“I Don’t Want to Be Transformational”

After running a recent workshop on facilitating transformational conversations, I got a piece of feedback that stuck with me.

During the workshop I taught what I call The 7 Keys for Facilitating Transformational Conversations. After explaining the content I demonstrated a fifteen-minute transformational conversation so people could see how those principles look in action.

Later that day, a longtime friend and former client of mine (who is not a coach) said something that caught my attention. “When you were teaching the keys earlier, I didn’t really understand how they would apply to my life. I don’t want to be a transformational coach. But when you did the demonstration it suddenly made sense.”

That comment made me realize something. Unless you’re a coach, therapist, or leader whose role involves guiding people through deep change, you probably won’t find yourself facilitating transformational conversations very often. Most people won’t.

But regardless of your context, the skills underlying those conversations are vital. A ‘transformational conversation’ is simply one arena where the foundational communication skills can be applied together and expressed at a very high level.

Those same communication skills can also be applied at their highest expression in many other contexts. Leadership conversations. Consulting conversations. Sales conversations. Marketing conversations. Parenting conversations. Strategy conversations. The list goes on.

The context changes, but the underlying skills are the same.

Watching a transformational conversation can be a bit like realizing you’ve been driving a high-performance car daily for your daily activities, without realizing its full capabilities.

One day you see someone driving the same model with precision and suddenly realize, “Wait… I didn’t know it could do that!”

Every day when you communicate you are driving a high potential, high-performance machine. 

We use this “machine” constantly with partners, children, coworkers, clients, friends, and strangers. Even when we are alone, our “thinking” is just the conversation going on inside our head.

Most of us were never taught how to cultivate our capabilities of thinking and communicating to their peak expression. What struck me about my friend’s comment is that once they saw those skills working together they  recognized them in a different way. Not as something reserved for transformational coaches, but as something that would meaningfully improve their quality of life, performance, influence, and results.  Skills that apply to themselves, and with the others that they communicate with every day, for the rest of their lives.

Of course if you’d like to become more transformational, I can show you how to do that. Yet, transformational conversations are just one small example of what becomes possible when communication skills are expanded to a higher level of mastery. Once you start to glimpse at what this “machine” is capable of it’s hard not to become curious where you’d like to take it and how far you’d like to go.

To your next level of momentum, meaning, and mastery,

Jason Schneider

PS. If you’ve been wanting to take your perception, performance, and influence to the next level, I’ll be opening limited space for new clients next month. Apply here to get notified first.