I do three things: speaking or teaching, which I enjoy the most, coaching is where I learn everything, and writing is where I reach people.
Americans get fatter and fatter and buy more and more diet books, but you don't lose weight by buying diet books - you go on a diet. It's easy to read a diet book, but it's hard to go on a diet.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten simpler - my level of aspiration has actually gone down and down. But my level of impact has gone up and up.
People that have integrity violations should be fired, not coached. How many integrity violations does it take to ruin the reputation of your company? Just one. You don't coach integrity violations. You fire them.
If somebody is going in the wrong direction, behavioral coaching just helps them get there faster. It doesn't turn the wrong direction into the right direction.
Coaching works best with high potential people who are willing to make a concerted effort to change, not as a religious conversion activity.
If the CEO is not going to give you a fair chance, you're probably not going to win.
If we become aware of what's happening before we act, behaviour becomes a function of choice rather than a result of an impulse or trigger. You begin to control your world more as opposed to the outside world controlling you.
The people I coach are very successful people, so it's very hard for winners to not constantly win. Even if it's trivial and not worth it, we still want to win - because we love winning. It's a very deep habit.
I don't get paid if my clients don't get better by a certain time period. And sure, I have not been paid before. We all fail sometimes; it's okay.
One of the most dysfunctional beliefs of successful people is our contempt for simplicity and structure. We believe that we are above needing structure to help us on seemingly simple tasks.
Active questions are the alternative to passive questions. There is a huge difference between, 'Do you have clear goals?' and 'Did you do your best to set clear goals for yourself?' The former is trying to determine the employee's state of mind; the latter challenges the employee to describe or defend a course of action.
If we can sacrifice something comfortable, that we're 'too good at,' that might even be holding us back, we'll have more room to grow into the person we want to be.
When we prolong negative behavior - the kind that hurts the people we love or the kind that hurts us in some way - we are leading a changeless life in the most hazardous manner. We are willfully choosing to be miserable and making others miserable, too.
The last thing I say on most phone calls is not, 'Goodbye,' but, 'Thank you.'
If we really want to make change, we have to make peace with the fact that we cannot self-exempt every time the calendar offers us a more attractive alternative.
In one of the largest studies ever done on the effects of executive coaching - over 70,000 respondents - we learned that the biggest mistake coaches make is in not following up. It didn't matter who the coach was or what method they used. Failing to follow up made any approach to coaching ineffective.
I was at UCLA when John Wooden was the basketball coach. The next coach was Gene Bartow, who got fired for winning 90 percent plus of his games. He wasn't John Wooden. It's incredibly difficult to replace someone who has been seen as an icon.
It's not appropriate to pass judgment when we specifically ask people to voice their opinions... even if you ask a question and agree with the answer.
When you say, 'I'm sorry,' you turn people into your allies, even your partners.
