business through the eyes of a child

My children are both grown up adults now, which is weird, but when they were very young they would often accompany me to breakfast meetings and coaching sessions before I dropped them off at daycare or school.

Sitting at a table next to me they listened to me conducting many sales meetings and coaching sessions and we always talked after about what was going on. They learned when business was good by the frequency of bank deposits I made and eventually pieced together what a service business was all about:

1. Find someone you like to spend time with.
2. Pay attention to what they are stressed about.
3. When you find a problem they have, think up a way to solve it using your skills and the things you've learned.
4. Make a "pitch" by offering to solve the problem in exchange for a certain amount of money.
5. Make a promise of what you are going to do and by what day and time.
6. Do the thing you said were you going to do by that date and time.
7. Make sure the person is happy with what you gave them.
8. When they are, send them an invoice.
9. When the check comes in the mail, go to the bank machine and deposit it.
10. Go to the bank machine, take some money out and go have some fun somewhere and something fancy to eat.
11. Repeat steps 1 through 10 as necessary.

In explaining how a service business worked to my young children, it actually helped me simplify my own thinking. It's actually pretty simple.

breaking through barriers

When I was seven a close friend of my parents taught me and my younger brother how to golf. "Uncle Leon" had no children of his own, but he loved kids and kids loved him. He was a master golf technician with a great sense of humour and bottomless patience (as well as a bottomless supply of chocolate bars). We spent hundreds of hours at the driving range learning and practicing the fundamentals of a game that is now the passion, or should I say the obsession, of millions of people in Canada. We did countless drills for grip, stance, backswing, foreswing, head down, left arm straight, rotate the hips to the target. My body remembers it all.

I owe a huge debt to Leon Plotkins and his wife Alice. This was the first major time in my life that I mastered something complex other than learning to walk, speak and read. Golf was different because it was as profound as it was unessential. I of course understand now that mastery is a process not an event, but this early experience taught me that if I stuck with something, eventually I would learn to do it reasonably well.

In my late teens I quit the sport because I started cheating and I did not like who I was becoming. Throughout my early twenties, thirties and early forties, when someone asked me if I played golf I always said: "I did as a kid but I'm not mature enought to play it now."

As a coach I have now come to understand that there is a second dimension to mastering something other than technique and that's attitude. And it may be even more important: attitude and technique, mindset and mechanics; consciousness and competence. Mastery over mindset, attitude and consciousness does indeed take some maturity.

I started golfing again last year after my wife Tania and I were in Maui and decided to play a round on a whim. At the end of the ice climbing season last year, after a big chunk of ice came closer to me than I was comfortable with, we thought it might be a safer choice (even though I've had more injuries golfing in two seasons than I did in twenty-five ice climbing).

We went about it with our usual full-on level of intensity: lessons, properly fitted clubs and a commitment to both practice and play a lot. It's become a great couple's activity.

For most of this year and last, my goal was to first break 100 and then 90. Only 10% of golfers break 100 on a regular basis and fewer still break 90 but most of my clients are very good golfers with low handicaps; so when I broke 100 midway into last season for the first time, it ranked as an achievement.

Last year I nearly broke 90 on six different occasions and oddly, on every single round that I came close, I scored a 9 on the 18th hole. I didn't even know what my score was going into the home stretch but I did know intuitively that I was close. I didn't handle the pressure. I choked.

For most of the first half of this season, I struggled to break 90. I got close several times, but got so anxious about my score I collapsed into a very mechanical process of analyzing every mistake and mishit. Everytime I play 6 or 7 holes at or near par, the pressure would build and I'd have a blowout for 6 or 7 holes with double and triple bogeys. Pars good. Bogeys bad.

About a month or so ago, I hired a new golf coach. Michael Bruchet is very skilled mechanically having been a professional tour player for many years, but it's his time in Asia that has distinguished him among golf teachers.

Michael sees golf as a martial art and spends more time on my mind than he does on my body. I can hit all of the shots but for some reason I don't do it consistently or frequently enough.

When I sat down with Michael for the first time, he felt like more of a coaching colleague than any other pro we had taken lessons from (and we have taken a lot).

The first thing he said was that he takes stressed out mid-aged men golfing in the mid-nineties and helps them break 80 in one year. Eighty. Not ninety as I had been hoping to do.

I have had four lessons with Michael. Today I finally broke 90 for the first time and shot 85–my personal best. And I am clear about where I can shave another six to ten strokes off that. Breaking 80 seems doable. No, inevitable.

The primary benefit of using Michael is confidence, not technique. He genuinely believed that I could break 80 quickly and now I am believing it too. I am fortunate to have access to a second great teacher for this phase of my golf career.

I met a golf yogi in Bandon, Oregon this year and came away having developed a simple formula for golf performance and really performance of any kind: performance = potential minus ego. My score is a function of how much talent I have and how much ego I have. I know I have talent because when I get my ego out of the way I can hit beautiful shots. I know I have an ego. That's more than obvious whenever the ball does not go where I want it to.

I then developed a useful acronym to reverse the negative parts of my ego that were leading to performance anxiety and choking. EGO = ease plus gratitude plus optimism.

Ease means loosening up and trying not to kill the ball. Counterintuitively, shots go further with less effort if one understands how to create power. This is where Michael's golf-as-martial art philosophy kicks in.

Gratitude means appreciating and learning from what goes well not just what does not go well. Most of us pick apart our mistakes and failings looking for inspiration and insight and sadly usually just find escalating frustration instead. I have a very good short game and now I thank my wedges after a good shot and kiss the ball after it goes in the hole. I'm starting to compliment my driver more and more.

Optimism means creating an expectation of a positive result. Each of us has a brilliant shot maker and a duffer inside and I can choose either at every swing. If the last thought before taking a shot is positive, I get more positive results. But if I say: "I hope this doesn't go in the water again..." well, I think you know where the ball goes. The duffer comes out.

A positive attitude of ease, gratitude and optimism removes the destructive part of the ego out of the equation, reduces choking and lets the deeper talent shine through.

Contact Michael Bruchet at 403 880 8180 or mbruchet@mbinternational.ca if you want to break 80 or 70 for that matter.

chances and choices

Something happened for my birthday this year that I never saw coming: The Canadian Tenors sang "Happy Birthday" to me. It was definitely a "top five" moment and the combination of their four voices focused on the celebration of my entry into this world was the sweetest sound I'd ever heard. It was like a dream. Surreal to say the least and something I'll continue to process for some time to come.

When I was driving back from their concert with my wife Tania and business partner Aly, it occurred to me that that night and everyone in it was the result of a single choice I made more than 22 years ago.

I was in the second year of design school taking a course on entrepreneurship in the MBA school. Hal Thompson came to the class at the request of our professor to give us some real world perspective. Hal was a gold medalist from both the engineering school and the business school he attended and as a young man had been exposed to a roller coaster of business experience. At the end of his lecture, he handed his business cards out to the 24 students in the class (23 MBA candidates and me) with the offer to spend an hour with whomever called him. I thought that if someone of his calibre was giving away free hours, it was a no-brainer. It turns out I was the only one who called.

When I started my first business–an industrial design consultancy–Hal was my mentor. Several years into that enterprise, I complained to Hal that I was lacking a sense of purpose and he introduced me to a company called Context Associated, which offered a series of personal growth courses.

In the second course in their series, I met and promptly fell in love with Tania. We've been married over 15 years.

After I completed all the courses I fell in in love with the personal growth business and bought the rights to market the courses in Calgary. That venture ultimately did not succeed but I met Aly in one of the courses and ended up hiring Phil from Context to be my coach.

I moved out of the seminar business and into the coaching business and Phil introduced me to one of his clients called Tom.

I did a good job coaching Tom and Tom introduced me to John. Their families vacationed in the same area every summer.

I did a good job coaching John and John introduced me to Dave. They were professional colleagues.

I did a good job for Dave and Dave introduced me to Richard. They were also professional colleagues.

I did a good job for Richard and Richard introduced me to Brett. They had done some deals together.

I did a good job for Brett and Brett introduced me to Jeffrey. Jeffrey manages the Canadian Tenors. The Tenors are becoming very successful and Jeffrey wanted Aly and I to coach them. Like any other kind of elite performers, the Tenors are facing the challenges typical of success and Aly and I started coaching them on the day I turned 46. Which is why they sung to me. That result was the last in a series of alternating chances and choices: things I had no control over mixed with things I had absolute control over.

Here is a video of our work with the Canadian Tenors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqiXSCHo34

I can only imagine where this thread of introductions and connections will go next.

So the moral of the story is this: if someone offers you an hour of their time take it. You could end up with a dream wife, a dream partner, dream clients and four guys singing to you like you were in a dream.

False positives and true negatives

Albert Einstein, while being primarily known for his keen fashion sense, hairstyle and oh, of course, that e=mc2 thing, would have been a great blogger had he been alive now.

He is the source of some very deep philosophy about life, as is the case for most great physicists, and his snappy quotes are some my favourites, up there with Emerson, Thoreau and Bush (the latest George W. one being something about "maybe I did make some mistakes".)

Einstein once said that you can either come from "fear or faith".

People make many decisions and do many things out of fear and many of those fears are not founded on reality.

I was once caught in an avalanche and nearly had the breath snatched out of me. This qualifies in my mind as a legitimate fear, linked directly and immediately to my actual death. The irony is that I was not really afraid, just calm, and this has been true for most of the life threatening experiences I've had in the mountains or behind the wheel.

Most of what I'm afraid of is vastly more abstract and fuzzy. I am afraid, in the low ebb sort of way, of amounting to nothing, of getting Alzheimer's and of being eaten by a shark, not all at once mind you, but if I do amount to nothing and get Alzheimer's, a shark attack might be a good way to end up with a swift death and a final write-up in a newspaper. I'm also certain that if I managed to get Steve Jobs' iPhone number, upon hearing he was shopping for a coach, I'd have a difficult time dialing the phone. And don't even get me started about the prospect of singing in public (secretly also my biggest rockstar fantasy.)

In the way I like to think about personal growth, people have four main fears: failure (and paradoxically success), rejection (which includes abandonment and all sorts of social shunning), criticism (humiliation, embarrassment, judgement) and loss (of money, health, life itself). It's a stunning to think about all the misery, value destroyed and opportunities lost to improve the human condition due simply to our natural tendency to avoid situations we think are painted with these fears.

I think the only viable alternative to fear is contribution, and here's where faith enters. Leaders show up when it's time for something to change. A leader sees something missing and thinks up an innovation to fill the gap and resolve the problem. There is so much working against a new innovation that it's remarkable that anything ever changes. In the face of these daunting obstacles to change, the leader must dig deep and find the sometime faint heart beat of the self-confidence, self-trust and self-security required to keep going on the sometimes cold and dark path to abetted future.

In the purity of my aspiration for a better future, I am not afraid. Such is the stuff of courage and the dance with danger.

huckers and stackers

When I was growing up, my mother always kept stacks of of stuff on the kitchen counters. She kept things on the logic that they might be useful one day and the carefully catalogued vertical pile was the organizational mechanism of choice.

Curiously, my first wife employed this same style of household storage with countless piles of stuff piled about the house. Ditto for wife now. There is no horizontal surface that does not feature items perched upon each other in groups of at least two.

I am not a stacker. I am a hucker. I would rather repurchase an item I have thrown out on the unlikley chance I'll need it again. Without the influence of a stacker in the house, my horizontal surfaces would be completely free of sequenced vertical organizational structures.

This leads me to the cruel irony that huckers and stackers tend to marry each other, and so each is forced to learn to reconcile their dipolarity.

The universe is not without a sense of humour.

I am, by the way, raising a daughter who is, not surprisingly, a stacker. She too will marry a hucker and will have the opportunities for personal growth that that offers.

an unusual definition of honesty

When my kids were growing up, we'd often talk about moral dilemmas and what each might do to resolve them. It was my way of talking about my values with my children.

I have a clear definition of stealing that applies to physical items, computer software, music downloaded on the internet and if I'm careful magazines. If I have not paid for something and I do not have the owner's or author's permission to consume the item, that's stealing.

Both my kids have no songs on their iPods that they did not pay for. Neither do I. I've paid for every piece of software on each computer I own. It's a respect I have for people who create things. I honour intellectual property.

I wrote a column at Alberta Venture Magazine for a few years back called "the business of life". As part of the arrangement, the magazine acquired full rights and ownership to the articles I wrote for them.

One day, at Chapters, I saw a copy of the magazine and went to my column and read the article.

My kids were with me and so I asked them if reading the article constituting shoplifting.

I'm not always careful in my definition of stealing as it applies to reading magazines in Chapter's, which is, strictly speaking, shoplifting.

But then I pointed out to the kids that I wrote the article. Then how could that be stealing? It's stealing, we concluded because I sold the rights to the article and thus it was now not mine. When I consumed a product without payment and without permission, I was, once again, strictly speaking, a thief.

It's an extreme example, but it's in the extreme examples that we discover who we are, really.

My definition of an honest man is one that knows when he's lying, cheating and stealing. Since we are all, in even some small way, liars, cheats and thieves, it's good not to fall down the slippery slope of justification. (If you question this logic, consider this: if you've ever driven over the speed limit, you are a cheater; if you've ever told someone they look good in an outfit that they didn't, you are a liar and if you've ever read a magazine in a Chapter's without paying for it, you are, like it or not, a thief.)

kryptonite

I've had numerous near death experiences as a climber and have fortunately graduated to the ranks of "old climber" from that of "bold climber". While I have no interest in repeating any of these experiences–some things are fun only the first time–I am very grateful for what I've learned about myself in the process of surviving them.

I recently had my fifteenth wedding anniversary with Tania. She was not a climber when we met, but she has become a superb climber over the years.

Just after our engagement and prior to our wedding in the spring of 1995, I took her on an alpine rock climb up Mount Edith, just outside of Banff. it was supposed to be easy and straightforward. it was not.

The route up the mountain and the way down were convoluted and complicated to say the least and we ended up off route on a part of the mountain that no one ever goes on purpose. As we were descending what appeared to be a viable way down, our rope got stuck and I abandoned it thinking we were just a short distance from the ground.

I continued to scramble down a gully, searching for a way down to the ground when I got to the top of an overhanging cliff 50 metres from safety. By this time it was 11PM and starting to get dark. We were caught between two overhanging cliffs. With no rope there was no way to go either up or down. I called up to Tania who I had anchored to the rock on a small cliff and said: "we're fucked". She started to cry. Here she was in her first season as a climber with her new fiancee stuck on a mountain that no one new we were climbing in an area that no one would think to look. Grave danger. Is there any other kind?

We had two headlamps, a powerbar, half a litre of water and a small amount of extra clothes. I gave her my pants and stuck my legs in our climbing pack and we settled in on our little ledge for the night. The ledge was just deep enough to sit in but only wide enough for three of our four ass cheeks. As the night turned cold, we tossed and turned quite restlessly. I kept waking up from what I thought were nightmares into the actual nightmare and as the night wore on I pieced together an escape.

I decided to leave the powerbar and water to the morning so that my brain and body would be functioning at its highest possible level. I was the more experience climber and when I saw Tania crying the night before, something clicked inside of me. I moved into a mode that I can only describe now as extremely "manly". Something primitive took hold and I needed to save the woman I loved.

The key to to rescuing ourselves was of course rescuing our rope. The night before when the rope got stuck, I reached up and cut as much of it as I could reach thinking that even a small amount would be useful to our scramble down. When I scrambled back up in the morning to the overhanging cliff where we had left the rope, it had shrunk back up the cliff face well above my reach (ropes stretch a lot when we slide down on them).

To retrieve the rope, I needed to climb about 3 body lengths of slick overhanging rock, several grades of difficulty above my climbing level. I then had to bat man my way up the rope another 30 metres to where it was stuck, the whole time hoping that the rope didn't suddenly get unstuck with me hanging on it (with the resulting fall to my death.)

Obviously, as I'm writing this, the story has a happy ending and it turned out to be the most seriously chivalrous romantic deed of life. It required a combination of emotional strength, physical skill and intellectual cunning I would not have guessed I was capable of. The thing that I have learned about myself from this and other extraordinary circumstances is that when the shit really hits the fan, so to speak, I'm the kind of guy you want around. I don't panic. I don't fall apart. I get calm and creative. I get the job done.

We all have strength that we maybe don't know we have because it's seldom called upon. But it is in all of us and we are all more capable than we realize.

And, we all have our Kryptonite–that person, circumstance or thing that zaps our personal power.

Mine is simple and it comes when someone challenges me on the price I charge as a professional coach or an invoice I have delivered and they are questioning the value. This is particularly true if I have been delivering or will be delivering the kind of heroic support that I do under very demanding situations.

It would be kind of like Tania saying to me after we got back to the car from our Mountain Edith adventure: "you think you saved my life? Whatever."