Todd is a Senior VP in one of the global Silicon Valley corporations. He asked me to coach two of his folks, Farid and Divyanesh. These guys are enthusiastic, crazy smart, high potential, ready to change the world, revolutionize the industry, and rocket their organization to success. I could see why Todd wanted to invest in them.
They had 5 goals:
Give killer presentations
Persuade others
Successfully negotiate difficult negotiations
Have people remember them
Do a whole lot of really meaningful good
I completed their coaching program. They were eager to grow and wonderful to work with. I met with Todd this week to see how he feels about the results.
What Todd said contains a profound message that I would love the world to hear:
“People always think someone else has more power than they do.
“What Farid and Divyanesh realized is that, instead of looking out at things like rank and status and prestige, to look inside at their internal capabilities.
“They learned how to communicate about anything to anyone. And when you have that, every audience will give you the keys to the house, there is no audience that you can’t win over.
“They had a tremendous amount of technical information going into their coaching, but it was all going through a small filter of inability to communicate it.
“They were outraged that they didn’t learn what you taught them earlier in their education, that they missed this most important element of success: communication. Because without that ability, all of the knowledge they had was useless. It was useless because they could not create the depth of understanding in others needed to make it useful.
“Now they can create that depth of understanding with anyone, with any audience. They are powerful.”
What Todd said is a profound truth. People think someone else has more power than they do.
But power does not come from the sources we are taught to examine. It is not a function of position or title or achievement or status.
Power comes from the ability to take what you have within yourself and communicate it to the external world.
That is what I taught Farid and Divyanesh to do.
Deep down, they already knew how to do this. We all do. It is a gift we have all been given as humans.
What I did was help them “remember” how to use that gift.
You are far more powerful than you imagine.
What do you think would happen for YOU if you “remembered” how to use that power?
Be the cause!