Learning To Swim...

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I worked with so many memorable clients and heard thousands of amazing stories over the years – some of which I can actually share with you!?One such client was a brilliant, beautiful but extremely intense Irish woman. ?I was very, very tough on her when she was in a seminar with me...but she came back for more and did the full individual coaching process.?She was wired for growth,and grow she did.?

Her intensity covered some deep lingering pain from her personal and professional life. It had become her armor.?When learned through coaching how to break down that armor of intensity, her career took off.?Her final line to me was, “When sadness was the sea, you taught me to swim.”?That was a grand Irish gift from her I will treasure forever.

But not everyone we worked with was as mature as this client.?A different female client comes to mind who stomped into our first meeting with the proclamation, “I am SICK TO DEATH of being told in feedback that I’m intimidating!!!?I’m not intimidating!?If you want to see intimidating, you should have seen my boss, Leo, back in New Jersey when I first started – now HE was intimidating!”

I just looked at her, silently, until she started to get nervous.?“What?”, she muttered as she squirmed in her chair.?“Why aren’t you saying anything?”?

I sighed and said, “Why are you so afraid?”?She looked as startled as if I had slapped her with a dead fish. ?Then, suddenly, she burst into tears.?That’s when I got her real backstory.

As you might expect, early in her career, her boss, Leo harassed and screamed and badgered everyone every day.?She assumed that if Leo was like that, and he was her boss, then she should be that way too.?The fact that shortly after she moved to another department Leo was unceremoniously fired because of his bullying behavior had somehow escaped her logic, because the emotional scars he left on her were so deep.?

So on she went with her career, continuing to emulate an unsuccessful bully.?The wall surrounding her grew thicker and thicker each passing year to protect her tender soul.?She was a true marshmallow surrounded by barbed wire.?That’s why, when I asked her why she was so afraid, she lost it because she knew down deep her approach wasn’t effective anymore.?She just didn’t know what else to do differently and that terrified her.

And this is what I want you to remember - every aggressive, arrogant, angry or just plain mean person you encounter in your career is based on a platform of fear.?Trust me.?I’ve seen all kinds of flavors of this type of ice cream!?

They won’t ever admit it to you.?They will spend tremendous energy trying to cover up their fear.?But if you look at them with the lens that for whatever reason, way down deep they are as scared as they are annoying, you can start to be much more effective with them.??This is where your skill in understanding that key question of OPPOV (the Other Person’s Point Of View), which is, “What scares this person?”?That question unlocks the door to dealing effectively with challenging individuals.

So how did we help our intimidating female client make the clubhouse turn and change her perception for good???First, we isolated why she was seen as intimidating by others, based on the survey data we collected.?

The overwhelming consensus of the data boiled down to three things that really turned people off about her were three things - vocal volume, facial expression and her excessively judgmental comments. ?

Seeing herself on video re-creating these behaviors took care of understanding why she needed to neutralize the facial expression and sarcastic commentary.?She was shocked to see how angry she looked and how mean her comments were when she was upset.?“I would never have thought this looked so cruel toward others”, she told us.?“If I had to deal with her”, she said, pointing at herself on the screen, “I’d file for a transfer immediately!?I just thought I was being intense on getting the job done, not overwhelming or terrifying.”

We told her, “Clearly, you didn’t think you were intimidating, but you are. ?You’re scaring yourself, just seeing it on video!?Imagine what that would be like in person.?You didn’t know how to show your intensity without being intimidating.?You’re doing what you thought made you successful in the past, but it doesn’t work today in this company. With the power you now have in the company, the expectations are different.?If you can’t accept that, you won’t be successful.”?

We also said, “This is about finding a dial to modulate your intensity.?You only have an on / off switch with your intensity at present, and it’s too much for most people.?You have to be able to regulate your energy down to the degree of the Wall Street Journal to get heard in this company with certain people in certain situations – but you don’t have to live there all the time.”?That was a huge relief for her, because she didn’t want to turn into a “corporate robot”, as she put it.

The biggest single surprising behavior that made this change work, however, was her vocal pace and volume.?The way her voice blasted out a rapid fire series of comments was stunningly different when she slowed down her pace dramatically and cut her volume in half.?The same comment, even with tough language, said more quietly and slower, had so much more professional impact.?When she saw that on tape, she burst into tears again, but this time it was because she finally knew what to do and how to do it.?

What we have done at Change Masters is to help people change their inside mindset by showing them their outside behaviors.?Our formerly intimidating client proved this when she told us a year later, “Change Masters was the most difficult professional thing I ever did, but it was just what I needed to make the changes stick.?I was scared to change because I didn’t want to lose my effectiveness.?I learned that I needed a different level of understanding to be more productive with people who aren’t like me.?It was incredibly eye-opening to change my perceptions of them and their perceptions of me.”

“When sadness was the sea, you taught me to swim”……this client’s sea was fear, not sadness, but she certainly learned how to swim very well in that deep, scary ocean.

?Train your team in a super easy and successful way!?Get them a copy of our book, Seeing Yourself As Others Do, available exclusively at Amazon, ask them to find themselves in it and tell you what they saw.