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| Quote of the Month |  |
"The quality of your attention determines the quality of other people's thinking." -- Nancy Kline |
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Greetings!
Welcome to all new and "old" subscribers this month. Thanks once again for sharing these tips with your colleagues, friends, family, neighbours, teachers and customers.
This month's feature article evolved from what I thought was an unusual thing that my Mum said to me on the telephone last night. It certainly made me think. See my article on Thanks for your interest below. For those of you interested in my Run a Mile Each Day experiment, I am happy to report that I have so far completed 8 months, or 251 days, or 88 full hours, or 484 miles, of running at least one mile each day since New Years Eve 2009. My experiment has now expanded to see if I can run at least a mile every day in 2010. After that, I have no idea what will happen to it. If you're interested in keeping up with my running experiment, my experiences and various other of my mutterings, please see my Coaching Approach web site and its associated tabs and links. Time to hit the road now. Come along for the fresh air. |
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Thanks for your interest
|  Yesterday, my Mum went to a special service at St Paul's Cathedral that commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. She was invited because she served as one of the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
I called her last night because I wanted to know how she enjoyed it, what happened, whether she managed to escape the rain we had here, and generally how she got on.
Twice during our telephone conversation my Mum said to me, "Thank you for being interested."
There are several things that struck me about what she said.
The first is that maybe I'm not always as interested as I could be. This certainly had the effect of raising my own awareness.
The second thing that struck me was that perhaps other people aren't, or don't show that they are, as interested, or that she doesn't expect people to be interested.
The third thing, and the reason why I decided to base this coaching tip on my Mum's words, was that I felt it demonstrated how easy it is to make a difference to other people.
I'm sure you'll agree that it doesn't exactly take a huge effort to listen to someone, and ask a few questions to try to understand what is important to them, but how often do we do it?
Actually, how often do I do it, when I'm not in a coaching situation? Not as often as I could.
A question I frequently come across with coaching clients is "How can I engage in conversation with someone I don't really know? There isn't anything really interesting to say about me."
I'll let you into a secret. People love to talk about themselves, and they feel flattered when someone takes an interest in them.
All you really have to do to engage with someone is be curious and interested in them, and the conversation will take care of itself.
So, here is my challenge for you to raise your interest level (don't worry, I'm not talking about your mortgage or your credit cards) this month, or even just today.
- After your next conversation with someone, gauge (on a scale of 0 to 10) how interested you really were (0 is low, 10 high).
- Think of what you could do differently next time to increase that score.
- Next time you realise that you missed an opportunity to engage with another person, think of what you could do in future if you were a little more interested.
As Anthony Robbins says, "The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships."
See you soon. |
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Until next time.....
Sincerely,
Tony Phillips
The Coaching Approach |
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