That was a huge act of both hands-off power and humility on the part of Coach Brown, and he had a national championship to show for it. Most coaches would still be trying to change Vince Young and “correct” him.
Listen to Coach Brown further and you realize that he does not have low self-esteem at all. Quite the contrary: A true and powerful humility is not thinking that you’re less than; it’s knowing that you’re phenomenal. But so is everybody else! So you raise the bar, not only for yourself, but for all those around you when you come from this powerful perspective.
“Sometimes great coaching is knowing what not to do,” he said.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Hold a meeting with your people that is not about the future or the past. Make the meeting be about the here and now: What talents and skills and loves do we now possess? Are we using them well? Center the whole meeting on what’s already great and how we can better use and express it. Just the way a football coach would after a game. Are we all playing the right positions?
2. Look at the next two or three decisions you think you have to make. Sit and write them down. Are you adding stress to these decisions by continuing to think, I’ve got to make a decision! Any stress you add to your day is getting in the way of your team’s—and your own—success. So challenge the stressful thought that says you “must” make a decision, and learn to let decisions make themselves. Look at the three decisions you have to make and write notes about the pros and cons of potential choices and notice how your inner vision will make it obvious which choice to make. You didn’t have to superimpose the stress of “having to make” a decision on top of this process of allowing the decision to make itself.
3. In your next interview with a candidate who wants to join your team, look at the time you have allotted for the interview and add an hour to it. That extra time will allow you and the candidate to drop all the role-playing that goes on in interviews and simply allow the inner vision to emerge. If the candidate is a good fit, the extra hour will only confirm that for you. If the candidate raises red flags, they will multiply in the next hour and you will know not to make the mistake made by Jack and Melissa earlier in this chapter.
CHAPTER EIGHT
REVERSING YOUR PROCESS
The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.
—James Allen
Chuck sat in the conference room fidgeting and nervously asking for coaching about a problem he had with Jodie, the young woman he was teamed with on a customer appreciation project.
“My problem is what Jodie did to me last week,” Chuck said. “She hurt me and disappointed me by taking our written proposal to the boss and acting as if it was all hers.”
We sat with Chuck for a while as he described his alarming and disappointing outer world and its untrustworthy inhabitants. We then guided him back to the moment. How would you like to feel moving forward? Because, the most wonderful thing about the past is that it’s finished and done with forever.
Soon we had invited Jodie into the room with Chuck and we were allowing a new mutual understanding to arise between them by keeping our hands off their conversation and letting them relate to each other in a new way. Jodie had given Chuck a lot of credit in her meeting with the boss, and the two of them began to see that they could support each other in more ways than they’d realized. Chuck’s outside world of danger was actually less of a threat than he believed.
After a while the process of mistrust was reversed.
What if all that’s going on in the outer world is nothing more than feedback? Opportunities to meet with people and understand them better? Maybe we can, through this reversing process, look at things differently. We can look at situations not for what’s wrong, but for what they’re telling us about what’s possible.
Therefore all of this “opposition,” “negative things,” and “what we don’t want” is merely beneficial feedback in disguise, showing up to help us understand and come to know ourselves. If we fear and judge this feedback, it becomes a barrier to that understanding. It becomes a resistance that blocks the very understanding it’s here to reveal.
I am a pilot and I fly a process