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
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