Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee - Lance Secretan

(interview blurb)

Lance: My work these days is about helping people become inspired in a world that’s not always inspiring. We’re human beings first, not functions. So when we coach, for example, we’re coaching human being, not a marketing manager or an IT specialist or whatever and that’s what I think we’ve forgotten in the business world. We’ve forgotten the humanity of who we are, not just in the business world, by the way, but in politics and in lots of other places too.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and these Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the world’s top authority on inspirational leadership, a trailblazing teacher, mentor, advisor, and leadership coach. He is the author of 21 books about leadership, inspiration, corporate culture, and entrepreneurship. His new book, Reawakening the Human Spirit, is a radical new way to look at our lives, institutions, and society. Please welcome Lance Secretan.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Lance.

Lance: Hi, Alex. How are you doing?

Alex: I’m doing great. Thank you for being here. It’s a pleasure to have you. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Lance: We’re drinking a rusty nail and this is very early in the day for me to be doing this. In fact, I never do this, but you asked me so I complied.

Alex: So I have to tell you, last time we had alcohol in the episode, I got a message from one of our investors saying that it popped up on his LinkedIn and he didn’t think it was a good look that I was drinking on the job but I think, hopefully, our listeners and the people that watch the video version appreciate that we just go with it, and, yeah, it’s 10 a.m. here in LA, I am typically not drinking whiskey at 10 a.m. but let’s just go with it. It’s fun. We’ll change it up a little bit. So thank you for a creative twist on this. 

Lance: Sure.

Alex: Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve had such an incredible career. You’ve done so many things. You write books, you help grow companies, you’re a poet, there’s all sorts of things that you’ve done so I’m really curious to see where you start kind of thinking about how do you tell us about your journey?

Lance: Well, the weirdest thing that you probably don’t know is that I was born in England, left when I was eight, but from the age of 10 to 15, I was the number one child actor in the English speaking language. So, if you go to IMDb and look me up, you’ll see all the movies I was in back in the day. This was in the 50s so a long time ago, but I was Peter in Heidi, for example so lots of all that history. 

Alex: Wow.

Lance: That’s my beginning, sort of.

Alex: That was not in your bio.

Lance: I don’t bother sharing that, it’s sort of irrelevant to the corporate work I do but probably more relevant to the work I’m doing more recently.

Alex: That is an incredible story. I’m really excited about our episode today because, again, you just have such a remarkable life and career and I think our audience, which is mostly coaches, will really appreciate learning more about it. So, after being a child actor, just tell us about how you started your career, a little bit on that history and let’s weave it into how did it evolve to what you do today, which is going to be a remarkable journey.

Lance: Well, the problem, Alex, is, at my age, I have to take weeks and weeks to tell you my life story because it’s a long one. Anyway, so, briefly, I worked in the Toronto Stock Exchange for a while. So when I was 18, I was working at the Toronto Stock Exchange, and I won’t share the whole story but I managed to figure out how the system worked and I went on the floor so I make $10,000. Now, this was in 1959. $10,000, if you look that up today is worth about $100,000 and I was 18. I’ve never seen that much money in my whole life, ever. And so I was lucky. And then I got a job at a company called Office Overload, I worked there for a year, became came sales manager and I got headhunted to go to England. And there, I was running Manpower and we ran Manpower and built Manpower from scratch basically to 75,000 employees, 72,000 employees. And then I came back to Canada and I started teaching and along the way I got a PhD and so on, but when I was teaching, I was teaching MBA students and I couldn’t figure out the books they were giving me. I mean, I was teaching strategy to MBA students, teaching them how to be leaders, which was what I’ve been doing for 14 years before that, and the books made no sense to me at all. So I wrote my own. Became the bestseller, people started calling me saying, “Hey, can you come and do this work with us?” That was 24 books ago and 30 years ago so here I am.

Alex: That’s incredible. We’ll talk about your books in a moment. But what drives you today? You’re in the latter stages of your career, you’ve had a storied background and experience and you’ve had many multiple things you’ve done, so you helped build one of the world’s largest companies, you got your PhD after that, you write books, you do coaching, so when you wake up in the morning today, what drives you? What is it that you want to accomplish?

Lance: Well, I’ve been asked that question a lot, Alex, and so I formulated an answer. The answer had to be formulated because I was asked the question so often, so it pauses you to say, “Well, why am I doing this?” I ask that question a lot. Why am I doing this? Well, the answer that I formulated is this: the world needs a sweet melody right now and I’m lucky enough to have been given the music that the world needs. So right now the world is in pain, hurting, and my work these days is about helping people become inspired in a world that’s not always inspiring. We’re human beings first, not functions. So when we coach, for example, we’re coaching human being, not a marketing manager or an IT specialist or whatever. And that’s what I think we’ve forgotten in the business world. We’ve forgotten the humanity of who we are, not just in the business world, by the way, but in politics and in lots of other places too.

Alex: 100 percent agree with you. And we are living in an age where there’s a lot more attention being placed in employees as humans and finding work-life integration that we used to talk about in terms of balance, so there’s more focus on that than there ever has been, but at the same time, we are —

Lance: Your talk, Alex. 

Alex: Yeah, tell me more about that because I agree with you that I think it’s one of the most important aspects that we need to pay attention to today, it’s like how do we inspire people, and, in a way, people are tired, there’s high levels of absenteeism, low levels of engagement, people are just — it’s difficult to wake up every day inspired sometimes, so how do we equate the fact that there’s more attention being put on this area of human life but yet we haven’t accomplished creating a society and workplaces that inspire people? So what’s the disconnect there between the attention that we place and our ability to be able to transform workplaces?

Lance: Well, I think there’s an interesting puzzle happening at the moment. We’re in between situations, right? We used to go to work and now we’re thinking about not going to work and the interesting thing about this historical context, we didn’t go to work 600 years ago, there was nowhere to go to work, we didn’t have any workplace to go to, and so we’ve been doing this since the 1600s so it’s about 500 years. We invented the work, the word “work” in the 1600s. But look what’s happening. We’re going back to where we were 600 years ago, working from home, like we always did. So there’s nothing new here, this is just telescoping and 600 years in the scheme of human history is nothing, like a blink. So it’s been just a little experience that we’ve had where we got up in the morning and went to work. But here’s the interesting thing. Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Twitter, they’re all making mandates to get people back to work. Amazon has an inside group of 30,000 people that said, “No, I’m not gonna do that,” and Amazon said, “Yes, you are or you’re gonna lose your job.” So the disconnect is that management thinks the only way to build a culture is to have people in the office. The real question we should be asking is not how do we get people back to the office but how do we build a culture in the new environment? We’ve got the tools to do this.

Alex: It seems like the pandemic really allowed us to hit the reset button and think about, wow, we were spending three hours on a commute, how about we deploy those three hours to something else, both professionally and personally. And I think the question for me is there has to be some downsides of being more spread out and so what’s the ideal combination of work from home and work in person with colleagues and I think that — I’ve heard multiple different perspectives on this, some are more research backed than others. One that really struck a chord with me was having the balance of being able to, you know, for creative work to get together and for a lot of like just the regular work we do every day being able to do that from home and finding the combination of approaches. It’s almost like a hybrid approach, which is exciting because, before, we weren’t thinking about how do we change this way of operating, we just get on the car, drive for 30, 40, 50 minutes, and then go to work and then come back home. It just became standard. So, now, we’re thinking differently, which I think is very exciting. There’s one term that has caught a lot of people’s attention and I think Adam Grant popularized it, which is the term “languishing.” So, have you heard about that? Are people talking about how we’re languishing at work? 

Lance: Yeah.

Alex: What do you think of that?

Lance: I’m not impressed with that approach because I think we have new tools and a new environment. And if you ask the question what’s the best relationship between hybrid and in-situ working, again, the wrong question. The only question to ask is what’s right for you, Alex? You’re a human being, what do you need? We’ll build it around what you need. But you can’t say to, like in Amazon’s case, 400,000 employees, this system or that system. There’s 400,000 different people, build something that fits those different people’s needs. Some of them will want to work home completely, some will want to come in the office completely, some will want to live on a boat and travel. I’ve got people in my organization that never get to land. They’re on boats 99 percent of the time and they’re coaches.

Alex: So I think the question that comes from me is what are some of the new organizational capabilities that we need to develop to be able to structure workforces where the way we work are more adaptive to individuals yet still create this cohesive work culture that allows for organizations to perform across time? So I think we’re talking about building cultures that are very adaptive, which I think it’s good for the environments that we operate in, but I guess my question is how do we align individual preferences with creating standards organizationally that align ultimately with what the organization is trying to accomplish?

Lance: Well, some organizations, you don’t need to have people showing up at all. I mean, the work can be done at home. I mean, I don’t know about you but I’ve been working from home for years. It’s not new. And I travel all over the world to meet client needs and so on but in the end I come home and most of my work is home and team is home and so on. So I don’t see the issue. The issue has to be rethinking the whole paradigm. And so think about this for a minute. I can walk out of my driveway in my house, talk to strangers and tell them I love them. I can’t do that at work. It will get me into trouble. I can go and hug a complete stranger, I can’t do that work. I get in trouble there. At work, we do things like key performance indicators, being granular and expressions like this that you never use anywhere else in your life. We do things like the performance appraisals and engagement surveys. I wouldn’t do that anywhere else either. Would you do a performance appraisal with your spouse? That’s kind of ridiculous. Why? Because it’s demeaning, it’s critical, judgmental, it’s horrible. But why would you do it at work then? And the same thing with things like holding people accountable, which is a phrase we use in business all the time. Would you hold your spouse accountable? Would you hold your children accountable? I mean, this is just uncivilized behavior. So what have we done here? We’ve created an alien world we call business where we do things completely differently from anything else that goes on in our lives. And this, frankly, is an existential problem, not just a small problem, we could wreck capitalism if we’re not careful. So, the issue is not about how do we get people to come back to work or to work from home or whatever, the issue is how do we treat human beings because, as somebody asked me the other day, I have a new book out and it’s called Reawakening the Human Spirit and they asked me, “Will this make me a better leader?” and the answer is no, it will make you a better human being and, therefore, you’ll be a better leader.

Alex: I love the connection that you’re making between the way we’ve structured work and the way that we think about it and really kind of setting the direction and mopping up the fact that we have to evolve work to encompass more of other aspects of life so that capitalism can thrive because we’re seeing that, you know, I think based on the way you’re framing it, I can see that we both believe that capitalism is an incredible engine for growth and prosperity for humanity but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to look at the way we are thinking about how to implement it to make sure that, in fact, you’re coming from the place that capitalism is the way to go but the way we’re thinking about it, the way we’re implementing it is not aligned with making it successful in the long term, which would be a shame.

Lance: Exactly. Exactly. I call it exploitive capitalism. And I’m not anti-capitalist, I’m pro capitalist, strongly, but I think we’ve got some mistakes built into the system that are not helping us and I think we need to change that. And, particularly, I think it’s a management problem. I mean, every problem, frankly, is a leadership problem in the end, no matter what the problem is.

Alex: You know, when we think about sustainability, we tend to focus on things related to global warming and we think about diversity, equity, and inclusion but we don’t necessarily think about the unsustainability of some of the ways we think about work and I think we need to be more systemic when we think about the things that we need to pay attention to, like we used to call it work-life balance and then that evolved to more like work-life integration because when you’re calling it balance, it already is a little too much of a bifurcation so we need to find the way we integrate work with your life in a way that is more sustainable. So I’ve been hearing people, I used to work at the Center for Creative Leadership and I think we were pretty early adopters of the work-life integration. I remember saying work-life balance when I was an intern in there and people just looked at me like I was like a Martian, it’s like, “Oh, my, I learned my lesson, okay, integration.” Marian Ruderman is such a good academic, has produced so much amazing work and I remember just being part of that culture and it really stuck with me. You asked me about the structure, you were talking about how you used to work from or you’ve been working from home forever and that made me think about my own journey. I used to be pretty much like a come to the office kind of guy when I started the company 11 years ago and I always wanted people to come show up, make sure they were there, we were based in San Diego, now I’m in LA and we have a global team, so I think the pandemic really accelerated the way we thought about remote work. Also, when we acquired WBECS and we became one company, coaching.com and WBECS, WBECS was always a remote company, they had an amazing culture where they would go to Bali, the whole team and spend time together so I’m really trying to bring some of that back as part of a larger organization, but the fact that we’re global and we’re all working remote has really opened my eyes to the power of flexibility. I work more than I used to when I went to the office because I wake up, I make an espresso, I check my email, I jump into meetings, I go and work out, I come back, and it’s like the fluidity allows me to be more effective. I could not have seen that without the pandemic.

Lance: Exactly right.

Alex: I want to learn more about, when you say inspire, like let’s break that down. I recognize that there’s this sort of dryness that comes with capitalism, the evolution of technology, the going away from that kind of like religious orientation level of human development where people found explanations for the world through religion then in the 1900s, you see this pollution and explosion of the use of science, which makes a lot of people kind of go away from that religious orientation. A lot of people are still religious but you’re seeing that society has fragmented a little bit in terms of how people explain the world so you have purely rational scientific ways of looking at the world, which, in a way, are a little bit dry and disconnects us with purpose but they’re so effective at creating technological advances that drive progress. So now we have all this progress but it seems a little dry and we have the capability of creating so many wonderful things but we cannot explain why we’re here and what’s the meaning of life and what’s the meaning of productivity, so I think that to get to the next stage, we need to provide deeper meaning that I think we used to get from religion and a lot of people still do, but now there’s other ways of explaining the world and the driving force is technology and science and innovation so we’re creating productive societies that have no meaning and no way to explain why we do what we do. Tell me more about your thoughts around that. I am fascinated to hear more.

Lance: Here’s the history of this, I think, Alex. It’s a very big subject. Let’s see if I can unpack it. First of all, we have been practicing leadership and most of the information we have about that subject comes from the military. I’ve written a book about that, it’s called The Bellwether Effect, and, essentially, what the book is relating to is eight things we do in business which cause people to quit, eight things that were taught — performance appraisals is one of them, mission statements is another, and so on. One of the things we’ve been doing with leadership is we have based leadership on motivational theory so, essentially, the same thing that Pavlov came up with but modernized with fancy language, sophisticated models, and so on. But, fundamentally, the way we run things is we make sure that there’s a reward if you do the right thing and a punishment if you do the wrong thing. It’s fear based and it sits at the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy and that’s what we do. And so you’ll see there’s an epidemic of fear in modern organizations, fear of losing a job, fear of not getting enough pay, fear of not meeting your deadlines or your budget, fear of the company going under, or fear of being on the New York Times tomorrow morning, and so on, so everybody’s in fear of a very vast source. So motivation has been the one way in which we’ve been leading and we motivate everywhere, Alex. So, in religion, join our religion or you’ll go to hell. In marketing, buy this product or you’ll be ugly. In healthcare, follow this protocol or you’ll get sick. In politics, vote for me or the bad guys will get you. In business, do what I say or I’ll fire you. At home, do what I say or I’ll punish you. And so on. It’s all over our society. That’s what we’ve learned and perfected. We’re very good at this. COVID is a massive example of a motivational, fear-based system. Now, what we don’t — I don’t know about you but I do not need another person saying, “I’m your leader, here’s my latest leadership model that I’m gonna lay on you.” I do not need that. This is not my first rodeo. So, what do I need? I want to be inspired. Inspiration comes from an entirely different place than motivation. It’s love based. If I’m the sales manager and I say to you, “Alex, I’m gonna give you a quota. If you hit the quota, you’ll get a trip to Hawaii. If you don’t, you won’t go to Hawaii. If you don’t do it for several quarters in a row, I’m gonna fire you.” That’s basically the system we use. That’s lighting a fire under someone. Inspiration is lighting a fire within someone. You don’t do things to other people, you don’t — we do motivation but we don’t do inspiration. Inspiration is contextual. So you are the kind of human being that creates the environment that causes other people to be inspired. And when we’re inspired, we’ll do anything. So, inspiration is the heart of everything that happens. I smell a rose because it’s inspiring. I go to a movie because it inspires me. I hang out with you because you inspire me. I go to work for a company that inspires me. I fall in love with someone who inspires me. Everything is about inspiration. And when the inspiration stops, I’m gone. That’s what’s happening in business today. The great resignation is, “I’m not inspired anymore. I’m out of here.” So we have built this entire thing on I think a false premise, motivation. Might have been good, by the way, in our time, just the same way you’re saying science has produce all kinds of benefits. In it’s time at that stage of our evolution, it was perfect. Obsolete now. We need to be inspired. We’re yearning for inspiration.

Alex: I agree. When you work with clients, specifically like organizational systems, how do you frame the focus on inspiration and how do you think that companies can implement practices that align with that?

Lance: Let me give you just one example of many: the language we use. You ever thought about the language we use in modern organizations, and, for that matter, the rest of our lives? It’s laced with war speak, warrior language. “You blow me away.” “I would kill for your hair.” “Drop dead gorgeous.” “Blows the doors off something.” “Let’s destroy the competition.” “You kill me.” I mean, we can go on, there’s hundreds of these. And every time we use the word that’s toxic, we fire off biochemicals in the other person and cause them to be sick. Therefore, if we want to be creating an inspiring environment, remove the language of war, replace it with the language of love, and watch what happens. And don’t say it’s woo-woo because it’s not. The number one requirement for human beings is that we’re loved and that we love others. That’s the basic human nature of all of us. So, we need that at work just as much as we need it anywhere else. There’s no rule that says, “Oh, at nine o’clock, I don’t need to be loved anymore and I’m okay ’til five and then I’ll be loved again.” That’s ridiculous. We’re human beings. It’s a global, 24/7, round the clock affair for all of us. We’re humans all the time.

Alex: I love — I’m connecting that with what you said earlier that the way we think about work is really very new, maybe like the last 600 years where there’s like bifurcation between personal and work. It used to be that our lives were our work and our work was our life. 

Lance: Sure.

Alex: And we’re starting to see some of the rapture that thinking about these two as different elements creates and now we’re really — I think the word for these is healing, right? How do we heal our relationship to ourselves and to our profession so that we can integrate who we are with what we do and it becomes part of one thing? And I can see why that bifurcation occurs. I mean, the space of change, it’s so quick these days. I mean, we live in the age of acceleration so things happen so quickly, which in a way is fascinating and it’s cool and it enables so many things that are potentially aligned with progress, but if we don’t stop and slow down a little bit and understand what are some of the things in the system that are fractured, we won’t be able to build a world that allows us to leverage all of the progress that we’ve made. And I think when I hear you, when I look at your work, it’s really about acknowledging that we’re in an exciting place, we’ve built a lot, through a lot of very hard work, society has put ourselves in a place where we can do a lot, but there’s a lot that is broken in terms of how we relate to ourselves so it is really about how do we move forward in a way that will create the world that we all think we could live in.

Lance: I agree. Well, it is about the human experience. The new book I’ve written is called Reawakening the Human Spirit and it is about inspiration, but it basically makes the point we have to do three things sequentially. Number one, we have to fill up our own well. You can’t inspire other people if you’re empty. I mean, you can do it for a while and we’re paid to do that, that’s our job and we can and we do it for a while but we can’t do it forever. And one of the other things to remember is that motivation is a short-term device and inspiration is long term. You want me to get out of a fiery building, motivate me and I’ll get out, but I’m not inspired to get out of a burning building. But if you want me to build a cathedral, I’ll be inspired if that’s my project. So it’s a different idea, right? We need to fill up our own tank. There’s ways in which I’ve spelled that out because I’ve studied leadership all over the world and worked with regulators too for many years. What makes them so special? One of the things they know is they know why they’re here. And, actually, human beings don’t know that. Generally speaking, regular person on the street, they wouldn’t know the answer to that question. Why are you here on the earth? They’ll say something like, “Well, to look after my family and get my kids through school and make sure I have a pension and retire and then I’ll die.” Well, that’s not why you’re here. Why are you here? Why not identify that and bring that to your life every day? That’ll put a spring in your step. That’s one thing. Secondly, the language that I just mentioned. Remove that language. That’s second thing. Third thing is to have a dream in the organization but also personally. We don’t need mission statements in organizations, we need dreams. Disney has a dream, Patagonia has a dream, Starbucks has a dream, Southwest Airlines a dream. The great companies have been built on dreams. They’re not built on mission statements or value statements or vision statements. And so that’s the spark, as we call it in the book, and then we move on to the flame, which flame is inspiring others. Once your tank is full, you’re able to inspire other people. We have something we call the CASTLE principles, which I can elaborate in a minute. And then, lastly, we inspire the world, that’s the torch. So spark, a flame, and a torch is the journey that’s included in the book. But let’s go back to the flame for one minute. We asked people what they didn’t like about people and they said, “We don’t like cowards. We don’t like people who are phony. We don’t like people who are self-centered and selfish. We don’t like people who lie. We don’t like people who rule with fear. We don’t like idiots.” Six things. So we said, okay, that’s pretty straightforward, why don’t we do the opposite? Courage, authenticity, service, truthfulness, love, and effectiveness. That’s an acronym, it spells CASTLE, it’s used by millions of people all over the world now. And that CASTLE principle philosophy is the way we inspire other people because people love courageous people. We love authentic people, we love people who serve, we love people who tell the truth, we love people who are loving, and we love people who are competent and effective. It’s a recipe for inspiring anybody, your spouse, your kids, your friends, and your colleagues, even the tax department.

Alex: I find the way you’re thinking about this so inspirational because someone that is so well versed with just the evolution of work from like you started working on Manpower Group in the late 60s and I think being able to look back at your career and to see how the world of work has transformed in so many ways, in so many positive ways, but to also recognize that there is a gap there in terms of being able to inspire people. I mean, it’s really making me think deeply about the role of coaching in inspiring people, because what attracted me to coaching and the coaching profession was the idea that these one-on-one conversations that allow people to understand themselves better, understand how other people perceive them, when you do that, at scale, the impact of that self-awareness cascades through the organization. So, for me, one of the most positive things that I’ve seen in the workplace is the evolution of coaching over the last 5, 6, 7, 10 years to really become a foundational practice, that we all want to provide coaching to as many people as possible and we’re thinking about what does coaching at scale look like and how do we provide this self-awareness at scale in organization, so, for me, that is potentially conducive to entering to this new stage where people are more inspired. Tell me more about your vision for the role of coaching to be able to inspire people to align with what you were describing just a moment ago.

Lance: That’s a great question and I have to tell you, I am not happy with the way coaching is, the industry is going. I think we’re overfixated on how many hundreds of hours you have to do and all that sort of stuff to get to CCM and MCC and all the rest of it. I just think we’re overengineering something that actually doesn’t require that, it requires something else. I want to tell you a story about a client I had in New York, physician, very successful, built three companies, sold them for hundreds of millions each and so he was very wealthy, starting a fourth company, hired me to be his leadership coach. Now, I have to tell you, I don’t believe in verticals in coaching, so career coach, leadership coach, and all that. After three months working with him, I had a meeting with him and I said, “I wanna talk to you about some things going on here that I see. One is, your daughter is a drug addict. She has a codependency relationship with you. She goes to rehab every so often, you bail her out, give her some more money, she does more drugs, she goes back to rehab. It’s a circle. Secondly, you live with a woman that you don’t love anymore and you should end your relationship but you don’t have the courage to do it. And, finally, third, you haven’t filed your tax returns in five years, you’re gonna go to jail if you don’t get this cleaned up. We need to talk about these things.” He said, “No, we don’t. I didn’t hire you for that. I hired you to be my leadership coach.” I said, “Well, if you have to fight with your common-law spouse in the morning and then go to work, you think people won’t know that? You think it’s hidden? You think you’ll be at your best? Everything is connected. I need to talk to you about your wife and what you’re gonna do about that. I need to talk to you about your tax return and I need to talk to you about what goes on in all aspects of your life. Are you open to that?” and he said no. Well, I said, “Then I don’t think we should be working together because it’s only one thing, I can’t work on one thing and not the other things.” So the thing I think that we’ve forgotten in coaching is we have to deal with a whole human being, all of us, so we all need to be trained in that, no matter what kind of coaching you’re doing because we’re dealing with a human being, that’s the general factor that we share. I can coach you in terms of wellness or mental health or whatever it is but I’m not a specialist in that field, I’m a specialist in human beings.

Alex: I love that. How much of your time do you spend coaching?

Lance: Depends what you mean. I mean, paying clients coaching —

Alex: Yeah, define coaching. 

Lance: Yeah, exactly. Well, coaching, again, very interesting, Alex, because I think we’ve made some mistakes here too in terms of our definitions of what we actually mean. For instance, I hear that one theory is that we should not lecture in coaching, we should not tell people what to do, we should help them figure it out. Well, if that were true, then, for instance, in hockey, we just say to the hockey player, “Well, you have it all inside you, right? I mean, you don’t need any help from me, you should know what to do.” I mean, that’s not true. A good coach at a sports team is an expert in the subject matter and helps young people grow. That’s what we should be doing. So teaching is an important part of coaching, in my opinion. In all my coaching, I am a teacher. That’s an understood beginning statement with all my clients. I think the other thing that I’m concerned about in a way is that coaching has become a mechanical specialization and I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think that we need to be much more inclusive with each other about what it is we’re dealing with. If the client wants to talk about, for example, an addiction, who are we to say that’s not my job as a coach, I don’t think I should — we keep telling coaches in coaching schools that they’re not therapists, they’re not clinicians, they’re not mentors, that’s definitely coaching. None of that’s true. Of course, we’re guides, health guides, wellness guides, we’re all kinds of things. We have to be. And if you can’t do that, then you’re not getting the training and the background you need to be an effective coach. 

Alex: How did you become originally acquainted with coaching? Do you remember the first time that you heard about this thing called coaching? 

Lance: Yeah, I do. I had some of my colleagues that were enrolling with CTI back in the day, a long time ago. That time, Thomas Leonard, he died, I guess I can’t remember what year he died but he basically bequeathed his legacy to a guy called Dave Buck who, in the end, founded CoachVille. And at that moment, when Thomas Leonard did that, I became Dave Buck’s coach and I don’t know quite how that happened but that’s what happened. So I was here, the coach, to the coach, to the coaching guru.

Alex: I love that. I asked you when was the first time you heard about coaching, you’re like, “Well, I coached the guy that was in charge of the legacy of one of the guys that really started the whole thing.”

Lance: That’s right, yeah, pretty well. And I’m still, for 12 years now, I’ve been working with CoachVille, we run a certification together, we co-teach certification.

Alex: That’s really cool. So, what do you make of where we are today in terms of like using technology to be able to scale coaching? Like how do we scale coaching? Because, at face value, it’s almost like we’re trying to scale the unscalable, right? Because coaching, by definition, shouldn’t be scalable because it is putting together someone that has tremendous experience and he’s going to dedicate themselves to really fully listen with intent and they have all these experience, all these variables so it commands a high rate, how do we bring that kind of expertise to more people in organizations, right? Technology can enable that and there’s also coaches that are starting their career and they have their — they went through an accredited program so they know the basic skill sets so they can work with people, but how do we scale that? Is coaching scalable? Are we doing it the right way? What do you think of that, Lance?

Lance: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t know. The one thing I think we want to keep our eye on is technology. Everyone will appreciate that in the last three years, we’ve probably done 12 years of research on things like what we’re using right now, right? I mean, we’ve crunched all this into a tiny period of time because you had to. We were home and we needed to talk to each other.

Alex: Necessity. 

Lance: Yeah, absolutely. And as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, that’s absolutely true. 

Alex: That’s what I was thinking about.

Lance: So I imagined in the back of offices of Zoom, I’ll bet they’re working on AI, they’re working on virtual reality. We will be able to touch each other. We will be able to walk around in each other’s rooms. We’ll be able to just smell each other. We’ll see it in 3D. It will feel much more real than this two-dimensional thing we have right now, and that’s coming. It’s very — it’s just around the corner. So scaling is going to be easier when we have the technology that’s helpful. On the other hand, how can you ever scale, I wonder, one personal private conversation? I don’t know. I mean, I think the mechanism of delivery can be scaled. I think there’s all kinds of options, coaches plug in to modules and things that help them bill and find clients and manage that time and all that, that’s great. All that’s useful. But I think in terms of the time that you and I might spend together in a coaching relationship, that’s exclusive to you and me. 

Alex: Yeah, I think there’s — we’re living in such an interesting time where the pandemic really accelerated us thinking about how do we go from 2D to 3D, which you’re bringing up which is very interesting. And one of the things about technology is it’s so hard to predict what it will look like, and I love that. 

Lance: Yeah.

Alex: Henry Ford —

Lance: What about 4D? What about 4D?

Alex: Yeah, right. 

Lance: Why wouldn’t I have a computer that sends out a smell of what you your aftershave is or what your rooms smells like?

Alex: It’s so interesting.

Lance: Or maybe you’re in the kitchen cooking and I can smell your cooking. I mean, this is what we will be doing.

Alex: Yeah, I love that Henry Ford quote, “If I would have asked people what they wanted, I would have built a faster horse.”

Lance: Right. And Steve Jobs said the same thing. “If I go out and ask people if they wanted a portable phone, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about.” 

Alex: This is so interesting. Well, we’ll see where technology ends up but I agree with like the smell — I already know that there’s companies working on transmitting smell and touch. I mean, the innovations that we’ll see the rest of this century are mind boggling. I mean, just the fact that we’re seeing each other at a distance, used to be a fantasy not too long ago. I was born in the 80s and the idea of seeing someone at a distance was out of the Jetsons, and now it’s just like you’re walking around with this computer in your pocket that’s millions of times more powerful than those computers that we had that occupied whole floors of a building. I mean, just the nature of technology is —

Lance: Or landed people on the moon.

Alex: Yeah, which we haven’t done in a long time. It’s interesting how you’re like, “Oh, we went to the moon,” and now there’s all this talk about going back to the moon and going to Mars.

Lance: But the computer that powered that rocket was smaller than the computer on your phone.

Alex: I know, it’s incredible, right?

Lance: Back in the 60s, yeah.

Alex: Yeah, I think, you know, so we have to, I think putting it all together what we’ve been talking about today is like how do we combine this progress and these beautiful things that we’re seeing and the capabilities that are emerging for society and humanity, how do we humanize that progress and how do we think about everyone deserves to have a live where they wake up in the morning and they’re excited and they’re inspired to work. I was just about to say go to work but I fall in the trap of the way we’ve been thinking about work for 600 years, right?

Lance: You know, I want to draw your listeners’ attention to a mobile app that we — it’s called use is called Spirit@Work and the “at” is a little round A, Spirit@Work, and you can get it on the Apple or the Google Play Store. And it’s 77 cards. I originally created them back in 2000 as a book. It’s a book with a set of cards, essentially written for business because there’s no card set that is a business-orientated cards. There was angel cards and tarot cards and all kinds of things, medicine cards and so on, but the business orientation is not there. When the pandemic came, I thought, oh, boy, I better automate this, so I created an app. The app is doing really, really well. So I would love for you to see that because you’re talking about scaling. We have a meeting every Thursday morning with people all over the world. Today, I just got off the phone with them this morning just before I talked to you, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, all over North America and Canada, all people on here with their app on their phone and we shake the phone and it shuffles the cards and picks a card for us to talk to. And so you might pick a card courage. Okay, Alex, what does courage mean for you? Are you courageous? Are you courageous at work? Is your boss courageous? Are you courageous with your kids, your family, your spouse? Can you be more courageous? Is there something you could have done last week that if you had more courage, it would have turned out better? And so on. Now, this is — you talked about scale. This is a global app, anybody can download it anywhere in the world, and I couldn’t do that a few years ago so that’s an example of how we can move this thing forward.

Alex: Thank you for sharing. I asked you earlier but now that we have more context of your life work and how you think about things, when you wake up in the morning, you’re doing so many different things, you’re writing books and you’re working on apps and you’re working with clients so what’s your plan for the next five years? Like how do you want to impact people in the next five years? Like what’s — are you writing a new book? Are you just going to be working with clients? What is Lance doing for the next five years?

Lance: First of all, I don’t have a plan. I’m plan free. But I do have an aspiration, which is to make the world more inspiring. That’s why I breathe. So, every day, I and all my colleagues all over the world are getting up in the morning and saying we want to make the world more inspiring. That’s what propels us. And this book, Reawakening the Human Spirit, is really about how do we do that and we wrote — 22 of my colleagues wrote 29 essays which we cobbled into a book called What We Got Wrong About Business and that’s a free download, you can download that off our website, secretan.com, and it’s basically showing all the ways in which we’re messing things up and the better ways in which we can do this. So there’s lots that we can do that’s positive but I’m afraid, Alex, we may have to get the old managers to retire before we move into that place. It seems there’s a lot of fixed thinking right now.

Alex: That makes me think of like, I don’t bring a lot of biblical references, I think every time I bring one, I say that, and I think it’s usually the same reference but it’s almost like when the Israelites were outside of the holy land in the Bible and they had to wait for like the old generation to die before they came in to the Promised Land. So, yeah, I mean, I think there’s some wisdom there around we have to re — a new generation has to get re-inspired. But I really appreciate your — it’s like the slumber of progress that we find ourselves in, I really appreciate your work, which is really all around inspiring and leveraging all the progress that we have accomplished but we can’t really leverage it until we think about how do we wake up every day inspired? How do we create structures and systems that allow people to be their best, not at work, not in their personal lives, but both, which I think is incredibly powerful?

Lance: The thing is I think we’ve focused — we’ve talked quite a bit in this conversation about science and we both agree that science has been providing us with incredible gifts. Amazing. I mean, we talked about the phone. That’s a miracle. Every time I pull it out of my pocket, I think that’s astounding. Every time I get in an airplane and the freaking thing goes up in the air, I think, “Wow, that’s amazing.” 

Alex: It is.

Lance: Amazing. I feel like a bird. It’s stunning. It’s all amazing. It’s just — but it’s not the only thing. So this morning, just as I’ve mentioned, the calls I referred to earlier are called Inspiration in the Cloud, so we’re in an Inspiration in the Cloud session with all these folks from all over the world and the card we pulled was intuition and we talked about intuition, which is a non-business subject, really. Like if I show up and say, “Hi, Alex, I’d like you to hire me. I’m a data scientist and I know how to code and I can do all kinds of spreadsheets and I’m a really good numbers guy,” you’ll say, “Come on, let’s talk.” If I said, “Hey, Alex, I’m really good at intuiting. I’m a fantastic intuitive thinker,” you’ll say, “Give me a call sometime.” So, you know what, we don’t value that side of who we are but you should have heard the conversation this morning once all these people, how they use intuition, how the need for listening — the intuition is always there but the listening isn’t and so if we listened better, we’ll hear what that intuitive thought is saying. How many times have you said, “Oh, I should have listened to my intuition. I made the wrong decision. I used the rational thing but I should listen to my intuition”?

Alex: I’ve never thought that because you’re talking to an intuitive decision maker. Like I love intuition. Yeah, no, I mean, you’re 100 percent like I’m on board into it. But intuition is — I think Dr. Gary Klein has done really great work. He has a book on the power of intuition and it’s almost like he’s frenemies with Daniel Kahneman, which is Thinking Fast and Slow, which is a pure rationalized way of understanding humans, I think we can meet in the middle but if I have to choose, for me, intuition is the driving force behind, you know, when you were saying intuition is not in business, when I think about people like Steve Jobs that you referenced earlier, like a lot of that decision making was inspired by intuition but you’re absolutely right that in like the corporate America, let’s call it, world, there’s no way to register the value of that. It’s created by it and fueled by it because innovation comes from intuition. I mean, I think they’re coupled together. But we don’t have ways to think about it in a business setting that actually translate the reality that business is driven by intuition.

Lance: Well, you know the expression, we value what we measure. You can’t measure intuition so we can’t evaluate it. But that’s true of a lot of things. We can’t measure a dream either but we know the power of a dream. I have many clients, Microsoft, for example, and Starbucks and Humana and so on that created dreams and they will tell you as a result of the work that we’ve helped them build, they have transformed their businesses. When I started working with Humana, it was, I think, $28 stock, it’s $500 now. That was 2008 and I’ve been very solid working with them for a number of years and I would say that they will tell you the dream was a major engine for them. It’s focused everything. And it’s one dream, not many, one dream. Everybody wakes up in the company in the morning and says, “We have a dream.”

Alex: I just checked Humana stock because I was curious. Yeah, no, I mean, the dream component, it’s so powerful. 

Lance: What is it? 470 or something? 

Alex: Yeah, 483. So, yeah, that was — I mean, that’s some pretty good returns. 

Lance: Yeah.

Alex: You know, and I was thinking about what I said that innovation is driven by intuition and I can see a lot of people thinking like, no, you measure and you have all these data on what people want. I think linear progress is very data driven but when you want to — we were talking about what Henry Ford said about a faster horse, we’re talking about the work that Steve Jobs did, I mean, when you’re thinking about exponential transformation, changing the conversation, it usually is driven by intuition. And then there comes the other type of work, which is data driven which fuels the intuitive dream into reality, which needs another type of relationship to ideas which is more practical and more rational and data driven. I think your point is that we’re too focused on that and not as focused on the intuition side of things. It’s almost like right brain/left brain, we need to find a balance between both which will probably allow us to create a world that inspires people a little bit more than we do today.

Lance: Right, and I think we’re going to be boxed into a corner anyway, whether we like it or not, Alex, because if you think about the functions that are going to be replaced with technology, particularly with ChatGPT and so on, it’s going to be the left brain numerical, clinical, technical stuff that can be repeated by a machine, but I can’t repeat the intuition. Therefore, intuition is going to rise in terms of its relevance and importance, whereas the others are going to decline because we cannot make them.

Alex: 100 percent. And then we’ll get to the point where we have human level machine intelligence and we’ll have computers that are intuitive and that will be quite the spectacle — “spectacle” is not the right word but it could be the right word, depending on how we go about building these machines so it’ll be very exciting. Lance, thank you so much for joining me today in this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. I really enjoyed learning more about your work, your career, and I think we’re all a little bit more inspired after having this conversation or listening to this conversation so thank you for all the work you’ve done for so many years and you continue to do so. Thank you for joining us.

Lance: Well, thanks for inviting me, Alex. It’s been great to be with you.