You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Hello, I'm Claire Pedrick and today I'm in conversation with Gary Crotaz. Gary was one of the participants on our recent, super successful actually, Business of Coaching extended podcast. And Gary's just got a book out called The Idea Mindset, Figure Out What You Want From Work and How to Get It in Six Weeks.
Welcome, Gary. Thank you so much, Claire, for having me on the show. been lovely to be here. And it's great to have you. You were one of the guests, weren't you, at our Business of Coaching I was. was in a team of four on the day you interviewed us all. Yes, and that was great fun. And you've got this book out.
Yes, I've just published this book called The Idea Mindset, which is a kind of summary simplification of a coaching framework that I've been using with my clients, which is kind of how I got into professional coaching. And I thought, I wonder whether I could take me out of the process and make the process the book. And so I've been working on it for the last 14 months from when I first started writing it and it was published just in mid January.
So yeah, I'm just in the beginnings of that post-launch phase. Fantastic. And there's a link to Gary's book in the show notes. But what I need to say, Gary, is the content is great, but can I just say it is the most strokeable book I have read in a very long time. My cover designer would be so happy. It's just got beautiful pages and you want a very lovely pencil and you want to get in there and start writing in it. Thank you so much.
I have to say when you say that, we had a lot of debates about the structure of the book, the paper it was written on, the thickness of the paper, all this kind of thing. And I literally just posted on LinkedIn yesterday because I was talking about something about the cost of publishing a book. And it's absolutely a debate that you think about as you're going through. Do I make this the best book it can be in terms of the quality of the materials?
Or do I make it a more profitable and economic book? And actually for me, particularly because I felt the book represented me in a way I didn't want to ever compromise on quality, which makes it probably commercially a less good book. But I think it's really important that when you hold a book in your hands that it feels weighty, that you open it and it feels quality and that you want to engage in it. So it's lovely to hear that feedback. Thank you.
And you can write on it, in it with a perfect pen and the ink won't go through to the other side. My editor who used to work at HarperCollins in non-fiction, one of the first conversations she had with me was if you want them to write in it, Gary, the paper's got to be the right kind of paper that it doesn't bleed through. And I just never thought of that. So yeah, it was really good to be surrounded by experts. Rachel Kenny, my editor, I owe her an awful lot. Well, we're all very grateful.
So we're talking about the book, but we haven't really talked about what the book's about. And we haven't talked. So we met you on the other podcast, but for the benefit of our listeners who are listening in today, and didn't hear the business of coaching one, just give us the headlines, Gary, of your amazing story. Eclectic story. So I'm now I am an executive coach is what I do as my as my full time thing and author and occasional blog article writer and various different things.
My background is a variety of different careers really. I trained originally as a medical doctor, so I went to medical school, did a PhD in a science lab and realized in my late 20s that I didn't want to practice in medicine. And so in my late 20s, I decided to come out of medicine. So I never took up my first hospital job as a practicing doctor. And instead I went into business and I joined one of the strategy consulting firms in London as a new graduate, even though I was in my late twenties.
And I spent the best part of 10 years working in consulting management consulting, working in lots of different industries, lots of different sectors. And I was in my late thirties and I realized I should probably go get a proper job at some point, in the corporate world and build up some experience with line management and owning projects and owning P &L, that kind of thing.
And so I had an opportunity through people I've worked with before to join the team at Mothercare, who were in the early stages of a major strategic turnaround. And what I thought was going to be a sort of three to six month project turned into five and a half years of my life. And I ended up as a group strategy director at Mothercare and then on the executive team as customer director.
So I was looking after for a period of time, the UK stores and online business and the global brand and marketing functions. my first sort of really big role there. I came out of Mothercare at the end of 2018, and I spent a couple of years doing a variety of projects and starting to build up my coaching practice. And one of those projects was as director of group strategy for Selfridges Group.
And I joined there in February 2020, when coronavirus was sort of on page 26 of the newspaper, something in Wuhan, a few cases. And five weeks later, we had all gone home because the shop had shut on Oxford Street and the offices had closed. And I spent about seven months then working with the team at Selfridges managing the beginnings of managing the pandemic.
And I came out of Selfridges the end of September, I was there on a maternity cover contract and decided at that point, do I carry on in the retail space and look for another role like this? Or do I follow the thing that I most love doing, which is the coaching that I've been building up. Now I hadn't done a huge amount of coaching at that point, but I'd done enough to give myself some confidence that it was something that I wanted to give a go at. And so that's when I started coaching.
Along the way, whilst I was doing those corporate jobs, my secret double life was as a professional ballroom dancer. So my ballroom dancing, which is a big theme, and I talk about it a lot in the book, it's kind of defined who I am much more than the corporate experience. I started boorum dancing when I was four years old. So was one of those very cute little boys in a white shirt and a black tie. And I did boorum dancing when I was growing up as a teenager, a little bit at university.
And then in my early twenties, my medical training was becoming very all encompassing. And I decided to stop dancing. And I thought that's what I'm gonna do with that. And that was the thing I'd done. I'd enjoyed it. And I actually came back to it in my late twenties. a girl called me up and asked whether I wanted to form a dancing partnership quite informal way. And about 16 or so years on 17 years on we're married, we've been married for 11 years. That phone call turned into a 10 year career.
And first we trained and competed all around the UK. And then eventually we decided that we wanted to take it even more seriously. And we started training in Italy. We would travel out to Italy once a month. We flew around the world and competed in 14 different countries around the world. So we had this really full-on dancing career. went to European and world championships representing England in ballroom dancing and juggling that with having a day job.
So now in coaching, I work with a lot of people who are looking for a way of working that connects what they love doing and something that connects deeply with that. their values and their purpose. And for me, that was the dancing that was, you know, we, we enjoy the work we do, we're at the work we do, we want to progress that and we want to have a career.
But at the same time, at that point in time, and this is going back a few years now, but at that point in time, everything for us was pointed towards being able to have the time and the flexibility and the funding to be able to pursue our dance career. So now I talk to people and it's about finding that balance in their lives. And so that's a big theme of coaching now. You've been incredibly successful at being extraordinarily unconventional, Gary. Thank you.
I think that it's in a very unplanned way. So and we'll come on talk about idea, but one of the themes towards idea is a framework that stands for doesn't it's nothing to do with ideas and innovation at all. It stands for identity, direction, engagement, authenticity.
And really, it's talking about understanding who you are, what you're great at, what your values are, where you're going in the long term, but probably more important the short term for a future that you love, and a future that connects deeply with your values and purpose. And for me, this point of direction, I do meet lots of people who are really clear on their long term goal. And they can say in 10 years time, I want to be in this role or in this sector or running this kind of business.
But equally, meet loads of people who say, I actually don't know where I want to be in 10 or 20 years time. And I was one of those people. I never really knew where I was going to end up. Even today, I don't really know what my life's going to look like in five to 10 years time. And the dilemma that I was trying to work through with the exercises that are in the idea mindset is what you do need to do is make decisions about what happens next.
So when you're faced with a choice tomorrow, do you turn left or right? Somebody phones you up and says, Would you quit your job and come and work for me? Do you say yes or no? If your boss calls you in and says, do you want to take this promotion that involves a lot of travel or do you want to stick in this role, which doesn't have so many prospects, what do you do? And if you don't have this long-term North Star goal to aim for, how do you do that?
So direction for me is actually about understanding how you make those kinds of decisions, particularly in the absence of some grand plan that tells you what the answer is because you absolutely know what you want to be in 10 years time. So that was me, that was me. I was the person without a grand plan and I'm kind of still that person. I don't have a grand plan either. I think it's quite fun actually to have that, know, sort of follow your nose for opportunities.
You know, before I'd worked for Mothercare, I'd never worked in retail. And actually my conversation when they caught me up and said, you know, would you come and have a conversation about whether this could be a fit? My first response was, did you realize that I literally have no idea how a retailer operates? And they said, no, that's not why we want to talk to you. We want to talk to you because of the way you think or the questions you ask or other experience that you have.
And I've so thought I was going to be found out in those first few months. And I'm sure many times I was found out, absolutely. But I became quite expert at asking a really stupid question because I didn't. have, there was no expectation that I would know how things worked.
And that did enable me to ask more open questions, because I could absolutely, and I played this card for five and half years, say, I, you know, I explain this to me and help me understand as if I don't have a background with this, because genuinely I don't. But it enabled us to have bigger and broader conversations. And I guess I pulled that through to my coaching now that If I have an expertise, is an expertise in asking questions rather than knowing the answer.
And there's value in looking at something from a different place. I think so. I think that's true. Throughout my career, somebody was asking me recently whether a shift to coaching is just the latest in my list of career changes and in three years time I'll be doing something different. And it was a great question. And I reflected on it and I said, well, actually there is a theme that runs throughout my whole career. And that's the theme around people.
and helping people starting at medical school. Some in consulting, but where that manifested was talking to people maybe who were thinking of leaving medicine as I had done, or talking to team members and colleagues who were thinking about whether they move from one role into another or one company into another. And then when I was managing teams, when I was in a corporate role, that was always the part that I just really enjoyed doing. It's a place that I got energy from.
It's a place that I felt very at home. And I think there's a distinction between what you're necessarily skilled at and what you love doing. And I work with a lot of people now who are very skilled at some things, but it's not what they love. And I had this absolute sort of pivot moment in sort of September of October of 20. when I was coming out of my role in Selfridges.
And, you know, I was reasonably good and skilled and value adding in the role that I was playing, but I genuinely sat there and I thought, if I was my coach and I was having a conversation with myself, at this point in time, I think I would probably invite the person to think, what do really love doing? Of all things you do, what do you love doing more than anything else? And I was really clear. that that was being in a coaching conversation.
At that point, I wasn't a trained coach, wasn't a credited coach. I didn't know an awful lot about coaching. mean, there's lots that I've learned since that I didn't know at that time. But I did know that I liked being a conversation, helping people to work through their thinking and find clarity in where they were. So I think that always felt very natural to me.
I didn't start my career with that sense of there's going to be this path I'm to go on, there's going to be this thread, but I can kind of, when I look back, I can track that through. And that's always been my style. You're describing a vocational journey, aren't you? A journey that's at the heart of who you are becoming. And I think one of the, and that's been my whole career actually, because before I was a coach, was a coach having conversations with people about those kinds of things.
And, and I think there's something about It's much easier to look at the thread when you're going backwards. It's like rowing a boat, isn't it? You can see where you've been, but you can't see where you're going. I think that's right. think that's right. John Adair says in he's, he's written a great book called how to discover your vocation. And he describes the difference between vocation and avocation. So vocation is the thing that gets your heart and your values and your being.
And then sometimes the avocation is the thing that we do to make the money to allow us to do the other thing. That's right. That's right. So when you were describing the dancing in Italy and the management consulting, it felt like there was a bit of a combination going on there. I think that's right. mean, ballroom dancing as a sport is one of those sports that is yet to be in any way, shape or form infused with money.
So I don't know the exact number, but it's something like our career winnings over the course of 10 years. If it was more than about 500 pounds, I'd be surprised. And if you're multiple time world champion as a professional boar and dancer, you know, you might make a hundred thousand pounds a year if you're the absolute best in the world, but that's about, that's about where it is.
The cost of running a top level, so better than we were, but a top level boar and dancing partnership is probably about 75 to a hundred thousand pounds a year. what it costs for the training, the outfits, the travel, the hotels, the whole gamut.
mean, one ballroom dancing dress costs two and a half thousand pounds, the tail suit costs 1500 pounds, and the top couples not only can't wear the same dress to the same two different competitions, they can't often wear the same dress in two rounds of the same competition. So it's this whole sort of machine.
And so at the top level, couples have government funding or they have sponsorship or they have family money or they sometimes like, you we were unusual in that we were holding down full-time jobs to pay for it. But it was interesting because, I talked a little bit about this in the book, that when we were in England and we were, the English poor dancing scene is not that big. And a lot of couples looked at what was going on in Europe and Eastern Europe and Russia.
And you can see, the quality of the couples, the quality of the competition overseas is is averagely higher than what you see in the UK. And we said, well, you know, why don't more of the English couples go and compete in that environment? And the answer was, it's difficult, it's expensive, which is both of which true. And eventually we got to a place where we decided that we'd done everything we wanted to do within the British circuit.
and we were either going to retire or we were going to go and spend some time exploring what was going on. mean, going to Italy for warm dancing is like going to Kenya for distance running. It's, you you go there, you immerse yourselves, everyone out there is hugely better than you are, but it pulls your standard up from where you were before. It's that kind of equivalent. And then we started meeting couples who had far lower means than us.
So a couple from Moldova or a couple from Albania, a couple from Vladivostok who, flew once a month into Italy, a couple who were world champions who cleaned offices at night to pay for their dancing, a couple who couldn't take flights to the competitions because they couldn't afford it because she was a student and he was a welder. And so they drove a rickety old car across Europe overnight to get to these competitions.
We met them in Prague and I said to them, you know, which flight have you arrived on? We arrived on whichever, you know, whichever low cost flight. And they said, we didn't fly. you we drove from Amsterdam to Prague overnight to compete here today, professional couple. Then we said, so tomorrow you're gonna drive home. And they said, no, overnight tonight we're driving to Paris to the competition in Paris tomorrow.
And then on Sunday night we're driving overnight from Paris to Amsterdam, we'll be back at work at nine o'clock on Monday morning. Cause as a welder, if I don't show up to work, I don't have any more work. And suddenly we free framed our thinking to, we were sitting there thinking it was really difficult for us in, management consulting and corporate jobs to do this. And it is hard, but compared with what other people were doing, it wasn't hard for us.
So it changed the bar that we worked to when we started to think, if we really want to make this happen, we can make it happen. We've just got to be more flexible. We've just got to pull more levers. We've just got to think very differently about how we run everything. And it comes back to this point about being really clear on what's important to you. And if that's what's most important to you, then you'll find a way to make it happen.
And we just blocked ourselves, I think, before from thinking that way. Yeah, and the other two things that really struck out for me there as you were talking, Gary, is that there was something, as you began to talk about that, I thought there's something about being with people who are better than you.
And I mean, I really advise that to coaches, know, move with people who are better than you, because if you move with people who are just like you, it's much harder to... to grow and develop because there's less room. But the other thing that really struck me from the people you met, the welder, the cleaner, is be with people who will do whatever it takes to make something possible rather than sitting around in a pub with people who go, you never do that. I think that's right.
So the club we were part of in Italy was a fascinating place. And it's where some of the strictly professionals trained. if you're a fan of Strictly, then people like Joanne Clifton. Which I am, of course. there you go, okay. So Joanne Clifton, who won a few years back with Oriaduba, was in our club. Giovanni Penici, who's on the show now, Nadya Bichkova, and Graziano De Primo, all part of our club.
And our club was based in an industrial estate outside a tiny village, and I was driving north of Bologna. And if you went to that village, I think there were two restaurants, there was one hotel that was owned by, I think the sister of the guy that ran the school. And he'd been running the school for years. And he was himself a very successful professional dancer, but an incredibly intuitive coach, mentor, and general sort of guru for the students.
So when you walked into the school, very unassuming building on this industrial estate. there was a digital screen in the entrance hall with a list of all the world championships that have been won by students at the school. again, I don't know the exact number, but it's something like 130. Wow. extraordinary number. And we walked in the first day we walked in. And in the evening on the Monday night, was a, there was like a training session with all of the couples.
And we didn't know who was a member of this club because it's not that public. And we suddenly realized that of the top six couples in the world, three were in the room. And of the top 12 couples in the world, six were in the room. And we suddenly thought we had no idea that the common thread, you know, across all of these world's top couples was they were all just in a very low profile way, part of this club.
And as we started to immerse ourselves in the way they worked, you started to see some really interesting little psychological nudges that were going on. one of them was, once a year, they did this big training camp in near Venice, and you would go and they'd hired like a secondary school that was close to the summer.
So they took it over and they took all of the different spaces, the main hall and the gyms, and ran training sessions and practice sessions and fitness sessions and lectures and all sorts of things. And in the main hall, there were seating around the hall and there was a reserved section. And the reserved section, you could only sit in, was quite a large part of the seating, you could only sit in if you were a world gold medalist.
If you're a world silver medalist, you weren't allowed to sit in that area. And you saw these couples who were number two in the world professional championship. They'd been dancing for 35 years. They were incredibly famous and they were sitting outside. But a 17 year old who was world champion in the under 20s was allowed to sit inside.
And the... the chap running the school, his mentality was, you know, it's a little thing which seat you get to sit in, but everyone's looking at who's in that area. And if you're world silver medalist, you've still got something to go for. And one of the things that you get, not only your gold medal, but you get to forever for the rest of your career, you're going to get to be able to sit in the platinum zone in this school hall in a little town outside Venice.
And it was fascinating because that drove people more than money would, more than fame, you know, that's not a marker for them. And when you look at something like Strictly, and you see this very often, you see sports people and celebrities who are paired up with these dancers. And so often what you hear from those celebrities and sports people is, I've never met anybody as competitive as the professional dancer that I've been paired with. And there's a reason for that.
It's because there was no money or fame for becoming world champion. It was purely that they wanted to win. They wanted to develop themselves, become the best they could be. And it's fascinating the psychology that that developed in people. It's very different in something like golf or tennis or another sport where you can be good and rich. And some people are good and rich and driven to be world number one. And others are good and rich and quite comfortable, you know, being part of the crowd.
In ballroom dancing, so many of these couples are just driven to be number one, because that's the goal. It's purely the goal to be number one. It was fascinating. And I think that, you know, my wife and I, Mildred and I both take a lot away from our experience there that we've brought into the way we approach other things in life. I certainly, I tell a lot of ballroom dancing stories when I'm in conversations with coaches. So a lot more than money. Yeah, yeah, it is.
And for us, I don't think money has ever been a goal for me. But I think that I wrote a post on Instagram recently about developing the book.
And what I said was, for me, the only book I was ever going to write was the best book it could possibly be, regardless of... difficult that was or how expensive it was to do it so I self-published the book and that absolutely translates to the mentality from from the dance world that I couldn't deal with looking at a book and thinking that we compromised on the paper or we compromised on the cover design or we'd compromised on getting the best team you know I'm no perfect author
by any means you know I needed an amazing editor to take what was in my head and translate it into something real human speak. But I wanted to find the best possible editor I could who balanced my skills and talents with theirs. And I think I recognize the power of team very strongly as well from that environment too. As I say, and I talk in the book about, sometimes you don't realize that you need a team around you until you've got that team around you and you realize what they bring you.
And I found that with developing the book as well. At some point, I think there were about 10 different people involved in different elements of it. You know, the design, the photography, the editing, the publishing, the marketing, publicity. And they're all things that I don't know how to do, you know, and I needed people who could bring ideas and inspiration and skills and experience and connections. Wow. So what's at the heart of the book? Well, the book comes from a place.
I started developing the concept of idea. The genesis of it is through my whole career. So I can sort of track back, as we talking before about threads, I can track that back, right back to when I left medical school. But I started to bring it together in something called idea when I first started. a little bit of professional coaching about two years before I started my professional coach training.
And at that point, I think I felt that I talked to a lot of people who had had maybe some experience in coaching and they found it quite an opaque thing to do. And I thought I didn't have the skills and training to be yet, you know, this incredibly effective. coach because I need to go through the process of developing myself to be able to do that. But what I do have is the ability to ask some good questions to help that person think about things.
And so I started building on some of my experience in the business world to say, well, I spent years helping companies think about what their vision is, and there's some principles about how to do that well. And could you do that for a person? And I've spent years helping organizations and teams to think about objectives. And again, how to do that well, could I translate that to a person? That's kind of where it began.
What I realized, even as I got more into my professional coaching training, is that it's still held that for some clients, not all clients, but for some clients, it helps them to do some of this work for themselves and then be able to bring that if they wanted to, to a coaching session. And so I would say, here's a workbook of some exercises you may find helpful. You can read through it, don't have to. You can do some of the exercises, but you don't have to.
You can write a few words or you can write an essay. You can share what you write with me, but you don't have to. And what I started to find was that the coaches who were doing those exercises were not coming to a session going, I don't know what I want to talk about. They were thinking, you know, I've just got some feedback from some people that know me at my best, or I thought about how I would articulate what my purpose is.
And so now I know what I'd like to bring to talk about because I started reflecting on a particular word or I started thinking about whether this thing that I thought was the answer maybe actually isn't the answer. And it was a nice lead into a coaching conversation. So that's where it started. And then I thought, Well, what if there's value in those questions where you don't necessarily need a coach?
And so really where the book came from was me first just taking my brain and putting it on the page and then giving it to my editor and saying, do you think that this works without a coaching session to help you navigate? And she said, it does if we substantially rewrite it, simplify it, put it in human language, put a lot more kind of things to help you get going things to help you along the journey. And that's the journey that we went on.
So what began as a very long book of 70 something thousand words turned into a book in the end of that 42,000 words. So we, we, we threw a lot onto the cutting room floor, and we put in a lot of things that I hadn't initially put in, which was a really interesting exercise to go through actually to reflect on. If I'm not here, What does that person need to be able to progress through?
But I do like the idea that one day somebody could be in Australia or in South Africa or in Argentina and could pick up a copy of the book. And they don't need to know me, but it can help them effectively coach themselves. And I do think that it works. The feedback that I've got from the first people that have read it, I think that it does do that. I think it does do that.
But it's such early days and it's always with a book, you're putting something out there and kind of hoping that people like it. So it'll be an interesting experience to go through the next few weeks, I think. Yeah, yeah, and the next few years. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because career coaching is where I came from. That's where I started when I was coaching and didn't know I was coaching and in fact, wrote some online stuff in the really early days, which people did without me.
And I think one of the things that I notice about working with people around career is that in a coaching conversation about pretty much anything else, you can say to somebody, how are we going to do this? And they've got a really pretty good idea. Whereas in career coaching, they haven't got any idea, which is why they came. Yes, yes, yes. And therefore a little bit of direction. which isn't about being directive. mean, I say to people, well, we could look at skills. We could look at purpose.
We could look at how you communicate that. We could look at how you talk about it, how you write it, how you decide what to look at. We could look at any of those, what's useful. I actually would always drop in some options because then people go, I don't think I know any of that. Let's start at the beginning. Or they say, actually, I'm really clear on this bit. I needed to work on that bit. Do you know, I think, that it's the 21st century English version of What Color Is Your Parachute?
That's very kind, thank you. I mean, I hope it does 0.01 % as well, at least as those books. It's amazing when you look at some of these books and somebody's had this idea at some point and they've created this book and then it's had so much impact. And I think that... Our coach, we had two, two main coaches in Italy.
One, so the couple that ran the school, one was Italian, one was Russian and our Russian coach Olga said to us about a different topic, but she said, if you do good things, then good things will happen to you. And actually it's something that I, remember all the time when I'm just thinking, sometimes I stop myself when I'm thinking, should I do this or not? And I just step back and go, if you're doing good things then thing, good things will happen.
You just you don't have to focus on you don't have to worry about how that's going to happen or when or where it's going to come from. Just keep doing good things. And don't worry about that other half. And I think that's been that's that's helpful. I have a lot of clients who who they articulate. Somebody needs to change by don't know what. And that's really, really common. Never more so than right now in the middle of the great resignation, great discontent, great reset.
And the journey, so one of the things about the idea mindset journey is that I reflect on this very strongly from my experience of working with teams and organizations. There's an awful lot of strategy projects and business development projects where the start is foundations, where are you today and vision, and the end is your action plan. And then you go, congratulations, here's your action plan, sign it off. You know what you're doing, when you're doing it how you're gonna do it. Good luck.
and you come back in six months time for those teams and those projects and unsurprisingly, they haven't got going. And the reason they haven't got going is often quite predictable is because someone in the room didn't quite agree or they hadn't anticipated somebody was gonna trip them up and then funnily enough, it did trip them up or there were too many other things going on at the same time and they got distracted or somebody got ill or whatever it is.
So in the idea mindset journey that you go through, kind of the first half, is the bit that is around, where are you now? What are you aiming for? And how are you going to get there? The second half, which is just as significant is, what are the things that might trip you up? How might you anticipate them and prepare for them? How are you setting yourself up in terms of mental resilience and physical wellness to put yourself in the best position possible to go through this change?
Which is not for me to say that you should lose weight or you should become fit or anything. It's just to invite you to think about whether those things are relevant to you and important to you. And then the last piece is telling your story to others so you know where you're going and what you want to achieve. But in so many aspects in life, you need other people sometimes to open a door for you or to support you or just to acknowledge the journey that you're on.
And sometimes there are little things that you can do to just indicate to somebody else that you've shifted. And again, it's something that we took from the dance world. we were taking lessons, doing our training, becoming fitter. And so if you watched our performances on the competition floor over time, they were gradually improving.
But the judges around the side of the floor who were sitting with a pad of paper and voting whether or not you go into the next round, they would see us week in, week out. And so they would glance, there's all these couples on the floor at the same time. They've glanced at us, they know who we are, they know what we look like, they know where we come in these competitions. it's pretty difficult to get them to vote in a different way from the way they habitually vote.
And so if we wanted them to notice that our dancing was becoming progressively better, then we had to do something strikingly different for them to just notice it was different. So that might be Mildred would wear a different color dress, or we would start in a different place on the floor, or we would do a new piece of choreography or something. Not because that was worth more points, but just because people would see it was different.
And so there's a thing I write in the book that is make them look, make them see. So you think you've shifted from a boss style leader to a coach style leader. But if nobody's noticed that you've done that, they probably still describe you as a boss type leader, however much you start the coaching style. So what's the thing that you can do that's like the flower bursting into bloom? that makes people suddenly see that you've objectively changed who you are.
And that's this last step in the book is getting other people to notice that change. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Because one of the concepts I like is the concept of angels, is, know, we are networked with lots of people and a few of the people we network with will be our advocate, but they'll be our advocate for the thing they think we do. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. you're doing something else, they're still going to be your advocate for the other thing.
really keeping people, you know, and as you say, telling your story is a really interesting one. And it's little things that you can do. So when I left Selfridges, the thing that I did that changed the way people perceived me was I changed my title on LinkedIn from director of group strategy or strategist was what I've said after I left the role. And then I said, strategist and executive coach. And then I said, executive coach and strategist.
And suddenly all these people started reaching out and said, you're a coach. I've been coaching for about three years. And I told people for some time that this was my full-time aim. was writing the book. I was going to do the Henry Business School coaching program, but they hadn't twigged or they hadn't seen or they hadn't taken it seriously or something. I changed my title. And suddenly, nobody, everyone stopped asking me to go and do strategy projects, which wasn't great for the bank balance.
But it did give me this complete focus on coaching. And it changed the way people saw me, even though I hadn't changed. In that moment, I hadn't changed. I'd just changed a title on LinkedIn. very interesting. Well, Gary, what a delight to spend time listening to you and talking with you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. Thank you for coming to our pub. So Gary's book is The Idea Mindset, Figure Out What You Want From Work and How to Get It in Six Weeks.
And it is the best writing working book that I've seen for a very long time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So thank you, Gary. I'm Claire Pedrick and I've been in conversation with Gary Croters. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, we'd love you to share the podcast with a friend or leave a comment on social media. And if you'd like to become a regular at The Coaching In, you can subscribe on Podbean and all major podcast channels. We look forward to welcoming you next time.
You've been listening to The Coaching In, 3D Coaching's virtual pub. For more information, check out 3dcoaching.com.