The Business Exchange Bath & Somerset Issue 10: Winter 2018/19 | Page 9

Taming Tigers 10 Minutes with international keynote speaker Jim Lawless. Jim Lawless is one of the world’s leading keynote speakers. Over half a million people on five continents have been entertained and inspired by Jim’s presentations and many more by his best-selling book ‘Taming Tigers’. Jim has advised companies globally on creating cultural change and elite teams, working with some of the biggest names including Apple, Barclaycard, Axa and BT. Uniquely, he believes in testing his framework for delivering change on himself first. He won a £1 bet to transform, from overweight non-riding 36 year old consultant to televised jockey within 12 months of sitting on a horse using his Taming Tigers framework. He used it to become GB’s deepest freediver, the first to pass 100m, in eight months. Both achieved whilst working at his day job because, as he says, “change must happen whilst we are fulfilling our current commitments”. Jim holds a Bachelor of Laws degree, qualified as a solicitor and practiced commercial law in the City of London and in a major IT company before founding Taming Tigers. Ahead of Jim’s visit to Bath in March 2019 to speak at the South West Business Growth Summit, we met to find out more about him and the conference. HOW DID YOU TRANSITION FROM CITY LAWYER TO TAMING TIGERS? I came from a poor background where gaining a profession was the ultimate prize. I took the legal route but became unhappy and by my late twenties, I had to change.  I resigned, with great trepidation, and went to drama school for a year to grow up and shake things up. It was a huge risk and it paid off. When I left, I set up a company to teach stagecraft to senior people. It was my clients who recognised that what my company was doing was helping their people to think and act differently - and courageously - to transform themselves. They invited us to design some large change programmes.  Working alongside companies like Accenture who were delivering the systems and processes, we delivered the “people” side.  Over a couple of years, the business was organically transformed from into Taming Tigers.  WHY TAMING TIGERS? Our response to the uncertainty and risk of trying new things to deliver a new result - with no guarantees of success - is visceral; it creates a large emotional and physiological change in us. The Tiger concept was invented to acknowledge that fact and to give the “enemy within” a name so that we can be more aware of it.  We do not teach the learnable skill of personal adaptation and change. Yet this will be the defining skill in this century. Taming Tigers is my best attempt at teaching this learnable skill. And we need it urgently in all areas of society. WHAT WILL DELEGATES LEARN AND TAKE AWAY FROM THE GROWTH SUMMIT? A greater level of self-awareness and an understanding of why we have the physical and mental response to uncertainty and change that we have. You will take away the basic groundings in psychological and neurological factors that we have to be aware of if we are going to successfully manage ourselves, our thinking, our emotions and our businesses through a process of change.  Everyone will be leave having chosen and committed to an exciting objective that they would have thought impossible before entering the room. Everyone will identify how their individual beliefs might frustrate the goal - and precisely what to do about that.  To hold ourselves accountable for delivering change, everybody will leave with a mentor from the group to work with. Oh - and we’ll all practice riding a finish at the races and have a go at some elite freediving exercises to steady the mind - and to move effortlessly past imagined boundaries!   To book tickets for the ActionCOACH South West Business Growth Summit on March 1, 2019, at Bath Racecourse visit: www.businessgrowthsummit.co.uk Faculty of Engineering & Design Connecting Talent to Opportunity OUR VISION: To encourage partnerships with international industry to turn business ideas into commercial reality, solve real world problems through knowledge transfer and research and to provide your current and future employees with the skills they need for 21st century careers. HOW CAN WE WORK TOGETHER? The Faculty of Engineering & Design at the University of Bath want to develop tailored, mutually beneficial partnerships for all. • Advertise your graduate careers directly to our students • Work with our students and academic scholars to solve business problems through research projects or internships • Upskill your current employees through our successful postgraduate degrees • Share business practice and ideas with our faculty and cultivate cross-cultural solutions • Acquire an international perspective working with our multicultural students and staff • You choose… How can we work together? CONTACT: [email protected] MORE INFO: www.bath.ac.uk/faculties/faculty-of-engineering-design/ THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2018 9