You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Welcome to this week's episode of The Coaching Inn. And here we are in holiday season. And it's my pleasure to have Robbie Swale back for our last podcast of 2022. Welcome, Robbie. Thanks, Claire. I noticed I've got a big smile. It's very lovely to be speaking to you again. We've just spoken as we're recording and just come out not long before this.
We've just spoken for my podcast as well. So it's like, it feels really like a real treat to get to speak to you again, like a week later or something. Yes. And we're still going to have that walk in the hills. Meet in real life. How amazing is that? It's going to be fun. So your goal, Robbie, for 2022 was to record, be guest on 100 podcasts. Or on 100 podcast episodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's important, Claire, because...
I'm setting these goals that feel to me like outrageous challenges. I got to say partway through the year when like, you know, someone very helpfully was telling me, really nice man who was very helpful in telling me, great that you're doing this. You're doing so well. I used to like 20 in the last two weeks. And I was thinking, okay.
So maybe a hundred in a year is not so impressive if you can do 20 in two weeks, but yeah, these kinds of challenges, I've done them a few times in my business and, you know, slash life. And they, it's important to make up the rules. yourself as you go in a way that's, it's important to me to make up the rules as I go in a way that serves me. And I was like, well, look, yeah, two, two appearances on the coaching in that should count twice for sure. Definitely.
Cause we're talking about something else. Yeah. And different people will be listening and it's twice as likely that people will, when they're skimming through your many, many back episodes in the future that they'll stumble across me. And that's, that's part of what it's about. So tell us a bit about you for those of our listeners who are new to you today, Robbie?
Yeah. So I work as a coach and broadly I think about that work as there being three, three parts of it, three things that I'm interested in. So a big part of my one-on-one work, most of it, and actually most of my work with teams and groups is on leadership in different ways. And we talked a bit last time about honor and why that's important to me, but I'm playing with calling it leading with honor.
you know, the leadership work, meaning that helping people do the things that like get that helping people achieve success without it feeling like they have to compromise who they are. And in some ways, honor, think of it as doing the doing the right thing, even when it's hard and in leadership and organizations, that can be particularly difficult because there are ways that people find themselves.
I went through a phase I had this thought when I I when I had several clients in a row, basically starting new work with me. who basically all said in almost the same way, I want to do this, I want to get this thing, whatever the thing is. And then they almost all said in the same way. but I feel like to do it, I'd have to play this game or like compromise this thing. And I don't want to do that. So leadership is a big part. coaching is a big part, the craft of coaching.
So I do some training for coaches and I have a podcast that I just mentioned for the coaches journey and the community there, because I really believe in the power of coaching to have an important impact on lots of the challenges that we face. And then I'm really interested in creativity and really the kind of the gap between wanting to make something happen from nothing and doing it.
And most of us, me included, have had plenty of times in our lives where we've wanted to do something and not done it for a long time or ever. And I get really curious, how do we help people do those things? And that's where the 12 minute method, which we talked more about last time, my series of books, comes in as well as some of the other work I do too. Yeah. I love, okay, leading with honor. Cause it covers so many other words, doesn't it?
It's not a word that's used a lot and it covers dignity. It covers integrity. It covers values. It covers all sorts of things. Honesty, authenticity really. Lots of those words that get, that get touched. And yeah, I noticed part of reason I started thinking about it in more detail was apologies for listeners who have listened last time. Hopefully you listened a long time ago to my last appearance.
I might've said this then, that I realized at one point that, you know, I had a set of values that emerged for me from an exercise. And I realized I talked about three of them all the time. And I never talked about the fourth. And the fourth was honor. The other three were courage and vulnerability and truth, I think. And they form a part of how I run my group program, for example. They're like explicit.
When we start, when new people join, we talk about those as a reminder that courage and vulnerability and honesty really create a really powerful container for learning, especially learning in a group. But I never talked about honor there. And I was like, what is that about? And then I saw this thing with these, I think three clients showing up in the next two weeks as if to say, yeah, this is the thing, you're doing it already. But maybe, like you say, maybe you talk about it a little bit more.
Yeah, yeah. I'm really interested about goals because you've done these hundred podcasts. And of course I've done my 600 kilometer walk this year and also got my thousand blogs. Thousand. Well, it's more than a thousand now. Well, thank you. And of course the thousand blogs just happened by keeping on writing them. It wasn't a goal.
was just, you keep writing them for long enough, you get to a thousand and the 600 kilometer one had been a goal for 12 years, but logistically it hadn't been possible. So it hadn't been possible because of other stuff. So I wasn't avoiding it. It just wasn't possible. So it kind of happened in the end. there's something, isn't there sometimes it was when you said, two podcasts every week. You you're doing an average of two a week. Yeah. And that person did 20 in two weeks.
Yeah. And I've got a little note here on my screen that says webinars maximum two per month. Yeah. And there's something about flow, isn't there? And what's doable for you and, and, and what's yeah, what's doable and sustainable so that you can actually get to the end. Cause you might be able to do 20 podcasts in two weeks, but you can't do a hundred. in 10 weeks, unless you're pretty much not doing anything else.
Yeah. Yeah. It was one of the big, so, so the four, for people who haven't heard it before, the four books. So there are four 12 minute method books out now, but they were written over a three year period, really like accidentally like the thousand blogs. It's like, I realized after three years, I've written 80,000 words. by writing for 12 minutes a week for three years. That's what it was.
So the weird thing about publishing my books is it's happened over the last year, but quite a long time after the books had been written. And so going back to them through the publishing process and having conversations like this has shifted how I've seen some of that. And I've been thinking a lot about the tortoise and the hare, like a lot. It feels like in a way the... That has been what that's probably the biggest insight for me this year.
And it's just, you know, I've known the Aesop's Fable, the Tortoise and the Hare since I was a little boy. And yeah, I've never really thought about it.
And I've thought about it a lot in the last year as I've been thinking about publishing the books, particularly the second one, which is called How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up, which is basically the idea that like exactly like you said, if anybody starts writing a blog and doesn't give up on writing it and writes it on a regular basis, in the end, they'll get to a thousand posts or their life will come to an end. Like, what if those will happen first, right?
If you keep going, if you don't give up. And that is an obvious truth. And yet it wasn't obvious to me, it's like obvious, I guess, rationally, but not, didn't, I wasn't living it. I didn't know it on a lived basis. And so it's been very interesting to settle into that and really see with the writing practice as an example, how much better it was for me in so many ways to be the tortoise. and not the hair. And it's not to say there isn't time for the hair.
Mo, my friend who did the, I think, 20 in two weeks, like great. Like there's lots of times in life where being the hair is very good. But there's, think I'd never really like, I don't know if society tells enough stories about the tortoises. And so it's been very powerful for me to see that and then suddenly start to hear it show up in other places, like with your thousand blogs. On our walk, we told that story so many times. Yeah. Because we were always last.
We were 250 years old between the four of us. And there was this couple who had super speedy clothes and super speedy shoes. And he had a rucksack that looked like it had a blue gun in it. But actually, I think it was walking poles in a blue container. And they passed us really fast every single day for about five or six days. And you'd think, we're not walking fast enough. Look how fast they're walking. But every night when we got where we were going, they were there.
So although they were going faster than us, we were actually achieving the same distance. So the first day we were thinking, no, everybody walks past us. We even got overtaken by nuns in habits. We pretty much. The only person who didn't overtake us was somebody who had quite a severe disability. Everybody else overtook us on the walk, but often we would get to the end of the day and we'd be in the same place. Yeah. So, tortoises and hares were mentioned daily. Yeah. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad.
I think like, again, it's a kind of one of the insights from this year has been, you know, it's underrated basically, stick it for me, being willing to stick it out. is a kind of underrated quality. Yeah. I think it's I had seen it in coaching before when I sat down and thought about, you know, what is it that helps people be successful in coaching? I think one of them is I'm here for the long term.
Because that helped at least that really helped me in my grow my business and because deal with deal with but well, it didn't really help me grow my business. It helped me stick it out. Because otherwise I was getting stressed and anxious and upset about all the things that were going wrong. And if I if I needed everything to happen right now, then I was failing. If I was here for the long term, I could find all kinds of ways to keep going.
And I do just think that is a, it's a really powerful idea and way of thinking. And if we're going to set an ambitious goal, like walking 600 kilometers or appearing on a hundred podcasts, or if you'd set a goal to write a thousand articles, then the hair would be really, it's really hard to do those things. If you've, if you've got other stuff going on in in your life, it's not impossible. Like you could definitely do it. And we can talk about that, but it's hard.
Yeah, got overwhelmed at the start of the year, having set this 100 podcast goal and told people about it. And it was really useful that I'd written a book about all this stuff that we've just been talking about. I was like, after like, probably a week of having gone public with it, of feeling massively overwhelmed and not doing anything about it, which is like my classic, which is why I've to write these books, right? It's my classic way of being, get overwhelmed.
get scared, stressed out, stop doing anything. And the 12 minute method was, okay, just do something. Right. That was the, just write something this week. It doesn't matter. Like we'll take the pressure off, do it with a timer, proof it once that's all. Don't worry about it. And it was like, I can't remember where I was, but I was like, I know how to do this. And so what I actually did to set up my tortoise for this challenge, my tortoise pace was I sat down thought about it.
How much is enough a week for me to be doing on this? Cause it was also like, probably when I was scheduling in the first conversation with you, it's like, there's admin to do for everyone. It's like, I don't have time for the admin, let alone proactively trying to find who these people are gonna be that are gonna have me on their show. So I thought, what's enough time every week that if I do that, I'll stay on top of it. And I chose 30 minutes. And so I put that in my diary.
And because of other things, because I practiced, one of the ways I think about it is I practiced keeping my promises to myself quite a lot over the years. So I now know that I'm pretty good. If I've got a thing in my calendar, I didn't used to be, but I'm pretty good now. If it's in the calendar and I have committed that it's a really important thing, then even if I have to move that thing, I'll move it to somewhere else in the week and it's going to stay up the priorities.
I didn't used to be like that, but I am now. that has mostly that, what, what, of the things that meant was, cause this is interesting. Like I was way behind at halfway through the year. And at half, I had it like two thirds of the way through the year, way behind it was like it didn't look as possible. That's partly because my other work was this year. I it quite often is because I do some work on some leadership programs that run April to October. And then there's the prep for that.
Like my work is weighted towards the first half of the year. And this year, it was like doubly so. But it was really good, right? So the key thing was, in those weeks, am I doing something towards this? Because if I'm doing nothing, by the time I get to the work clearing up in in September, August, September, October, I got no chance. And it's like, am I if I was running a marathon, I've never run a marathon.
But you see it in the you see it on the Olympics or the European Championships or whatever. You know, you got to hang around in that front pack of runners or be somewhere near it before somebody kicks off and gets too far ahead. So that if you've got the gas left, see it actually see in other other things that you've seen in 1500 meters even hang around. And then if you've got that last lap where you can really kick on with the pace, then that's still possible.
So I guess in a way that tortoise in the was really key because it was do 30 minutes on this a week. And if I've done 30 minutes, I can relax. And also in a key way, and this was the lesson in some ways from publishing the Keep Going book was what was really good. So one of the things that came out in that book, just to kind of tie this up, is because I'd written, I'd accidentally written these books, right? So I knew that the... There was a bunch of articles I'd written about keeping going.
And then I looked at them and I was like, well, what are the themes in the keeping going ones? And one of them was there's a load of hard times. Over three years, there are hard times in life. And so one of the things I realized was there's all section in that book about hard times and keeping going and what I learned from writing in hard times. one of the lessons is, well, I wouldn't have necessarily named that as a thing you have to do to keep going.
except that it was written by writing every week. And so it's a bit like the same thing. It's like one of the key lessons for me was... If possible, and we have to be kind to ourselves in really difficult times, keep going with your thing, even in a tiny way in those times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If possible, even in a tiny way, because that keeps the thread. And it's really different, I think, to... It's a different decision. It feels like this to me anyway, to say, will I start that again?
Having given up even for, even after a holiday, right? There's always a decision after a holiday, will I, because I usually don't write on a holiday, will I keep my blog going? Now don't think about it that much these days because it's basically made, but it's like, it's always there. And the gym or exercise is the same. Like any of these habits we have after a break, essentially you have to ask yourself, will I start this again?
Whereas if you've been keeping going even a tiny bit, I think it feels different. Of course then we have to be kind to ourselves because there are times when, for very good reasons and really difficult times, we're going to stop doing. Everything. So we have to be kind to ourselves in those times. Yeah. Keeping going. It's a powerful thing. I'm sitting here thinking I stopped walking. But that's because that's because of injury. Exactly. Injury is a classic one, isn't it?
But it's hard to go back because other things have squished into the space. Yeah. So that's an interesting one. So what have been the highlights of your 100 podcasts, Robbie. Well, Claire, the number one and two highlights have been the Coaching In. Of course. I mean, genuinely it has, like one of the, like the Coaching In audience has been one of the most lovely and active audiences that I've interacted with. great.
number of people contacted me after, after I was last on the show and had some lovely exchanges and that kind of thing. So was really lovely. mean, on, this is like a, This is like a silly thing. when I've, what I found, so I've done, I've done challenges a bit like this. Part of the reason I did this, this hundred podcast thing was because early on in my business, I had a coach and he from nowhere, as far as I remember in a coaching session.
so Joel Monk was the coach to people who read the books will know was a big inspiration. It was from that work that the 12 minute method came. But Joel said at one point, I think you should do a challenge where you invite people into coaching conversations and. I really admire the way Joel held those kinds of things. And it always felt like every time he gave me something like that, which was like a bit of a bit more mentoring than coaching, it was on the money basically, in that period for me.
And so I did a challenge where I had to invite 30 people into coaching conversations in a month, you know, a couple years into my coaching business, maybe a year. And I did another one a bit later on with a different thing. And I found that they are really useful for me to like kind of get out of my own way. Like I have been able to, perhaps because I played so many games in my life, I'm able to hold them as a game, to hold them just seriously enough.
So if you're playing a game, you see this with people playing with games with children, it's like, if you don't, like if they can't hold the rules of the game, then it's not that fun as a game for an adult, right? But if they're holding it too seriously, because they haven't like learned games yet, then it's not that fun either because you kind of have to let them win. And the happy spot is you have to have everybody engaged in the game enough that they, what is it?
I've heard somebody say this before, engaged in the game enough that they're playing and taking it seriously, but also that they know that playing the game in the longterm, like being able to be invited back next time is the important thing. So you have to hold it seriously enough, but not too seriously because the long game is where you all have fun with the game.
And that's one of the tough things about, I'm thinking about goals, I think, goals in coaching, it's tough with clients because often the goals are really important to somebody. Otherwise they wouldn't be paying you money and showing up every week or every month or whatever. So I've learned that holding these challenges is important about holding it lightly. So it gets me creative, it gets me out of my own way and it makes me ask for help. And those are all quite hard things for me.
Like the creative thing a bit less, but the other two quite hard. And what I found about them is Like if you're playing the game, you have to detach from the outcome to a certain extent. So in some ways, this is a, this challenge, this goal was a goal about getting word out about my books. Once, once I've set the challenge for that reason, I have to detach from that for me, because then I have to play, just play the game and see what happens.
I've created an enormous body of work over it, but, but, like, there've been lots of unexpected things have happened. meeting like, It's so obvious to me, right? love the reason I do the creativity work is that I love people who make stuff happen. I love people who create cool things in their corners of the world, whether it's like a handmade, you know, model or it's a podcast. And so of course it's super fun for me to meet, you know, it hasn't been 80, it hasn't been a hundred.
In fact, yes, funny Claire, cause when this is coming out, I don't know yet as we're recording this, if I'll get to a hundred, we can maybe talk about that in a bit, but you know, it won't be a hundred, even if I've appeared on hundred podcasts, but let's say I'll have met. 60, 70 or people who run these kinds of shows and or run series of events. And they're mostly they're really interesting people. So there's been lots of new connections. That's been a total highlight.
And then I'll kind of practical highlight is I other than the coaching image, Jim genuinely has been. So when I was working out what to do with my books and how they would be published, I got some advice to read, I can't remember what it was, the writer's and artists yearbook guide to publishing, something like that. I might've got that horribly wrong. I think that is the name of it. Yeah. But there was a particular one, it wasn't the most up-to-date edition that someone was recommending.
It was like an old one written by this, because they're written by different people. And the guy, Harry, who had written the old one, like I didn't want to buy the old one because it was like old. And it was like quite old, like 10 years old or something. And the world of publishing has changed enormously. in last five years, let alone 10. But I found that he runs now a community for writers.
So I joined this writers community called Jericho Writers, and really helped me just kind of understand the publishing world, which was really hard. And I was obviously, in some ways, just getting tangled in resistance, right? And because it was like overwhelming, and so I wasn't doing anything, but they helped me get into action. And a really fun thing was, so that the challenge makes me get out of my own way, right?
So it's like, I've got, start, start, at the other start, I start collecting a list of potential things that I could appear on. Cause it's important. I've learned that I need to like, when I have the idea, I need to write it down somewhere so that I don't forget it. And it's great. Cause that's slowly my list grows. It gets longer and longer. Some of them outrageous ones. Some of them, me doing things. Cause it's like, again, write your own rules.
And at some point I wrote Jericho writers on there. So I was like, that's, that's a thing. But, then I remember sitting, I got an email from them about their York festival of writing. was like, that would be cool. And I bet there'd be some writers there who would love to hear this 12 minute story and it'd really help them. But I was obviously then I was like, yeah, but who am I to appear at York Festival of Writing run by Jericho writers? Like I'm a nobody.
I've published at this point, I don't know, one book, two, like what, like no way. And then the game kicks in because it's like, yeah, but if I don't send this email, like this one, am I going to send any others? Like have I really got any chance? I basically, now I've sat here for. five minutes thinking about this or 10 minutes or 20 minutes, it might've been longer. If I don't write this email now, I'm never gonna hit the hundred.
So I sent this email to this woman, Anna, saying, what about your festival of writing? I've got this thing, here's the link. And she emailed back pretty much straight away saying, no, we're fully booked for that, but do you wanna do an event at our October Builder Book Month? And so it's like, and then I did it, know, in And that's meaningful because it's like returning to the place that a place that was meaningful for me.
But it was also such a great reminder for me of just like, you don't know how because she just said, your work looks great. Yeah, come on. So all that self doubt and worry that I had, like, who am I to be do this? You know, she just looked at me and saw something different and said, Yeah, come and do it. Amazing. And so those kinds of that's the kind of thing that this kind of goal helps me with. And there are other stories a bit like that as well.
The kind of, the other thing is, yeah, maybe the another one is the other end of the scale was my friend Mike had been asked to do a talk for a part of Deutsche Banks. They were running a learning week and he said, look, I don't really want to do a talk, but they won't let me do a workshop. I want to have a thing where everyone's in breakouts and things and they, that's not what they're interested in. So I said, I don't want to do that, but I thought you might.
And normally I would have gone, is talking to Deutsche Banks. like learning really my thing, like, and some of that might have been real and some of it might have been myself down, but because of the game, I was like, I have to say yes, don't I have to say yes to everything. And then, you know, and Mike was like, and they're Deutsche Bank, so make sure they pay you plenty of money.
And they did pay me some money, not, not I'm sure if I'd really been in it for the money, I could have gotten to pay me more. so, but that was so those are like two ends of it. of like unexpected organizations that I've ended up doing, you know, speaking to. And the reason that they count as podcasts is because when I thought about the podcast thing, it's like, what is this actually about? It's about telling the stories, inspiring people into action who are stuck.
And really, you know, how do I know how many people are listening to a show? And actually they were, they didn't record the Deutsche Bank one in the end, but they recorded the Jericho one. So that'll be there on the Jericho website forever now, as far as I know. And so it's like, it counts basically. So for people who are going, that's not a podcast, which is a fair response to hear to this, these stories. I'm always trying to listen to what's like, what's the real point of this?
That's one of the lessons that I've learned is what's the real, like, yeah, what's, what's the real point of this? And the real point of this is to, and that's where it all came from was me asking what's real success for my books actually. it's well, people hearing it and thinking I've hearing something, reading the books, would have been thinking I've been meaning to do this thing for long time. And now I've come across your work and I've finally done it.
And that's really meaningful for me, but people can get that from the podcasts. And that's where the, that's where the goal came from. Really it's how can I create that real success, that meaningful thing for me. and part of it is by having conversations. And part of that was by saying yes to everything. Everything that fits this game. Right.
So like, because it, you know, it actually, One of the things, one of the reasons I think I've done, I've got, I've got, I've got at least close to this is because I've learned over the years about setting goals for a year. So I've done a yearly goal setting cycle for probably five, maybe this might be the, can't remember if this is the fifth or the sixth year using a particular goal setting exercise.
One of the key things I've learned is the most dangerous things for the things that are most important to you. you like the things that are most likely to make you make me stop doing the things that are most important to me are the things that are next most important to me. right. So like, there's a Warren Buffett story that James Clear tells in a blog about this.
But it's like, essentially, if you've got 25 goals for the year, and you choose your top five, which is what I do, then the next 20 become the avoid all cost list until the five are done, because they're really interesting, meaningful, and significant. They're just not as meaningful and significant. And if you spread yourself too thin, then this stuff is really difficult. So yes to everything that fits the rules of my game and bend the rules of the game.
If there's some stuff that feels like it should fit. So for example, I started a new podcast of my own this year and I was like, this doesn't quite fit the rules. But if this is about me telling, creating work that tells in some way the stories that help people get inspired to do the things that they need to do, which is what it's about.
Then if I make, in the end, I think 14 episodes of a new podcast, then that counts because this body of work is going to be there for as long as I leave it there. And who knows which is the bit that inspires somebody. Yeah. so, so therefore saying yes to the right things, but also saying no to things, which is tough. Like essentially this year publishing the books and doing this, I've said no to doing active business development work on my coaching practice.
Like I basically haven't done any for two years now, because I realized that, you know, I'm lucky that my coaching business by this time feeds itself just enough. And I've got enough relationships that that, that works. And some stuff came in, which made that even more work, even better, you know, bit by chance or the universe helping me, but that's been quite tough, but actually to make the space to do this.
It's like, what happens when I'm, you know, in October sitting down with a clear afternoon? Well, I say yes to doing stuff on, on the podcast challenge and no to everything else in theory. So yes to everything that resembles it, not yes to everything. Yeah, and you and I just had a little bit of a chat, didn't we? About something that you were asked to do and I was asked to do and because you said yes, I decided to say no. Yeah, good choice.
And I probably said yes to it because it had the energy of the podcast challenge. Yeah. And basically, you know, it's interesting. It doesn't quite fit. I'm not going to include it on my list. Yeah. But it was interesting that that was what I, a mutual friend of ours, Jamie Drew, basically sent me exactly the same message as you. about an hour later or two hours later.
And I don't know whether he's going to do it, but it's like, had that insight that it's because it's the energy of the podcast challenge. I said yes to this thing, which I normally I think would have said no to. Yeah. Yeah. And it was an email that was asking for us to put in some work to be published, wasn't it? And it was really unclear. And when I searched them on the internet, I didn't really find very much.
fact, the only apart from your name, which is why I then said to you, That's good for me then. it's good that one, as long as, in fact, I should have said to you and Jamie, don't do this thing. Cause then it's useful for me to have done it, isn't it? I'm the only you come to the top when we search. Yeah. Although that might just be, that makes me think I've been thinking a bit again about, and we talked about it bit last time, actually.
I've been thinking again about the social media stuff and the, my latest 12 minute, one of my 12 minute blogs this late this year is about that. Like maybe Google just showed you that. Maybe other people would have found other. Yeah. Personalized Google might have showed you me because it knows somehow secretly that you know me. Yeah. But yeah, I said no to that, which is smart. It's like when you start talking about sewing machines, Facebook starts showing you sewing machine ads.
It's really terrifying. I've, yeah, like I said, I've re-engaged with that thing a bit and I'm feeling more unsettled about it, I think, than I have for a long time. Yeah. Like I heard... Couple of things, I went to an event with some people speaking about it and... Just this thing that it like, we don't have shared reality anymore.
Yeah. And you know, because, and it's worse than that, like, because what's the social media algorithms do when they're just, this is what I heard from a guy called Daniel Schmacktenberger. It's a hard name to spell. but, So that won't be in the show notes. Won't be in the show notes, but you can try, try Googling that and Google. The good thing about Google, right, is it'll correct your spelling of Schmacktenberger. There's a, there's a couple of CHs in there, people who want to look for him.
And also- Tristan Harris, who's kind of one of the leading thinkers on this stuff, you know, how the algorithms, they keep our attention by showing us the thing that will make us most angry and outraged about everything, And so we are outraged about things that aren't really that outrageous. we agree with other people. Then they were talking about democracy. It's just, yeah, so I'm feeling unsettled about all that at the moment. Sorry for bringing us onto that.
And, but it is like, so, so I think, you know, the reason that's interesting, what I'm saying is because when you mentioned Facebook, listening to you essentially. I used to kind of laugh about that a bit. And it's quite useful. Like I quite like it sometimes when I'm getting the adverts. It's quite interesting. But at the moment, I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing. Yeah, this morning it showed me an advert for for stuff you put on the walls when you have a spray tan.
you can protect your walls when you have a spray tan. And I just laughed because I thought, why are you giving this to me? This is a random advert. Although now I've said the word. Yeah, it's not going to be random anymore, And we never sit in our house because we do a lot of Duolingo. So Duolingo is classic. I don't know if you've ever heard of Duolingo. It's like classic tortoise and hare, Claire. it's like, I think about it a lot. So I've got like people who don't know it.
It's a language learning app. And I, so one of the episodes, so my new podcast was about, I'll get back to the adverts in a sec. Let me do this little, can I do this little digression? Of course, because I loved Duolingo. And when you were talking about gamification, I was thinking about the fact that I opened French because I know French because I wanted to get some extra points. classic. Yeah, classic.
Sometimes, well, they've just, on mine, I don't know if it's reached yours yet, they've just updated the way it works. And I suspect that the way it works is updated to make it, to force us to learn a bit more. and play a game a bit less. But so the 12 minute method podcast that I created this year as part of the challenge was, is me sitting down with like in the end, I think 14 or 12, I can't remember, things that I have wanted to do, not done for a long time and then finally done.
Because I was like, are the things in common about those things? Like what has the process of each one been? And I do it using a 12 minute timer because that felt like the obvious thing to do. And Duolingo is one of my favorite ones to do. And I keep trying to tell the story of Duolingo to make it into a transformational story for people. When I've told that on podcasts before, it hasn't really worked. Maybe it'll work now because you like Duolingo as well.
But basically the insight I had when I made the episode of the 12 Minute Method podcast was, so we lived in Costa Rica for three months, partly because my wife's work seconded her there. I'd wanted to learn a language. Like I loved language learning at school. And then by chance, absolute classic, like going on holiday, I couldn't do French and maths at A level. Cause I went to a little school and you had to choose. And I chose maths because I love maths and but kind of, but loved French.
That was probably my second favorite subject. So was like the universe really making me, forcing me to choose. And so ever since then I wanted to learn a language and I hadn't done it. And then we went to Costa Rica and it was stressful. they're really friendly in Costa Rica, great place to learn Spanish. But we had a Spanish tutor because Emma's work paid for that for her and I snuck in at the back. And that was a really good way to learn Spanish, much better than Duolingo.
Except Duolingo teach you South American Spanish. So you can't order an orange juice in Spain using Duolingo because it's the wrong word. And also they have accents. So when I first went to Spain after having learned on Duolingo for a few years, It was really, really hard. They speak a lot faster and they're a little bit less patient than the Costa Ricans. so when I came back, was like, I thought I would definitely get a tutor again because I loved it so much.
But I thought while I'm doing it, I'll keep my Duolingo going. And I've never got a tutor. So imagine, and I've got like a four and a half year Duolingo streak. So imagine if I had not done like, so it's infinitely better that I have kept going with Duolingo. than what would have happened. So it's not so let's do tortoise and hare. So hare is get a Spanish tutor, speak to them every week or twice a week.
If you could maintain Spanish tutor, if I'd maintain Spanish tutor for the last four and a half years, that would be better. I would be better at Spanish than Duolingo. Well, I wouldn't have done that. Exactly. And I have done Duolingo for four and a half years. And this is a long way of saying me and my wife do Duolingo. It's a big thing in our house. We have to do it at the same time, but we get completely different adverts.
And it's really funny to watch me getting harassed about online businesses and coaching and her getting really good. Like just the kind of adverts, like women's adverts basically constantly. And sometimes they're interesting. And sometimes I like screen grab them for a project I've got in mind for one day, which is to make it like a parody coaching training, which is like how to get how to work hard for a long time and grow a small to medium sized coaching business.
know, some point I'll make that thing and I'm trying to collect adverts which say, come and do my thing. And in two minutes you'll have your seven figures. Cause we can just change all those for like, if you do this thing for a long time, you might have five clients, which is I think more the reality of coaching. Yeah, the adverts are very strange. That was a long digression class, sorry. I paid for one year. that I can go quickly while I'm motivated.
And then when I slow down, then I'll stop paying. Yeah. That's interesting. Isn't it? Yeah. Cause you wouldn't go, that's, that's how they monetize it. Yeah. You have to, that's a good point. Like there are times when, yeah, we, run out of hearts and basically stop. Yeah. It was a really nice, I heard a really nice interview. People are interested in the way they think about this really carefully.
a really nice interview on the Tim Ferriss show with the CEO of one of the founders of Duolingo, whose name I think is Luis Arn, AHN, he's got a Marlon, really interesting guy. But yeah, they think about it really carefully.
And I think Duolingo also is like, if we think about the technology thing that we were just talking about, the Duolingo is like using technology, using the addictive nature of technology for good, or for me, like it's like leveraging it so that I'm learning a language, which is better than scrolling Facebook. That's also why the scrolling Facebook thing and the attention economy and that kind of thing.
I think it's one of the reasons why helping people make something meaningful for them is important. Because if we were all making a meaningful thing every week, something meaningful to us, I don't know what it is, and sharing it. And let's say we shared that, or we shared a meaningful thing someone else had made, and we shared one less angry post, outraged post. Like the world's quite a bit better and the social media algorithms are a bit easier on everyone. Now it won't work that well.
Like, you know, if I wrote clickbaity articles about how evil, you know, insert political party here is for insert, you know, current controversy here. Every week I would have a lot more followers on LinkedIn and Twitter than I do. But I don't want to do that because it doesn't feel like the honorable thing to do, I guess. We're right back to honour. Yeah. So, Robbie, are you willing to share your goals for 2023? Such a good question. So I had an amazing one of my podcasts.
Here's another highlight, was on Leadership Live. amazing coach called Daphna Horowitz, and she'd been a guest on my show and her podcast is often her coaching people. So here's the thing, I think I would, I've done this twice in a year. I wouldn't have probably done either. I would say one didn't like create big insight for me. Like I can't remember what happened on it, but the one with Daphna, partly maybe it's quite recently, was a really powerful coaching session.
And she One of the people can go and listen to it. I'm sure it'll be out. If it's not out now, it'll be out soon. like the insight was essentially, let me see if I can do it. So I have had a bunch of ways that have really served me for thinking about goal setting. And she, what we caught in the coaching session, I think she reflected back to me was essentially, it sounds like those things are now a barrier for you.
And certainly I needed to be shaken out of, like I basically, if you'd asked me this before that coaching session, I would have probably told you some things that I thought were in it. But I would done it with an energy of a kind of hesitant energy. And I'm not sure that those same things won't end up in it, but that'll come from a different place now. And I think that's just like a really important, what would it be like?
Thing that's outcome from coaching sometimes, often for me and for clients, it's like you end up in the same place, but why you're there is for a completely different reason. And that makes a difference to how you end up. successful I end up being or the client ends up being with the thing. the podcast challenge is probably a good example of that as well.
I hadn't tied it to a deeper, more meaningful success than sell some books by appearing on some podcasts, I don't think I would have kept going with it. It wouldn't have been meaningful. It wouldn't have really stayed with me. But because it was tied to a really meaningful success for me, helping people finally do these things that tie them in creative hell. then that's one of the things that keeps me going. So look, I've so I don't know.
actually, what I said to Daphna was I wasn't I'm not sure if I wasn't going to do the goal setting exercise. Now, I might have come back on that. know, but again, coming back from that good place because because it's really useful for me to have something for the reason we've just said, right? The afternoon where there's nothing, do I just get lost in my inbox or do I choose to do something that's actually meaningful? And how do I know what the meaningful thing is?
But the phrase that we came to, which is a hard for me to say, a bit like being creative. This is a word that I find it hard to connect myself to. But I basically need to connect to the visionary. That's what we got to. So it's like instead of being stuck in the goal setting or the task focus person. You know, in some ways the books out and tied to that, the podcast challenge has been the, what would you say, like the completion of a cycle. things, these, these books were written finished.
finished writing them in 2019. So getting them out feels like the completion of something. And then I don't know, so I can keep just running with all the stuff that I'm doing, but actually what came out of the coaching session was I need to shake into a different way of seeing things. So being less task focused and more vision focused. So well, so my goals are maybe, maybe I'll walk and be one of these.
Because the thing that came out of it was the most important is to protect is that in 2023, I protect space for the visionary, right? Which for me means what I came to was two. So I've twice done retreats, they were both pre COVID just myself once was explicitly writing one, but once was more, where is my work going?
was a walk actually in the Pete district and by myself and that's so so my one of my goals is when in 23 is to have two retreats and one holiday like an actual holiday booked proactively because we like me and my wife are really good at reactive holidays so we've already got booked in like some time with her siblings and things but we're less good at
proactive holidays maybe that's a bit harsh we might have done it if we hadn't just moved house we might have done one this autumn but that and then Where else do I, and then how do I find that space on a more regular basis outside of those as well? So I've been thinking with Moose the Countryside, how do I make sure that each week, you know, I'm spending some time in the countryside? So maybe, so that's what I've got in terms of goals. I'm not sure if I'm going to do the 25, five thing again.
And then I've got loads of ideas and this is why it is probably, might be worth me doing it. Cause like I want, you know, one of my old clients was like, I haven't read any of your books because I don't read, I only listen. when's it going to be on audiobook? And I was like, yeah. And also like the entrepreneurial person in me is like, there's a load of things I can like fun, creative things I can learn about, the books or in that kind of space.
So I'm sure if I like, and because you, partly because you just said, yeah, I like that leading with honor. I'm back to like, yeah, I've got a few ideas for that projects to do with that. So. We'll see about those, but I think that the most important goal is for me for 2023 is going to be to protect space for not doing essentially. it sounds as though for you, there's something about goals protecting you from the things that you'd love to do that actually aren't the things to do at the moment.
Yeah. That is how, it's a nice way of putting it, that is how that exercise works. So a woman called Sarah Cartwright was the first person to say this to me, but she didn't, you know, it's why I love it. Like, no, we talked about this before, I think, no new wisdom, right? But Sarah was the first person to say to me, when you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else. If you say no to other things, you're creating a space to say yes to something else.
And that has been like one of the most important insights for me in my work and life, I would say. And that goal setting one is just another way of saying that same thing, right? But it absolutely has been like, it's been an exercise in what matters most. Like using goal setting as way to ask that question, I think. Yeah. Wow. Well, we're coming to the end of our time, Robbie, and we will go for a walk. Thank you. Yeah, help me do that. Let's do it.
Yeah. And we won't record it just for everybody's information. just tell us what your new books are called. Yeah. So as we said, they're quite long and that's partly because I got there, in fact, longer than I say them. So one of the things that came out of my journey with publishing, partly from Jericho, was I wanted to have a team around me that were really good at what they did.
And that was most important, more important to me than was it a particular publisher or a particular way of publishing. And the people that I worked with on the first two books and a bit on the third. We can have a conversation another time about why that didn't carry on. You know, they talked about how do you help people stumble across your work in the internet age? Because it's not the same as a, like, you know, people don't buy books in the way they're used to. It's not all about bookshops.
And so they're, they're, they're titled in some ways for that. And it took me quite a long time to get, to make peace with the fact that I was calling on her books, things that felt too definitive for me. So first one is called How to Start When You're Stuck. And then it's got, it's actually called How to Start a Book, Business or Creative Project When You're Stuck, because that's like SEO on Amazon.
And I found it quite hard to have a book that felt like it was answering such a big question, because I had written it accidentally. And who am I to write a book like that? And one of the great things about going through this is you become someone who, I've become someone who's got books called things like that. And now I feel much more like that person. So that's the first one. The second one is to keep going when you want to give up. That's the tortoise and hare book really.
The fourth one, which in a way is one to talk about next, is how to share what you've made. And those are the three, for me, are the three most important ones. If you want to do meaningful work, you have to start it, you have to keep going with it, and at some point you have to share it. Now, the third book is an interesting one because it's called How to Create the Conditions for Great Work.
And the reason I'm talking about it fourth, I possibly should have I think I published them in the right order, but talking about it fourth is because the three most important conditions for great work are that you start, keep going and share it. And many projects, including mine, have been wrecked on the rocks of speech marks creating the conditions.
So it's like, I'll start writing when, you know, I've got a nice desk or my office is set up, or I'll start my business when my kids are at nursery. But actually I only have like the mornings now because the nursery is only open nine till three. So I'll... start it when they go to school, but then something else happens then and suddenly they're at university and the business has never been started. It's like, so the create the conditions thing comes last.
But for me, it's an important part of the journey because I've always been interested in making an impact in the world and fulfilling my potential. Those are questions, contribution and potential have been questions that have driven this phase of my life in lots of ways. So that's the third book, but the fourth one I've mentioned. So they're all going to be in the show notes. Thank you. So please do dip into them and have a look, have a read everyone.
And Robbie's contact details will also be on the show notes so that you can pick up the conversation. So Robbie, we will pick our conversation up on the hills. Looking forward to it. Looking forward to it. And yeah, just to say, like, I think it's been such a pleasure to have this conversation and to be bringing the year to an end in this way.
I hope, like I'm looking forward to listening back in that because it's like a It's a really interesting time, you know, this holiday period, like difficult for lots of people, but a kind of voluntary slowing down for a lot of people. So it's nice to be able to have a conversation about goal setting. I guess like, they're not for everybody, but those challenges, especially if you've got someone to play them with and help you with them, they've been so important for me.
And so I'm happy to help people create those ones, you know, because I like the game element of it. know, reflect with people on that. So if people want help with that, do reach out. But otherwise, yeah, thanks so much, Claire. Well, thank you. All the listeners. A wonderful 2023. Indeed. And here's a game for the end of the year. What we've done in our house for about the last 15 or 20 years is we do an A to Z of the year. So we write down a word.
So it might be a place or a person or a thing we did that just reminds us of what a year we've had and what's been good and what's been bad. So if anyone wants to a looking back fun game, that might be a useful thing. So happy new year, everyone. We'll see you next year. And I'm sure Robbie will be back in 2023. I'd love to. And Robbie, thank you very much. So you've been at The Coaching Inn. I'm Claire Pedrick and I've been in conversation with Robbie Swale. Bye bye, everyone.
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