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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday October 7, 2002 Volume IV Number 40 |
FOCUS - Parquet Hardwood Floor
In a room with about thirty of the top producers in my business, I came away with an unavoidable observation. Most every one of them has retained the services of a personal coach.
A coach plays something of a mentoring role, but it’s more intense. The purpose of the relationship has a narrower focus. A mentor sets the pace for the whole of life. A business coach is more a personal trainer – like the one retained to prepare an Olympic hopeful.
I realized that these peak performers had at some point abandoned the mentality that says, “I’m not gunna pay some guy to come in here and tell me what I already know, read his list of predictable ‘how-to’ books and fill in the blanks on sophomoric worksheets that distract me from the real work of my business. I can do it myself, thank you very much.”
Instead, they are, virtually everyone of them, men and women who are intensely curious about how to do what they do with ever increasing improvement. While they are driven to be profitable, and to achieve ambitious personal goals, they realize something even more critical than the need for profits: they will only grow to materialize those personal aspirations if they become the kind of people who attract a steady stream of high level clients and actually deliver an extra-ordinary level of personal service. No matter how much money they made last year, they share this one thing in common – the commitment to continue to become better and better, all the time.
That’s where the coach comes in.
It’s a level of openness that I must confess (painfully) is new to me. It’s inviting someone into the most personal levels of your life. A good coach understands that peak performance is more than an efficiency training program. In our wired world, if you can master the contemporary art of multi-tasking, you can produce mounds of paper, stay in touch with a mind-bending hoard of people (e-mail, voice messaging, wireless communication) and maintain a frenetic pace for twelve working hours a day. Six days a week. Most of us are weary of the old efficiency model, we’ve had enough. We’re nursing an efficiency migraine.
Peak performance involves something else. It’s not just doing a whole lot of things, it’s doing the right things. It’s not simply putting in a large quantity of hours, it has more to do with the quality of those hours. It’s not appearing busy. It’s becoming engaged. It’s not so much the number of widgets coming off the assembly line. It’s finding a passion that energizes excellence.
A good coach peels back the layers of protection, sees through the appearances of success and gets you back into the basics - the basics that drive real productivity. Most of us are caught in the overwhelming laundry list of undone chores. We react. There’s no time for pro-act. We are more victims of our work-day than captains of our fate. The phone rings. The deadline approaches. The late fees loom. The boss beckons. Where once our nocturnal dreams painted pictures of a colorful world filled with excitement and anticipation and longings, now we are chased in the night by hideous monsters who will not let us go, horrible crashes of flaming machines, and mostly, exhausted, in painful slow motion, we strive in our sleep, vain attempts to get ready, to prepare for those waiting impatiently for us just outside and we can’t find our clothes or our shoes or our presentation folder or our keys and we are hopelessly late for the most important performance in our lives. Instead of finding pastoral peace in our beds, we are restless. Sweating, churning in the night. We know we need something, but we’re not sure what.
Coaches understand this. Not that they have it figured out. They know how to work on the things that matter most; to get us to start thinking about where our life is going.
A good coach will bring one simple truth to the table. You have the ability to shape and mold that future ahead of you. One way or the other, that future is coming. Let’s get ready to make it the best of all possible worlds.
There are some things over which you have no control whatsoever. But there are many more you can determine. You can choose. The coach helps you understand the difference.
His/her role is to help you develop a plan to make that future of yours the best it can be.
* * * * * * *
I’m still recovering from the party.
The last person left our driveway at just after one o’clock Saturday morning. At this stage in my life, recovery time has been extended. It doesn’t seem that long ago that bouncing back came a little quicker.
The “Party Rents” truck arrived at about 8:30 Friday morning. They unloaded tables and chairs and china and crystal and linens, placing them all around our back lawn in the bright sunshine and under a clear blue sky. “A perfect day,” we said.
But the best part of the delivery was a eighteen by twenty oak parquet hardwood floor, pieced together on the grass for dancing. Then the crew raised a steel frame, four standards at each corner about ten feet tall, with supports looking like a pyramid to a peak at the top, support for a single globe light at the center which would hang from a wire and illumine the scene, gently under the night sky.
We spent the morning and early afternoon trimming and sweeping and dusting and vacuuming getting the home-place ready for the arrival of about sixty quests.
Terri turns fifty this weekend.
The decoration crew arrived before noon; flowers and candles and centerpieces and serving dishes all in place. Lights and the ivy went up on the frame over the dance floor, while I cut down the weeds down the hill behind the house… our back yard will become, for the first time, a parking lot for some thirty cars. The food arrived about four, along with the DJ. We had extension cords running every which way, illegal, I’m sure. Chevy Chase became my inspiration (from the old movie Christmas Vacation) and I worked up more than a little anxiety worrying about a blown circuit. After cutting the lawn and the weeds, I decided I really ought to warn the neighbors – so I went house to house, cheerily inviting everyone to the party, and expressing the hope that we would not be a disturbance. Surprisingly, most everyone with a smile said Party On! like maybe they thought a real party would do the neighborhood some good. I even ran into a County Sheriff, a young buffed out neighbor and friend and family man dressed in uniform who attends our church, and told him about our plans for the evening. John radioed in the news from his high-tech law enforcement equipped black and white Ford Excursion just in case a caller might report us that night. They made a note and put my phone number someplace handy over at the Station.
The sun dropped low on the horizon, and cast a pink glow on the scene. The kitchen (the panic room) filled with the aroma of Gourmet cooking, and all the lights around the house and the dance floor and the gardens came up in the sunset.
Terri knew nothing of the plans, and weeks ago gave Scott clear instructions – “Don’t make a big deal over my fiftieth birthday,” she said.
But he did anyway.
Cars began piling in as the sun disappeared. Terri’s best friends lined up in the driveway and down the back and then up to the house. A few stragglers, unaccustomed to poorly lit country roads and impossible signage, had trouble with a couple turns, but finally arrived, well before a tardy Scott and Terri pulled up for what Terri thought was dinner for four.
I feared she might see the out-door fireplace blazing out back (designed to knock the chill off the night air), or maybe she’d notice the twinkle lights on the arbor in the garden. The cars were well hidden down the hill, and the dance floor, starlit, was blocked from view behind the house. The living-room packed with people went unseen behind closed blinds. If Terri knew, to this day, she’s not saying.
I opened the door to nearly sixty guests hiding inside (kept informed with the help of a walkie-talkie). In unison they shouted, “SURPRISE!”
And then collective, boisterous laughter. Terri appeared to be in shock. (Terri’s not an actress. What you see is what you get. If she had a clue, it was only that. The scale of this Herculean effort could not have been anticipated.)
Next, a rousing chorus, in harmony (Scott is the Contemporary Worship Pastor of a large church nearby), “Happy Birthday to you….”
Then hugs all around.
And through it all one of those looks at her husband that required no words, “I thought I told you…”
“I know… I know,” he repeated. Nodding.
Smiling from ear to ear.
* * * * * * *
My coach has me working on a Mission Statement. A Vision. A list of core Values. I don’t know how many lectures (sermons) I’ve heard on the value of such an exercise, or how many books I’ve read indicating that these are critical elements in personal, professional and business development, but I am only now hammering it out.
He told me that such work would energize me toward my goals.
He’s right.
The questions are almost clichés. How you gunna get there if you don’t know where you are going? How you gunna hit the target if you don’t know where to aim? Who will want to do business with you if they don’t know what you offer? That sort of thing.
But in the aftermath of a world event that has turned our economy upside down, in an era where war looms on the horizon like a mushroom cloud, in a time when the assumptions about growth and profitability and effectiveness in the marketplace are being re-written, when people are re-assessing their place in the world and their expectations about the future, where do we fit?
Where are the passions that will fuel the next generation of dreamers? The next decade of dreams?
A coach can help. A mentor can help.
But only if we let them.
* * * * * * *
After a European feast, an Italian banquet, Scott took the microphone from the DJ, and under a black velvet sky and a gentle evening breeze, candles flickering on each table, the dance floor behind him glowing under a thousand tiny glimmering bulbs, held a crystal goblet of chilled Martinelli’s high, looked at Terri sitting at the table beside him and said (for all of us, including the neighbors, to hear),
“Terri, I can still
remember the day my heart raced at the sight of you… and today, I not only
remember like it was yesterday… I can still feel it…”
A collective sigh swept over the crowd.
“We’ve spent half a lifetime together, a lifetime filled with wonderful friends too many trips and dinners and conversations and holidays and get-aways to count. You and I are somewhat seasoned now, I guess. You are the mother of our two terrific children…” The two of them, one married, the other just finishing up his college career, both sitting on either side of their Mom, beaming, nodded approvingly at their father’s blessing, as though they understood the gift they’d been given, and even the son-in-law, well, he nodded, too, knowing that his young pretty wife bears the unmistakable imprint of this remarkable woman, the subject of the toast in progress.
“You are the love of my life,” he said, choking back the emotion that comes when the truth of a spoken word coincides with a moment in time that will not be forgotten.
He raised the glass one more notch, “here’s to Terri! My wife, my lover, my best friend.” He moved his glass toward her, and she had hers ready. Their goblets clinked, and they sipped without looking away.
“To Terri!” everyone said, and you could hear the crystal ringing across the garden and down the valley and the echo, “Hear, hear!” “Hear, hear!”
(NOTE: Not “Here here.” “Hear, hear!” is the abbreviated version of an old saying - “Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!”)
Hear, hear!
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
One of my passions is writing LeaderFOCUS. It gives me the opportunity to put into words the things that happen to me during the week that make a lasting impression. Writing about them helps solidify, to clarify and bring home the meaning. My hope is that in the retelling, you learn too. As I feel it all again in the composition of narrative, I hope you feel it too.
My coach tells me I ought to keep it up. I think I will.
To learn, we’ve got to listen. We’ve got to admit that we don’t know everything. We’ve got to be willing to let go of the need to be right. To stop pretending that we don’t make mistakes.
We’ve got to be willing to change. With the help of our coaches and mentors and teachers and friends, we will.
Scott and Terri have something special together. So do you. There’s a place for extravagant love... a time for pushing the boundaries out a little.
There’s a time to dance.
And we did. ‘Til late on Friday night.
The Sheriff never showed up. Neither did the neighbors.
But I think they were listening.
And maybe by ten or ten thirty, in their own living rooms over there across the holler, windows open, to the melodies of our DJ’s romantic tunes, they were dancing, too.
Right along with us.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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