Agree or Disagree:

Cause and Affect Learning is Deadly!

 

Dave Buck and Joe Disalvo go DEEP and WIN BIG!

Crazy Coaching Friday Episode #008 Highlight!

28:00 minutes into CCF #008 – Stacy: Real Quick. I’ve used this several times in my coaching. Players will say, “Well, I tried this a lot of times before and I failed.” And, I will say, “Well, how many times have you done it with a coach?”

Dave: LOVE THAT LINE!

I want to talk about this! This is a BIG point. This is a bit of a tangent, but I’ve been on fire with this.  Deanna, hold on just one second, I’m on a rant right now.

This has been a big thing that I’ve been talking about with so many of my players this past week and that is: The Paradox of Learning. 

On the one hand we are always learning and growing by cause and affect learning. It is integral to survival. When we touch a hot burner we learn never to do that again.

But, cause and affect learning is also deadly! Especially if we look at affects and misinterpret the causes.

So if you say, “I tried that and it didn’t work, you have to be careful because there could have been 3 or 5 other factors that lead to that particular failure.

For example, it’s like “I tried inviting people to a networking event but they didn’t come.”  The learning is NOT that inviting people to networking events doesn’t work.

Rather, you have to consider OTHER variables. Maybe the invitation was unclear. Maybe your energy about it was fear based and your fear was influencing them.

So, the trouble with cause and affect learning is that we often miss allocate the cause of the affect and we learn wrong things.

Part of coaching and having a great coach is to challenge what you think you know. Challenge your cause and affect learning to gain more clarity on what was the real cause.  If you tried something and it didn’t work, maybe there was another cause that you’re not aware of.

As coaches we have to be so broad based in how we approach what we do so that we are willing to challenge what our player think they know about what works and what doesn’t work. At the same time, we have to challenge them gently and carefully because players can get pretty attached to their learning’s.

(Jump to 47 minutes into the CCF Episode #008)

Dave: So Joe, if you could pick up your Bat-phone there. The Bat-phone calling Joe!  (You have to watch the show to get the joke!) Joe where are you expanding your best efforts though being rather than doing?

Joe: My relationship to time has got to change. That’s where my own focus is in expanding my personal best efforts.

That’s been a big challenge for me, especially in the first quarter. I took an incredible amount of stuff on. It was all good stuff and it required me to play big, outside my comfort zone.

But in retrospect I look back on it and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could even though it all went well at the end of the day because I felt this pressure of time.

Instead of enjoying some of these BIG things and really cool things, I was grinding through it. I was pushing through it.

So you always look at what went well and what would you change and clearly I what I would have changed was how I process time between my ears because that would have allowed me to enjoy it more.

Dave: Joe, so let me ask you this then… in your awesome debrief, was the challenge really most about our relationship to time or was it your relationship with the activities or the overall intention of the project or the stress of getting results?

What most deflated your enjoyment of the activity?

And what could we do to ramp up your enjoyment during the game itself?

Joe: …I wasn’t too worried about results and I wasn’t afraid of failure. I think it’s important to push your limits instead of playing tight. I really think that it was because I took on too much.

No matter how rich the projects are or how much they inspire you, at least for me it was just too much and I would have liked to have taken one of those things off the table.

Dave:…I guess we’d have to dive a little bit more into the stuff (the projects), but I’m feeling like there’s still some other affect. We just talked about the paradox of learning and I wonder if the lack of enjoyment was really caused by too much stuff.  Or, if there was some other element that was deflating the enjoyment?  Just a thought.

One thing I do know is that in terms of the experience of overwhelm, we often think overwhelm is the act of doing too much. But, the reality is that overwhelm is act of thinking when you’re not doing.

Overwhelm is not caused by doing too much. Overwhelm is caused by the feelings you have about what you are not doing.

When you’re doing what you’re doing then the game is to be in it fully.  But, it’s the feelings that you have about what you’re not doing, when you’re not doing it that can be really intense …and that is what actually causes the overwhelm.

It’s not what you’re doing, it’s how you feel about what you’re NOT doing.

So, if you can think about how you felt about what you were not doing when you were not doing it, that might give us some clues as to what to really explore…

Joe: …You know that’s a great point Dave and I think I just had a little bit of an ah-ha moment. Going back to my staff meeting yesterday, one of the things that we realized that was really left out in the first quarter was documenting the organizational processes we have really focused on doing over the past couple of years from Gerber’s book, the E-myth.

Jan, Feb, March saw no focus on that at all. In the meeting that was one of the first things I brought up. I missed the good productivity of the systems we had been building and that was driving me crazy.

Dave: There you go.

Joe: Yeah, it’s so important to us to be able to deliver the product we promise to deliver.

Dave: So that is an AWESOME clue and shows us insight Joe. So, now it’s about bringing that awareness to the next time you go for it big and take on a bunch of things.

You want to notice, ‘what’s driving me crazy about what we’re not doing.’  If you can be cognizant of that and then engage your team in that in some way then you could be on your way to a solution. But the awareness of the cause is the first step.

Joe: Cool

Dave: That’s what I’m talking about people!

 

What do YOU think of Stacy’s question: “Well, how many times have you done it with a coach?”

What did You learn from Joe’s overwhelm experience?

Please comment and share below…

 

If YOU want to be on Crazy Coaching Friday, please email Molly at: info@mollyrider.com or call her at 603-568-8637

 

 

 

Crazy Coaching Friday Episode #008 Timeline: Click HERE to watch the show.

Time AT…	Coaching Topic
01 min	Expand Your Client’s Best Efforts
3:30 min	What’s CoachVille’s BIG WHY????
07 min	Contestant Introductions! Stacy Hemeyer, Megan Hoernke & Joe Disalvo
13 min	NEW Trend in the Field of Coaching
15:33 min	Expanding Best Efforts: What it Means To YOU
28 min	Dave RANTS on the Paradox of Learning
33 min	Being Vs. Doing Shares by Deanna, Megan and Stacy
42 min	Deanna Calls Timeout To Honor Stacy and Deanna’s Play2Win Students!
44 min	Molly Gives CCF Website Shares from Viewers
47 min	Coaching! Discover the REAL Cause of Overwhelm with Joe Disalvo
57 min	Coaching! Stop Being a Chameleon & Step into Bold Self Expression with Megan Hoernke
73 min	Molly Gives More CCF Website Shares from Viewers
76:53 min	Highlights from the show
84 min	Stacy Hemeyer shares the need to change the perception of coaching

Click HERE to watch the show.