Thank your teachers
Have you thanked your teachers?
I’m flying back from a week or so in Amsterdam, doing some work with my friend (and the most recent pod guest) Paulo Pisano, walking the canals, and visiting the renovated Van Gogh museum.
But for some of that time, I time-travelled.
It was 2006. I’d created my first-ever book, Get Unstuck & Get Going. I say “created” because this wasn’t your classic pages and paragraphs play.
It was like one of those kids’ books with different sections you can flip and combine, so you can create a character with (for example) a ballerina’s head, with a scuba diver’s torso, and a wizard’s legs.
Only mine wasn’t drawings, it was great coaching questions. (I’ve been in the game of collecting great questions for a while.)
The idea is you’d bring a challenge to the book, open at one of the 100,000+ combinations, be inspired (new ideas and perspectives!), and get cracking.
I self-published because it was ridiculously complicated and I was a complete unknown. I had just gotten a small inheritance from my grandfather, and I decided to spend it all on the book.
But how do you market a book? I had no idea, other than you get someone famous to blurb it. (There’s more to it, btw.) How many famous people did I know? None.
So I went to my bookshelf, then organized in alphabetical order, and the first book in the top left corner was David Allen’s Getting Things Done, the OG of productivity texts.
I hadn’t read it per se, but I was sure it was pretty good.
Seizing the moment, I looked up David Allen on this cool new thing called Google, found the company’s phone number, and rang it.
And on the first ring, it was picked up … by David Allen.
I had prepared nothing, thought through nothing, was utterly unready for this conversation.
But I burbled out something, David said, “Send me the book,” and he ended up writing a testimonial, and we formed a friendship. He and I even did an early version of a podcast together in, hmmm, 2010 maybe?
David moved to Europe, and we fell out of touch. But circumstance reconnected us just before my trip to Amsterdam.
So a few days ago, we shared a delightful lunch and a very good bottle of wine. And I was able to say thank you.
Not just for what he taught me (frameworks I still use today to focus my time and to ward off the overwhelm), but more for the encouragement, support and mentorship.
As I prepare for the launch of the 10th anniversary of The Coaching Habit next year, I’ve been reminded that beyond solving problems, people want to be deeply seen, heard, and encouraged.
And David did that for me two decades ago. It was one of my lucky breaks.
You’ll have your teachers and mentors as well.
If you can, take a moment to drop them a line to say thank you.
