dsbatten on Nostr: “To know and not to do is not to know” 10 years ago I made a life-changing ...

“To know and not to do is not to know”

10 years ago I made a life-changing decision.

I was coaching the leaders and sales teams of large corporates. I’d worked with major corporates including most of the country’s largest banks and Telcos. But a big shift was about to happen.

I never forget the moment. I was in the office of the L&D Manager of one of those corporates. He asked if we could come back and do some “refresher” sales training. For context, 2 years earlier, we’d run a 5-day sales and mindset training session that had yielded exceptional sales results and won a number of awards.

“So what happened after that sales training?” I asked. As an associate, I didn’t see the long term results. Nor did the company that provided the training specialise in embedding change: it doesn’t fit the business model of most training companies because each day you book out time for an hour long piece of coaching is a day you can’t book them out as a trainer at a much higher rate.

He shuffled in his seat a little uncomfortably. “Well”, he proffered. “We had great intentions, and don’t get me wrong, the uplift in sales was enough to pay for all your training easily. But after a few months people started going back to their old habits, and those people who were supposed to support the changes got deployed onto new projects. So that’s why we thought some refresher training would be timely.”

Within 6 months, I’d stopped all corporate training. My last illusion that I was creating any lasting impact had been removed. I was grateful to him for shattering my illusion.

I knew what I wanted to do, but I had no idea how to do it.

But then I realized I did know what to do. It was to do something I’d already done that had worked.

While corporate training wasn’t my life’s purpose, it was rewarding because I learnt a lot of skills that I was able to repurpose into my own coaching years later. Plus the many hours of facilitating helped me hone my craft. Kind of like the Beatles playing Hamburg gigs before they took the world stage.

I had only gotten that far in the first place because after leaving my corporate job, I got my own coach who helped me get into doing what would eventually become my life’s work.

So I used the same strategy. I got a coach to help me get out of corporate training, and into whatever I wanted to do - even though I wasn’t sure what that was.

One of the first questions she asked was “Who do you really want to work with”. At the time it was technology entrepreneurs (and that still is one of the communities of people I serve). But what I said was “Tech entrepreneurs, but there’s no business model doing that. They are cash-strapped startups”. She smiled. She challenged my limiting beliefs. And we built a new model that brought top coaching (not just mentoring) for the first time in the world to founders of early stage tech companies. That decision to get a coach, doing something I already knew worked, changed the direction of my life and that of many others I coached. And because they consistently applied what they learned, they never needed “refresher” training.

Sometimes we fail to use the same strategies that have worked for us in the past, believing that we need to continually create new strategies. Not so. Much of the work I do with clients involves mining their experience for things they have already done and stopped, or are doing inconsistently, and making those winning strategies they already know both contemporary and consistent.

The results have been incredible. If you want more peace, and you’ve already experienced it through meditation, restart meditating. If you want to feel more energy on a daily basis and already know that when you exercise regularly you feel more energy, recommit to daily exercise. If you have a dream you haven’t watered for a while, but you already know that when you give attention to it daily it grows, start giving it your daily attention again. And if you know that doing this with a coach creates faster, more consistent results, get a coach.

The ego loves complexity. The mind loves what’s new. But most of our answers are found in the simple application of the already-known. To know and not to do is not to know.