2025 Issue 3 | GearedUp
50
Entrepreneur Continued from page 49
• Large Public Seminars: For a few months early on I did a lot of public seminars for the American Management Association. I quickly found out that while that is great work for some people, it is not great for me. I like teaching my own material, not someone else’ s.
• Traveling to Four Cities in Five Days: This one is connected to the last one. In doing public seminars, I was traveling to four cities in five days. After a few months of that, I realized that it was not the reason I left high school teaching. I left to be able to offer my own ideas toward helping other people to achieve whatever they wanted to achieve. I admire people who can travel non-stop and teach those public seminars, but it was not the method for me to add the most value to the people I wanted to work with.
Did Work Well
• Executive Coaching: This was the perfect match for me. I like listening to people tell me about their dreams, goals, obstacles, challenges and concerns. I like working with them as thinking partners in figuring out how to achieve what they want to achieve. This was the ultimate sweet spot for all that I had learned and was able to deliver to other people. I’ ve enjoyed every second of being an executive coach for so many wonderful individuals.
• Writing 2-3 Page Feedback Letters: Some people think that writing a 2-3 page feedback letter after every single executive coaching session must be exhausting grunt work. I see it differently. I think of it as being an artist who is given a blank canvas on which to paint a unique and beautiful painting for an audience of one person. I love the challenge of writing those letters each time. In the past 25 years, I’ ve written more than 10,000 pages of feedback letters to my clients, and I still love doing it.
• Half-Day and Full-Day Seminars: These seminars are so tremendously fun for me to do. I love teaching an idea, asking people to reflect, getting them into one-on-one discussions, and then gathering ideas from the large group. It’ s like conducting a fast-moving jazz session with ideas flowing rapidly. It’ s an amazing way for everyone to learn from each other. And I learn the most each time.
• Facilitating Important Group Discussions: I facilitated so many meetings at McDonald’ s that one person called me,“ Dan, Dan, the Facilitator Man.” I love facilitating. I do my best to clarify the desired outcome, to include every person’ s perspective in the room, to summarize clearly and to keep the group on track. I remember a particularly enjoyable three-day meeting at Emerson as we worked on the idea of a digital transformation for Emerson. And another time I facilitated a four-hour session on strengthening the culture at Traffix that led to a wide variety of powerful ideas.
• Group Coaching Programs: This idea came during the pandemic. I love to teach, and I love facilitating small group discussions. So, the idea came to me to invite people from anywhere in the world to join a six-month Leadership Development Group Coaching Program where we would have no more than five people at a time in a Zoom room. I sent them the pre-work thinking exercises two weeks before each session, and we had a total of 10 sessions. The conversations were magnificent.
• Working with Open-Minded Learners Who Want to Improve: At the heart of my successful and enjoyable work are the types of people I work with. This is not based on age, gender, race, title, experience or any other label. The key is that the participants are serious-minded and open to learning new ideas and are willing to try to put insights into action. The vast, vast majority of the people I’ ve worked with over the past 25 years have had this attitude, and they have made this work tremendously fulfilling and enjoyable.
Think about your work and the things you have tried. What works well for you, and what does not work well for you? Be OK with letting go of lots of things in order to focus on the few things that you can be really extraordinary at doing.
Deal with Forces Outside of Your Control No matter how hard you work and no matter how much success you have at any one moment, there will always be forces outside of your control that are going to challenge your will as an entrepreneur. Here are five that I dealt with.
• The Dot Com Bubble Crash: March 2000: In the first 26 months that I was in my own business, the world was obsessed with dot-com companies. I mean literally obsessed. Twenty-somethings were becoming instant multimillionaires with literally just an idea for a company. Then in March 2000 reality set in, and the dot-com bubble burst. Enormous amounts of money were lost. It was chaos. Some of my clients just went away, but something far worse was to come 19 months later.
• Sept. 11, 2001: On Sept. 10, 2001, I took a flight from Washington, D. C., to Chicago, and then another from Chicago to St. Louis, which is where I live. The reason I remember that was because there was no security gate to be checked through. I walked right up to my gate. And then on the morning of Sept. 11, I was sitting in a conference room in St. Louis when the person who was running the meeting walked out for a few minutes. She came back and said,“ Two planes have flown into the World Trade Center. The announcer thinks we are under a terrorist attack. Everyone please go home right now.” Immediately the world changed. That day 3,000 people died in the U. S. It was absolutely horrific. My wife, Barb, and I had a two-year-old daughter, Sarah, and a 5-month-old son, Ben. We kept the news off. We didn’ t want them to see the images on TV. All my clients instantly shut down their work with me. It all happened within the same week. No additional income that year, and none to start the next year. And that was the very least of what I was worried about. We as a country had no idea when the next attack was going to happen.