Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee- Michael Bungay Stanier

(interview blurb)

Michael: I have a way of articulating my purposes in life. My big purpose is to be a force for change. My business purpose is to infect a billion people with the possibility virus, meaning how do I create ideas that spread in the world and give people the courage to make the braver choice?

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is at the forefront of shaping how organizations around the world make being coached like an essential leadership skill. He’s the founder of Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that helps organizations transform from advice driven to curiosity led. In 2019, he was named the Number One Thought Leader in Coaching and his book, The Coaching Habit, has sold over a million copies. Please welcome Michael Bungay Stanier.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Michael. 

Michael: Alex, welcome. I mean, why am I saying welcome? Alex, thank you, but also welcome. I’m delighted to welcome you to your own podcast. I know you’ve been waiting for that invitation. It’s part of the nature of being more coach like, you create a safe space wherever you go so I’m weirdly doing it even though I’m the guest on your own podcast.

Alex: Thank you for having me in our podcast. I mean, this is a great start to what is going to be a great episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. 

Michael: Yeah, it’s going to go downhill from here. We started badly and probably the wheels are going to come off. We’re going to discover that we’re not drinking coffee at all, we’re both drinking mezcal. I mean, anything could happen. 

Alex: I mean, I think people are getting really excited about this episode already. So let’s start at the beginning. What are we drinking today, Michael?

Michael: Well, I’m a double espresso guy. I grew up in Australia and part of the great things — there are many good things about Australia but one of them is that, in the 40s and 50s in particular, we had a strong wave of Italian and Greek immigration to Australia and it means that Australia is a country that really celebrates and understands European-style or Italian-style coffee, not this bilge water that America drinks, which is like here’s water diluted the color brown which is ridiculous. I’m like I want a really good coffee, and so when I started coffee, I started drinking coffee in Italian cafes and, over the years, I’ve gone from that flat whites and the cappuccinos, the macchiatos, or those kind of milk into coffees. Nowadays, I really like good coffee so we have an espresso maker in our kitchen, we have lots of places around where we live where we can buy fresh beans, and I’ll make my wife an oat milk cappuccino in the morning or flat white and I’ll have a couple of double espressos as the day unfolds.

Alex: That’s wonderful. Coffee in Australia is so good. 

Michael: It is.

Alex: I went to Australia four years ago and that’s really about when I started drinking coffee and I was just like, I couldn’t believe how good it was and I’m going in a few months and I’m really excited. So it’s great to share a double espresso with you. 

Michael: Cheers. 

Alex: You know, this morning, I usually just have one a day but, this morning, I made myself a latte, I haven’t been making almond milk but I used to do and last night I left some almonds soaking and I had homemade almond milk —

Michael: Good for you.

Alex: — latte this morning. It was so good. I should be doing it every day. I’m going to start soaking almonds every day, I think.

Michael: It’s a lot of effort. I mean, I used to make assorted milks as well and I’m like it’s good and it feels much cheaper and probably healthier than the stuff you buy from the shop but it’s a thing to have to soak it and blend it and do all that stuff. But still, I admire your commitment.

Alex: Well, thank you. Honestly, I feel like it takes me five minutes. 

Michael: Oh, there we go. 

Alex: And then the cleanup is another thing but, yes.

Michael: I’m just lazier than you, I think that’s the conclusion everybody’s coming to.

Alex: You know, I have my moments, like this morning, but we’ll see when I make it again. Maybe we’ll make it a thing every time we connect, I’ll make sure I have fresh almond milk.

Michael: Sounds perfect. 

Alex: Well, it is really exciting to have you here in the podcast. You are one of my favorite coaching thought leaders. I don’t typically reveal who my favorites are, but, I mean, I definitely have to say you are up there. I think you’ve done so much for coaching, both for coaches but also popularizing coaching and the coaching approach. I’ve seen your books in airports. I mean, I don’t know how many people have their coaching books on airports. You self-published your book, The Coaching Habit. It has sold over a million copies. Before we get into all that, I’ve always been curious to learn more about the origin story for MBS so let’s start at the beginning.

Michael: Yeah, well, I was raised by a mob of kangaroos in the Australian outback. So, for the first 15 years, I was like Mowgli in The Jungle Book but with kangaroos and with desert rather than bears and jungles. That’s not quite true. Born in Australia, born in Melbourne, but at the age of one moved to Canberra. Canberra is the little known national capital of Australia. When Sydney and Melbourne were fighting over who’d be the capital, they ended up building Canberra somewhere in the middle as a compromise so it’s very much a government town. It’s like Ottawa in Canada or Brasilia in Brazil. It’s built for a specific purpose. And I grew up with a really strong happy, lovely family. My wife goes on and on about us being the Waltons, strong parental relationship. I was the eldest of three sons so I had two younger brothers and it was a pretty great childhood. I liked school, I was okay at sport, I had a cleft lip and palate, which is one of the things that is perhaps noticeable about me if you’ve seen pictures of me or you hear me talk, a slight speech impediment, but my dad had a cleft lip and palate and one of my brothers had a cleft lip and palate so it was normal rather than a disability in our house. And I was just born with a pretty good sense of worth. Call it self-esteem, perhaps, but I’m like I always backed myself, I rarely doubted myself. So primary school, as we call it in Australia, then high school, which is 13 to 18 in Canberra as well. I took a year off after high school and went and worked in England for a year. I worked as a teaching assistant in a private school in England and travelled around Europe a bit, very exciting. Back to Australia, did a combined degree at University in Canberra, the ANU, the Australian National University, so we call it arts law, so, concurrently, I did an English degree in English literature and a new law degree. That’s a five- or six-year combination. In my sixth year, I won to Rhodes scholarship. I mean, I applied, I tried very hard to win it, and I somehow pulled that off. That took me to Oxford to study a master’s degree in literature and was responsible for kind of two really significant turning points in my life. One, not becoming a lawyer, because it’s very hard not to become a lawyer if you’ve got a law degree, you have to have some extraordinary event pull you off that track, and I had that good luck. I would have been a terrible lawyer. Secondly, very early in Oxford, I met my wife. So that’s 30 years ago. We just celebrated our 30th anniversary of our first date way back when.

Alex: Congratulations.

Michael: Yeah, I know. It’s also a piece of good luck. You’re lucky to fall in love with somebody and then you’re lucky that you kind of grow together and you stay on the same path, which we have. I finally finished my Oxford degree, I’m now mid-20s, still no idea what I want to do with my life. I stumbled into the world of innovation and creativity so I worked in an agency helping to invent new products and services. From there, management consulting. From there, moving from London to Boston. From there, after two miserable years in Boston, moving to Toronto. I actually had a flight out of Boston on 9/11. So, shortly after arriving in Toronto, what with 9/11, I kind of had to start my own company. So my career as an entrepreneur was forced upon me and out of that grew a training company called Box of Crayons and that is a company that trains coaching skills in big organizations around the world. And now I will consider myself an author, a teacher, Box of Crayons is helping people champion the power of curiosity in organizations. My other company is called MBS.works and it’s about helping people unlock their greatness and unlock the greatness of the people with whom they work. That’s the story in a single breath so feel free to rewind and pick at the things that might be interesting there.

Alex: So many things to unpack today. I’m curious if you remember the first time you heard about this thing called coaching.

Michael: Approximately. So it would have been in the 90s, in the early 90s. I was living in London, and when I was at university, I had done crisis telephone counseling so trained to support people having a hard time or having suicidal thoughts and offering telephone support for them and was train in basic Rogerian counseling, which in essence is ask good questions and know that the real answer is probably not their first answer. And that was an important and defining moment for me is ending up and doing that training and doing that work. And then when I was in the world of innovation and research, actually, a lot of that is market research, which is running focus groups, which is sitting with people and asking questions and trying to figure out what’s really going on. So, really, I’ve been practicing staying curious since I was 17. I’m now 55 so that’s like, what’s that? 40 years? Oh, my goodness.

Alex: If you’d asked me, I thought you’d be like your early 40s.

Michael: Yeah, well, thank you. You’re very smooth and nobody believes you for a moment. And then I remember, I was working as a consultant and had been influenced by some people like Peter block, who wrote a book called The Flawless Consultant, where, amongst other things, he champions staying curious and having conversations rather than being a download of content and information. So I have a lot of kind of little things pointing me this way. Coaching started showing up on my radar in England. It was clearly a weird Californian, woo-woo, touchy feely, BS thing so everybody in England was like skeptical about it because that’s the standard British stance, you’ve got to be skeptical, but I was like I’m skeptical but I’m kind of interested because I can see how there are moments in my past that point me towards that.

Alex: You do have some famous skeptics over there, yeah.

Michael: That’s true. And then when I moved to Toronto in 2001, I went from kind of experimenting, really. I would just tell my consulting clients that I was doing coaching with them without really knowing what that meant. And then in the early 2000s, I did training with the CTI, Coach Training Institute, built a coaching practice, dismantled the coaching practice really quickly because it turned out, to my great surprise, I did not love coaching as a lifestyle or as a business. It didn’t use the best of me and I got bored and I don’t like people enough. So, with all of the things, I kind of closed that down and moved more into a commitment to try and be a good teacher and a good facilitator, which plays more to my strength and speaks more to my ambition.

Alex: So many things to unpack. Well, you know what, let’s just go there, we’re right there, and then we’ll bring it back to that inflection point after law school. What is it about one-on-one coaching that it was not as appealing to you both as a practice and as a business? And what is it about the facilitation side that really speaks to you?

Michael: So I have a way of articulating my purposes in life. My big purpose is to be a force for change. My business purpose is to infect a billion people with the possibility virus, meaning how do I create ideas that spread in the world and give people the courage to make the braver choice. Coaching, I love a good occasional ad hoc conversation that is coach like. I can be really helpful in that. I’m good at asking good questions and holding the space and making them feel safe and pushing people and holding that space of fierce love where you’re like you’re thoroughly on their side and you’re thoroughly going to do what it takes for them to do the thing or be the thing that they want to be or do. But when you’re running a practice, I found a few things. One is it’s very hard to scale impact if you’re running a coaching practice. Let’s say that you’re really good and you can hold a practice of 30 people. That’s a lot of people that you’re coaching if you’ve got 30 people. There’s only so much you can charge unless you’re some sort of rock star, and I’m not, which means that it’s 30 times whatever you can charge on a monthly basis is your revenue, is your scale of your revenue. But, more importantly, for me, 30 people means that you’re trying to change the lives of 30 people and there’s going to be a ripple effect with those people, their team or their families or whatever, but the scale doesn’t go that far. And then with 30 people, it’s a full-time job just trying to keep the people you’ve got, to let the people go when it’s time for them to go, to find the replacements, it’s a lot of work to maintain, it’s like gardening, it’s a lot of work to maintain a healthy garden, it’s a lot of work to maintain a healthy coaching practice. And there is part of me that craves a bigger audience so I just got — impatient isn’t quite the right word but bored is a closer word which is when I’m talking to somebody and they haven’t really made progress and they haven’t really done the work and I’m like, “I’m just kind of bored of this conversation and I’m going through the motions,” and that’s not fair to the person I’m trying to coach and it’s not how I want to live my life. So, yeah, it just turned out, to my great surprise, because I really thought this is what I’d been building up to all my life which is to have a coaching practice, I’m like, nope, it turns out not to be the thing.

Alex: It sounds like you’ve been very courageous throughout your story in your journey because you decided you want to be an attorney, you go through law school, then you finish law school and you decide that you don’t want to do that, then you’ve position yourself as, “Well, I really wanna grow a coaching practice, that’s exciting to me,” you’re doing it, you realize that’s not what you want to do. Well, that takes a lot of courage. What are some of the learning experiences looking back? I mean, I know that you have some books related to asking the right questions so is that coming from part of your experience around navigating that journey, thinking that you want something and then, when you get there, not being sure that that’s what you want, and being sure that it’s not and continuing the journey in a different direction?

Alex: You know, Alex, I don’t think of it as courageous acts, really. That’s not the language that hits a chord for me. I did a law degree because, actually, I wasn’t sure what to do and I just had a feeling that only doing an English degree wasn’t going to necessarily open up a whole lot of jobs so, in some ways, it was lack of courage that made me do a law degree because I’ve never been interested in law, it was really a kind of backup proper degree to go with my English literature degree. And then one of the things that I think I have a wiring towards which is really helpful is I think about what’s at risk and I’m lucky enough to have a life where the fundamentals are really well in place and it means that I feel like I can take risks without risking the things that matter most. So my wife and I are very happily child free, we’ve never owned a house, we’ve never owned a car, we’ve never been overly connected to having stuff so it means that if we’re like taking a risk, (a), it doesn’t take that much to continue to fund our lives, and I’m not that good at status or career growth, I’ve tried that for a little bit and wasn’t very good at that so I’m not like going, “Oh, I’m gonna risk my reputation,” like I don’t have a reputation, nobody even knows who I am so I’m like there’s not a whole lot at risk there. So, courage is one way to put it but I feel that I do have a hunger to have a life well lived, I do have a hunger to have a life where I feel like I’ve made a contribution as best I can and had impact. I feel like I’m quite conservative in terms of risk taking but, at the same time, I have a really clear understanding of what’s actually at risk, which means that I can do things that might, from the outside, look like it’s an act of courage.

Alex: Yeah, I see what you mean around courage. Sometimes, it takes courage to stay on the path that is not for you, right? Sometimes it just feels like you’re removing barriers when you actually pursue what makes more sense to you and aligns with you. And I think, looking at your story, it is really about that, removing those roadblocks and aligning your path with what comes easy to you that maybe for others is not easy but, for you, that is what you like, being in front of people —

Michael: Yeah.

Alex: — enacting big change and impact. And you started Box of Crayons and from what I know about the story, it sounds like, well, at some point that becomes a business and what you wanted to is really influence people and write books. So the same thing happens again where you’re doing something, it was exciting, and now maybe it’s not kind of what you want to be doing every day. 

Michael: Right. I mean, I have these moments regularly. I mean, for instance, three years ago, I stopped being the CEO at Box of Crayons because I’m not that good as CEO. I mean, Alex, you probably are a great CEO. You seem to like it, you seem to like creating cool partnerships, scaling, ambition, vision, people management. I’m just not that great as a CEO. I’m good as an ideas person. I’m good at taking things that are complex and making them feel practical and simple and accessible. But running a company is boring to me. And it’s a bit like coaching. I can get away with it, I don’t absolutely suck at it, but I’m not very good at it. So there are these moments of me going I found something that I’m not overjoyed with, I’m not that good at, it’s not that fulfilling, and I do have a degree of impatience to move on from that once I figure that out. It takes me a while to figure it out but once I do, I act on it. 

Alex: You keep saying that you’re not a rock star and people don’t know who you are but that’s not — maybe in the past that was the case but I actually was in a call an hour ago and someone — we were thinking about how to structure a project as part of the ICF, what does it mean to be a coaching platform, what are the things that buyers should know that coaches should know, so it’s really thinking about establishing a framework for the industry, thinking about technology and platforms and someone there brought you up and she’s like, “Well, let’s think about this way with the MBS approach,” so I think that’s impact where there’s all these millions of conversations that take place. I actually just remember one of my friends from growing up in Mexico a couple years ago told me, “I know you’re into coaching, I just read The Coaching Habit, it was amazing,” and he was not someone I would at all think would be reading a book about coaching. So your impact, I see it every day. I mean, I’m in the coaching space, I see MBS everywhere.

Michael: Well, thank you. Here’s the nuance though. You remember that I talked about my business mission being to infect a billion people with the possibility virus? Here’s my guess. It’s just a guess, but if you said to your friend, “Who wrote The Coaching Habit and what do you know about him?” he’d be like, “I don’t know but it’s a good book,” and that’s a win for me. I mean, I like being known. I mean, I have enough ego that I don’t mind people coming up and going, “You’re Michael and thank you for writing the book,” and that does happen to me a little bit, but most of the people, as you said, sold more than a million copies, almost all of those people won’t quite remember who wrote that book. And I met somebody last week, we were at a place and he’s like, “We use your seven questions to help scale these companies that we coach, that we coach companies going to scale, so that’s 35,000 people who are having conversations structured around your questions to help them be more effective managers and leaders.” I’m like, “Brilliant. How many of those 35,000 people know who I am?” Not 35,000, not 3,000. I’d be lucky if it was 350 people out of that 35,000 know who I am. And that’s fine by me. I care a lot about impact, I don’t care nearly as much about name recognition.

Alex: I see your point and I think us in the industry, we know you because we see you speak at the WBECS Summit and —

Michael: Exactly. So in the coaching world, amongst coaches, I’m better known, in part because WBECS and I’ve spoken at WBECS, now coaching.com, for 11 years and coming up, I’m teaching in pretty soon. So you have the biggest hub of coaches in the world so there’s a chance I’m known to a percentage of people at coaching.com. It’s great. That’s a very, very, very small percentage of actually being known in the world.

Alex: You’re absolutely right. I think I was looking at you with my lens of you are an absolute coaching rock star, but thinking about value, it’s interesting to separate the impact that you have in the world with your name itself, right? So many people know about The Coaching Habit and is that important whether they know your name or not? I think true impact is really changing people’s behavior, the way they think about themselves, the way they think about others. You know, one of the things that I really like about your approach is creativity and innovation are really at the core of what you do and how you do it. I remember last year, you did the summit presentation with no slides and that’s — well, that sounds courageous to me. But your approach to thinking about things is really unique and I think it appeals to people. In a world where there’s so much information, we’re drowning in information, to being able to just be yourself and get in front of people, sometimes it’s really all people need. And one of the things that struck me as interesting was in your book, your latest book, How to Begin, you start — I have the book right here because I thought it was so clever that the book starts in the cover. 

Michael: I know. I love that. 

Alex: So, how did that come about? I thought that was so clever.

Michael: Yeah. Well, let me rewind a little bit and just pick up on some of the things that you talked about.

Alex: It is your episode today, we established that at the beginning so let’s do that.

Michael: Well, I don’t actually show up and just be myself when I’m teaching for coaching.com or for wherever else. There’s principles behind a lot of what I do. So, some of the principles are this. First of all, what’s the least I can teach that would be most useful. So, one of the anxieties that writers and teachers and facilitators and coaches, for that matter, have is am I adding value? And their solution to that is to add more content. And my design philosophy, backed up by how adults learn, is people have a very limited capacity to take in content. Their brain gets kind of saturated really quickly. You’re actually trying to create space to process the most important content. So you got to find the most important content and you got to trust the people you’re teaching to fill the space that you give them to learn and engage. One of my other principles is how am I different from all the other stuff that’s going along? Because I’m trying to build a brand and a reputation. I’m trying to make people pay attention to who I am, and one of the ways I do that is by disrupting what’s expected. So I know that most people show up with a PowerPoint deck or nothing at all, just talking to the camera, and I got a way of when I’m doing virtual presentations of having a middle ground where I got bits of paper that I’ve written that I hold up to the camera and then I take away. When I’m on stage, I use a flip chart rather than a slide deck. Deliberately disruptive, not for my sake, really, it’s more to try and disrupt the audience so that they pay attention to who I am. And then, in terms of just showing up and being authentic on camera, I’ve been practicing for 30 years to be authentic on camera. I’ve got a lot of learned behaviors, learned use of my hands, learned use of my eyes, learned use of how I modulate my tone, learned use of how I structure a session so there’s an ebb and flow of energy. There’s a lot of rehearsal and practice that goes into me being authentic onstage. Even practicing and figuring out what my voice is, what’s my style, what do I care about. And then making decisions, like if anyone is watching the video, I’m wearing a pearl necklace and I’ve got a couple of opal earrings in and that’s because I like wearing pearl necklaces and opal earrings and it’s also because I like being a little bit different. Most people won’t notice. Most people won’t care. Some people are like, “Ah, this is now interesting, because Michael’s kind of, he’s a bejeweled man showing up on the coaching podcast.” So just to speak to I’m really keen on understanding core principles and having some core principles from which I build the work that I do.

Alex: One of the things that you really anchor on is, and I think you call it the taming your advice monster, so, for coaches, coaches really are very giving, they’re in a helping profession. In your experience, how can coaches tame the need they have to add too much value? Because a lot of what I see you talk about is really about understanding value and how to manage it, how to create it, and I think a lot of people and coaches are tempted to, you know, they question, “Am I adding value? Am I adding value?” and sometimes that takes away from actually adding value so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. 

Michael: Well, I agree with your premise, which is sometimes people add too much value that it becomes not value at all. In fact, it detracts from an experience or an interaction. So, yeah, I talked about the advice monster first in The Coaching Habit and then I do a deeper dive in The Advice Trap book where I talk about the three different advice monsters.

Alex: By the way, your names for the work you do, you’re really good with the branding because everything resonates. So you’re a bejeweled man but the title of your books, the way you frame concepts and theories, there’s a lot of thought behind it but it’s also bejeweled, in a way, where it sticks with you, like Tame Your Advice Monster, that’s going to stay there.

Michael: Exactly. Well, thank you for saying that. Shannon, who’s the CEO at Box of Crayons, talks about my ability to thingify stuff. So to give abstract concepts a handle that people can pick things up by. And I think she’s right. That’s one of the things that I am good at and I practice and that becomes one of my calling cards, if you like. So, I think coaches try and they underdeliver the potential of the conversations for two broad reasons. One is they don’t know what the other person wants and they don’t trust them and the second is their own anxieties and their insecurities. So if you take the first category first, which is I don’t actually know how best to add value to you, I think that often comes down to a conversation with a client or a potential client where you, in essence, ask, “What does really good look like? How do I serve you best? And what does mediocre or meh look like? And how do I avoid underserving you? Because I don’t know any better.” And if somebody asked me that, if they were asking questions of me, I’d be like, well, first of all, don’t do the usual coaching stuff because I’m too experienced at that and I can wrap you around my finger if you’re doing the usual coaching stuff. Secondly, always check whether it’d be helpful for you to offer up advice to me because often it will be but I just want you to signal it so that we both know that you’re moving from curiosity to advice giving. There’s a really helpful place for that but I want it to be an explicit agreement that that’s the thing to move to rather than not. Thirdly, don’t let me be slippery because I’m very slippery and very elusive and so keep checking in that you’ve kept me at my learning edge rather than faking that I’m at my learning edge, which is something that I have done and continue to do occasionally with people who I hire to help me. So have a conversation with the person you’re serving and going, “How do I best serve you? What’s your relationship with curiosity? What’s gonna drive you nuts? How do you like your advice? How should I push you? What does fierceness look like to you? What does love look like to you?” And then there’s the second category which is your own work to do, which is what are your anxieties about who you are and what you bring. And in The Advice Trap book, I talk about these three different advice monsters: tell it, save it, and control it. And those are named for the things that kind of rise up out of the darkness and make you leap in with advice, even though it might not be the most useful thing. But take that to the next level of abstraction to understand that these are manifestations of ego states, where you feel vulnerable and will drive you to try and add value in all sorts of ways because of your own anxiety rather than for what best serves your client. So, “tell it” is a sense that you’ve got to have the answers. If you don’t have the answers, you’re a failure. You need to have all the answers to all the things. “Save it” is you’ve got to save the person from themselves, you got to be the rescuer, you got to make sure that no harm, no damage is going to take place. And if they do struggle or stumble or find it miserable or find it difficult, that’s your failure. And then the third one is “control it,” which is like if you take your hands off the steering wheel, all sorts of chaos will erupt so you got to manage everything and you’ve got to make sure that you are driving it and there’s no sharing of control or power, it’s all down to you to hold it because you know better than them and if anybody else gets behind the steering wheel, you’re lost, you’ve failed again. And it’s not a bad idea to just get clear in your own mind which of those is the key driver for you. I think at theadvicetrap.com, there’s actually a little quiz you can take to kind of figure out which is your advice monster, I think that’s still there, because then you’ve got to do your work to get over your stuff to go, “I need to get comfortable with not having the answers. I really need to be comfortable with not being the rescuer. I really need to be comfortable about not being in control so that I can create the space for that other person to find their answers, to take responsibility for their own life, to take control of the things that matter to them.”

Alex: You know, a lot of the coaches working in today’s modern workplace work with leaders that are operating in environments where there’s a lot of ambiguity and a lot of what you’re talking about are these internal kind of challenges that you face as a coach to be able to add value to your clients without being overly focused on adding value, just being there, understanding yourself, understanding why you want to say something, why maybe you should, why maybe you shouldn’t. The more you understand yourself and you’re able to live without ambiguity, I think the better equipped you are also to understand the operating environment that your clients are working under because —

Michael: Yeah, agreed.

Alex: — ambiguity is just, it’s everywhere and it’s becoming, I think, more prevalent in this interconnected fast-paced world. And, to me, it’s interesting how these internal states, this relationship with yourself, the more you tame it, the more you understand it, the more you are able to manage yourself and have this level of understanding, I think the more you can make sense of the world and others’ experiences of it as well. I mean, continuing to work on yourself as a coach is so important and that’s also why I was very excited about our episode today because I think the work that you’re doing is it’s both simple, straightforward, and incredibly deep. And, to me, that is, I think, the combination that only comes with a lot of thoughtfulness and real understanding of where you are, where you want to take someone in that journey. So you appear there without PowerPoint slides but it doesn’t — and you’re yourself and you’ve been training to be yourself and show up like that, right? So there’s so many layers and I think that you, when I look at your work, I can see how layered it is. And you want to do that cheesy CEO of tech company thing where you quote Steve Jobs but it’s so true. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Michael: There’s another quote, which is quite a lot, which is striving for simplicity on the other side of complexity and that’s definitely what I try and do in my work, which is I think of it, I’m often taking complicated abstract ideas and just working them and it’s like kneading bread, you got to keep kneading it to get to a certain point where I’m like, I’ve found the clarity and the crystalline simplicity in that. And that’s one of the things that I am good at. The one thing I want to add, Alex, to what you’re saying, which is around learning how to manage ambiguity in yourself, and this is the kind of the drum that I’m beating at the moment, because, in June, I’ve got a book coming out called How to Work with (Almost) Anyone and it’s about how do you build working relationships that’s safe and vital and repairable.

Alex: I’m interested to learn more about who you shouldn’t work with because there’s a little space there for that but we’ll get to that in a few minutes. 

Michael: Sure, exactly, yeah. The heart of it is how do you actively construct the best possible relationship with the people that you work with so that you have the best chance of navigating ambiguity, uncertainty, hard times, misunderstandings, crises between the two of you? Because that always happens. How do you get back on track? How do you bring the fullness of the relationship? How do you repair cracks and dents and damages that might have happened? And so you need to do your own work around your own kind of triggers around ambiguity or uncertainty or whatever it might be and you need to do the work of building resilient relationships with the people with whom you work.

Alex: So I like how you frame things, Michael. Just when I’m talking to you, I kind of have this clarity and I think it comes from all the work that you do. When you’re interacting with someone, it’s like you’re very clear about the ideas that you have, you’re very clear about where they come from and how they need to be applied. 

Michael: But here’s the other thing just behind the scenes, Alex. So, I can now talk about this book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. It’s about building relationships that safe, vital, and repairable. Now, I didn’t just make that up for this interview. It’s taken me nine months to find that phrase. I shared like what was a third draft or a fourth draft from this book with about 100 people on my newsletter list and all that sort of stuff to get feedback and, honestly, I was like, “This is already a really good book, they’re gonna stroke my ego, they’re gonna give me a few little refinements.” And, universally, everybody was underwhelmed. Everyone was just like, “It’s okay. I couldn’t quite get to the end of it but it seemed all right.” I was like pretty downcast — I had to blow the whole thing up and just go, “All right, I’m rebuilding from the rubble yet again.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to — I’ve built something and it hasn’t been elegant and clear and straightforward and kind of what I hope is like revealing the thing that you kind of already knew but nobody had just put it to you in that way so I had to go back and write it and rewrite it and rewrite it again and I’ve now got to a point where I’m like it’s great. Three things, safe, vital, repairable. Five questions and the keystone conversation, one, two, three, four five. Here’s how you prepare for these conversations. I’ve now got it. It’s exciting. But I just want people to understand that I don’t have this kind of ability just to dash these things off in a day or two. It takes relentless mistake making for me to get to a point where I do find the simplicity on the other side of complexity that I’ve been seeking. Sorry about that. 

Alex: Simplicity on the other side of complexity. What are you sorry about?

Michael: Oh, just you keep trying to ask me a question and I keep interrupting you and answering a question you haven’t even asked me yet so it’s me taking over the interview again. So far, I’ve asked me six questions and you’ve asked me three questions.

Alex: Well, you’re a dream guest because you’re doing all the work. I’m here sipping espresso and enjoying you asking your own questions. I want to go through your books because I think they’re all uniquely interesting and I think they both appeal to the experienced coach and also to anyone walking through an airport that may want to have a fun interesting read that is actually applicable when they go back to work or they’re working through something with their spouse or whatever it is. I think your books are both niche and also universally applicable, which I think is a really cool combination. 

Michael: Thanks. 

Alex: Let’s go to the beginning of those works that we’ve been talking about. So, The Coaching Habit, how did it come about? What’s the genesis story of the book?

Michael: Sure. So The Coaching Habit feels like my first book but it was my fourth or my fifth book. So, again, it’s always taken longer and been hard work and had more failure leading up to it, this is a test.

Alex: I feel like I should have prepared better and know that but since this is your — since you’re hosting today, then I’m not obliged to know that that was your fourth book.

Michael: First book was called Get Unstuck & Get Going…on the Stuff that Matters and it was a self-generating coaching tool. It has little flip pages so you could create questions in a random combination that would provoke you to think differently about whatever challenge you brought to it. Then I wrote a book called Find Your Great Work. That thing got immediately picked up by a New York publisher and became Do More Great Work, which is about how do you figure out work that has more impact and more meaning. Then I did a book in partnership with Seth Godin called End Malaria where we raised close to half a million dollars for Malaria No More by publishing in partnership with Amazon. And then there’s another book or two in there. And, finally, I had this idea for a book around, as I would put it now, unweirding coaching, because I thought to myself, “I am a big fan of coaching and almost everything I read about it, whether it’s in books or courses, makes it obscure and complicated and mysterious and woo-woo and black box and shrouded in incense, fog,” and I’m like I need to unweird coaching so normal people, people who don’t listen to these sorts of podcasts, but who are like, “I don’t wanna be a coach but is coaching helpful?” that’s who I was writing this book for. And I had a working relationship with a publisher in New York, who published Do More Great Work and I thought this is a really good idea, not least because it turned out to be basically what my company had been teaching. So I tested the ideas. I knew that this stuff was actually practical and useful. And I wrote a proposal to them and they’re like, “Great, okay, let’s see what you got,” and so I wrote the book and they’re like, “That’s not good. Go away and write another book.” So I was like, okay, so I wrote another version of the book, and I was like, “Okay, great,” brought it to them and they’re like, “You know, we like you, Michael, but not this. Something else.” I’m like, oh, okay, and I did this six times, Alex. I literally wrote six versions of this book over three years trying to get these publishers to be interested in it. And it was pretty depressing. I lost my nerve and lost my confidence, like is there a book here? And after some thinking about it, I was like, you know what, I’m really clear on what this book is and who it’s for and what the structure is because I’ve written so many bad versions of it that I think I can see the good version. And I went back to them and I said, “Okay, this is it. This is a yes or a no. You’re either gonna say yes to it and we’re gonna go ahead with it or you’re gonna say no and we’re done.” I was super confident that they were going to say yes because my last book had sold like 100,000 copies, which is a lot for a book.

Alex: That’s a lot.

Michael: And so I think they’re going to bet on a guy who’s written a book for them that sold a lot, who has the business that this book is connected to, you can probably guess how this ends, they did not say yes, they said, “No, we’re not interested in this book.” I was taken aback. And after — dark night of the soul would be putting it too strongly but a certain kind of like depressed few days at home, I went, look, this is — I’m going to back myself on this. This is a good idea. I know what’s at risk because I’m going to publish this by myself, I’m going to publish it like a professional. I’m not going to do an amateur self-publishing job, I’m going to do everything it takes to put this book out as if a publishing company would put it out. So I found an editor and I found a designer and I found a copy editor and, actually, through all of this got introduced to the company that now produces my books, they’re called Page Two, they’re based in Vancouver, and they are the ACME, the epitome of the hybrid publishing model. The author brings an idea and some cash up front, they have all the mechanics of a regular publisher but a different business model, we get a book out there, it sells and it takes off so they produced The Coaching Habit with me and it just took off. It sold close to 200,000 copies in the first year. I had a goal. I didn’t have a sales target, I just had a goal for it to be a classic, wanted it to be considered a classic in the world of coaching. And my measurement for that was that it had a thousand reviews on amazon.com. That was it. So I was like how do I market this to try and get those thousand reviews? And so I spent two years marketing it and being on podcasts and doing all sorts of stuff, and I worked really hard to get the flywheel spinning and I did and that’s hard work and a really good book and a whole bunch of luck and fairy dust and stuff that I don’t even understand, but since then, the book’s kind of taken off and continues to sell really well. I mean, I checked it a couple of weeks ago and it was like number 600 on Amazon, which is amazing for a book that is seven years old.

Alex: How many copies has it sold to date?

Michael: I’m not totally sure. 

Alex: To today. We need to know today, how many?

Michael: Look, it’s more than 1.2 million and it’s less than 1.5 million so it’s somewhere in that range. At a certain point, I’m like I’m just going to stop counting because it’s already so vastly exceeded my wildest expectations that it doesn’t really matter anymore. 

Alex: I mean, it has to be up there in terms of numbers of copies sold by a self-published book. It’s unbelievable. 

Michael: I suspect so. I mean, there’s a bunch of books that really take off in fiction as self-published, but in terms of self-published books in nonfiction, it’s got to be, I don’t know, one of the top, I don’t even know, I’m just making up numbers. 

Alex: It must feel good for someone that — you strike me as someone that has worked really hard to get their success, I think. Life’s not fair. There’s no cosmic balance of like everyone has to work this hard to get this outcome. Every one’s experience is different and you strike me as someone that has a clear objective of wanting to bring impact to people, have fun while you’re doing it, but if what you’re doing doesn’t work, you’re going to find the path that you need to take to get there. And that’s very — I admire that. And after that, was your next book The Advice Trap? 

Michael: Yeah, which is kind of a sister book to The Coaching Habit. It was because a few people wrote to me going, “I really liked the book, The Coaching Habit, I liked the seven questions, I just can’t find a way to use them. For some reason, I’m wired to not be more coach like, to stay curious a little bit longer,” and so The Advice Trap was a deeper dive into what does it take to change your behavior and that’s why the advice monster is a kind of deeper dive into the deeper needs of the ego to tell it, save it, control it. And so it’s a deep dive and an expansion into that and that’s the book that Brené Brown really liked and so I was on her podcast, I’m coaching Brené and stuff, so that was super exciting. And then after The Advice Trap came How to Begin, which came out about a year ago. And that’s a shift away from the practicalities of coaching and into a bit more about goal setting but really purpose setting, how do you find your next big thing, the thing that’s thrilling and important and daunting for you.

Alex: From someone that has done that repeatedly. So it’s good when the author has experience in the field.

Michael: Well, that’s right. I mean, I haven’t always done it successfully. I mean, people only ever hear the stuff that works and they never hear the stuff that doesn’t quite work and —

Alex: Like the guy that goes to Vegas and comes back and, “Oh, I won,” but you never hear when — they never come back saying, “Oh, I lost all this money, it was so fun.”

Michael: I have a bunch of small, medium, and large losses and failures, which, for me, is just part of the process. I don’t look at it as failure really, just things that hadn’t succeeded, because my basic philosophy, as best I can, I don’t always live up to this but I try to, which is I’m really trying to commit to the process rather than the outcome. So with The Coaching Habit book, for instance, I’m like putting the best book out I can in the world, make it professional, market it hard for two years. It might sell 5,000 copies, it might sell 10,000 or 100,000, who knows, I can’t control the outcome, I can just control my commitment to the process. So a phrase I use a lot is I take my best guess about the next thing that is best in service to the mission, me to be a force for change and then work to infect a billion people with the possibility virus. So what’s my best guess, and then we work on it for a bit and then it either works or it doesn’t work or it’s somewhere in the middle and it’s a bit mediocre but maybe it’s recoverable, and then we take our next best guess about the next thing that we do.

Alex: Focusing on the process not the outcome actually has some parallels to asking questions versus providing advice.

Michael: Right. I hadn’t thought of it like that but I think you’re spot on, which is when you’ve asked questions rather than give answers, when you commit to the process rather than the outcome, you are committing to ambiguity. Is this working? Is this the right thing? How does this story end? I don’t actually know. But, for me, what you’re doing is you’re focusing on the stuff that you can do best, particularly when your process versus outcome and like let me do the thing that I can do best, let me try and execute really well. I mean, I’ve just been writing out my plan for the next book launch, marketing stuff, because, it turns out, the only thing worse than writing a book is trying to market and launch and sell a book. It’s miserable experience for the most part. My philosophy is let’s pick a few things and then execute really well and do them at a scale that’s bigger than we might imagine rather than, and this is where I started because I’m good at ideas, here are 38 different fun things I could do as part of a book launch. And I’ve stripped that back to about seven things that we’re going to try and do really well. And then we’re going to commit to the process. And then the book will sell or it won’t sell but we’re going to celebrate a launch well launched.

Alex: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of work, those book launches. One of the things that I liked the most about ambiguity is that it’s inescapable and so much of what we do as humans is try to control and escape the fact that there is no escaping ambiguity and chaos and complexity and that’s why complexity theory always appealed to me. I think it’s so interesting to find these like strange attractors, this order within chaos. In business, you can see it as sometimes the riskiest thing is not to take the risk. 

Michael: Right, right. 

Alex: And those are really fundamental foundational aspects of the world, the way the world works. Stagnation, sometimes, too much stability leads to stagnation, which is hard to understand. You would think stability leads to more stability, but like, fundamentally, in the way the universe works, actually, that is decay and entropy. Having a little bit of randomness is what keeps things moving. 

Michael: I agree. I mean, with Shannon, our CEO at Box of Crayons, one of the things that I’m doing to her as the founder and kind of the owner of that company is encouraging her to lose money, encouraging her to fail, encouraging her to try some stuff, because she’s highly responsible so her natural wiring is how do I protect Michael’s legacy and how do I protect Michael’s money, because that’s kind of what it is, this is all my money, sort of. I’m like, actually, I’m really ambitious for the impact this company can have and unless you’re trying stuff that’s not working, we’re not stepping up and being the right level of ambition. You can go too far. I don’t want you to lose the farm, although if that happens, so be it, but I’d rather you fail for that if it’s a well thought out gamble rather than fail for playing it too safe.

Alex: Our intentions and our intended outcomes don’t have a linear relationship and when we’re describing that, it’s really sometimes someone, like Shannon, can have absolutely the best intention to make you money, to grow the business, to have impact, but if you don’t lose money sometimes by trying different things, maybe that impact will not be sustained and I think that’s why coaching is so impactful and such — I actually think beyond just professional coaching but like using a coaching approach is so impactful for, let’s say, in the scope of business, because innovation comes from thinking differently. And I think when we are stuck in providing advice, we always need to be the expert and being the expert in a world that keeps changing makes you ultimately a relic of the past, not someone that can envision how to succeed in the future in the changing world. And I think we see that in business all the time.

Michael: Well, I mean, with ChatGPT and AI, I can get better advice from the AI cloud than I can from most people most of the time so I do think that’s right. The question I’m always asking myself, Alex, and this is not just about the advice I’m giving but it’s also about the questions I’m asking, is who does this serve? Does this serve me and my ego and my status or does this truly serve the person on the other side of the table from me? And when you ask that question, you see that, sometimes, advice is exactly the right thing because that’s truly the thing that’s most in service to the person and, sometimes, your advice is not because it’s more about look what I know and look what I can do and look how this makes me feel better and safer and adding value or whatever. Same with questions. Sometimes, you ask questions because it actually serves your agenda in a sneaky way rather than their agenda. Often, the question, for instance, a classic coaching question, “Tell me more about that,” is not that helpful for the client because they already know all about it. You want to find out more because you got no one else to ask, you’re trying to come up with a solution so you need more information to get that solution. “Tell me more about that,” is often not a question in service to the client. 

Alex: That resonates with me a lot. I’ve done a lot of coaching as a coach. Unfortunately, I don’t get to do as much these days but I find that to be absolutely true. Sometimes — and the better you’re becoming a coaching, the more I think you can — I’ve seen myself think, wow, I’m really good, I’ve become a really good coach,” the moment you start doing that, you stop growing as a coach because you start focusing more on, “Oh my god, that question was so good. That coaching session, I was just amazing.” And I think that’s a human tendency, but that’s why we call it a coaching practice. The practice is to get really good in service of the client and to recognize that you’re good and have self-confidence because you come to the client feeling good about your capability to be able to help them. But you can get lost if you start focusing too much on how good you are and here’s a trap there, for sure, and as I’m hearing you, I’m like that resonates with me when I’m sitting there as a coach and it’s fascinating. And I also agree that, sometimes, I’m not — I don’t believe that advice is never warranted. I think some clients in some instances really are even looking for the coach to provide advice but I think —

Michael: Totally agree.

Alex: It’s how you do it, how you frame it, and also —

Michael: And how you set up the relationship in the first part, which is like, if you say, “Look, sometimes I ask questions, sometimes I teach models, sometimes I give advice. I’m gonna check in with you about what’s most useful.” I could actually go, “Alex, I understand I think some of the stuff you’re wrestling with. What would be most helpful for you here? Should I ask you some good questions because I’ve got some beauties? Should I teach you a model because there’s one that I think could be helpful for you? Or should I just come out and give you some thoughts around how I might address that if I was you? Which would be most useful for you?” So stop trying to guess what the client wants and continually negotiate the relationship so that you continually orient to serve them best. You’re not going to figure that out in your own head, you’re going to figure that out by going, “Alex, of all the things I could do, what would be most helpful here?”

Alex: Absolutely. The one instance where I think sometimes it’s important as a coach to keep in mind is like is this the right moment to give advice or is giving advice just being a little lazy because formulating the advice in terms of the question and having the person go on that quest to find that solution for themselves seems like too much work? I think that’s like the crux of the matter for me.

Michael: No. Questions that are like the advice — it’s like fake questions because the advice is built into the question somehow, drive me nuts.

Alex: How is that working for you?

Michael: Yeah, exactly.

Alex: That gives me time to figure out what actually to ask.

Michael: Yeah.

Alex: Because I kept thinking about how good my other question was and then I lost track. I want to close with your latest book and when I saw the title for the first time, so How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Building Better Working Relationships, so, immediately, I went to why almost everyone? Who are the people you can’t work with?

Michael: Well, I like a little bit of hype as much as the next person but I think how to work with anyone sets you up for a whole bunch of people explaining how you can’t work with that other person. So, rather than me define who the almost is, I’m going to say that everybody can define who the almost is. There’s some people who are wired. I mean, there’s that research that indicates that the level of people who are psychopaths who are at high levels in organization is a much higher percentage than they are in the general population because, actually, a psychopathic approach to business, which is, “Get the results, don’t care about the people, say whatever needs to be said to get the thing that you want and don’t worry about truth and lies,” that actually works. A lot of times, these people end up kind of being senior leaders. And I’m not sure that the core strategy that I’m suggesting in this new book, which is like how do you have a conversation about how we’ll work together before you have a conversation about what you work upon is necessarily going to work with everybody. But I do think, no matter where you are in the bell curve between some working relationships are really great and some kind of suck and most of them are kind of somewhere in the middle, all of those or nearly all of those can be improved by making it explicit about how you want to work together, how you will navigate the good times, how you’ll navigate the bad times.

Alex: Michael, I have so many more things I would want to unpack with you, let’s definitely, as we’re doing round two in the Coaching.com Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee podcast, let’s definitely think about what our next conversation might look like. It is really always a pleasure. Thank you so much for everything you do. You genuinely are someone that is out there trying to help people improve themselves and the world and that is much appreciated so thank you for everything you do.

Michael: Thanks for having me, Alex. I really appreciate it.