Tag: Coaching

active CEO Podcast #2 Introduction Part 2

Posted on by Craig Johns in Leadership, Podcasts

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Ben Gathercole and Craig Johns expand on the active CEO Podcast, and take the active and healthy lifestyle to another level.

Ben Gathercole and Craig Johns have a more the 50 years combined experience working in performance coaching and leadership roles. They understand the importance of living an active and healthy lifestyle, and are now sharing their insights and enlightening people how to become better leaders through a brand new concept, corporate periodisation.

Ben and Craig also speak about:

  • The secret to switching off from work when at home.
  • Why it is important to be diligent and being on in home environment.
  • How experiencing different cultures matures your leadership ability.
  • Engage with your people more often.
  • What allowed Craig to make the decisive move to change his lifestyle when he moved to Taiwan?
  • How do you break the vicious cycle of all work and no play?
  • The importance of planning, goals and writing them down.
  • Trust, accountability and sharing are crucial to achieving your goals.
  • Your “circle of trust” in a leadership role.
  • Why is having friends in the workplace is invaluable?
  • Let’s put the kid back in us!
  • Approximately 85% of people don’t like their job.
  • The 6-8 week tipping point.
  • You have to practice happiness.
  • You have to be willing to improve yourself to be an active CEO.
  • There is no choice but to live an active and healthy activeCEO lifestyle.
  • What was the last thing you did for the first time?
  • Get out of the comfort zone.
  • Learn who Craig and Ben’s noted had the biggest impact on their lives.
  • What were Ben and Craig’s biggest mistakes that they learnt from?
  • active CEO Wellness Tip – Stairway to Heaven

Tweets

active CEO’s Ben Gathercole and Craig Johns use the Stairway to Heaven in living an active and healthy lifestyle. You can listen here

Being humble as a leader with Ben Gathercole and Craig Johns providing powerful insights into being an active CEO

Resources Mentioned in this show:

www.nrg2perform.com

craig@nrg2perform.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ceo-corporate-wellness-perform/

Keynote Speaking link

Recommended Reading:

Better Than Winning – Ben’s best selling book

https://nrg2perform.com/portfolio/book/

Unleash the Niche

Posted on by Craig Johns in Article, Leadership

By Craig Johns

What can your members not do without?

No organisation can be everything to everyone, no matter how big or small. Being able to narrow the focus of your target market, known as creating a ‘niche’, is key to success. By understanding what your consumers can’t do without and servicing that requirement, you will be a step ahead of the competition.

What is your place in the industry?

Niches do not exist, but are created by identifying needs, wants and requirements that are limited in the marketplace, and can be satisfied by developing, delivering and implementing products, programs and services that satisfy them. Having a strong identity and a clear understanding of who you are to the consumers, is very important.

What is your market?

Knowing what market you providing for allows you to specifically tailor content and services that connect with your consumers. People like to have exclusivity and know they are receiving special service. They want to feel cared about and being able to specifically make a connection with them should be a priority. If you don’t know whom you want to do business with, you can’t make contact.

What makes it different?

Do you know why your market stands out from the rest and what are the behavioural characteristics of your consumers? Understanding what makes it different allows you to create a stronger brand and identity to ensure you recruit and retain your consumers effectively.

Steps to success

  1. Create a list of who you want to attract and work with.
  2. Focus on what products, programs and services you are going to provide, based on your skill-sets, achievements, lessons learnt and style.
  3. Determine how your consumers see, understand and interact with their world.
  4. Synthesize your niche through ensuring it fits your long-term vision, it is desirable to your consumers, it is carefully planned, it’s one of a kind and has evolutionary elements
  5. Look at whether you niche meets the criteria of all aspects in step four and evaluate its viability.
  6. The one step that is most often forgotten or misunderstood is testing the niche with the market.
  7. Unleash the niche, into the market place.

 The Pressure Test

Once you have effectively implemented your niche and established your identity it’s important to regularly check its relevance in the marketplace. By asking key questions, you will be able to do a temperature test on whether it’s still ‘hot property’ or not.

  • Are your target consumers who you thought they were?
  • Do you stand up to the pressure test with your consumers?
  • Is it constantly evolving and moving ahead of the competition?
  • Are you offering what the consumers really want?
  • Do you have a connection, passion and focused energy with regards your niche?

Be one step ahead!

Are you looking for more insights and ideas? Then read the following inspiring and thought-provoking articles by Craig Johns:

Ask a Question!

Posted on by Craig Johns in Article, Leadership

Question

By Craig Johns

Are you asking the right questions and how are you interpreting the answers?

Asking the right questions provides a powerful tool for a leader, manager or coach. The following piece provides an insight into how questioning impacts both the person asking and those answering the question, through a coach/athlete relationship. It is applicable to all industries and aspects of life.

“There is more learning in the question itself, than the answer.” 

Andrew Weremy

Utilizing questioning as a coach can provide a greater insight into the athlete in how they learn, understand and perform. Questioning encourages athletes to think for themselves and increases their involvement, responsibility, creativity, motivation and interest in learning.

A positive benefit of questioning is that it promotes increased levels of communication (2-way communication) between athlete and coach. Enhanced communication then leads to developing mutual respect and trust between athlete and coach. This “helps the coach understand the athlete better through enhanced communication, which could lead to recognizing the athletes emotional, social and life variables that are/were affecting performance.” [ITU2]

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.” 

Albert Einstein

Questioning “helps athletes become more autonomous and continue to learn and explore when the coach isn’t there.” [ITU2] The athlete will learn to problem solve more effectively, have “confidence in their ability to analyze situations” [ITU2] and improve their decision making ability under pressure in a competition.

There are various types of questioning including closed (‘Yes’ or ‘No’, provides limited information), open (requires explaining in-depth) and leading (contains information the person asking wants to hear in the question) questions. Open questioning provides greater opportunities for understanding and learning due to the more detailed response. Questioning can also be classified further into [ITU2]

• Knowledge (attending to and remembering facts)
• Understanding (Interpreting meaning, translating into the athletes own words)
• Application (using information and solving problems by applying information in new and different ways)
• Analysis (Breaking things into parts: examining relationships; asking why)
• Synthesis (Create something new; construct; design)
• Evaluation (judging, assigning value, justifying opinions)

It has been found that “using bandwidth feedback with questioning maintains communication with athlete, allows the coach to gain a greater understanding of what the athlete is concentrating on and encourages athlete autonomy for their learning.” Bandwidth feedback sets an acceptable zone of performance and only provides feedback when the athlete falls below or excels above. Another way to create more effective results from questioning involves the use of a pause or waiting time to allow them to think before answering.

“Sometimes quiet people really do have a lot to say. They’re just being careful about who they open up to.”

Susan Gale

Reference – [ITU2] ITU Competitive Coaching Level II Coaches Manual pg 170, 171, 172

 

Are you looking for more insights and ideas? Then read the following inspiring and thought-provoking articles by Craig Johns:

Complexity is Your Enemy

Posted on by Craig Johns in Article, Leadership

Complexity Coach

By Craig Johns

Why do we fall down the trap of thinking and making things more complex than they should be?

KISS – Keep it simple stupid is a great acronym too seldom used. We often make everything very complex, leaving both ourselves and those we are talking to confused and unsure.

As Albert Einstein once said:

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.

A common trap people fall into is thinking that it is the people were are talking too’s fault for why they don’t understand, rather than placing the emphasis back on ourselves, as the one (s) presenting the concept or information.

Being able to deliver a compelling message to our employees, investors or athletes comes down to your ability to make it understandable to the audience you are speaking or writing to. It is common for a CEO, manager or coach to send their employees or athletes off with a task and for them to return as a failure, in the their eyes. This is not because the employee or athlete wasn’t capable of doing it, but because they didn’t understand what was being asked or provided to them.

It is important that the CEO, manager or coach are able to analyze a situation and determine whether the message they are presenting is actually being understood.  If you can’t explain it in less than 20% of the words you used, then it is probably too complex and you don’t understand your subject matter well enough. The ability of an employee or athlete to understand what the CEO, manager or coach message is, can have a major affect on the trust and support they will provide.

Richard Branson summed complexity up with the following:

“Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simpler.”

How do you check if your message is being understood and whether you understand your message well enough?

Are you looking for more insights and ideas? Then read the following inspiring and thought-provoking articles by Craig Johns: