To care, to not care. How do you do both?
I left the most provocative for last …
The final of the four paradoxes in the new chapter of the 10-year hardback edition of The Coaching Habit is Care and also Don’t Care.
So here’s what I’ve cared about in creating The Year of The Coaching Habit:
I’m creating things that are useful and beautiful.
I’m having fun. (I’m not not having fun.)
I’m thoughtful about how we market.
I’m not doing things that other people on the team can do faster, easier, or better.
I don’t trade short-term wins for our longer-term goals.
I make it easy and tempting for people to get involved.
I’m co-creating ambitious goals with the team.
I give myself the best chance of finding new readers for the book.
I give people who invest in us a great experience, whether that’s as a Quest-ionnaire or through one of the Power Ups.
In other words, what I do.
And here’s what I haven’t cared about:
How many people hit the buy button.
How many Power Ups we sell.
How many new books we sell.
How many new readers we find.
In other words, what you do.
When I say “don’t care,” don’t make that for not trying with all the skill we have to get you engaged in The Year of The Coaching Habit, whether that’s at the completely free Explorer level, or the best-value-by-far Insider level.
The way we do that is to care deeply about our strategy, our team, how we work the plan, and how we keep it going for a year. We’re doing our best, taking our best guess, and are focused on the process. We all want to be able to say, we gave it our best.
I’m not ignoring the outcomes by any means. We’re tracking Power Up sales, book sales, unsubscribes, and the rest. But I’m considering them as incoming data by which we adjust the process, not as a metric of success or failure.
Good or bad, we say, “How fascinating! Now, what do we do more of — and less of?”
Care and Don’t Care scales up and scales down.
It’s a way of managing a company, it’s a way of being with someone you’re coaching, it’s a way of being a parent to a child.
It’s also difficult.
We’ve spent our lives being trained to sweat the outcomes, so to hold that lightly feels almost irresponsible.
We love people, so to grant them the agency to decide on their own lives feels coldhearted.
How do you not care about something when you care so much and put so much effort into it?
Not caring doesn’t mean you don’t care about them. Quite the opposite, actually.
It means you care about helping someone, but you don’t care what choices they make. You care about the process and don’t care about the outcome.
Even writing this down feels challenging.
But that’s what it takes to be more coach-like. And that takes courage and working through the hard stuff.
The Year of The Coaching Habit helps you practice that work in a fun and useful way.
Whether you join us or not … well, that part isn’t up to me.
