15 Minutes. Confidence Doubled.

Last week I ran a workshop on the 7 Keys for Facilitating Transformational Conversations: Powerful communication skills for coaching, leading, parenting, and self-development.

We had a great turn out and in the hours before the event I was questioning whether or not I would do a demonstration of a ‘transformational conversation’. 

In retrospect that was a silly question.  

After overviewing the 7 key principles I checked the clock and thought to myself, okay, we have 15 minutes for a demonstration and set up the camera to record.

“Would anyone like to come up and experience a potentially life changing conversation?”, I asked, and invited one of the volunteers to the stage. We set a timer for 10 minutes so that we could have a 5 minute warning to wrap up the conversation and dove right in.

She works as a consultant and told me that a client of hers had asked her to help them with “emotional regulation and mental clarity”, but she had never done that kind of ‘inner game’ coaching before so she wasn’t feeling confident in her abilities. She was afraid of potentially “damaging them”.

As we continued to explore it was revealed that this fear and lack of confidence got triggered most recently when she received payment for the service.  She told me that she had explained to the client that she hasn’t done this kind of work before and it would be an experiment before they paid, and clearly her client had enough confidence in her to invest.

I validated her courage, as I know that the invitation to step out of one’s comfort zone in this way stops many others in their tracks, and yet she still pressed ahead into new territory.

As the conversation continued it turns out her belief that “she had never done this before” was not actually true. She has had quite a few of these kinds of conversations before, with herself and with others, but she had been discounting them.  

We took some time to “externalize” those examples from her self-coaching, and to count them. And since time was short we created a task for her to continue this process with her past experiences of doing this with others before delivering her first paid session on Sunday. 

She seemed excited by the task, and when I asked her what her biggest takeaway from the session was, she stated “I can find the evidence if I need it”.

That was beautiful because at the end of the day, transformational conversations empower the receiver. Her takeaway was not about what I did, but about the power she has now to do this for herself in the future. This is incredible, and the benefits of that can ripple out into many different contexts, far out into her future and those whom she impacts.

At the end of the conversation she reported that her confidence had gone from a 4/10 at the start of the session to an 8/10.  A productive use of 15 minutes to say the least.

While my main focus of this workshop was for coaches/aspiring coaches, the principles that drive transformational conversations go way beyond the coaching context.  These foundational communication skills are powerful in conversations with friends and family members, with colleagues, teams, prospects, and perhaps most importantly, with yourself in your head.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your conversations, so what are the quality of your conversations? More on this coming soon.

Until then, did you find this article valuable? If yes, what are you taking away from it that will have a positive impact on your life? Reply to this email and let me know.

To increasing our quality of life one conversation at a time,

Jason Schneider