Hello. New season at The Coaching Inn. Season 6. Thank you so much for traveling with us this far and for tuning in to the first episode of the new season. You're about to notice that we've got brand new music and to go with our graphics. So the graphics that you see are painted by David, who's part of our comms team along with Jack. And David has recorded some music for the new intro. on his banjo and steel guitar slide thing. And we're absolutely delighted because real matters a lot.
So real matters in our watercolour pictures and real matters in our music. And we're very grateful to them for doing that. Today's episode, you're going to love it. It's about simplicity and mastery, which we know are things that are of interest to you. So tune in to find out about what Tony Latimer is learning. from simplifying coaching and he's come up with three simple laws of coaching which are fantastic and you heard it here. What a delight.
So let's see what he has to say in today's episode. Welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn. Today, my guest and I, who have been in conversation on LinkedIn for ever, finally meet in real life, well, online in real life, Tony Latimer. Welcome to The Coaching Inn. Good afternoon, it's lovely to be here. It's so good to meet you finally. So tell us a bit about you and where you are. um I'm in Singapore. This is home. So for your local listeners, GMT Plus 8.
I've been here permanently for about 25 years now. So we came here when the kids were young and settled up. This is where my wife was originally from and where I first met her in the early 80s. Yeah, wow. And you're a coach. So tell us about your journey into coaching. once upon a time, long, long ago. So I was a techie. That was my job. I worked through all the different parts of, know, mainframe operations, programming systems analysis, business analysis, eventually into business development.
And during part of that, I was working for a software company that was an IBM business partner and IBM is fantastic. They shared everything. So I was in my first people management role and clearly not doing well because IBM were running a leadership course and they said you can offer places and my boss went, he's going. That course was amazing. I suspect.
IBM had done every bit of leadership training in the world ever because we ended up doing a week at Ravenhurst in Surrey country house on a tennis court learning Tim Galwey's Inner Game tennis coaching. So that was my first exposure to non-directive coaching. And it was just mind-blowing.
I mean, We don't have time to talk about the process of how it worked, but at the end of the week, as somebody who can't play tennis and didn't understand the rules, you get to test what you've learned with somebody and it just worked amazingly. I got really excited and kind of rushed up to the people teaching and went, guys, guys, I get it. This is brilliant. But I don't understand how it helps me manage people. And the response was... No, do we really.
Instinctively, we think it should, but we haven't worked it out yet. And that the guy running the cause was Alan Fine, who is obviously now a very famous top executive coach in America. Um, so then Alan Fine and Galwey and all the others who were involved in, you know, the, the grow model and all that sort of stuff. They went off and figured their stuff out. Unbeknownst to me, I, as a techie went back to work. and did what techies do, which is like, I need to figure this out.
So quite literally through the eighties and the nineties, I took Galwey's performance equation from sports and started thinking, how does this apply? So I came up over time with stuff that I played with initially um in my job. then about 2000, when I stepped out and started my own coaching business. brought that into the leadership programs that I run and the coaching as the frameworks of how to coach a leader. So that was where it started for me. It was fascinating. Long, long time ago.
Wow and now And now, new stuff keeps happening. Huh? um three years ago. Gail Moore who runs the Moore Master Coaching Program out of the US, where she gets people like you and I to go and do stuff for our members and things, bullied me for years because I spent 25 years only working with corporates. I've never done anything with other professional coaches. So we were teaching coaching skills to leaders, to internal coaches, to HR people. And she bullied me and bullied me.
then between her and Fran Fisher, they finally said, come on, come and do something. Share what you do. Um, so just over two and a half years ago, I went and did a live coaching demo and started sort of sharing stuff. And to my great surprise, people went, that's good. We like that. Can we have some more? So in the last and a half years, I've started actually doing teaching for coaches.
We have a fairly unique approach with doing a monthly membership process, so you learn gradually over time and next year we're going to be doing the first run of a level three program. it's all focused, for me it's all focused on, there's lots of people doing brilliant stuff out there with level one, level two training. So I am completely focused on MCC and beyond. Yeah, nice. So you use the word simplicity and mastery, which of course I love.
Yes. Yes. Yes, we're definitely on the same page there. Yes. so I'm really interested what do you mean by mastery? What does it mean for you? Oh, how easy. So I often describe it in terms of martial arts development because that was in my late 40s and 50s, that was a journey I went through. When you're doing martial arts, I was doing the sort of rather tough full contact karate stuff. You go several times a week into the dojo and you do the basics.
You practice set routines, set moves over and over and over and over again until you've completely internalized them. You go through a series of tests, know, white belts, yellow belts, blue belts, green belts, until you get to black belt. And when you become a black belt, you suddenly realize that they invite you to the black belt class. And you're going like, never heard of this, what's this?
And you suddenly find as a new black belt, you're in a room training and you are the most junior person there. The room is full of first to eighth Dan Blackburns, serious people. And for me, Mastery begins, not achieved, begins when you get your black belt, when you get your MCC. If you've got over the bar to MCC or equivalent, I think you're now a competent beginner. So you've learned all the stuff, you've absorbed things. Now it's how are you going to do that?
something new comes in at that level. So for me, coaching happens at two levels. There's Newtonian physics and quantum physics. And the Newtonian physics is ACC, PCC, MCC in ICF terms. It's about the five senses, what do I see, what do I hear, what do I say, what's the facial expression, the body language, the words, the tone, the breathing. And I see the shift from, to the MCC is when you let go of the models and structures and you're learning to just flow in the conversation.
But then going beyond that, going beyond MCC is the degree to which you bring energy into the world. So I'm in the Einstein class. Yeah. As he said, if you can correctly analyze anything to its simplest components, you get a universal trick, something that works everywhere. And the magic for me happened when, I don't know whether you were doing it. I was working for my MCC kind of 2006, 2007.
um And the problem I found was that it was like that movie, it was at 2012, where you seek the master to learn from. You climb the mountains and sit at the feet of the master while they pour tea into overflowing cups. And go like, what does that mean? And the relatively small number of Masterful coaches, MCC coaches, there were, I mean, I think I qualified as number 103. So, you know, there weren't many, right?
And the interesting bit was that the majority that I was interacting with couldn't actually explain what they do or how they do it. They could do it, but they couldn't explain it. And my breakthrough was when, when I got through and then suddenly realized that This means I can do it. And if you can do something and then you can correctly analyze what you're doing, you can codify it. And if you can codify it, you can teach it. Yes. Yes. And the key is simplicity. Yeah, so many, so many things.
Thank you for the good ideas that you've given me there. I really appreciate them. oh Even though we can't describe it, I think there's only some of it we can't describe. Because I think I can describe, I can describe. So there's a sort of knowing here that I know what to do. Where does my knowing come from? My knowing comes from seeing, sensing, feeling. So there's a way to describe it, even if you can't describe it, I think. Yes, and it's down to whether the language...
So the bit we get restricted with is the language that we have to be... that we're limited by. Because when you start working at the energetic level, there is no language for that. Yeah. Yeah, so people have to experience it. Physically, you teach them physically to do it and gradually they get it. um And it's amazing to see. that's what I'm, and here the interesting bit is that Mastery that energetic work, you can teach anybody. You can teach a beginner that. So it's not restricted.
find the nice bit is I'm not restricted to just saying, I can only teach you if you've got to this level so far, but no, no, you, anybody can learn to do this because I believe we're not teaching something new. I believe we are, humans have the sensors built in them to detect the energetic wavelengths. Because again, going back to the science of it, I'm energy, you're energy, the space between us is energy in a different form. So it is all connected once we get beyond our own body.
I learned to do it. Now, there's no way I could have learned to do that if it was something new. And there's no way I could now teach it to people if it was something new. If this was a skill above and beyond. I think the beauty of the energy work is that we are reawakening dormant receptors. I don't know, but I suspect humans, I suspect those receptors shut down eventually about the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Because people can, we can sense when something's there and we can also sense, can't we, when it's not there? I've just been writing about a dog. There is a point to this. I used to be not really like dogs very much. When I was in the room with this dog, the dog was really badly behaved, so much so that the owners, when we went to stay, had to kind of shut it in a room. I'm now really good with dogs. We go and stay. The dog's great.
And that is entirely down to me and my, what I'm giving off, what I'm vibing, isn't it? It's nothing to do with the dog. It's to do with me and me and the dog. Yes. The energetic level is actually the similarities to the Newtonian physics level of interaction is the paradox. We always want other people to change, but we can't change anybody. The only thing we can change is ourselves. And yet when you change yourself, they must change. It's action and reaction.
Third law of motion just kicks in and works. Yeah. I'm loving all the physics. Well, I was a techie originally. That's the stuff that makes sense. And it's been fun because in doing so much work in the corporate world, you're talking to people who are technical. No matter what industry they're in, they're technical. So if you go in and talk fluffy woo woo, they don't get it. They run a mile. But if you can talk logic and... a scientific approach.
when you say, hey, you want performance from people? Well, here's the equation. Yeah. The mistake you're making is you're looking here and trying to change a constant. Look here, this is the variable. And then you go, oh, is that it? Yep. That's it. It's that simple. Nice. Have you met Lisa Turner? No. Where is she? a few months ago. She's in the UK. I'll make an introduction. She codifies, she's an engineer and she codifies coaching. I think you'd have a good conversation, you and she.
Nice, yes, okay I will forward to So say more about simplifying from your standpoint. Um, great. An interesting thing emerged over the years when I look at my, uh the profitable leadership frameworks, the stuff we use for the leadership programs. Every time I've analyzed something to what I think is its simplest components, it always comes up with a three. Oh. So I don't know if it's absolutely right or I just know it works for me.
If I'm analyzing something and I'm stuck at four or five, like no reorganize reshuffle and the three emerges. If you get down to binary, it's this or that. No, you've gone too far. You missed something. So just, it wasn't a deliberate just over the years as I worked my stuff out. um I noticed this pattern of threes emerging. Nice. So I find that's a good rule to play with, but not be bound by if you're trying to simplify something.
What are the three groupings, categories, or anything that you can break it down into? So what are they for coaching, Tony? What are the three? What's the question you're asking? You said it's always about three. I'm just wondering where your threes are in coaching. uh Interestingly, you're now asking about something I haven't published yet. well, you don't have to tell me then. Unless you want to. Well, I, why not?
So I've just been asked to do a session for, I think ICF Florida in January, where we're going to actually talk about this a bit more. um, because this one is fascinating. You know, we've got several professional bodies around the world for coaching. We've got similar, but slightly different core competencies. We've got. many, many different coaching schools teaching different things.
And you remember that fuss that happened last month when competency seven was changed and the word knowledge was brought in. Yes. Yes. For ICF coaches. Yeah. coach, this is about evoking awareness and whether or not it's okay to share knowledge. Sorry, keep going Tony, that was just to our listener. That's good. Yes. I often find myself forgetting that not everybody and they should be, but not everybody, even in the ICF world, can sort of you go competency six and they go, I know what that is.
Um, so quick notes to everybody. If you can't tell me what the companies are from the number, then go work on it. Cause you have to do that. This is your basics. This is your do your stuff in the dojo, right? Every day you should know them inside out. Anyway, so. 2007, I was going through training to be an assessor. And I do remember being beaten up because I was being too harsh on people. And I can remember even then having the conversations that you can't coach through a knowledge gap.
So if your client is nearly missing some information or some knowledge, if you know where they can find it, you share that if you, you know, whatever you need to do, their knowledge may come from you, from somewhere else or whatever, but you don't leave them dangling, you help.
So the interesting bit is everybody's got a little bit flappy about the wording change in the competencies, but for those of us who were here way back when, that was always understood that that was okay, that's what you did. Because there's a massive difference between sharing a missing piece of knowledge, a data point, and telling them what to do with it. Absolutely.
I've been thinking for some time about how this was all getting, and I've noticed over recent years that people keep using the phrase pure coaching. I don't know where they got that from. It's a meaningless thing, but you pure coaching. But what happened 10 years ago was I was coaching one of my CEOs. So I do a lot with technical companies, banks, fintechs and things like that. And I was working with this guy and he got to the CEO position coming from an IT background.
So, know, it's techie to techie talking. And he was looking for a way, he you know, one thing that I would find useful if we just had a slightly simpler way of explaining the concept of coaching to managers, because a manager might have to teach coach, advise, mentor, et cetera. They shift different roles. He said, they actually know how to give advice. They tend to know how to be a mentor. They know how to consult. The bit they struggle with is how to coach.
So they put the label on it and they think they're doing it, but they're not really doing it in that really powerful way that when non-directive is the style that's gonna work best. They don't know how. So how do we explain it to them? I don't know if you're a science fiction person or not. Do you have any interest in science fiction? Cool, okay. but do continue. All right, yes, I like crime as well because that's solving. As a 12 year old, I read everything Agatha Christie wrote.
In fact, I used to stay with my grandma who lived just down the road from where Agatha Christie used to live. So at 12 I read everything and she used to irritate me until I finally figured out her trick. Why you can't read an Agatha Christie and solve it before you get to the end? She keeps some of the data hidden. Yes. there's always one thing she doesn't tell you. And when I finally realized that I went, I'm done. I was getting so annoyed that I couldn't solve the problems.
Yeah. So I finally figured out why I couldn't solve them. Anyway, where were we? Yes. Science fiction. I love science fiction. And, you know, when, when Apple TV a couple of years ago said, we're going to make do foundation, which is one of Isaac Asimov's great epic pieces of work, multiple books. I just went, right, I have to refresh. And I went back and over, I think it was the COVID year.
I read all the foundation series of books and all the robot series of books, which do ultimately come together at the end. So it's 17 books, each one about five to 700 pages long. That was, that was my COVID year in my spare time. Oh nice! absolutely. So one of the most powerful things that Asimov came up with was the idea of the three laws of robotics.
And basically it's going like, if you've got a robot that's autonomous, intelligent, if they follow the three laws, you can let the robot go out into the world and do anything. You don't need to control it because it has to follow the three laws. And they were just perfect. So this tech CEO I was talking to said, know, could you not come up with the three laws of coaching, just like we've got for the three laws of robotics? So I started thinking about it 10 years ago.
and then about second quarter of 25th, I started, you know, they'd been churning around. thought, okay, I'm going to do this one seriously. I'm going to see if I can nail it down. And literally about a month ago, I finished it. So, and. Do you know I think about now? It's a little breathtaking because I think it's right. And what it does is enables you to, so it's supportive of, independent of, and agnostic of all coach training and all competency sets from the professional bodies.
and allows you to go one step above that and say, was that a good coaching conversation? So. Let me just run it by you so you can think. So here's three laws of coaching. First law. Everything the coach does in a coaching conversation must have the intention of triggering fresh thinking in the client, whether in establishing or resolving the agreed outcome for the coaching, addressing issues they need to resolve in order to achieve that outcome or deepening the understanding of themselves.
Second law. Okay, good, Second law. Everything the coach does must be responsive to what the client has communicated and must not conflict with the first law. Ooh, yeah. And then the third law says the coach may bring silence, questions, insights, observations, metaphors, analogies, knowledge, or any information to the coaching conversation, provided this does not conflict with the first or second laws. Thank you. How does that feel?
It feels so... I love it when somebody can describe this amazing thing we do without using any jargon at all. And I absolutely love how you've managed to describe that really simply. And even though there quite a lot of words in each phrase, it was still simple. And as you were saying it, I'm going, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, and I love that you don't go to three.
I love that you do one and you might do one and two and you might do one and two and three, but you don't do three unless you've done one. Yes, so you've got to conform, so it's that same principle. So when you think about it, you could be trained in any coaching style from any coaching school, and you can do anything you like, provided it complies with the three laws. Can I just be a bit direct?
You could be trained in any coaching school in the world and you might have to put down an awful lot in order to be able to do what you've just said. You might have to put down, you mean? in the sense of don't use what you've been taught. yeah, I think that a lot of coach training teaches complexity. I have to create a great question, I have to do this, I have to do that. Whereas actually what you've described in your one, two, three is everything is in response to and in service of.
client and must be delivered in a way that triggers fresh thinking. Yes, absolutely. So if you think about it, that's why I say it doesn't matter what coach training you've done, as long as what they taught you to do is delivered in line with these three laws, you're okay. Yeah. And those are laws that are actually simple to learn. Yes. Yes. So you're going to write a book. yes. Yes, I've started on that. It's going to be my second book. um I have an epiphany in 2025.
Having been messing with this stuff since 1984, I've finally got the confidence to think that perhaps I've got something worth sharing. You have. So this is going to be the second book for coaches and there will be more. I've got a couple more plans for after. I know what they're going to be about. ah The first one is gonna come out in hopefully January. And it's actually not about how to coach.
because one of the things, so the last couple of years since we started the Simplestia Mastery membership, one of the things that I really became aware of that I missed somewhat was that the vast majority of coaches aren't making enough money. Yeah. Yeah. I've my business over 25 years, 98 % of what I've done has been me selling myself direct at decent fees, direct to corporates.
And what I noticed was the last 10, 15 years, the middleman platforms and now the, you know, the, coach hub, better kind of things that a lot of coaches are getting their work there. not making much money, which is a real shame. um So I decided, first thing I'm going to do now that I've got the confidence to actually go like, guys, guys, I do know something that might help you.
My first bit of confidence, so what if I just wrote the book that helps them let go of their fear of selling themselves and gives them a clue as to how you could sell direct to corporates so that you sell something that the platform can't deliver. So they can only get it from you. Nice. So what's that book called? Oh, I think that is very imaginatively called selling yourself to corporates. The nine actions, the nine actions blueprint for coaches. It's as straightforward as that.
Yeah. Yes. It's um, what I did do though was I realized that sales textbook wouldn't help. There's enough of those out there. So what I've done is I've written a story. about a key character through going through a bit of midlife crisis and the principles sort of kind of unfold as the story goes along. So the idea is that as a coach, you're not trying to follow a sales textbook. You're like, read the story, relate to it, reflect on it and go, how could I use that principle for me?
So I think it would be an easier way to kind of learn how to see selling differently. Yeah, I think so. meaning. Yes, yes, absolutely. Nice. And then the one on the three. Thank you for sharing them. Oh, well, my pleasure. I've been kind of holding it here for a long time and I've realised at some point you have to release it, you have to let it go. Yeah, and put it out there. So we're going to have a lot of fun with it. I don't know that I know absolutely what I'm going to do with it.
ah But I think it's something that's going to help. Thank m Wow. What an absolute delight, Tony, to talk to you at the beginning of a new year. Yes. m And what a great gift you've given to our listeners. So really appreciate that. I'll change the show notes, lovely listener, when Tony's book is out. The one that he hasn't got a title for and he hasn't started writing yet. I will also put the selling yourself to corporates link in the show notes.
Yes. So actually on that one, I can help you right now. I think it's definitively the second book is going to be called The Three Laws of Coaching. Oh nice! Fantastic. And just as we, just before we finished, Tony, you, you said something to me in a LinkedIn message about accessible coach training. Affordable coach training. Tell me about your dream for accessible and affordable coach training. Well, so that was the pilot I started two and a half years ago.
so it came from a conversation with, with Fran Fisher when we were, we were talking about just how many, um, how many PCC coaches go do their 10 hours mental coaching because they've now got that two and a half thousand dollars. They do 10 hours mental coaching and then fail the exam. They, they fail their MCC assessment. Um, I can remember when I was an assessor, the failure rate, was the past first time pass rate was single digits. And I don't think it's that different now.
And I realized what the problem was. We do our ACC, we work hard, we get our PCC and another 2000 hours client work time is going to take on average five to seven years. I've talked to him, that's the average. It's a long way off. And by the time you've renewed your PCC a couple of times, you've actually accumulated the statutory requirement for training hours. So doing training for MCC level doesn't kind of occur to us. We just go like, all I need to do is get my 10 hours of mental coaching.
mental coaching is phenomenally valuable. I do it for people. but it's not a substitute for intensive training. 10 hours mental coaching will not take you from PCC to MCC. The reason the hours requirement is so big is because the skill jump is massive. So I thought, what if we could start learning to coach at a mastery level as soon as you passed your PCC? Right? That's the moment to begin. So we set up a monthly membership where you do over about an 18 month period, you do online learning.
So I've created all the videos to teach you, I going back to the cutters that you have to do in the karate dojo, once a week, spend one hour. Here's a new little bit. It's a video of maybe five minutes. go over it and over it and over it and figure out what's that one thing I could change with my clients next week. Nice. Yeah. So each week you just go a little bit more, a little bit more. And it is designed in a way that if you just implement that one new idea every single week, you get better.
So by the time you get to, I've got the hours for MCC, it'll have been coaching at a mastery level for several years. Yeah. So we went in, we went in at a price point of, I think it's $125 a month. And as well as all the learning, we have four 90-minute tutorials every month as well. So that's 90 minutes of live interaction with me. And we dig deep into the learning, we do practice coaching, and we do the energy work. So they're learning how to do the energy level coaching at the same time.
So it's tremendous fun. Yeah. wow. So how do people find out more about you and about your stuff, Tony? If they go to SimpliTiD of Mastery.com that will take them to a page on my main website, which is where the start point for various programs and bits and pieces. Yeah, I have to figure out where to put something that takes them to all the books and things, but there'll be a link from there. So simplicityofmastery.com is a good start point. Yeah. Lovely. Thank you.
Well, thank you so much for coming to The Coaching Inn. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure. and sharing the three laws of coaching. And you know, what's not to like, simplicity and mastery, what's not to like? Thank you, Tony, for coming to The Coaching Inn and thank you everyone for