PROOF: It's Never Too Late to Change!

Is there a change you've been resisting?

I’ve had some proud moments in my life - after all I have a son who was a Yale student athlete drafted by the Cincinnati Reds - but my most recent session with a client is right up there among one of my proudest moments.

A firm in the financial industry engaged me two years ago to give a presentation for their staff and to work one on one with some of their employees on communication skills.  They are a successful firm that handles billion dollar accounts. However, it was founded several years ago with a crunchy granola, mom and pop type sensibility. As they’ve gotten more and more successful, they have seen the need to up level all of their skills - communication being one of them. I did a group Communication Elevation workshop and one-on-one executive coaching sessions with several of their employees and was able to implement some immediate changes. However, one of the tasks I was given was extremely challenging and at times I thought it was going to be impossible.

I was asked to coach one of their senior employees, I’ll call him Alex. Alex is very bright and knowledgeable about the business. However, he has a regional accent with some related grammar issues. In addition, he tends to be what I call a “chain talker”- someone who rarely comes up for air and therefore dumps way too much information on unsuspecting listeners. I knew that I could give him tips and techniques to deal with his chain talking but the accent and grammar issues seemed daunting. After all, this was a 40-something year-old successful businessman and the issues mostly only surfaced when he was under stress. Fortunately, Alex was not someone who denied he had these issues. He was very receptive to feedback. But that doesn’t mean the normal resistance to change didn’t crop up. 

Change Your Voice, Change Your Life

I love those special moments when I'm teaching and I get chills because I just witnessed someone make a huge transformation right before my eyes. It happens most often when I'm working with someone on their voice. It happened the other night as I taught a small class at Fashion Institute of Technology. I often do an exercise where I have students/clients read and interpret a short speech from a famous movie or by a famous politician. As I worked with a very shy young woman, I coached her to use her diaphragm, and feel the words of Martin Luther King. On her second or third try, the soft, timid, monotone was replaced by a strong, solid, passion filled oratory. We saw her body fill with confidence, her eyes begin to shine and I knew that she had suddenly touched a part of herself that she didn't know she possessed. It was priceless. I love that a simple physical shift can have such a profound effect.

Break Through!!

I'm teaching a continuing education class on business presentations right now at a local college. I have some really dedicated and wonderful students. The other night, two of my students had mini breakthroughs - nothing thrills me more! It made me wonder what creates a breakthrough. I asked one of my students and he said something like, after repeatedly getting up in front of the room doing the exercises I provided and struggling over and over with the same issues he just thought 'I can do this differently'!
I'm not getting his exact words correctly and to be honest, there really was no way for him to even communicate what he had done but all of us in the room got it. There's a time when you just get tired of being insane - doing the same thing over and over expecting different results - and you think, hey, maybe I should try doing things a different way!!! That's when you have a breakthrough. I love breakthroughs. What we also realized in class is that without repeatedly putting yourself out there, or up there in his case, you won't be able to have those breakthroughs. It's when you get tired of acting insanely that the breakthroughs come!