Be Specific | 120 Seconds to Better Leadership

*Video Transcription*

Just want to take a second to talk about encouragement and being specific.

So I just got done having a talk with a colleague of mine in the barn and she was asking about a clinic. I've talked about this clinician before. I think he's the most gifted trainer I've ever worked with, and he certainly has helped me more than anyone else in this world of Dressage.

And she asked me why I thought that was, and here's what it boils down to. And I actually use this technique with a client this week, and it worked for him, too.

So one of the things that he does when he teaches is to say what he wants. So for example, if I'm, you know, too heavy in my hand with my horse, you know, most trainers will say, "stop hanging on your horse's mouth" or "get off the inside rein" or, you know, "get out of his face" and it's not specific and it's more critical. So you know you're doing something wrong.

But if you knew how to fix it, you would, right?

So this guy will say, "give her left rein another inch" and then the minute you give the smallest effort, even though that's kind of a scary thing to do when the horses want to barrel off with you. He'll say "Good", and then he'll be very specific. "Give her one more inch." "Good."

And then when he knows he's built your courage to let go a little bit,

he'll say, "Good, now throw the rein away", which means don't use it at all which is also scary. But because he's taken those steps to get you kind of ready for it.

It's less scary and more doable.

So he's high on praise for effort. He's not negative. He doesn't say, "Don't do this, don't do this, don't do that." He says, very specifically what he wants you to do.

And so what I want people to realize when you're coaching your folks is that when you tell people to stop doing something, their brain doesn't understand the word "don't" or "stop."

So the brain will fixate, right?

So I had a client whose bosses keep giving him feedback on his presentations. You know, "stop making them so convoluted." "Stop making them so complicated." "Stop making...", you know? So he's obsessing on how to do that.

The answer is he didn't know how.

And so what we tried instead in our coaching session was, OK, let's let's try it again. Let's try to slow down your delivery by 20%. And he did, and I was like, "That was so much clearer to me." And then I said, "Let's focus on using - make all the same points with half the words" right?, very specific.

So it wasn't. "Don't be wordy." "Don't be fast." It was "slow down 20% and use half the words to say the exact same thing." And that worked really well for him, too.

So I think the bottom line is when we're coaching people, if we focus on what we don't want from them, it actually helps their brain keep fixating on that thing and it keeps them repeating that behavior more than if we give them, plenty of encouragement and also direct on specifically what we want, things that will change their behavior incrementally and get us the result that we're after.

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