Book 255 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Learning is a leading indicator of what matters in your life!

Book – The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier

Book Description:

Coaching is an essential skill for leaders. But for most busy, overworked managers, coaching employees is done badly, or not at all. They're just too busy, and it's too hard to change.

But what if managers could coach their people in 10 minutes or less?

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact.

Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Reflection:

What we learn and consume reflects what matters to us most our lives right now. You may not see it right away, but if you take 5 minutes to look at the trail of what you have been learning, it will become obvious what mattered most to your life at that exact moment.

This Year of Magical Learning is a documented account of exactly what mattered to me most at any given point in time over the past few years of my life. It is interesting to take a look back at where we are today and think back on all the different things that have mattered to me most over the past few years.

In the beginning the majority of what I read and consumed was a business themed book as that was all I knew and cared about at the time. Quick reminder, this journey technically started 3 months before the birth of my daughter when I was still viewing the world through my traditional paradigms of the world I had lived in for the last 15 years of technology and sales. My reading recommendations came from business colleagues and all of them were about our shared world.

Then, my daughter was born and passed away after 39 days. My reading dramatically shifted from books about business and strategy to books about happiness, habits, humanity, thinking, and how our minds worked as I searched for answers. Next, I slowly allowed myself to finally begin exploring books about pain and suffering as I tackled the reality of a lifetime without my daughter. Somehow that pushed me back into a business mindset where I wanted to apply what I was learning to new areas that I could create myself. That led into books about culture, the connected nature of the universe, and exploring all kinds of lifeforms that inhabit this Earth. That led me to books about spirituality, philosophy, and stories of humans and animals living out extraordinary lives. That brings us to today.

You know what is funny, books exploring learning more about my day job and trying to improve never make an appearance at all since Emilia has passed away…not one single book! If that doesn’t show you how I feel about my current job and how much it doesn’t align to my life or what I care about, then I don’t know what else I can say.

I’m ready to change that…

I find myself in a new season of life where I’m ready to put a lot of this self-exploration into action in a more tangible way through the meaningful work I produce in the world in which I generate money to fund my other meaningful work projects (ie YOML, ClubAny, Tennis, etc). That is a roundabout way of saying my day job…lol. I’m ready to start giving back to the world all day long.

As I recently stated in one of my other reflections about a book called The Dip by Seth Godin, I’m quitting my job. For reference, I literally did quit my job 2 days after reading that book…no joke. I’m quitting my job to realign my life around work that is meaningful to me all the time, not just my mornings and evenings when I get to do this stuff and ClubAny stuff.

To me, that meant I was being called back to lead, coach, mentor, and give back to others to help them through their own journeys of self-exploration and growth. Within a few days of quitting my job, I accepted an offer to lead a sales team at another company and I couldn’t be more excited about this new upcoming chapter in life.

Hence, you will probably start to see me reading a lot more books themed around leadership, coaching, culture, and mentoring like The Coaching Habit in the months to follow. Don’t worry, we won’t only be focusing on just this stuff as I love all types of books these days, but I can imagine this will be the dominant theme of this season to come…but I guess you never really know.

The one thing that I clearly can see is that learning is a leading indicator of where your life is headed. What you are putting into your mind that is powering your thoughts and questions matters. If you aren’t filling your mind with information that aligns to your values, mission, or purpose in this life than it may be time to reconsider what you are consuming.

Question: Is the knowledge you are consuming each day contributing toward your purpose or sending you in the opposite direction?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Coaching Habit