[MUSIC] In this lesson we're going to talk about the real importance behind managers paying attention closely to the thoughts that their employees offer up. Most of the times that employees offer up thoughts they don't offer them up as thoughts. They offer them up as things that they believe to be true. But hopefully as you have been someone who's been going through this course you can start to really identify the difference between what someone might think about something versus what actually might have really happened, right? That's what we want to start to discern when we're doing our coaching. We saw quite a bit of that in the coaching videos that we watched, right? We saw the manager in the good example be able to listen to an employee, hear what the employee has to say, identify the thinking the employee has and then coach the thinking. Right? So there's a few things here that I think are really important. There's a lot of coaching training in the world, which is great. I love everything that you can learn about coaching. What I want to offer is that one of the things we hear a lot about coaching is that you need to be an active listener, and I don't have any dispute with that. I think that listening skills are exceptional, and they are a quality of an exceptional coach. What's important, though, is it's not just about listening. It's about knowing what to do with what you hear, okay? The reason we listen is because we want to pay attention for something. And the kind of coaching that I've been teaching you in this course is that we really want to pay attention to the thinking that our employees are demonstrating us through the words that they choose. And way that they sort of react and respond to questions about their performance. Because as I mentioned when I taught coaching algebra skill set verses mind set, the majority of performance issues that people experience really relate more to mindset, right? Skillset sometimes totally. But a lot of times the reasons why employees aren't performing, has more to do with their thinking than their actual ability. So in the videos, we watched the good manager be able to really identify those key thoughts that were interfering with the employee's ability to get the work done. And while we've talked a lot about thoughts and mindset throughout this course, here are some things I want you to keep in mind, right, as you're practicing this as a manager. This is the core I believe of this work is your atuneness, how well you actually hear what people are thinking. You hear it in opinions, you hear it in labels. Right, so someone might think this is hard. Well that's an opinion. Someone might label something as difficult, right? That's a label for actual effort or execution of something. Someone might share their perspective. Someone might share their assumptions, right? Now where this gets challenging for managers, is when you believe what the employee says to you. So if they tell you something is hard to do and you agree with them, you won't just think of it as a thought, you will believe it as a fact. If an employee comes to to you and says this new rule at work isn't fair. If you agree with them, you will believe it as a fact, and you won't see it as a a thought. If an employee tells you that there's no way they can get all their work done and you believe it, then you will believe it as a fact, not as a thought. And I'm going to share an actual example here because I had a company that I was working with. And everybody in the company believed they could never get all their work done. Everybody, all the way up the top, to the very top CEO person believed there was too much work and there weren't enough people, and so they believed it. And so they all entertained and nurtured this thought. And so what do you think their result was? Nobody ever got their work done. It's so fascinating but they all believed it and so they all managed to it. This is a very finite skill but it's not hard to develop. It takes effort. But it's pulling yourself away from what you hear someone say, looking at it like okay, is that really true? [LAUGH] What they just said, or is that something that they believe? And where it gets harder, is when you believe it, right? It's kind of like that expression I talked about, jumping in the pool, being in the pool. We have to be careful that we're not in the pool. Is that something that's easy to do over time, time, time? No, there's going to be situations where you're totally believing everything they're saying. And that's just normal, that's just being a human being. But if you want to really help them, as a coach, you don't believe them. You don't acknowledge the thought as a fact, you identify ooh that's an interesting thing that you're thinking, let's talk about it. Let's talk about how thinking that is affecting your performance, right? So identifying thoughts as a manager is your key to effective coaching, okay? And we're going to talk about as we go through the next couple of lessons, how do you do that as a manager, how do you keep that going as a practice? Because that's what it is and there's no right or wrong way, it's just about being in practice. And I think, when I first learned the thought model, gosh 12 years ago, I noticed people's thinking everywhere I went. [LAUGH] If I was in the grocery store and the clerk made comments about how hard her day had been, or how they couldn't wait to get off work today. Or how much they loved their customers or I could hear it in my friends. I could hear thoughts in my kids. So it's about training your mind to start to discern the difference between what someone thinks is happening versus what really happened. And it is a skill, but it's totally a skill you can develop, right, it really, really is. But I hope, through the videos, especially, that you were able to see how pulling out the thoughts, and just treating them like something that we can decide, we want to believe or not, gives us so much more ability as a manager to help our employees improve performance and to really drive home ownership and accountability. If you keep believing this, you will keep getting this result, right? If you want to change a result, then we've got to decide to think something differently so we get that. Right? So I'm going to look forward in the next lesson we're going to talk more about what to do in those coaching sessions particularly how to make sure that you take a moment and you really invest in acknowledging the employees successes and strengths. So we'll talk to you in the next lesson.
