Side Mirror: The book that changed my life.

One book (and it’s not a religious text) has had an increasingly significant impact throughout my career. In this Side Mirror I want to talk about that book, my relationship with it and the lessons that I take from that relationship.

 I’ll explain the role it has played in me finding my purpose and how it ultimately contributed to me leaving behind my corporate career and starting my business. 

 I’m sharing this story because there are a few aspects that I hope may help you when designing your own life and / or help you to develop or grow the people you lead, parent or mentor. 

 If you’ve taken ownership of designing your life and living intentionally, reflect on the paradigms or beliefs that you have about your situation. Are they helping you to move towards the life you want or stopping you from doing that?

• If you’re asking yourself, “How can I create a job I love without throwing away everything I’ve already got?”, this is how I started to go about that
• Bill Gates is credited with the saying “people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.” I’m going to share how long I’ve been working towards being in the position I am now.
• The other learning that I've taken from this part of my own journey that I feel strongly about sharing is that knowing stuff isn’t enough. You have to use your knowledge, you have to apply it, you have to practise it, you have to live through those really uncomfortable early phases of being rubbish at things before you can start to get better and eventually benefit from your new skill
• Finally I’d like to ask you to think about your role as a leader and try seeing yourself for a portion of that role as a facilitator guiding your people to experience insights that will help them grow and become more effective

Those are the points that stand out as learnings for me from my relationship with this book and from the part it has played in my life so far.

There may be other thoughts that come to mind for you as you listen to this story and that is absolutely perfect. 

This episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR is brought to you by Aquilae.

Mobility businesses are all about people, processes and technology. We leverage our Aquilae Academy for people development and Aquilae Consulting for those wider business topics.

If you're looking for some help with people or business topics and you like the idea of having some additional very experienced, resources who can work flexibly alongside you. Please get in touch with me for a conversation. You can email me directly at andy@aquilae.co.uk

For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk

Episode recorded on 5 January, 2023

Transcript

Ed Eppley: 0:00

I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key, Florida.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 0:03

I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand

Daniel von Treeck: 0:05

Prague in the Czech Republic

Osman Abdelmoneim: 0:07

Cairo in Egypt

Holger Drott: 0:08

Auckland, New Zealand,

Shannon Faulkner: 0:09

London, England.

Andy: 0:10

Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy Follows Hello listeners, and welcome to this side mirror episode of Career-view Mirror. If you're a regular listener, thank you, you'll be aware that most of our episodes feature interviews with people in the automotive industry who kindly share their life and career journeys with us. We celebrate their careers, we listen to their stories, and we learn from their experiences. From time to time, we also publish these side mirror episodes, which are usually an opportunity for me to share some content with you related to careers or developing ourselves, or developing people we lead, parent or mentor that I hope you find valuable. One book, and it's not a religious text has had an increasingly significant impact throughout my career. In this side mirror, I want to talk about that book, my relationship with it and the lessons that I take from that relationship. I'll explain the role it's played in me finding my purpose, and how it ultimately contributed to me leaving behind my corporate career and starting my business. I'm sharing this story because there are a few aspects that I hope may help you when designing your own life and or help you to develop or grow the people you lead, parent or mentor. If you've taken ownership of designing your life and living intentionally, reflect on the paradigms or beliefs that you have about your situation, are they helping you to move towards the life you want? Or stopping you from doing that? If you're asking yourself, How can I create a job I love without throwing away everything I've already got, this is how I started to go about that. Bill Gates is credited with the saying people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. I'm going to share how long I've been working towards being in the position I'm in now. The other learning that I've taken from this part of my own journey that I feel strongly about sharing is that knowing stuff isn't enough, you have to use your knowledge, you have to apply it you have to practice it, you have to live through those really uncomfortable early phases of being rubbish at things before you can start to get better and eventually benefit from your new skill. Finally, I'd like to ask you to think about your role as a leader. And try seeing yourself for a portion of that role as a facilitator, guiding your people to experience insights that will help them grow and become more effective. Those are the points that stand out as learnings for me from my relationship with this book and from the part it has played in my life so far. There may be other thoughts that come to mind for you as you listen to this story. And that's absolutely perfect. In September 1990, I started my first proper job after university. It was with a paperback book printers called Cox and Wyman based in Reading in the UK. I'll share more about my experiences there at another time. I stayed in that business for about four and a half years. And one statistic I remember is that when I left, we were producing over 100 million paperback books per year. A year before my career started, Stephen Covey published The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. At the book factory I remember seeing the title on production schedules over and over again as it gathered momentum and kept being reprinted. As we were producing around 40 new titles a day, there were plenty of other books to attract my attention. At that stage I was not curious enough to pick it up and read it. Fast forward about 10 years, I've left the printing and publishing industry and I'm working in automotive. My wife and I weren't getting on as well as we had been and we thought that a little break away might do us some good. We decided to take a trip to Spain. We planned a night or two in Barcelona, and a couple of nights further up the coast in Roses. Going through the airport, I noticed the Seven Habits on sale and decided to give it a go. I bought it, read it and it's still the only book I've immediately flipped over and started reading again once I'd finished it. I'd assumed that it was a business book but soon realised that it was so much more. In the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition, Jim Collins describes it as the operating manual for human beings. And I love that description. It really does help us to take charge of ourselves and function interdependently with others. It goes without saying that I highly recommend it. I'll share separately about the habits themselves and how to use them. That's not the emphasis for this episode. From that point on to varying degrees I practised implementing the best practices in my personal as well as my professional life. Around the same time I took on my first role as a people manager, and I passed on some of the habits and best practices to my team members. Ironically, one of my team from those days went on to work for Franklin Covey, the organisation founded by Stephen Covey and is still there today. And when my kids became old enough, much to their dismay, I never missed an opportunity to share the Seven Habits with them. Moving on five or six more years to 2008 I remember being at my desk in Singapore, looking into how to become a facilitator or agent for Franklin Covey. In 2010, we moved to New Zealand and for the first time, as head of BMW Financial Services and Alphera financial services, I had an opportunity to formally roll out the Seven Habits signature programme to my team. I was fortunate that Mark Gilbert, who was the then president of BMW New Zealand agreed to support this initiative. And at the beginning of 2011, we rolled out the programme to all associates in our respective businesses. As part of the negotiation with Stuart and Olivia at David Forman, who were the New Zealand distributors for the programme, we agreed that they would include some additional training to help me become accredited as what they call a client facilitator. Over a period of months, Stewart facilitated the three day seven habits signature programme on a number of occasions until we'd all been through it. I went for a couple of days further training with Stuart at their offices in Takapuna on Auckland's North Shore. And once that was done, I was certified and in a position to deliver the programme myself. All that was left for me to do was to familiarise myself with the facilitators handbook, which is a formidable 450 Page binder with about another 150 pages of appendices. To put this into context. We're now in 2011, about 12 years on from me first reading the book, I know from reading my diary entries from that time that I was already considering creating a role and potentially a business for myself doing more work that I loved. And I thought that this additional string to my bow, would allow me to add value within BMW, and would also be helpful to me, should I eventually leave. It would be another five years before I'd fully leave the corporate world but the seeds were being sown. I'd encourage you to think about Bill Gates says quote, and ask yourself, what you might be able to achieve if you give yourself 10 years to do it. My manager Alan Crookes, the CEO of the Asia Pacific region, was impressed by the initiative to roll out the Seven Habits programme in New Zealand and highly supportive of me becoming accredited to facilitate the programme in BMW. He was based in Australia and it wasn't long before he'd arranged my first gig as he liked to call it delivering the Seven Habits signature programme in Melbourne. Once a month. I'd fly out to Melbourne on a Monday, have the afternoon in the office in Mulgrave. Run the programme Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then after a morning in the office, head back to Auckland on Friday, I was delivering the three day programme once a month watching all the videos, running the exercises and teaching the concepts. There's a regular exercise in the programme called Teach to learn, which encourages participants to have a go at teaching the latest concepts they've been learning to their neighbour or to the people on their table or to the whole group. The reason being that there's no better way to engage with the material and get to grips with it and internalise it than by teaching it to someone else. The first time I went out to do it, I was pretty anxious. I downloaded the 450 page facilitator guide onto my iPad. And as I stood in front of the room with 16 of my colleagues from the Australian business in front of me, I was gripping the iPad pretty tightly. After a few months, I was no longer clutching the iPad, I was getting comfortable with the material. All that teaching to learn was working. I was starting to tell some of my own stories, noting which ones went down well and adjusting those that didn't. I gradually shifted from being a guy who was painstakingly delivering the programme from the facilitator handbook, to revealing more of my authentic self, a father, a husband, and a business leader sharing some concepts, tools and practices that I genuinely believed in and felt passionate about discussing, to help my colleagues be more effective in their professional and personal lives. I started out being concerned about sticking to the script. But eventually I realised that because I'd been practising applying the best practices for years, I had plenty of examples from the real world that I could draw on. My friend Peter Dry, who's been a guest on this podcast and who was working in HR in the business at that time tells me I was becoming known in the Australian office as the Seven Habits guy. Then I was going back to our business in New Zealand and applying the concepts like never before. Everyone in our building had been through the Seven Habits programme so imagine what that common understanding gave us. Some of my favourite moments in the corporate classroom are where someone starts a question with, I've got this situation, and they explain it. And then they say, how could I use this to solve that. And everyone goes quiet and leans in to hear what the facilitator is going to say. And if I'm the facilitator, what I'll say first is, well, before I say anything, my nonverbal cues, will be sending out lots of encouragement to this person, I'll turn my whole body towards them, I'll focus all my attention on them. And me turning all my attention to the person tends to shift the focus of the room onto this person, they'll know I care, and that I support them asking the question, and that I want to help. And I'll say, What do you think? And sometimes they'll groan. And the room will erupt. And we'll all have a laugh at how unhelpful that appeared to be. And then I'll say, I'll share my thoughts in a minute. But first, I'm interested to hear what you're thinking. And the reason those are highlights of a session for me is that I 100% know that at that moment, that person is engaged in connecting with the content that we've been discussing. They've identified a potential use for this new tool, and I have an opportunity to help them make the connection between theory and practice in their environment, whether that's at work or at home. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the difference between knowing something and being able to apply it to achieve more effective outcomes. One of my big realisations from doing this work is that people need a lot more help than we usually give them to make those connections and to be able to benefit from the concepts. The internet and Google have made all the world's knowledge available. And we seem to have become a bit obsessed with gaining knowledge, whether it's from books, articles, podcasts, like this, YouTube, Twitter, top 10 lists of this and that, but knowledge is only part of the equation, you have to be able to apply the knowledge to get the improved outcome. When someone leans in to ask how can I use what you're telling me to solve my problem, I know I've got an opportunity to help them through the next stage, which is working out how to apply their new knowledge or skill to get the desired result. And this is where we need to spend more time, helping people make the connection between concepts and applications, between theory and practice. This is why the programmes we designed for clients are designed to run for 12 months with lots of opportunity for participants to practice their new skills. Back to the story. I was in the privileged position of being the managing director of the financial services company. So lots of people came to me with their challenges. Because we all had a common toolkit of concepts of best practices, this gave us a common language. And because I was the Seven Habits guy, it was very easy for me to help my team members to make the connection between their current situation, their real life work issue, and the components from the Seven Habits that could help them be most effective. Most importantly, I was not telling them how to solve individual workplace problems. Instead, I was teaching them to use the tools that we'd given them, so that they could solve their own problems now, and long into the future, both at work and at home. Some of my favourite stories from people who I worked with at that time, are about the long term impact that applying the Seven Habits has had on their family lives, on their effectiveness as parents and how they were able to use their new knowledge and skills to raise effective teenagers. After six months delivering the programme in Australia, we had three volunteers from that business, Sue, Larna and Craig, who put their hands up and said they wanted to become facilitators too. I handed over responsibility to them, and they took the rest of their colleagues through the programme. That freed me up to support my fellow CEOs in the region, and I went on to deliver the programme in Japan, Thailand, India, Hong Kong and Korea. The ability for the content to work across different cultures reinforced my belief in it, all that practice teaching it and answering participants specific work related questions helped me to refine my delivery, and feel even more at home on my feet, facilitating others to experience their own insights. It's the sort of book that gives you something new each time you pick it up depending on what you might need most at that time. Interestingly, one section that resonated with me the first time I read it during that trip to Spain, was about love. And about how love isn't just a chemical reaction between two people and more a verb, a doing word, something you have to work at and invest in to keep it alive and healthy. If you're wondering how the trip went, and whether it helped my wife and I Yes, thank you. We're approaching 35 years as a couple and are as happy as we've ever been. Thank you for listening to this side mirror. The Seven Habits has been so much more than a book to me. And I wanted to tell that story. As I mentioned, I also wanted to share how long I took to execute on my plan to create the life I currently lead. In case things are not going as fast as you'd like, or in case you're avoiding making a change because you're not thinking long term enough with your own plans. And I really want to encourage you to help people you lead parents and mentor make the connection between theory and reality, as I think we vastly underestimate the need for this and assume that if people understand something conceptually, they're somehow benefiting from that understanding when in truth, they're not benefiting because they're not applying their learning. Interestingly, it was not at the expense of my day job. BMW Financial Services New Zealand posted record results during this time. Could it be that there was a connection between our approach to developing the people and the results that we delivered? I recognised that I went to above average lengths to grow my people by becoming an accredited facilitator, because as I later learned, enabling fulfilling performance is truly my mission in life. I'm not expecting you to do the same, but would encourage you to do whatever you can to grow the people you lead parent or mentor. You've been listening to Career-view Mirror with me, Andy follows. If you enjoy listening to our episodes, please could you do me a favour and click the Follow button in the app that you use to listen to your podcasts. This helps our podcast grow so that we can continue to share the wealth of experience that our guests have amassed during their careers so far. Thanks for listening.

Osman Abdelmoneim: 16:46

No matter how hard you try, no matter how hard working you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible.

Paul Harris: 16:53

You know, at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you, and you're seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect.

Rupert Pontin: 17:01

Don't rely on others. You have to do it yourself. You have to take control. If you've got an idea if you've got a thought about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself but you just haven't quite got there, do it.

Tom Stepanchak: 17:17

Take a risk. Take a chance stick your neck out what's the worst that can happen? You fall down okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.