Gerry Valentine: Founder of Vision Executive Coaching and best selling author

Prepare yourself for a truly enlightening conversation with Gerry Valentine, a public speaker, executive coach, and author who's turned his life's journey into a roadmap for success.

Gerry's story is nothing short of extraordinary. From his humble beginnings in a low-income neighborhood in NYC to his rise as a Fortune 100 leader, he's a testament to the power of resilience and ambition. In this episode, you'll learn how Gerry uses his personal and professional experiences to guide others on their own paths to success.

Gerry will take you through his transition from the corporate world to coaching, revealing how his managerial approach seamlessly aligned with his coaching style. He'll share insights on how understanding systemic components and organizational culture can be a game-changer in guiding clients.

Ever wondered how to turn adversity into a stepping stone for growth? Or how diverse coaching styles can cater to a variety of client needs? Gerry will shed light on these topics and more. You'll also discover how to develop the skills needed to navigate conflicts and disruptions in our fast-paced, technology-driven world.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Gerry Valentine

(interview blurb)

Gerry: I think that the coach should be very, very comfortable leaning on their background, their life experience, their professional experience as a foundation to help their clients and that is very much my style of coaching.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a public speaker, executive coach, and author who inspires people to overcome setbacks, look at challenges in new ways, and understand that adversity can become a source of advantage. His latest book, The Thriving Mindset, talks about new tools to empower your clients in a volatile and disruptive world. Please welcome Gerry Valentine.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Gerry.

Gerry: Hi, Alex. Great to see you today.

Alex: Yeah, likewise. It’s so good to have you on the podcast today. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Gerry: I am drinking coffee and I am drinking it in my trusty Hydro Flask canteen — or Klean Kanteen, rather, so it holds, I don’t know, half a quart of coffee and I’ll fill it in the morning and it keeps it warm and all my clients know I’ll appear on Zoom with this thermos in my hand. Wouldn’t be myself without it.

Alex: That’s awesome. Yeah, I like the look and feel of your thermos. As you know, I just made myself an espresso, actually, an Americano.

Gerry: Looks good. 

Alex: Yeah, it was a good one and I’m actually using a new tea cup that I bought in Japan when I was there two months ago. 

Gerry: Wow.

Alex: Yeah, I bought this in Kyoto and, yeah, I really like it.

Gerry: It’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful. It looks like it’s like a gray kind of almost matte finish.

Alex: Yeah, it is. I was looking for all matte kind of stuff and definitely the majority of what I found in those stores in Kyoto were a little shiny and I was looking for matte so I was hunting for these all over and I bought a couple different sets, then I had to wait about a month for it to arrive. I was excited when I unpacked it. And then I heard that some of these have lead so I had to buy a lead swab and test all of them and I think they’re all okay, so, yeah, that’s what happens.

Gerry: That’s what happens, yeah, I know. In this day and age, that is it. But I’m glad they’re not full of lead. But it looks beautiful. Looks like a great cup.

Alex: I am as well. And now everyone’s gonna go rush to go and buy for $14.99 some test swabs on Amazon so that you can test all of your pottery. Yeah. It’s good to know. And, actually, before we get started properly and we’re talking about your career, coaching, and all these things that coaches find so interesting in this amazing conversations I get to have with coaches is I actually was with Peter Hawkins a couple of weeks ago in England and I saw that he had the whiskey crystal, what you call those, but where people store their liquor outside of the bottle and you put it in —

Gerry: Oh, yeah, the decanter, whatever it is.

Alex: I read a few years ago that the amount of lead that gets absorbed by the liquor over time in those, it’s like 50,000 times what you should be exposed to lead so it’s a little something something for our listeners, like keep your liquor where —

Gerry: Where it’s supposed to be. 

Alex: Exactly.

Gerry: So, yeah. I’m picturing it as you were saying and I’m thinking, oh, maybe I should get one of those and now I won’t. Now I’ll just keep my whiskey in its bottles.

Alex: They look really, really nice but I guess it’s not worth the lead exposure. So, with that preamble on lead and trying to not consume it when you don’t even know you’re consuming it, let’s get started. Maybe next time we’ll actually have you in the podcast, we’ll do the whiskey version of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee.

Gerry: Okay, then. So this is an invitation, I’m taking?

Alex: Absolutely. We’ve done a couple, those are fun, and I try not to schedule those in the morning West Coast time. 

Gerry: Yes. 

Alex: Well, thank you for being here. Such a pleasure. One of the things that I love to learn about coaches is their history of how they ended up, that journey that led them to be coaches. Everyone, I find, in the coaching profession has really cool, unique stories. So, I am excited to hear yours today.

Gerry: Sure, I would love to. You’re actually — that conversation about lead was actually making me think about something. So, I always start with people introduce me as a coach and they talk about my 11 years running my own coaching practice and before that, I had nearly a 30-year career as a Fortune 100 leader with companies like American Express and Pfizer, but what I always say is — there you go, yes, he’s showing me his American Express Gold card. Way back when, I was marketing those.

Alex: That’s amazing. 

Gerry: But my story really started out growing up as the son of a single mother in a really low-income part of New York City and the reason I was thinking about that just this moment was because I grew up in a home where we had a lot of economic problems and I remember peeling lead paint and it was before people, like as a kid like literally peeling paint which would have been lead-based paint off of our walls, and we had all kinds of that. My mother worked incredibly hard but, sometimes, we didn’t even have heat or electricity because there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills. And you mentioned my journey to coaching so that’s kind of how I started out. I was really fortunate. I left that home and that neighborhood to earn an Ivy League degree, which was from Cornell University. My degree, little fun fact, was in electrical and computer engineering, which always kind of takes people by surprise, like, “Wow, you’re an electrical engineer and now you’re a coach?” Which is like, yeah, I am, and, actually, it all comes together. I then got an MBA at NYU in the Stern School of Business and that launched me into my corporate career. I started with American Express and spent several years there. I worked for a couple of other Fortune 100 companies, including Columbia House when there was a Columbia House. They’re now defunct but many of you listening may remember those CDs that you — mailings that you got in the mail and what I always joked with people about is if you are probably 40 years or older, maybe 35 or older, I have mailed you, I have sent you a piece of mail because marketing campaigns were so enormous that I’ve mailed you. I’ve mailed everybody.

Alex: We have that in common, Gerry. I email everyone and you used to physically mail everyone.

Gerry: Exactly, and I used to physically mail everyone, like literally 10 million pieces of mail at a pop. I mean, they were just enormous mailings. So, my last corporate job was with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and the story I always tell was that I came to Pfizer thinking that I would be there three to five years, which was my norm back in my corporate days, three years, five years, make a hop, go somewhere else, take a promotion along the way, and twelve years and eight months later, I handed in my notice at Pfizer so it was a really long and wonderful experience. I would say that I kind of experienced two or three different Pfizers while I was there, which was part of what kept me staying so long and really helped me in what I do today. When I left Pfizer, I was about to turn 50 and my husband and I, my husband was also about to turn 50, the reason I left was we really wanted a change of life. I am a native New Yorker, I went to college up in Ithaca, New York, I came back to New York for grad school and all the jobs were in New York so I stayed. I absolutely loved New York but I decided that, not just me, we decided that we wanted to try a different lifestyle and we are cyclists and runners and skiers and hikers and when we were a bit younger, triathletes, and Boulder, as you may or may not know, is kind of the outdoor Mecca and so we decided, okay, it’s time for a change of life. And we were fortunate enough we had the resources to make that kind of change so we packed up and went to Boulder and, being the go-getter corporate type that that I was in the day, I was barely off the plane before I was interviewing, thinking about, “Okay, where will my next job be?” and we had planned for a very long transition, like I had at least two, maybe three years to find a job so there wasn’t a lot of pressure. But I quickly realized that I didn’t want to do it anymore, that that life was over for me. And the thing that, then I was left with kind of like with this little bit of a midlife crisis, like, “Okay, so what do I want to do now?” And when I was at Pfizer, people had talked to me many times about, “Wow, Gerry, you should be a coach, you should be a coach, you should be a coach.” Now, I had a couple of coaches back in my corporate days, but I always, again, electrical engineer, MBA, I thought, “Oh, that’s that squishy stuff. That’s not really me,” but I finally took some time to think about it, I’m like, well, you know, maybe I should do this. I got some training, got some certification, and said, “You know, I’m gonna try it,” so instead of looking for a job, I started spinning up a business. And what I quickly realized, the story I always tell us that not my first client but my second client was someone who used to work for me at Pfizer and he had just taken a C-level job with a mid-sized company and he engaged me to help him come up to speed, he’d never been a C-level executive before, and I realized that our relationship hadn’t changed at all and it kind of answered that question about why people had been talking to me about coaching all those years, because I was the kind of manager who was more of a coach than a manager. I mean, I managed people because they paid me a bunch of money to do it and I’m reasonably good at doing it, but what I was really interested in was developing my people. And I realized, “Oh, okay, well, I guess this is a business model,” and that was eleven years ago. I have never looked back. I thoroughly enjoy what I do as a coach. I thoroughly enjoyed my corporate days when that was the time and now I thoroughly enjoy the coaching practice that I run.

Alex: What was your experience like with those coaching engagements that you had while you were an executive and did you ever think that you might become a coach yourself back then when you were working with those coaches?

Gerry: Never crossed my mind. Not even once. That’s one of the things I tell people all the time. There are many, many, many different types of coaches and that’s a very good thing because there are many, many different types of clients with different needs. So, one coach I was thinking about, her name is Karen, I haven’t spoken to her many years, and I had her when I was at Pfizer, and she kind of wafted into my office on the breeze, like long, blowy, tie-dye things, lots of big, noisy jewelry and all that and this was back in the days when culture then was suits and ties all the time at work and I kind of looked up over my desk and thought, wow, you definitely do not work here. But the reason I had her was because at that time in my career, she was precisely what I needed. She was very different from me. She was definitely getting me to open up more, more creativity and all that, and was perfect, but she is not who I am. My style of coaching is very much informed by my corporate background. I understand corporate culture extremely well. I also have a very deep understanding, deep technical understanding of business so I never had a coach like me when I was in corporate because I didn’t need a coach like me. The clients that I tend to work with are the ones who are looking for a coach that’s more of a business thought partner and does have a lot of technical business domain expertise. So I didn’t think of being a coach in those days because I never had a coach like me.

Alex: That’s very interesting and I love how you bring up that there’s many different types of coaches and there’s many different types of clients, and sometimes there’s just some beautiful pairings between people that are very similar and sometimes beautiful pairings between people that are very different, and by beautiful, I mean, just people enjoy the experience and there’s clearly a powerful outcome that comes from the work. And, as we both know, sometimes you work with a client and the impact is palpable. Every session, you feel this momentum, things are headed in a really good way. That’s that pattern for that engagement. Sometimes, it ebbs and flows and I think it’s probably most of the time, right? And, sometimes, you don’t feel like, as a coach, you’re able to impact the person as much and can get into that but there’s a whole host of different reasons and sometimes it’s just contextual. But I really like the idea of when I think about coach matching to go into some of those aspects that, for example, business experience, because some people think like ICF credential level, location, time zone, areas of specialty, but I love chemistry sessions because, sometimes, you interact with someone that, on paper or like on their bio, it doesn’t necessarily seem like it would be a good fit and then you have a call and there’s something electric that happens.

Gerry: I think that’s absolutely true. So the chemistry meetings or the initial sessions, I’m very clear with people that it’s actually a two-way interview and the objective of that session is for each of us to decide whether this would be a productive relationship. And I really think that it’s important to be rigorous in those initial meetings, like as the coach, to be very clear about, okay, do I feel like this is a client that’s going to be a productive relationship, and I think, as a coach, you should not be afraid to say no. I mean, I have said no. It’s important. It’s in your best interest and it’s probably in the client’s best interest too.

Alex: I agree and I think one of the things that we all can learn from Marshall is just choose your client, Marshall Goldsmith, choose your clients well. Not every coach is in a position where they can turn down business but I am a firm believer that you should always try to work with people that you know you can work well with and if in that initial call, it doesn’t seem like there’s a good connection or it doesn’t feel like you can be as helpful, it’s always good to maybe refer them to someone else because, at the end of the day —

Gerry: Exactly. 

Alex: — it’s going to pay dividends to be able to just work with people that you’re going to be able to help. But, again, not every coach is in a position where they can turn down business and a lot of coaching is not necessarily dependent on the connection as well so there’s — that’s one of the things that I really like about where we are with coaching today. It used to be that we used a lot of just experiential knowledge to think about what works or what doesn’t work in coaching. There’s an increasingly growing and exponentially growing evidence-based understanding of how coaching is effective, when is it more effective than other times, so we actually are living through some of the probably most exciting times in coaching research and application in a way that actually is very practical for practitioners to actually connect with the literature and understand how can I be a better coach and how do I measure that.

Gerry: Exactly. I totally agree with that. I think people who’ve worked with me will know that I’m very rigorous about coaching goals. One of the things I will ask in those chemistry meetings is, “What do you want to get out of our time together? What brings you to coaching? What do you want to get out of our time together?” and be very clear about what is it they feel they need to have at the end of the engagement. And, for my style of coaching, that’s critically important, because then, it’s a thought for me to think very clearly about, okay, so, given what this person wants, is that something that I feel I’m the best person to deliver and to not be afraid to say, “You know what, there might be people who are better qualified to serve you in that need.”

Alex: When you say your style of coaching, what do you refer to? Can you expand on that? I know you mentioned practical business experience and understanding of corporate structure and organizational climate and culture and politics, all of that, but can you break that down for us a little bit more?

Gerry: Absolutely, absolutely. So, one of the things I, after eleven years, believe very firmly about coaching, and I guess this applies to all work, that when you’re a coach, you come to this practice with your body of knowledge with you, which is your technical knowledge but also your life experience. My life experience is, actually, first off, someone who overcame a lot of difficult hurdles so I bring that into my coaching. I am particularly good with clients who are facing some type of disruptive change. It might be a new promotion, it might be a career setback, it might be uncertainty in the industry, whatever it is, because my life experience is well aligned with that. And in my book, I’ve actually written about ways to thrive in disruptive environments. Very good people have done that. I tend to work well or I’m interested in working with people who are very much excited by and interested in the strategy of business, who want to partner with another strong business practitioner. Some of my work is with clients who are in technical domains so I’m very good at helping people who may have come up with some type of technical domain, it might be technology or it might be science or some kind of very fact-driven domain and now they’re looking to ascend into senior leadership levels because I have been there and I understand that and I understand the fundamental shifts that people need to make when they’re making those changes. I think that the coach should be very, very comfortable leaning on their background, their life experience, their professional experience as a foundation to help their clients. And that is very much my style of coaching. Does that make sense?

Alex: It makes a lot of sense. I always find it super interesting that people that come from an engineering perspective into coaching, because coaching tends to attract kind of like people-oriented people, and we all know that engineers are not necessarily, the average engineers are not like super people oriented or maybe not necessarily — how to frame this? As an IO psychologist, I should find a better way —

Gerry: Left brain-right brain thinking.

Alex: There we go. That’s a good way to frame it. I always find that a lot of coaches that come from an engineering perspective and background sometimes are able to meet clients where they are because clients also have that way in orientation of looking at things. And I also find that a lot of the coaches that I’m friends with and that I know and I’ve worked with that come from an engineering perspective tend to find the assessment process invaluable as well. Is that the case with you as well? Do you use assessment in your practice? How do you weave it in in case that you do use assessment? 

Gerry: So I think assessments can be valuable. There’s another way that I tend to think about my engineering background. I think that engineers are trained to be great problem solvers. And, in fact, I was talking to an engineer just yesterday about — on Friday, about the client who actually comes from an engineering background himself and he’s having to break through into some new modes of thinking about the difference in the way engineers are trained versus the way scientists are trained and he needs to evolve his thinking more to a scientific approach than an engineering approach. So, engineers are trained to be great problem solvers. You tell an engineer, “We need to build a bridge from point A to point B,” and you give them the parameters that are limiting and we are trained to use the tools of science to build that bridge but the endpoint is defined. Scientists are trained to start at point A and then explore the unknown. So people get confused about this nuance because we use literally the same tools but scientists are, at their core, looking to expand human knowledge. I think the way for me the way engineering comes into play is that I approach a lot of my work with clients as a problem solving exercise so I’m a great problem solver, great structured thinker. It’s interesting what you say, Alex, I find that I pair very well with clients who tend not to be structured thinkers, because I’m the one who brings the structure to the situation. I’ve had lots of clients say to me, start out a session, “Oh, my goodness, Gerry, I am so sorry, I am all over the place today. I wish I had come to you better prepared,” and I’d say, “You know, that is not a problem. You go be all over the place because I know that my mind will listen to you and I will pick up all the nuances and then I will bring them back to you and we’ll figure out how to get to what you’re trying to address today.” So it’s about using who you are and I think being really, really, really comfortable, deeply comfortable using who you are and, again, I’m assessing that at that very first meeting, does this make sense based on who I am, and there are certain client needs that I think are much better suited to people who come from different backgrounds, deeply emotional challenges like someone who’s having something like anger management problems, I probably wouldn’t want to work with them because I think that’s really much better suited to someone who comes from a mental health background and there are many, many, many coaches who come from that background so you’re better off pairing there. But people who are more in that problem solving vein who are looking for that strategic thought partner, which is actually how I position myself as a coach very much as a strategic thought partner, that’s what works well and I find that the engineering paired with a business background, it just really works well for those clients. 

Alex: That makes sense. Actually, I worked with a number of coaches before and not too many, actually. I’m actually on my second coach. I’ve had more kind of like longer term kind of coaching relationships. So I’m working, I started working with a new coach about six months ago and one of the things that really appealed to me was that he had, similar to you, that corporate experience and corporate then entrepreneurial and a lot of what we talk about is advice, it’s more like an advisory capacity, things like fundraising, financials, P&L, things like that. Oh, he also went through the Hudson Institute of Coaching program, which I regard as one of the best coach training programs in the world, although my Hudson friends have a very definite kind of way of looking at coaching and I think the models, the coaching model there, I really like it. So I started working with him because relationship, it was kind of coaching for development and even development and performance, I needed the advisory side to be integrated into our coaching relationship, just given kind of the stage of where the business is. So I needed to work on myself but I also needed someone that could help me navigate some of these uncertainties that are more kind of business oriented so I found the perfect coach for me in this juncture of my development and the company’s development. So it’s so interesting. 

Gerry: Exactly.

Alex: That really resonates with me, kind of what you’re talking about.

Gerry: That’s precisely what I’m talking about. And, once again, I think styles of coaching, they’re all important. I know that a lot of people draw a very bright line between coaching and consulting and that is appropriate for some people and for some styles of coaching. 

Alex: Yeah.

Gerry: For my style of coaching, it sounds like the coach you’re talking about it, I’m not afraid to consult because most of my clients, I have done what they’re doing and so it is, with all the appropriate caveats. I will never tell my clients what to do but I will tell them what I think. And I think that for certain styles of coaching, that’s totally fine. In fact, I think it’s beneficial to the client. I think it all comes to what is the background you’re bringing to coaching and the style of coaching that is appropriate for the client’s needs at that time in their career. And I think that at that time in their career is also an important thing because we’re all dynamic beings and we need different types of help at different points in our career.

Alex: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. There’s a lot of caveats. We’re talking about advice versus just asking questions, and I think it’s a nuanced topic. I think there’s a shift in the way we understand coaching and the way we talk about the fundamentals of coaching that a lot of it is context dependent and things that may work for one coach with a specific set of clients may not necessarily apply to other people.

Gerry: Exactly. 

Alex: I can see where the approach of thinking, “Well, you should not provide advice,” where it comes from, but, in my experience, working with a lot of different coaches and working with clients, working with coaches even outside of the coaching relationship, just I know a lot of coaches and we talk about this topic all the time and I think having the overall way in which we understand coaching be flexible so that advice is baked in and we understand how to do it, how not to do it, when to do it, when not to do it, I think it’s important because if we just say there shouldn’t be any advice in coaching, then we miss out on an opportunity to understand how advice should be integrated into coaching because, in my experience, clients are looking in some instances for the coaches to get into that consultative mode and in, some cases, it’s very much warranted. I think it’s one of those areas where there’s a lot of nuance and it’s growing.

Gerry: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely nuanced area. The type of client that I attract will not be satisfied with just powerful question. 

Alex: I hear that a lot.

Gerry: I mean, it’s just not going to work because —

Alex: I hear that a lot.

Gerry: — at a certain point, they’re going to say to me, “Alright, enough, Gerry. Tell me what you think,” and I’m going to do it. I think one thing that’s very important when you talk about this nuance is to be clear with yourself and clear with your client about where your advice comes from. So, if you are giving advice, much as if you were a consultant, and part of my corporate experience was actually as a consultant so I am well aware of what that world looks like and I’m in no way afraid of that world, I think it’s to be very clear about where advice comes from and to be clear with your client about that. So, I think that advice that is poorly founded is always a bad idea but if it’s a situation that you actually have a great deal of subject matter expertise around and you share that with your client, I think that’s actually in the client’s best interest. And I think it’s also always important to have the appropriate caveats to your client that, “You know what, hey, listen, there is no way that I’m gonna know all the nuances of your situation because I am not you but you’ve asked me what I think about it, here is what I think based on what you’ve told me and here’s the rationale behind what I think.” I think that that’s it.

Alex: I agree. Let’s talk about adversity because I know that adversity is a big topic for you. You already mentioned, when we’re talking about lead and the lead paint in your apartment growing up, so adversity is really part of a lens that you’ve used that seems to have been actually very powerful lens and driver for you so you did a TED Talk on turning adversity into an advantage and the topic is also similar to the topic of your book. So, let’s talk about adversity, let’s talk about your TED Talk and your book.

Gerry: Yeah, let’s do it. I love talking about this topic. So, you’re right. So my book, which the interesting little fun fact story about my book was that the title is The Thriving Mindset: Tools for Empowerment in a Disruptive World and it’s about what are the tools that one uses to thrive and actually find opportunity in a disruptive world, which is turning that adversity into an advantage. So, as I was doing proofreading on the book, COVID hit and I thought, wow, so I’m writing this book about, it’s about to go to press, on how do you thrive in a disruptive world. The word “COVID” is not in the book because COVID didn’t exist when I wrote this thing. We’re proofreading now.

Alex: Good timing, though. 

Gerry: Well, yes, but then, of course, so now I’m on Zoom with my publisher, I’m like, “So what do we do?” and they said there are three things you can do, you can do nothing and send this out without even mentioning it, you can rewrite the book which will take you another year and, therefore, you’ll kind of have missed this boat, or you can do a Dear Reader letter, which is what I ended up doing, which was talking about the book in the context of the moment that it was coming out and I found that to be a very powerful thing. So, launched the book, there was COVID, then it turned out to be a much more difficult thing than any of us would have imagined. And then, of course, we had all kinds of political unrest here in the United States, so more disruption. Now we’re dealing with things like AI and an uncertain economic environment so it’s turned into, this has turned into, is that it’s kind of an evergreen topic. And so, since I wrote this book, what I’ve spent my time doing is thinking about whether the tools I put forth in the book are equal to the challenges of the moment, and I really think they are and the core of what I talk about there is that I think we are in one of the most disruptive times in human history, so I think about things like advanced computerization, the fact that we’re all walking around with cell phones that have more computer power than was used to put the first Apollo missions on the moon, which not only that computers are getting smaller, they’re getting smarter so now AI is really hitting the presses but I’ve been thinking about AI for years now that it’s going to thoroughly disrupt so much of what we do. We have a hyper-connected world through the internet, which we thought was a good thing but now we’re learning that there is really a lot of really dark sides of that. And one of the things that this interconnectivity has caused is a shrinking world, which means that we are now all interacting in ways that were previously unimaginable. You and I, I am in New York, you are in Los Angeles, we are very far apart but yet we are in a conversation today, all enabled by the way of the world that we work. I as a solopreneur collaborate with people literally around the globe all the time. Very, very different from a generation ago. And I think that you can think about these disruptive forces as kind of a flywheel that are just going to get faster and there are a couple of things you can do with this. You can be yourself disrupted and approach this type of disruptive change from a place of fear, or you can look at this type of disruption as an opportunity and build the skills for search to search for opportunity in the midst of that disruption. The center of gravity in my practice is helping people build the capabilities such that they can find the opportunities and thrive within the disruptive environment and continuously more disruptive environment that we find ourselves in.

Alex: I love that, Gerry, and we live in a world where nonlinear dynamics are the norm and just the speed of change, the acceleration puts a lot of pressure on people, puts a lot of pressure on businesses. In a hyper-connected world, things happen faster and I think a lot of us are still struggling to be able to understand. For example, one of the top topics in coaching I know is prioritization so being able to prioritize your time is incredibly important. I think it’s a very — I’m hearing more and more about prioritization from coaches and I know that that’s a big topic and it kind of has a lot to do with kind of what we’re seeing and what you’re describing. One of the things that I’m really attracted to in your book is this concept of thriving through failure, because the way we understand failure, it used to be, in a world where it’s more linear and moves slower, I think we used to see failure as a bad thing, but in a world that is more complex — in complexity, I think trying different experiments, things, for example, within the startup community like a minimum viable product and testing something quickly, learning from it and adjusting, that has really shifted the understanding of failure to be success means that you have to fail probably a couple of times to get it right. How do you bake that into your coaching and why is that such an important thing for you that it even has a whole chapter in your book?

Gerry: Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Alex, for bringing that up. So, here’s the thing, if you don’t fail, you’re not learning. Sometimes, I do get clients who say, “You know what, we really wanna build a more innovative culture here,” and I say, “Great, that’s wonderful. I love helping people build innovative cultures. So I want you to tell me something, how do you deal with failure?” and a surprising number of them would say, “Well, we don’t tolerate it,” and then, at that moment, “I know exactly why you have no innovation. Let’s have a talk.” The concept of if you have no failures, then you have clearly not pushed yourself to your limit and then there is less learning than there ought to be. What I tend to really like doing in my coaching practice is helping leaders develop what I call cultures of learning and in order to have cultures of learning, you have to be able to have what I call in the book intelligent failure. And, in fact, I just realized this, this is a perfect example of how my engineering comes into my coaching. 

Alex: Let’s see. 

Gerry: So, what I will advise leaders to do is, of course, you cannot have failures on your watch that jeopardizes the viability of the company. That makes no sense. But as a leader, what you’ll have to help your people do is construct laboratories because that’s actually what we do in the real world. So, a laboratory is a controlled environment that mirrors the real world but it’s a safe environment so it’s an environment where you can conduct an experiment and the purpose is to learn from that experiment. Some scientists will say that they would much rather have a failure than a success because once you have a failure, then it’s like, “Wow, there’s lots of stuff here to learn that I didn’t know before,” and how do you help your people in your organization develop laboratories within the organization and then conduct what I call are intelligent experiments? So, an intelligent experiment is one that is really built around learning. So, if you have a person who has an idea, it succeeds, there’s great results and then you say to the person, “Okay, well, help me understand why this was so successful?” and then the answer is, “Well, I don’t really know but it was really, really successful.” That’s actually not a great thing for your culture because there’s not lots of learning. But if you have a colleague who has an idea, conducts an experiment in a controlled environment, and then the idea does not succeed and you say, “Well, help me understand what you learned here,” and there’s tons of learning that is extensible for the organization, that’s actually something that should be celebrated in the organization because you have a lot of intellectual capital that you have gained from that experience which is going to be what the organization needs to go forward, inclusive of, “What I did was I conducted a great experiment of this idea and I’ve discovered that this will never work and we should never try this again.” That’s a success for the organization. And what you need is the thinking within the organization set to cultivate those people, that type of thinking in the organization that’s going to deliver that kind of knowledge base because that type of skill within your organization, it’s what’s going to prepare you to deal with a highly disruptive world where things are changing around you because you’re going to have to experiment. That is the only way to grow. Make sense? 

Alex: It makes a lot of sense. 

Gerry: Did you see the engineer in there?

Alex: I absolutely see the engineer in there. 

Gerry: Literally never thought about it that way before. It’s like, wow —

Alex: Clearly.

Gerry: Yeah.

Alex: Love that. And going back to what you were saying earlier, sometimes, the right match is pairing up with a coach that thinks differently than you do, that thinks more linearly if you are not a linear thinker so it can help you start thinking and expanding your perspective, kind of you seeing a different way and mode of thinking. As you were describing that specific situation or organization, I’m thinking working with a client, sometimes, in a situation like that, there’s the whole component of the organizational culture and coaching someone within a specific system in which things happen in certain ways, there are some oftentimes systemic components to that one-on-one relationship that I always find fascinating and, in some cases, it can act as an enabler for the coaching engagement to be very successful where you’re piggybacking on understanding some of these systemic components that are inherent in the way the environment in which the client is operating. And in some cases, I’ve also found that those systemic components could be barriers, where let’s say that there’s not a good fit between the individual that you’re coaching and the culture upon they’re operating and there’s really not a lot you can do as a coach to help your client navigate through that and, oftentimes, it leads to perhaps that person leaving the organization. So, I was just really thinking about the systemic component.

Gerry: Well, yeah. I think, so, Alex, I want to go into this example because I think that’s a great point. What happens when you are coaching someone and what you discover is that there is not a match between what your client wants and what the organization needs? And you’ve done the discovery and that’s what you understand. I would label that understanding as a successful outcome of the coaching. 

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. 

Gerry: That goes into the bucket of a tremendous success. And I’m very, very particular with the language I use around that. I’m not saying bad organization, I’m not saying bad person, I’m saying a mismatch between what the organization needs and what the client wants to do. And then that leads to some, I think, really intelligent conversations with the client about once you can frame that out, what do you want to do about that? So now we understand what the organization wants, now we understand where you actually want to go. We can see that there’s a delta. What do you want to do about that delta? So, if you want to figure out how do you build additional skills such that you can match what the organization is asking of you, I’ll help you do that. That’s great. Let’s get on it. If you decide that, well, actually, no, I don’t want to do that, what I want to do is exit, great, let’s talk about that, but let’s not do from the frying pan into the fire kind of exit, let’s really reflect on what it is you want to do and think about what that right next step is so that this is not a rash decision. And so this scenario that you brought up, I have seen it 100,000 times, and I think it’s actually that clarity I think is an extremely successful outcome of coaching, because the point is not to, in my opinion, blindly push the client into that round peg into the square hole that is the organization but it’s to look at those two things and think they’re different. Neither’s good, neither’s bad, there’s a delta here and now what do we want to do with the client? What do you want to do about that delta? And I think that’s a really rich, insightful work that sadly, too often, people don’t do.

Alex: Yeah, and I think you’re tapping into that agency component of coaching. Who’s your client? Is it the organization? Is it the individual? And, oftentimes, it’s the system, right? So there’s not necessarily a clear answer in many cases but a good outcome is one in which there’s clarity as to the dynamics that are going on.

Gerry: And an informed clarity, and then which leads to an informed decision about action.

Alex: Absolutely and I think that’s where everyone benefits, right? Because there’s so many things that are happening under the surface, if you uncover them, you understand them, then if it’s, let’s say, not a good fit, well, it’s better to have it out in the open to understand do we want to work to find a way to structure the relationship in a way that’s a better fit or is it better to move on and find someone that works better and the person can move on to the next step in their career in a culture that maybe it’s a better fit. So, there’s so many different ways in which something can play out.

Gerry: Exactly. And then, Alex, the thing I would point out there is it actually doesn’t matter whether your client is the organization or the individual and I work in both cases, because, let’s imagine, you’re the organization, my client is the organization, what we’ve discovered is that there is a mismatch between the organization’s needs and this particular employee’s desires for what he or she wants to do with their career. From an organizational perspective, once again, it’s better to have clarity so, yeah, whether you want it from an individual perspective, if your client is the individual, you discover there’s this mismatch, it’s better to have clarity because then you can, whether you’re the organization or the person, the vantage point from which you’re looking at the mismatch doesn’t matter because it’s the same set of facts, you’re just looking — you’ve discovered the facts of the matter, it’s just a different view of the facts but it’s still, the mismatch is still the fact of the matter and then no matter who you are, you’re going to decide what you want to do about those facts. And, hopefully, you’ll decide together what you want to do about those facts. Makes sense? 

Alex: It makes a lot of sense. I like that we’re getting into some of these dynamics that happen in coaching in organizations. So, continuing on down topic talking about adversity, you have a really cool TEDx that you did when you were in Boulder. Why do you think that was so well received? What specifically around embracing adversity have you found that people like when you’re talking about that? Because face value adversity sounds like not a great thing —

Gerry: Run away.

Alex: Exactly, so a lot of conflict avoidance is something we see a lot also in many, many folks, right? 

Gerry: Yeah. 

Alex: So, continuing my question around that TEDx and how it was so well received, how can we shift our perspective on adversity so that we start seeing the benefits that come with embracing it and understanding it?

Gerry: Yeah. There are a couple of things to realize there. The first, which is highly informed by my personal background, is there is no such thing of avoiding adversity and disruption. That’s not going to happen. It is a normal part of life. And the productive thing you can do is decide how you’re going to respond. And the thing I talk about in the book is that, and I coach a lot of clients around this, there’s this cycle. I call it the adversity fear-paralysis cycle. So, the normal response to some type of adversity is fear and that’s just what we’re talking about here, the conflict avoidance, like you want to run away from it, and the problem with that fear-based response is that it always leads to a kind of paralysis which is an inability to respond productively to whatever that adversity or disruption is and what that tends to do is cause whatever the original disruption or adversity is to get worse, and I talked about many examples of this type of thing in the book. And so we’ve all seen in in our coaching, many examples, as you know, there’s a problem with a co-worker and so your response to them is to avoid it, like, “I don’t wanna talk about it. We don’t get along, I don’t wanna talk about it.” Well, that just spirals, that causes it to get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. The principle that I encourage people to remember is that when we find ourselves in these adverse or disruptive moments, to remember that there’s nothing wrong with the fear, it’s what you do when you’re afraid that matters. And so you can use that fear response as also a signal that you are standing in front of some type of opportunity and this notion of thriving in the face of adversity or disruption is learning to use that fear as a kind of a springboard to leap towards whatever the opportunity is on the other side of that adversity or disruption. And I call that taking a courageous leap. So, let’s bring it down to a very small example that we’re talking about here, like let’s imagine that it’s a co-worker, you don’t get along with, you’re conflict avoidant, all that kind of stuff. So, one path you can take is to let that fear drive your response and to avoid. The other thing you can do is to realize, “You know what, this keeps happening in my career. I keep running into these people that I’m in conflict with and I don’t know how to deal with it and then it spirals and turns to a bad thing. Maybe what I need to do is to embrace this opportunity to learn to better deal with conflict and how I’m going and figure out and develop more skills in myself so that I can better deal with and manage these conflicts so that I will be better off in the long run.” Makes sense?

Alex: Makes a lot of sense and it’s really flipping it on its head and understanding. Look, as you were talking about the way we’re looking at adversity, I thought about this line that I love, which is sometimes the biggest risk is to not take the risk. And it’s the same thing when you’re not looking at adversity from the right frame, you can’t really run away from it. So understanding and embracing it takes courage but it also allows you to get a better sense of the reality of the situation.

Gerry: Exactly, exactly. And here’s the thing, in this disruptive world that we’re in, the adversity, the fears, the things that we feel overwhelmed by, they’re not going to slow down, they’re going to get faster, and so the productive thing to do is to get better at dealing with it. So every now and then, I was doing a keynote the other week and I was talking about this, every now and then, I run into people who say, “You know what, technology is the problem. We need to slow down all this technology. It’s getting out of hand,” and all this stuff and I always respond to that and say, “So, exactly what technology do you want to give up? Do you want to give up Zoom? Do you want to give up your cell phone too? Do we want to give up telecommunication? Do we want to give up electricity? Do we want to give up refrigeration? Do we want to give up the wheel? So where are you going to draw this line that you’re saying, ‘I want to give up technology,’?” Because with every disruptive technology and change that has ever happened in history, there’s always been this outcry of, “Oh my god, it’s too much, this is getting out of hand, I can’t deal with this, it changes too much.” The real skill is to develop the ability to embrace it, to understand it, and to figure out, okay, where is that opportunity that this is presenting rather than running away from the challenge. Makes sense?

Alex: Absolutely. It makes a lot of sense. Gerry, thank you so much for joining me today in this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Really enjoyed the conversation and looking forward to round two with a little whiskey, perhaps, with Coaches on Zoom Drinking Whiskey. 

Gerry: Sounds great. Alex, it’s wonderful meeting you. Thank you for today. I’ve really enjoyed this time together.

Alex: Likewise.