable stuff to know how to improve this the next time and there's something very human and Humane about that process of recognizing that it's a teamwork system problem not an individual and one of the core principles of coach is having a no defense budget you want people playing offense not defense and this is where a lot of that comes from I mean we stack the odds in our favor let's be clear because we really want to have people who are have unique abilities in each of those roles but sometimes our systems are not up to what it needs to be and so we learn quickly using the experienced Transformer the tool we talked about in the last podcast but then also unique method to help us really organize the flow of unique ability teamwork you've also created tools that really help people organize the teamwork so that it can happen effectively and people can get a lot smarter really quickly because they have the full value of their experience yeah again it's kind of being in the present I mean I think that's a crucial skill on an individual basis but then when you're in a team situation you don't want to get between the team's future capability you know you don't want to deprive the team of a negative experience and as long as everybody in the team feels that nobody's going to have to bear the brunt you know the negative brunt or judgment about what happened that it just happened to the team and you want the team to have full access to their experience of the negativity so they can transform it into a positive and what's interesting about this process Dan because we do have a review process you know winning situations and learning ones is that if someone did drop the all on their own part because we're not looking to blame someone people go you know what I should have checked this and I didn't or people actually take ownership of where they weren't in 100% you know productivity mode or whatever it was you know they actually take responsibility for like oh I could have foreseen that next time I'll know better but people actually you know take ownership of their part of it which is kind of cool because most people you think would try to avoid it yeah it also has the great benefit of working yes it does and I've watched the Alternatives and they don't work so I mean I've never seen a situation where individuals have to fear and defend themselves I've never seen it work I mean if it worked I might try it out but it just it just never never works you know so yeah it's the antithesis of creativity right and coming up with new Solutions Dan just to wrap up this conversation can you talk about the distinction of being on the winning team or on the learning team because I think it fits right in here yeah one of the things I find is when you're dealing with new things in the world and you know the last year and a half is a great example of a really big new thing in the world I mean it's going to take five or 10 years in the world for there to be a collective understanding of how you deal with a pandemic that's Global there's a billion working parts of how Global Society works that's been negatively impacted or disrupted by what we've just been through I think it's just going to take a long time for the learning to become 10 times more useful than the knowledge that existed before okay so long long story short so what I've adopted is that if I'm growing and if I'm ambitious and if I'm creative then I have to accept that I'm always going to be running into situations that I wasn't prepared for I didn't see it coming I didn't prepare for it and therefore the only way I can avoid that is by not being ambitious and not be growing okay but if I'm going to be growing I'm going to be creative and I'm going to be ambitious then I have to accept that a reality you know small medium siiz and big I'm going to be constantly confronted with situations that I wasn't prepared for before they happened therefore I can't constantly be talking about how I'm failing or how I'm losing right okay I've got to eliminate that as a matter of judgment I can't have that as a judgment that when I wasn't prepared it was a failure or because I wasn't prepared and didn't deal with it that that's a loss so my world has been reduced just to two things I'm either winning I really handle it well or I found out how unprepared I was and I just learned an incredible amount so that next time anything similar that happens like this I'll be a winner so in my life there's only two things there's only winning and learning okay and you can't be winning all the time unless you're learning part of the time right okay because there's no growth I mean just winning and just doing what you did before isn't very very interesting you know you want to be winning continually in new and better and different ways and therefore you have to be learning okay the only losing is where you put yourself in a situation where there's no winning and there's no learning and you're losing okay and my feeling is trying to rescue people prevents them from being either in winning or learning brilliant brilliant summary you also just explained to me when I've been watching some YouTube videos on a new capability and people are like 10 mistakes I made when I started doing something and I just get annoyed watching them because I'm like you just started it why are you beating yourself up and saying it was a failure when it was brand new like tell me what you've learned I'm interested in that it's a bit of a weird mindset that's out in the world right now so you know being on the winning team and the learning team and this is such a phenomenal mindset for a companies so many people wnab be wannabe Shakespeare's you know I call them wannabe Shakespeare's well Shakespeare was the great genius that he could dramatize anything yes and we're surrounded in the world about people who can dramatize things you know but they don't have Shakespeare's skills you know they don't have Shakespeare's genius okay but they're wannabe dramatists they can take almost any part of their life and dramatize it I'm choosy about the drama that I yeah I love yeah so many drama queens and kings out there want to be sh yeah they're dramatist you know yeah the commute in today is a source of drama then you want to say get a life if everything's drama nothing's drama you know great point I don't value any attempt in my life of other people to rescue me I don't consider any of it valuable my feeling is if that any attempt on my part to rescue other people is going to be of no value whatsoever too so you know yeah you give what you want to get which is really cool and Dan I just think this is such a powerful mindset for teams as we've been talking about to really know that they're either winning or they're learning and both are really important to continue growing and that great leadership from leaders or the owner is to let people learn from their own experience and trust that they have the confidence and capability and support to do that so that's a very powerful takeaway thank you so much again so fun talking to you thank you chairman