The story goes:
The huge printing presses of a major Chicago newspaper began malfunctioning on the Saturday before Christmas, putting all the revenue for advertising that was to appear in the Sunday paper in jeopardy. None of the technicians could track down the problem. Finally, a frantic call was made to the retired printer who had worked with these presses for over 40 years. “We’ll pay anything; just come in and fix them,” he was told.
When he arrived, he walked around for a few minutes, surveying the presses; then he approached one of the control panels and opened it. He removed a dime from his pocket, turned a screw 1/4 of a turn, and said, “The presses will now work correctly.” After being profusely thanked, he was told to submit a bill for his work.
The bill arrived a few days later, for $10,000.00! Not wanting to pay such a huge amount for so little work, the printer was told to please itemize his charges, with the hope that he would reduce the amount once he had to identify his services. The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.
I heard this story a while ago, and it stuck with me, because it resonated with the way I view my work with people, including myself. It’s easy to see the shortcomings of someone else, or see what he or she really ought to do. And your opinions and advice might actually be right on. But unless you figure out exactly what the underlying problem is, and helps the person overcome that, it will only frustrate and infuriate.
Say someone is in an unhealthy relationship, and you’re telling her to get out of it. And it really is a bad relationship, and you’re absolutely correct in your assessment, but she still stays, and keeps coming back, and you go out of your mind.
Chances are there’s a good reason she stays. Perhaps she’s afraid to be alone. Perhaps she believes that life should be hard. Perhaps she thinks she deserves it. Maybe she just doesn’t think she’s worth any better.
Whatever it is, unless you can pinpoint exactly what it is, unless you know which screw to turn, that is, you’re not going to be able to help the person. In fact, there’s a good chance that your trying is just going to take you further apart.
I have this idea that there’s only so many things we’re open to change our minds about at any given point in time. Have you ever had an insight, a realization, only to then realize that your friends had been trying to tell you this all along? Well, you just weren’t ready then. Our beliefs are locked together and reinforce each other, so one has to go before you can get to the next one. It’s not linear, of course, but they are interrelated. Hence the knowing which screw to turn.
Incidentally, when I went looking for the source of the quote, I found it in a text about software debugging. I hadn’t actually made the connection, but now it’s obvious that I find some of the same joy in tracking down a bug that I do in finding the right screw to turn when talking to other people.
I’ve been scanning the market for coaching education for some time, and am 95% committed now to starting with Sofia Manning in a little less than a month.
The other program I’ve been considering is the one from Coaches Training Institute (CTI), which starts in August in Malmö, or in September in Copenhagen.
They’re both about the same price and duration, both can give you a certification.
- Price: Manning costs DKK 35,000, or 40,000 if you want both life coach and business coach modules, which I would probably do. CTI costs DKK 40,000.
- Duration: They both take around 6 months with about 3 days per month.
- Certification: The CTI program gives you direct access to being certified by the International Coach Federation (ICF), whereas Manning has her own certification. The training adheres to the ICF standards, though, so you can get certified with the ICF based on the training you’ve had.
They also both have published books. Sofia Manning’s book is Coaching – Det handler om at stille de rigtige spørgsmål (Coaching – it’s about asking the right questions), and CTI’s book is Co-Active Coaching. Both have lots of good content, but to be honest, I’m now reading Manning’s book for the second time, while I’m still fighting my way through the Co-Active Coaching book. I find it mind-numbingly boring. It seems to me too removed from the lives of the people involved, the choach and the coachee, too mechanical.
It’s odd, because the criticism I hear from people who attended the CTI course of the Manning course, is that it’s too rules-driven, there’s too little place for intuition, something I don’t recognize from her book at all. The other criticims I hear is that it’s based on Tony Robbins, and he’s suspect, thus Manning is suspect. It doesn’t get any more specific than that, and sometimes it’s just in the derogatory tone, but I get the impression that there’s some Manning-bashing going on over at the CTI, whereas most Manning-alumnis simply haven’t heard of the CTI education.
In the end, I decided to go with Manning because I enjoyed reading her book more, because she’s widely known which gives my credentials more value, and because my own coach has taken it. It doesn’t hurt that it’s in Copenhagen, not Malmö, and that it starts 6 weeks sooner.
And in the end, I believe that my value as a coach isn’t so much a function of the 17 days spent on one specific education, but a sum of everything I have learned and will continue to learn throughout my life.
If you have taken or are considering taking a coaching education, I’d love to hear what you’ve found, what you chose, and why.
UPDATED: I’ve gotten a response about the certification and have updated the text above. The answer is that Manning has her own certificate, but the training adheres to the requirements by the ICF.
I’ve realized that while I love creating great software, I care even more about creating great lives.
It started to dawn on me at the EuroGEL conference in the fall. GEL is rooted in technology, but takes a broader look at what constitutes a good experience. I enjoyed that. But what really boiled my blood was the talk given by Stephen Bauman about what makes a good life. Good technology → good experience → good life. That’s the direction I felt compelled to move in.
Since at least my teens, I’ve been consumed by how to grow as a person, and how to make life more enjoyable, more fun, more fulfilling. I’ve read, I’ve thought, I’ve written, I’ve implemented, I’ve shared what I’ve learnt. But only recently have I gotten the courage to think I could make this my living.
So starting today I’m offering my services as a coach.
I don’t have any formal training as a coach yet. I’m going to get to that. But I know that I know enough and have enough to share to be of use, right now.
I also have a lot of personal experience with entrepreneurship, and have already informally coached some people about their startups, so I feel especially confident about coaching in that specific area.
So if you’re an entrepreneur, or think you might want to become one, get in touch, and I’d be happy to help.
It’s not going to be your typical entrepreneurist advice like “you need a business plan”, “what’s your market size”, “what’s your defensible barriers”, and all that. That’s all good, we can do that. But what’s more important is that you’re connected with your passion, and that you get rid of the patterns, habits, and beliefs that are limiting your ability to reach your goals.
I’m going to charge DKK 500 per session, each session typically being 1½ hours. The first session is free, so you can give it a spin without committing. If you’re not getting any value, no hard feelings. If you’re in Copenhagen, we can do it in person, otherwise we can do Skype or phone.
I found this inspiring quote in John Batelle’s The Search. It’s Bill Gross talking about his friend, director Steven Spielberg (on page 99):
“He walks around all day using his brainpower to creatively enhance things around him,” Gross told Inc. magazine in 1997. “I’d always thought you had to take the good with the bad. How audacious to think that your job could be perfect all day long. But here was someone doing it.”
What’s your dream job?
Mine would be learning about how to make myself and other people the best we can be, and then making it so, all day long.
I’ve noticed a pattern that has been annoying me. We’ll be having a conversation about the development of a product, I’m feeling good, things are flowing, we’re coming up with ideas. But then someone asks the question “Can we do that?”, directed at me as the programmer, and my body tightens up and my smile disappears.
This has been going on for a while, and I just couldn’t get a grip on why it happened. At first I didn’t notice when exactly my state changed, so I didn’t catch the connection with the question.
But now that I saw that, I’ve been noticing what’s going on. What happens is that the question puts me into a different frame of mind. From focusing on the user or the business, I’m now asked to focus on the technology. My mind will start racing to find and compare various ways to implement what we’re talking about, comparing their various merits, thinking about which options would be worth the time to do, what the on-going maintenance burden of various options are, what the potential downsides and side-effects are, what paths could this close for the future.
Once I start down this path, it’s hard to return to the free-flowing state I was in before. Often the session will be derailed from here on, at least for a good while, unless, that is, awareness kicks in, so I can consciously get myself back on track.
It’s not that one mindset is better than the other. Both are necessary to build successful software. It’s just that they shouldn’t be mixed.
Alan Cooper said that the same person could easily be both an interaction designer and a programmer. Just not on the same project! Because the technology demands so much of our brain, it’s really difficult to silence the part of your brain that’s thinking about implementation once you’re involved.
I agree with Cooper, but I also find that it can be done, at least to the extent that I become a valuable party to the conversation, but that it requires conscious effort, and it’s extremely difficult to switch back and forth within the same session.
It’s somewhat like the six thinking hats. You need different perspectives, just not all at the same time.
Do you recognize this from your own line of work? How about outside of technology? I’d be curious to hear your experiences.
In my country, you pay for your plastic bags at the supermarket. Typically about 2-3 kroner (50 US cents). The effect is that a fair number of people, myself included, reuse plastic bags many times, which is a good thing.
But every so often I end up at the supermarket without any spare bags, either because I forgot, or because I hadn’t planned to go shopping, so I end up buying new plastic bags, even though I have plenty at home. This happens often enough that I routinely have to purge my collection of plastic bags, throw them out, because there’s just too many. They last pretty long, after all.
Wouldn’t it be even better for the environment if instead of throwing them out, I could bring all my used plastic bags to the supermarket, and other people could use them when they’d forgotten their own plastic bags, and without paying for them? Why not share bags among all?
Unless, of course, the supermarkets think it would be ugly or disgusting, or they actually enjoy the revenue they’re making from plastic bags currently?
A silly, small thought, I know, but one that I had, nonetheless.
I too have started a tumblelog, mine is over at http://tumbl.pinds.com/.
Mostly quotes and stuff, but there’s been more going on there recently than here.
