Executive Coaching Quotes

Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, "I did it before, so I can do it again.

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on. I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise. I have full confidence in myself and my abilities. I can do all things that I commit myself to. No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me. I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily. I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past. I am moving forward daily. Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.

When you are down to nothing, God is up to somethng. It is up to you to reach out to find what God is up to for you.

You can't stop negative thoughts from coming in, but you can make sure they leave as quickly as they enter.

Don’t mistake activity for achievement. To produce results, tasks must be well organized and properly executed; otherwise, it’s no different from children running around the playground—everybody is doing something, but nothing is being done; lots of activity, no achievement.

Coachable people seek out those who speak truth to them, even if it is a painful truth, because it protects them and it makes them a better person and leader.

They own the window, You own the view

Good coaches, however, teach you how to think and arm you with the fundamental tools necessary to execute properly.

The Six Steps to Success: 1) Define Success 2) Devise a Plan 3) Execute and Overcome Adversity 4) Measure Results with Key Metrics 5) Revise the Plan 6) Work Hard

Since the world around us is always changing, businesses that want continuity should be regularly shifting their paradigm.

Do not let your mind kill the fun. दिमाग़ को मौजें रोकने न दो

Nobody overtakes you. Do not let your mind kill the fun.

It is the Lion, not the Deer, that hides in the grass! तुम शेर हो यक़ीनन ख़ौफ़ खाओगे; हम हिरण ख़ौफ़ पीछे छोड़ आए हैं

Nothing in life is simple. You have to keep yourself simple.

Wer mit den Haien schwimmt, der darf nicht bluten. Aber, mein Freund, Du blutest gerade. Und zwar heftig

If you do not have a defined process that moves your people forward so the can achieve greater results, then what is it you are managing?

Develop your leaders into a competitive advantage. Reconnect your leader-power to success.

SOME PEOPLE KEEP LIONS, BUT ALL THEY DO IS, RUN A CIRCUS. कुछ लोग शेर पालते हैं, पर सर्कस चलाते हैं।

A leader who people do not perceive as worthy of following is really not a leader at all.

As a leader who delivers victory, people are more likely and more willing to follow you.

When people feel like they are a part of a team, they are more likely to act in ways that benefit everyone, and less likely to engage in destructive behavior.

Life Is Like a Big Kitchen — You Create, Plan, Organize, Execute, Achieve and Sometimes You Fail…

Self-awareness is a great tool to combating resistance. When you feel resistance to taking action, stop in your tracks. Try to understand the ‘why’ behind it. Is the resistance valid?

People want to feel that you can lead them to victory. And often times that is a measure of competence - people are looking for cues, signs, indications, and proof of your level of competence.

Was man über Angst erreichte, das wurde stets auch mit Angst bezahlt. Die Mächtigen fielen irgendwann genauso der Hybris der Macht zum Opfer, wie die Ohnmächtigen dem Zorn über ihre Machtlosigkeit.

In order to be an executive coach with a thriving practice, you need to have been a leader, be fluent in psychology, and have a evidence-based methodology." My book can't help you with #1, but it can help you with the rest.

Marshall Goldsmith, one of the world’s top executive coaches, put it to me this way: “Your biggest challenge [is] customer selection. You pick the right customer, you win. You pick the wrong customer, you lose. Focus on helping great people get better.

Every coach, every executive, every leader: They all know right from wrong. Even those Enron guys. When someone uncovers a scandal in their company, I don't think they can say, "I didn't know that was going on." They're just saying they're too dumb to do their job! And if they really are too dumb, then why are they getting paid millions of dollars to do it? They know what's going on.

Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?

Strategy is important. Execution is imperative. However, the most overlooked aspect in team sports, and what most coaches and leaders fail to grasp, is the fact that it is your culture that will determine whether your strategy works and is sustainable. It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.

The difference between selling a service and talking about something you love makes a world of difference.

The only time you learn is when someone thrusts an opportunity at you and you are not sure.

What can be locked is just our movement. If we lock our lives it would be our own decision Our feelings, expression, creativity, spirit, enthusiasm and care can never be locked.

Being a good leader inherently requires the ability to be a good follower. Good leaders follow as well as they lead.

It's not only about the big wins or the ultimate victories – it's also about the small victories along the way.

Let the energy of small victories permeate the spirits of those you lead.

Based on your perceived level of competence, people will make a determination as to whether you are worthy of following or not.

Every team desires to win - and it is your duty as a leader to guide them to the victory.

THE WORLD IS TOO BEAUTIFUL TO IGNORE. PEOPLE WILL TRICK YOU INTO BELIEVING, IT'S NOT. IGNORE THEM, NOT THE WORLD.

Either fill pitchers or live by the river

STOP APPLYING PATCHES. RECODE YOURSELF NOW. 24 Dec National Mathematics Day

It is not called 'The Web' for any small reason. It was declared to you right at the start that this is going to be a web.

Ninety percent of the time, the game is going to be decided in the final five minutes. When two teams are evenly matched, the better conditioned team will usually execute better when fatigue set sin, and will probably win.

Good leaders follow as well as they lead. Because you can’t delegate effectively without being a good follower. When you delegate, you have to then trust the leadership of the person you delegated the activity to. And that’s good followership.

Give your managers the abilities they need with this on-site management training program.Agenda this course, class, workshop, a seminar on your group.someday training program for brand new managers and new supervisors that teach important abilities.

The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically “crabby” boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man,” the indifferent graduate school adviser, the “holier than thou” minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter’s school programs, the coach who ridicules his star athletes, the therapist who unconsciously attacks his clients’ “shining” and seeks a kind of gray normalcy for them, the yuppie—all these men have something in common. They are all boys pretending to be men. They got that way honestly, because nobody showed them what a mature man is like. Their kind of “manhood” is a pretense to manhood that goes largely undetected as such by most of us. We are continually mistaking this man’s controlling, threatening, and hostile behaviors for strength. In reality, he is showing an underlying extreme vulnerability and weakness, the vulnerability of the wounded boy.

Self-reliance is an America virtue but not a biblical value. Solomon wrote, "The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice." (Proverbs 12:15) The word 'listen' carries with it the meaning of seeking out as well as receiving advice. A lot of pain can be prevented if leaders would just check in with their coach before a making a big decision.

This is a small book about a very important subject. A lot has been written about trust: about what it is and what it can do for people, families, companies, communities and countries. As an executive coach and consultant I often find myself engaged by companies where good work is being sabotaged by interpersonal conflict, political infighting, paralysis, stagnation, apathy, or cynicism. I almost always trace these problems to a breakdown in trust. It not only kills good work, it also inevitably creates some degree of misery, annoyance, fear, anger, frustration, resentment, and resignation. By contrast, in successful companies where people are innovative, engage in productive conflict and debate about ideas, and have fun working together, I find strong trusting relationships. As a result, I’ve come to believe having the trust of those you work with is too important not to be intentional about building and maintaining it.

I've always believed that culture is defined and created from the top down, but it comes to life from the bottom up. This meant that I had to build our culture by working with the leadership group (i.e., the owner, general manager, and executives), the coaching staff, and the football team. To strengthen the culture among the leadership group, it was important to reiterate to the owner, team president, and general manager the shared beliefs, values, and expectations that we had discussed in depth when I was interviewing for the head coaching position. It was important to have collaborative conversations on a regular basis to discuss the changes we were making and why we were making them.

1. Did you conduct one-to-one meetings with each salesperson on your team? 2. Did you ask each of them how they like to be managed? Are they coachable? 3. Did you inquire about their prior experience with their past manager? Was it positive or negative? 4. Did you set the expectations of your relationship with them? Did you ask them what they needed and expected from their manager? What changes do they want to see? 5. Did you inform them about how you like to manage and your style of management? This would open up the space for a discussion regarding how you may manage differently from your predecessor. 6. Did you let them know you just completed a coaching course that would enable you to support them even further and maximize their talents? 7. Did you explain to them the difference between coaching and traditional management? 8. Did you enroll them in the benefits of coaching? That is, what would be in it for them? 9. Did you let them know about your intentions, goals, expectations, and aspirations for each of them and for the team as a whole? 10. How have you gone about learning the ins and outs of the company?Are you familiar with the internal workings, culture, leadership team, and subtleties that make the company unique? Have you considered that your team may be the best source of knowledge and intelligence for this? Did you communicate your willingness and desire to learn from them as well, so that the learning and development process can be mutually reciprocated?

Here’s What I Believe about Good VCs Good VCs help entrepreneurs achieve their business goals by providing guidance, support, a network of relationships, and coaching. Good VCs recognize the limitations of what they can do as board members and outside advisors as a result of the informational asymmetry they have with respect to founders and other executives who live and breathe the company every day. Good VCs give advice in areas in which they have demonstrated expertise, and have the wisdom to avoid opining on topics for which they are not the appropriate experts. Good VCs appropriately balance their duties to the common shareholders with those they owe to their limited partners. Good VCs recognize that, ultimately, it is the entrepreneurs and the employees who build iconic companies, with hopefully a little bit of good advice and prodding sprinkled in along the way by their VC partners. If VCs remain good, they won’t become dinosaurs.

In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

Pat Riley, the famous coach and manager who led the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat to multiple championships, says that great teams tend to follow a trajectory. When they start—before they have won—a team is innocent. If the conditions are right, they come together, they watch out for each other and work together toward their collective goal. This stage, he calls the “Innocent Climb.” After a team starts to win and media attention begins, the simple bonds that joined the individuals together begin to fray. Players calculate their own importance. Chests swell. Frustrations emerge. Egos appear. The Innocent Climb, Pat Riley says, is almost always followed by the “Disease of Me.” It can “strike any winning team in any year and at any moment,” and does with alarming regularity. It’s Shaq and Kobe, unable to play together. It’s Jordan punching Steve Kerr, Horace Grant, and Will Perdue—his own team members. He punched people on his own team! It’s Enron employees plunging California into darkness for personal profit. It’s leaks to the media from a disgruntled executive hoping to scuttle a project he dislikes. It’s negging and every other intimidation tactic.

The successful individual sales producer wins by being as selfish as possible with her time. The more often the salesperson stays away from team members and distractions, puts her phone on Do Not Disturb (DND), closes her door, or chooses to work for a few hours from the local Panera Bread café, the more productive she’ll likely be. In general, top producers in sales tend to exhibit a characteristic I’ve come to describe as being selfishly productive. The seller who best blocks out the rest of the world, who maintains obsessive control of her calendar, who masters focusing solely on her own highest-value revenue-producing activities, who isn’t known for being a “team player,” and who is not interested in playing good corporate citizen or helping everyone around her, is typically a highly effective seller who ends up on top of the sales rankings. Contrary to popular opinion, being selfish is not bad at all. In fact, for an individual contributor salesperson, it is a highly desirable trait and a survival skill, particularly in today’s crazed corporate environment where everyone is looking to put meetings on your calendar and take you away from your primary responsibilities! Now let’s switch gears and look at the sales manager’s role and responsibilities. How well would it work to have a sales manager who kept her office phone on DND and declined almost every incoming call to her mobile phone? Do we want a sales manager who closes her office door, is concerned only about herself, and is for the most part inaccessible? No, of course not. The successful sales manager doesn’t win on her own; she wins through her people by helping them succeed. Think about other key sales management responsibilities: Leading team meetings. Developing talent. Encouraging hearts. Removing obstacles. Coaching others. Challenging data, false assumptions, wrong attitudes, and complacency. Pushing for more. Putting the needs of your team members ahead of your own. Hmmm. Just reading that list again reminds me why it is often so difficult to transition from being a top producer in sales into a sales management role. Aside from the word sales, there is truly almost nothing similar about the positions. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on corporate responsibilities like participating on the executive committee, dealing with human resources compliance issues, expense management, recruiting, and all the other burdens placed on the sales manager. Again,

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

Marshall Goldsmith, one of the world’s top executive coaches, put it to me this way: “Your biggest challenge [is] customer selection. You pick the right customer, you win. You pick the wrong customer, you lose. Focus on helping great people get better.” Ultimately, this is your business. It’s up to you to run your business as you see fit, and serve the customers you want to serve. In our experience, business is the most fun (and most profitable) when you focus on helping great people get better.

1. What are the expected levels of performance? What are the expected attitudes or behaviors? How will we measure those? How will we know whether people are performing to expectation? What is the best practice? Let’s take a very simple example. How do you know if the salesperson is doing a good job in executing their deal strategy if you have no sales process, or incomplete/bad process metrics? Without these, you and they have no basis for knowing what great execution of a deal strategy is, so you have no basis for assessing an individual performance or coaching them.

Our research and extensive interviews with executives and senior practitioners in the digital transformation process revealed that digital leaders think differently about high performance. In successful digital organizations, pushing the performance envelope, rewarding high performance, and learning how to invest in “optimal” mindsets are all critical parts needed to drive and sustain digital changes. “Overall, starting with a feeling of optimism promotes hope and overrides any other sentiments in your work. What would happen if all your employees felt different about coming to work? There would be a different buzz about the building. There would be a different outlook that would help people look forward to what’s next and what’s coming up. This optimism and hope creates an environment that inspires people to seek out their best and find levels of performance that maybe before they never thought were attainable. Starting with this whole new and different chemistry, any workplace is far better suited to achieve its goals and be its best, even in times of difficulty or adversity.” —Pete Carroll, head coach, the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks

Passage Five: From Business Manager to Group Manager This is another leadership passage that at first glance doesn’t seem overly arduous. The assumption is that if you can run one business successfully, you can do the same with two or more businesses. The flaw in this reasoning begins with what is valued at each leadership level. A business manager values the success of his own business. A group manager values the success of other people’s businesses. This is a critical distinction because some people only derive satisfaction when they’re the ones receiving the lion’s share of the credit. As you might imagine, a group manager who doesn’t value the success of others will fail to inspire and support the performance of the business managers who report to him. Or his actions might be dictated by his frustration; he’s convinced he could operate the various businesses better than any of his managers and wishes he could be doing so. In either instance, the leadership pipeline becomes clogged with business managers who aren’t operating at peak capacity because they’re not being properly supported or their authority is being usurped. This level also requires a critical shift in four skill sets. First, group managers must become proficient at evaluating strategy for capital allocation and deployment purposes. This is a sophisticated business skill that involves learning to ask the right questions, analyze the right data, and apply the right corporate perspective to understand which strategy has the greatest probability of success and therefore should be funded. The second skill cluster involves development of business managers. As part of this development, group managers need to know which of the function managers are ready to become business managers. Coaching new business managers is also an important role for this level. The third skill set has to do with portfolio strategy. This is quite different from business strategy and demands a perceptual shift. This is the first time managers have to ask these questions: Do I have the right collection of businesses? What businesses should be added, subtracted, or changed to position us properly and ensure current and future earnings? Fourth, group managers must become astute about assessing whether they have the right core capabilities. This means avoiding wishful thinking and instead taking a hard, objective look at their range of resources and making a judgment based on analysis and experience. Leadership becomes more holistic at this level. People may master the required skills, but they won’t perform at full leadership capacity if they don’t begin to see themselves as broad-gauged executives. By broad-gauged, we mean that managers need to factor in the complexities of running multiple businesses, thinking in terms of community, industry, government,

Tolerations are the seemingly inconsequential little things that drain away your energy.

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Express to the crowd your near obsession

On a 3 x 5 card, he’d written, “I am grinning ear to ear when I meet Jack Canfield face to face.

Patrick Lencioni’s book Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding the Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty. When it comes to client loyalty, Lencioni found that by being completely transparent and vulnerable with customers, service providers like coaches and consultants can build surprisingly resilient levels of trust and loyalty. So what’s stopping you and me from being more vulnerable with our coaching clients? One word. Fear. Lencioni outlines three fears that sabotage client loyalty: fear of losing business, fear of being embarrassed, and fear of feeling inferior. This last fear struck a chord with me. I often coach new coaches. I share ideas for identifying a market niche, marketing to that niche, and finally using their individual strengths to get paying clients in their chosen niche.

Or let’s go with insightful, confident, and honest (Context). This is you. I know it is.

What makes these three words special is that they’re your three words. Memorize them. Repeat them often. Sing them aloud when you’re in your car. Mumble them to yourself when you get nervous. Three words that, if repeated often enough and with enough oomph behind them, might just drown out your fear of feeling inferior (you’re not) and help you build some much-needed client loyalty.

What if you didn’t feel inferior? What if you felt

Whatever your strength, let it shine.

For the rest of us, however, we must ask the question and await the answer. “Tell me what you need.” I could make the case this is the only question worth asking. The only question of any significance anyway. Why? Because these five short words express that you care. If you have just one question in your quiver of questions, this is the one. Knock, knock. This is me tapping gently on your desk. I didn’t say the answer held significance. I said your ability to quiet your racing mind enough to ask the question was significant. Ask. Listen. If you like, confirm what you heard. Then, ask again.

Here’s the rub. None of that matters if you feel inferior—to others in your industry, to the You of yesteryear, to your client. When a prospect calls, you must boldly answer the phone. You must open your mouth, even in the face of overwhelming fear. You must speak your mind. You must offer considerate advice one human being to another. The best business strategies in this universe won’t amount to a nickel of revenue if you let the fear of feeling less than your best, less than your potential, less than your client expects (all in your head, mind you) get in the way. For many new coaches, the fear of feeling inferior is wide spread.

So let me ask, are you being honest when you withhold your advice from a coaching client because of your own fear? Nope. Holding ideas inside your head isn’t insightful, confident, or honest. Is it? I know it sounds glib of me to tell you to replace your fears with confidence. But, well, you might consider replacing your three biggest fears with three new words that express your greatest strength:

From a strengths perspective, would you like some feedback?

Here are some quick guidelines for powerful affirmations. Be personal. Start with “I am” or your name. Be present. Use present tense. Be positive. Say what you want. Be precise. No more than a sentence. Be purposeful. Include action words. Be passionate. Include emotional words.

If it’s Context, then offer people a look into the past in order to understand the present.

Mila Givens works as a dental executive coach. She has decades of experience in the dental industry and wants to remain in it until her retirement. Mila Givens is the Chief Executive Officer at Millennium DPM. She plans to semi-retire in two years and enjoys traveling.

Exits are great but it’s better to do it as a choice, not a consequence of bad moda operandi.

Marketing for “Lead Generation” and “Lead Development” Market development rep (MDR) doing research and responding to inbound leads Sales development rep (SDR) generating leads via outbound prospecting techniques Account executive (AE) getting initial customer commitment Onboarder (ONB) to guide the customer to first value sits with a sales engineer Customer success manager (CSM) orchestrating the customer’s ongoing experience Account manager (AM) helping the customer grow the business When executed well, job specialization can increase sales velocity and improve effectiveness. Organizations need to ensure that specialization is paired with a well-defined, cross-functional process and job training for each role. Without a well-defined process, customers and win rates will suffer from poor handoffs between functions. We have seen it again and again: Without a well-defined onboarding and coaching program, the reps will fail.

The best coach knows you better than you know yourself. Then enables you to discover your true self and potential while guiding your steps till you reach your goals, one by one.

Never make serious decisions under stress. They will probably be wrong.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

In 2002, with a new understanding of what makes a great place to work, Patty and I made a commitment. Our number one goal, moving forward, would be to do everything we could to retain the post-layoff talent density and all the great things that came with it. We would hire the very best employees and pay at the top of the market. We would coach our managers to have the courage and discipline to get rid of any employees who were displaying undesirable behaviors or weren’t performing at exemplary levels. I became laser-focused on making sure Netflix was staffed, from the receptionist to the top executive team, with the highest-performing, most collaborative employees on the market.

Now the biggest challenge is learning the skills that will get me to the next level. Going from 80 to 150 employees takes an entirely different skill set than going from 1 to 80 employees takes. It comes down to figuring out if you're an excellent executor or a good manager. It took me the longest time to get my head out of execution and be more strategic. A lot of my value and self-worth were on the revenue-generating side of the business. I would put in X effort and get out Y monetary growth. I had to shed that skin and tell myself that my worth isn't tied to what I produce, it's tied to what my people produce. That's something I doubt myself about today. You can only read so many CEO books and only get so much coaching before you figure out, "This is all you. You have to figure out how you like to lead

You can make do without a cofounder. You can survive for a while without a team. But you can’t make it without a mentor. Find at least one person who you deeply trust and who believes in you. Not a life coach or an executive leadership consultant, not an agency, not someone who’s read a lot of case studies and is ready to charge you by the hour. And not your parents—they love you too much to be impartial. Find an operational, smart, useful mentor who has done it before, who likes you and wants to help. You will need to lean on them when you start a company. Or even when you launch a project within a big company.

A wise business executive once said that in order to “grow as a leader” a person must feel “a strong will to modify the environment to make it better, then create challenging situations that (he or she) can’t get out of except by changing.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

Coaches are teachers. Some coaches—lesser coaches—try telling you things. Good coaches, however, teach you how to think and arm you with the fundamental tools necessary to execute properly. Simply put, good coaches make sure you know how to use both hands, how to make proper reads, how to understand the game. Good coaches tell you where the fish are, great coaches teach you how to find them. That’s the same at every level.

Most coaching involves identifying weak spots, changing behaviors, and reimagining goals—none of which carries an overlapping, specific industry prerequisite. Coaches with a variety

Learn your coaching type. There are many types of coachable leaders. Before entering a coaching engagement, spend some time determining what type of client you are and ways in which a coach could support you.

The four tenets within the openness framework require you to be open to change, feedback, action, and accountability.

Coaching is not just about understanding what is important to you and why. Nor does it encourage you to develop skills in a vacuum. Even as you absorb the lessons of coaching, you must put them into practice. By the end of six months, you should be observing concrete, measurable improvements in your performance and your work relationships. Your bosses, colleagues, and reports should begin noticing them, too.

The process is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The process of becoming coachable and, in turn, being coached, is a journey that demands steadfastness, resilience, and flexibility from you—and the reality is, the leader who is ready is the one who will embark on the challenge.

All executives and middle managers should have a coach (or peer coach) holding them accountable for behavioral changes. We

You must be willing to be disciplined as well as make personal sacrifices. It takes discipline to go through rigorous training and study programs. You need a coach or coaches and sometimes mates to help you stick to your planned program in execution of your responsibilities. To be excellent and effective, the non-essentials must give up time and space in your life – some sacrifices have to be made. Work hard and work smart.

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Yogi Berra once stated, “If you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else.

When he died, much was made of how singular Steve Jobs had been. For comparisons, observers needed to reach back to the mythic inventors and showmen of earlier eras, particularly Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Jobs was singular, to be sure. But he also was of a type. He was what psychotherapist and business coach Michael Maccoby called a “productive narcissist.” In 2000, Maccoby published an insightful article in the Harvard Business Review that applies Freudian terminology to three categories of executives Maccoby had observed in corporate life. “Erotics” feel a need to be loved, value consensus, and as a result are not natural leaders. These are the people to whom a manager should assign tasks—and then heap praise for a job well done. “Obsessives” are by-the-books tacticians with a knack for making the trains run on time. An efficient head of logistics or bottom-line-oriented spreadsheet jockey is the classic obsessive. The greats of business history, however, are “productive narcissists,” visionary risk takers with a burning desire to “change the world.” Corporate narcissists are charismatic leaders willing to do whatever it takes to win and who couldn’t give a fig about being liked. Steve Jobs was the textbook example of a productive narcissist. An unimpressed Jobs was famous for calling other companies “bozos.” His own executives endured their rides on what one called the “bozo/hero rollercoaster,” often within the same marathon meeting.