What Did You Say? | Steve Job’s Business Coach Required 100% of His Attention

Audio Transcription

Grabbed the duct tape and mentally prepare yourself for yet another mind expanding knowledge bomb from America’s number one business coach, clay Clark,

Andrew. Each and every time we discuss the knowledge bombs taught to us in the book written about bill Campbell, the world’s number one business coach, to what called trillion-dollar coach. My mind almost explodes every time I find another knowledge bomb in this book, my mind almost explodes. You get a duct tape it up. Have you read, have you finished reading the book yet? I have gone through it. I’m now going back through reading my highlights and tabbing it. Oh man. So w do you have a knowledge bomb that you can think of right now or that you do you have the book president is a book near you. The book is in my car. That’s fair. That’s fair. Yep. Do you have an idea so far that you’ve got to have the book so far where you say, wow, this right. This is something I learned from this book, the trillion dollar business coach written by Eric Schmidt.

That has moved the needle for you. Yes. I’m one of the biggest things is uh, uh, well there’s two big things. One is weekly meeting times is haven’t crazy. Yeah, it’s insane. It’s the, just having the exact same time that you meet with someone every single week and it’s scheduled, it’s reoccurring and it doesn’t change. Why is it so efficient to do that, Andrew? You see it in our office, we run our coaching program that way. Why is it so efficient to have a set weekly time? Because if you do not cause the other option, and if you do not have a set weekly meeting time, you’re constantly going to have 40 different people reaching out and trying to plug in and puzzle piece your calendar with their calendar. And it’s the most inefficient thing you can do. Or they each send different cascading emails at different times.

Right? Each one with one more thing. Oh, one more thing. Exactly. And your whole day is spent reading some big thread of email responses. Now I wanna I want to ask you this. When you, when I told all the guys in the office by this book, had you ever heard of bill Campbell really before? Had you mean his, was he a household name to a lot of people talk about bill Campbell. I had not. Are you amazed at the clients he’s had? Uh, I am. I tab. That’s one of the tabs I’ve made and it’s just a huge list of these big names that who are household names. He’s sitting there and bill Campbell is the business coach of choice for Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, Steve jobs, the cofounder of Apple. Uh, Larry Page, founder of Google, Sergei Brin, founders of Google, uh, the head of YouTube, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon.

I mean, what this guy is, it’s hot now. Page 89 from the trillion dollar business coach. I read here it says, practice free form listening in a coaching session with bill, you can expect that he would listen intently. What he would listen, what intently. Oh no. Checking his phone or texts or email Glen to get his watch or out the window while his mind wandered. He was always right there. Today. It is popular to talk about being present or in the moment. We’re pretty sure that those words passed the coach’s lips. Yet he was one of the great practitioners, meaning he actually did it. He was a Dewar of this idea. Al Gore, and they look, it says, Al Gore says, he learned from bill Campbell how important it is to pay careful attention to the person you’re dealing with. Give him your full undivided attention. Really listening carefully.

Only only then do you get into the issue. That’s there’s an order to it. He says, only then do you go into the issue. There’s an order to it. Alan [inaudible] called bill Campbell’s approach, freeform listening. Uh, academics might call it active listening. A term first coined in 1957 and in practicing it, bill was following the advice of the great UCLA basketball coach, John wooden, who felt that poor listening was a trait shared by many leaders. We’d be a lot wiser if we listened more. John wooden said. Now just hearing those words, not just hearing those words, but listening and not thinking about what you’re going to say while someone else is talking either. Andrew, why is it so important that when you’re working with a client that you are 100% focused? Uh, it’s important so you can, uh, so you can be able to break down if they have a question or if they have a problem or if they have a, a when it’s important to be present with them.

Uh, and it, it, it’s uh, uh, it blows my mind that this football coach is telling Al Gore and he’s not just telling it. Actually, he, he mentions in the book, he never says to do this. He never wants, this was never an action item to actively listen. It was just what he did. And so, uh, Al Gore and all these other, um, huge entrepreneurs learn from him based off what he did and not just what he said. Now this is, this is important to pick up when you’re listening in a 100% present. There. There are. There’s a lot, a lot to be. There’s a lot to learn here. Okay. How much, you’ve been married for a while now. How long have you been married? A year. In a month and a half. Now let me tell you about something I know you’ve never done right, but something that I’ve done cause it you, you know, you’re, you know, you’re, you’ve been married that year and you can be married 50 years and you’re never going to do what I do.

Okay. But this is what I do. Sometimes I’ll do something and I don’t know. It’s something, but it’s something and I get the look and you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I know what I’m talking about and I get the look. Then I’m going, well baby, what happened? And then I get the subsequent look, which is the look of how do you not know that what you just did was wrong? How do you not know what the look meant? So let me tell you just some recent examples of me doing stupid things in the last year that have caused me to get the look. Got it. One, uh, what’s go way back in time. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go back. Let’s, let’s get back into the past. Let’s make it far enough in the past where it’s not a big deal. Date line Saturday, that Saturday driving in the car and my, I’m listening to the Patriots podcast.

Yep. I’m driving the kids to the cheer tournament. And my, my, my job as a Patriots fan is to know everything about the team headed into the season because it makes my cheers more sincere. Right? No one wants an insincere cheer. No, no. I’m yelling at my screen and I mean, I’ve been yelled at my screen since below check out there and we keep winning. So it’s working. So all I’m saying is I want to get coached up. You don’t want to know what’s going on. Yeah. So I’m hearing about this new receiver named Braxton Barrios that they drafted in the sixth round last year, who’s five foot nine and 190 pounds. And he’s in the NFL. Wow. And I’m like small guy. Oh gosh, this, this is this, this is my kind of guy. So I’m listening to it. And then my wife’s like, Hey babe, there’s a, there’s a car over there.

You don’t run them off the road cause the, the lanes are emerging or something. And the guy’s like is trying to merge. Yeah, he’s trying to merge. I’m just going at my pace. You’re just trying to go. And I’m like, Oh, you know. Okay. And I said, okay, cause I’m listening to Braxton Barrios. I listened to him talk about Braxton Barrios one thing at a time, a guy on the practice squad who might be playing for the Patriots, you know, and I’m thinking, well Braxton Barrios, I mean, God, I don’t even know who he is. I mean, I remember he played at Miami and I’ve seen him like one time, I remember him being good last preseason. I wonder why Braxton Barrios isn’t, why don’t I know more about this? Am I a terrible fan? Braxton Perez? And then my wife said it again. It seemed like it was like hours later, but it was probably just seconds later.

She said, Hey, I’m, you’re going to run the car off the road and I’m like, what you we’re going to run? And I’m like you, I said, so I move. But instead of doing the right move, like where you’re supposed to like turn in a way or speed up so they can get past you. Yeah, I kind of turned into the most, like I was trying to run them off the road almost, but I wasn’t, I just, my reaction was to turn a little overseer, so I’m like, Ooh, you know, it just bad. All I’m saying is then I guess when I was got, I got stressed out at that moment, you know, cause at that moment of like where I’m realizing, Oh no, I don’t know what they’re talking about on the show anymore. Look, I have that you’re stressed out. They’re like, Oh no.

Like I have. Ah, I think, I think I, I might’ve missed a part wonder. So I’m like, we got to go back to that part cause we, I admit, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Now you’re scrubbing through while you’re, and she’s like you, you’re not even concerned at all that you almost ran someone off the road. You’re not, you’re not, you know, but this is all just non verbal cues. Right? And this is the look. And then it was, I’m driving the car, I’m not giving her my 100% attention. So then I finally look over and I give the a hundred percent of attention. Now at this point, I don’t even know where we are in the interview. And I remember the name Michael Bennett was said and I was like, I think he was a really good defensive player on the Eagles. He’s on our team.

Oh. And then I look over at her when I do, I, my attention turns away from the steering mechanism. Now I don’t know if you’re aware how standard cars work, right? You’ve got a right foot there. You’ve got two pedals. Usually the right foot, you’ll control gas or the brake or whatever, you know the collage one and then you’ve got the steering wheel too tend and to, yup. I think I kept my hands on 10 and two while jerking the wheel. Right. And taking my foot off the gas. When you looked, you also turned right? Oh let go. It’s a natural thing for me. When I look, I let go of, I let go of the gas. Yeah. Thus slowing down the car behind us almost like hits us cause I don’t see brake lights, they just, you have a heavy vehicle and it slows it down really quickly.

And all I’m saying is like I, it was, and then, and then we got out of the car and she’s like, you almost ran some off the road babe. And I was like, okay. But I just think like if you guys wouldn’t talk to me, I could, I’ve tried to get the podcast and I don’t know, like I don’t if I don’t know what we’re going to be on. And I was like seriously concerned about like not knowing what happened in that podcast. And I was like, where did it cut off? Like what time? When did it cut off? And then, then, then it occurred to me at the super Walmart at that moment as we went to get a into the year card for the coach to say thank you for coaching our kids and cheerleading. Yup. That’s when it occurred to me, cause I was a hundred percent focused on her.

Right. That I had upset her. Mm. Put it cause it wasn’t focused. Yeah. Now this sort of misunderstanding can happen all the time. All the time. But if you’re 100% focused, you pick up on those details. Yeah. Now Andrew, what’s the big temptation today? The big, the big temptation today of, you know, kind of putting the phone face up a little bit and then people tend to do what they tend to get distracted by the constant texts, calls and emails that come in while they’re in a meeting and they’re checking their phone under the table. Now, what’s really, really disturbing about this whole thing as according to psychology today, the average person is now interrupted a minimum. The minute, the minimum we know right now is 11 hours a day by some type of, of media, some type of text, some type of Facebook, some type of social media.

Does that at all bother you? Does that enter, does that freak you out a bit? I mean does that kind of seem a little like, wow, that’s a lot. Do you ever have that thought that that may be as a problem? That is, that does freak me out considering the fact that some people are awake for 11 hours per day, that’s like 11 hours is an extremely long amount of time to be bombarded by other people’s opinions and thoughts and messages and burning fires. Um, let me just give you some statistics here real quick that may be or, or some some deep thoughts and then we’ll want to give you just a few deep thoughts. I think I just had somebody see this. I’m talking on Skype right now. I think someone tried to reach out to me right now. See this is why I have, I always turn the apps off here we are recording.

I didn’t turn it. I didn’t turn it off. And what did you just hear? You hear to a notification, the temptation is to go, Oh, what’s that? That is what was, I wonder what that was. And so then you get distracted, you lose train of thought, and then your listeners say, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Okay, so let’s try it again. So here we go. So the fun factoid I want to read to you, this is from psychology today. The content of the articles called is your making you dumb reads that these perpetual distractions add up studies indicate that even brief interruptions exponentially increase our chances of making mistakes. What this is, because when our attention is diverted, a K a car’s trying to merge, I lose track of where I am mentally in the podcast. We use up valuable cognitive resources.

Reorientating ourselves going, Oh, what were we talking about? Let’s reset, right? We use up valuable cognitive resources, reorientating ourselves, leaving less mental energy for completing our what? Completing our work, right? So fun fact, fun fact, Andrew read the fun factoid coming to you hot from the good folks at Nielsen. According to the first quarter 2018 Nielsen total audience report, nearly nearly half an adult’s day is dedicated to consuming this content. Oh boy. In fact, American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading, or genuinely generally interacting with media. My friends, my listeners, my good, good esteemed members of the thrive nation, Steve jobs, the cofounder of Apple had a coach and his coach, bill Campbell, was the coach of Jeff Bezos, the guy who started Amazon. His coach was the guy who started that wonderful company called Google Larry and Sergei, the guys who started Google, and their coach was the coach who coached Facebook, the leading technology companies and all of them. This is the CEO of YouTube. They all were required to be 100% focused and not distracted, not glancing down at their phone while bill Campbell was talking. That is so important that we grasp that knowledge. Bob. Now, if any further, I do in each and every show with a boom, here we go, three, two, one, boom.