Reinventing Yourself: 3 Ways to Create a Better Future

Some of the things discussed here you have not heard before.

This week, Gay and Mike sat down with Jim Selman, a living legend in the coaching industry.

Jim is the person who coined the ideas of corporate coaching and executive coaching (and first used the term in print). But this is not only a history lesson.

We will disclose some unique tactics and concepts that will change how you see the world and approach personal transformation.

You have the opportunity to shape, create, and design your future, but this will only happen if you take charge of your present and work your way forward intentionally.

This episode is not your average coaching discussion. These ideas have been polished through literally thousands and thousands of hours of corporate and personal transformation, working with real people.

Are you ready to take control of your future? Let’s dive in!

Start Practicing Deep Communication

Gay remembers that in the early stages of his career, on one magical day, he realized that the way he had defined communication had only to do with how words left his mouth.

On that day, he decided to focus on whether the other person received the ideas, understood them, and acted on them.

You must realize that communication is in the interaction and what it does to the other person, not just how it's crafted as it leaves someone’s mouth.

Inexperienced organizations and marketing teams focus on the message they are sending.

To be successful, you've got to understand that communication is more than sending and receiving information. It’s much, much more profound than that.

It’s about connection. It’s about trust. If you're connected, trust people, love people, and are engaged in a common cause, communication will be different from sending and receiving information.

And that type of deep communication would help you achieve personal transformation and help others do the same.

How Can I Start?

I would say, quit trying to send messages and start listening.

The more you listen, the more you will be in a natural dance with whoever you're interacting with, rather than thinking that they should appreciate your brilliance.

There’s magic in this because people don't listen to you until you listen to them first.

Adjust Your Relationship With the World

Jim’s new book is Living in a Real-Time World: 6 Capabilities to Prepare Us for an Unimaginable Future.

He wrote it before the pandemic, but the pandemic certainly validated his point.

The book is predicated on the premise that we live in a unique time in human history. The rate of change is getting faster and faster. The gap between the future and the past is getting shorter and smaller, so we're living at a time where our predictions are no longer reliable, and we don't have control (if we ever did).

All of this requires us to rethink who we are, how the world works, and what's not possible.

We are going where no one has gone before, and we don't have any maps for getting there. As a consequence, we need to appreciate the power of our relationships.

One of the capabilities Jim mentions is learning to care. And living in this context, caring for others is becoming an essential ingredient, perhaps even one of survival.

The tag can be applied to capabilities such as learning to listen, learning to learn, relearning how we learn, and accepting reality to create change.

The book revolves around this human egocentric orientation. We want to make the world that we want rather than learn to live with one another in the same world in harmony with our individual circumstances.

This takes us to the subheading of this section.

Do we want to improve, change, or be transformed? We shouldn’t try to do it alone.

Transformation has always been about possibilities. It has always been about relationships. When you have an authentic shift in how you RELATE to the world, you can tell you're effectively in a different world.

Transformation is changing your relationship with the world, so it creates possibilities and choices you didn't have before. We need to start caring more about the people around us and their needs, problems, and aspirations. Only that way, we will grow together.

Come From Where You Want to Go

When we are starting a project or beginning to create something, we have a vision. We tend to give ourselves to that vision, which uses us. And then, when we succeed, we start to think it had to do with us, and we begin to take credit or begin to believe that what we know is what made us successful.

9 of 10 people have no idea what their power is. They think they're powerful because they're intelligent, rich, or beautiful. The fact is that if you just look at your network of friends, most of them seem very powerful to you. But the reason they're powerful to you is not the reason that they think they're powerful.

And this begins to reflect that there's a kind of human blindness that is always present. When people are successful, they become trapped in that kind of blindness, where they believe that it's about them rather than about their relationships and the company.

It was the whole network of people that allowed them to be successful. That creates some form of an egocentric story that kills their creative juices. That destroys the possibilities that they would imagine that they can have. And so what they do is they try to think about what's relevant, rather than just be relevant.

How Do I Handle This?

Declare that you are relevant, no matter what you are doing, but don't spend any time trying to figure out why.

Don’t try. Leave that up to history, the community, or your clients to decide.

Be authentic in terms of what you are offering.

Decide to be grateful for what you have and who you have in your life and work to help anyone struggling with this blindness.