Interview: The Coaching Habit with Michael Bungay Stanier

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with my good friend Michael Bungay Stanier, who is an extraordinary human being. In addition to being one of the world's leading coaches, he's written a number of great books. His work focuses on great work. We had a prior chat where we talked about doing more great work. I'm excited to chat today about his new book, the Coaching Habit. Subtitle say less, ask more, and change the way you lead forever. Really excited to connect today, Michael. Appreciate you taking the time and look forward to unpacking some of my favorite ideas.

You know, Brian, I think we've been friends now for what, five or six years. So it's been cool just hanging out and seeing how our businesses have changed and evolved and grown. But one thing that's been a real constant for you has been a real champion for ideas at work. So it's always cool for me when I get to kind of talk to you on your shows because in part I'm going, wow, Brian thinks these are ideas that work, so I must be doing something right. So thanks for having me.

Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, thank you for your great work and for your commitment to doing what you do. Let's start at the top.

And.

And let's just start with the Coaching habit. Then I want to break that down. Then we'll obviously go into detail, but tell us why you named the book the Coaching Habit.

You know, the way I make money, the way I have a business, is box of crayons. My company is a training company. And when we started this up 12 years ago, my business model was pretty much if somebody says, can you do this? Say yes, and then figure it out. And that worked. Okay. But as with all things, and I'm sure this is covered in other podcasts you've done, focus actually brings results and depth and development, I think. And what we've done over the years is just narrowed our focus increasingly. So now here's what we do. We teach and train busy managers to coach so that they can coach in 10 minutes or less. For us, coaching is a foundational skill. So if you're in a big company or a small company, if you're trying to evolve or you're going through some sort of change or you're trying to drive a team so that they can be more engaged and have more impact, do more great work, in fact, then coaching is Just one of those foundational skills. And the more I looked around the world and went, how are managers taught coaching? The more kind of underwhelmed I was by that. So we tried to fill that niche by providing practical, engaging training that doesn't feel like corporate training, because, let's face it, most corporate training is miserable. And we have a program which we started five or six years ago, called the Coaching Habit. So when I started to write this book, I actually went through a whole range of different names for it. But then the sensible part of me just went, you know what it's about coaching and about habits. You have a program called the Coaching Habit. It's strategic to align this with what's out there. Really, the subtitle, which you talked about, is what gets to the essence of it. Say less, ask more, and change the way you lead forever. And that's really what the heart of this book is about.

I love it. Let's break down coaching and Habit because you talk about how we all coach. And I think with our audience being many managers and executives and also just people from a broad array of domains and all that, you talk about how we're all coaches. What does it mean for you to be a coach? And why is that an aspect of our lives we want to embrace?

Yeah. You know, if I had to summarize it in a kind of tweet, because, you know, we live in that world. Here's the essence of what coaching is. It is a little less advice giving and a little more curiosity. And in a perfect world, what a little more curiosity and a little less advice drives is, you can imagine a virtuous circle. It starts with insight and creating new insight about yourself and also about the situation. You're going to get at that double level about me and about the world I live in. Insight, you hope, leads to positive behavior change. In other words, you do something differently. Insight leads to action, and action and positive behavior change leads to impact, increased impact, and then in a perfect world, that then feeds back on itself. So new impact, different impact, then drives new insight about yourself and about the situation. You know, as part of the work that we've done, I researched what the definition of coaching is. And the quick summary would be, there are one bazillion definitions of what coaching are. I think there's probably a correlation to how many people are trying to sell coaching to how many definitions of coaching there are. You know, there's that, oh, here's my version of what coaching is. So if I had to pick a definition, it probably would go with a guy called John Whitmore. Now, John Whitmore is a champion of the work of Tim Galway and Tim Galloway. You'll know from the inner game of work and the inner game of tennis. He's one of the fathers of the coaching profession. And Sir John, because he's British and he's knighted, so we call him Sir John. Sir John, his definition of coaching. And I'm going from memory here, Brian, so I'll get it slightly wrong, but it's basically unlocking people's potential. Helping them learn rather than teaching them. I think that's such an particularly that last piece. Helping them learn rather than teaching them is effectively helping them learn is driven by great questions. Teaching them is by downloading advice. And one of the things that we now know, and this becomes increasingly obvious when effective teaching happens, is it's much more effective to help people make their own connections, find their own AHAs, help get on their own journey. Because honestly, downloading content, downloading advice just doesn't work that well.

Yeah, I love it. And we're going to talk about the advice monster in a second. So that's kind of the first part of the equation, coaching. And then you dedicate a chapter in the book to habit formation. You kind of joke about all the, the misinformation out there. Can you give us just kind of a quick overview of your insights into effective habit building?

Yeah, let me start by going, here's the stuff that you should ignore on the Internet about habit building, because there's plenty of that. And the one that I think most people have heard of is the if you do it for 21 days, it will become a habit. So here's what I used to say. I used to say somebody just made that up. And now it's stalks the Internet like this zombie piece of information that won't die. But I actually heard the origin of it the other day, and the origin makes it even more ludicrous. And here's the origin. A plastic surgeon, years and years ago, a plastic surgeon noticed that it took somebody who'd had a nose job about 21 days to get used to their new nose. And somehow that turned into, so do something for 21 days and it becomes a habit. So you're like, no. But of course, what's great is that actually in this world of behavioral economics and psychology and neuroscience, there's a lot more actual data that tells us how the brain works and how new connections are formed in the brain and therefore how habits actually work. And the two Guys that have been most influential on me, as I think about habits, Charles Duhigg and BJ Fogg. So Charles Duhigg people have probably heard about, if they're interested in habits at all, because he wrote the Power of Habit, New York Times bestseller. He's actually a New York Times journalist, which is a useful connection to have if you're trying to have a New York Times bestseller, my guess is. But it's actually a fabulously good book. And I say that believing most business books are pretty much awful. Somebody's taken a loose idea and scraped it thinly over 220 pages. It's like, but this is a great book. You'll laugh, you cry. It's got science, it's beautifully written. And what Duhigg says about habits is this. He says, so look, a habit actually isn't just a thing you do. It's actually got three parts to it. The habit loop. And the three parts of the habit loop are a trigger. That's the thing that sets you off. Then there's the behavior itself. So that's the old habit, the way of working. And then there's the reward. That's the thing that makes your brain go, yeah, do that again next time. You know? So to take a common example, your smartphone goes ping. That's the trigger. Your behavior is just to automatically go, I've got to check my email. And the reward is that little rush of chemical in your brain that says, oh, look, an email. Somebody might love me. Fantastic. I'll do that again next time. So that's Duhigg. He's influenced me. And the thing that I really took from him was this idea of the importance of the trigger. Then the other guy is a guy called BJ Fogg. Now, he hasn't written a book that I know of, but his website is excellent. It's called tinyhabits.com and he's a West coast researcher, scientist, academic. And for me, of all the stuff that he's talked about, the thing I love most of all is his idea that if you're going to define a new habit, define it in a way that takes 60 seconds or less to complete. Because if you make it any bigger than that, your brain and just kind of the weight of the status quo will kind of hack it and you'll never get into this new habit. So his story, which I love, is around a commitment to floss your teeth regularly, right? Because we've had this experience. You go to your annual teeth cleaning, the dental assistant leans over you. It's Normally a woman, she goes, oh, great. And after a little bit of starting the cleaning, she goes, so how's the flossing going exactly? And you typically go something like, well, I have flossed 98 times in the last three days to make up for the previous 362 days where I've done no flossing whatsoever. So she finishes cleaning her teeth and at the end of it she goes, you know, it would be really great if you did just a little bit more flossing. And I'm like, yes, yes, this time I will definitely floss. And of course you go home and nothing changes. You do no flossing at all. So BJ Fogg's commitment was to floss one tooth because even he couldn't think of a reason why he didn't have the 5 seconds it takes to floss one tooth. And of course what happens is after you've flossed one tooth, you're like, well, I'm here now, why don't I finish off the flossing? And so another example, you want to go for a run? We're recording this at the start of the year, New Year's resolutions. I'm going to go running every day. A better way of defining that, according to BJ Fogg, is after I get up in the morning, I'm going to put on my running shoes and step out the front door. It's like a microhabit that sets up the best chance for winning and filling out a larger habit. Taking duhigg, taking Fog, knowing some other stuff about behavioral change, we created what we call the New Habit formula. That's, as you say, one of the early chapters of the book. And the New Habit formula is simple but powerful. And it goes like this. When this happens, and that's when you write down the triggering event instead of. That's when you write down the old way of behaving that you might want to change. I will. And that's when you write down the new habit. That's going to take 60 seconds or less. So if you're going to take some of the information from the Coaching Habit book that we're talking about, a new habit might sound like this. When this happens when I have my regular one to one weekly meeting with Brian, instead of telling Brian what we're going to talk about and running through the same old agenda we always run through, I will ask Brian, what's on your mind? As the kickstart question. This is the first question in the book of the seven questions that we Share the seven essential questions. The Kickstart question is the first one, what's on your mind? And you can see how I've now turned that into a specific habit.

That's awesome. Yeah, I love everything about that. It really echoes a lot of the stuff that we do. I love doohig. We have a habits 101 class that's coming out right around the time we're going to release our chat, so people can check that out. You also mentioned Dan Coyle, huge fan of Dan Coyle and that repetition.

The Talent Code is a book that if people haven't picked it up, they really should, because the other book in that same reign is Josh Kaufman and 20 Hours, which is all about how do you get good fast at something? And a few minutes deep practice trumps hours of kind of dabbling, pseudo practice. And it speaks to that level of focus that you bring.

That's so good. What was the name of that book?

It's called the first 20 hours. I think first 20 hours by Josh Kaufman, who also wrote the personal MBA.

You also have a fantastic list of recommended books at the end of the book, which I very much enjoyed going through.

I do think that the work that we talk about and often the work we champion, I think of it as old wine in new bottles. I'm not kidding myself that I'm coming up with something that nobody has ever thought of before. What I'm trying to do is put it in a way that's accessible and creates insight and action that may have not been framed like that before. But the stuff that's out there is out there. So it's like, acknowledge your sources. And I've been influenced by all sorts of people, many of whom actually have been introduced by your work because of your brilliant ability to summarize and read broadly.

Well, I appreciate that. And all of that is kind of a prelude to really the heart of the book, which are these seven questions. Again, subtitles say less, ask more, and change the way you lead. I want to kind of kick that off with why questions are so important. I'll leave it at that. Why are questions so important?

Gosh, that's a really good question. Why are questions so important? Well, you know, on a neurological level, if you buy into that definition of John Whitmore about what coaching is and helping people learn rather than teaching them, and you're going, my job, therefore, is to be somebody who creates a space where people learn. You have to understand how people learn. And the truth is, the hard fact to face is people don't actually learn when you tell them stuff, when you give them advice, I mean, it pretty much floats in their ear and floats out the other ear. Everybody listening. Think of all the advice you've been given today or over the last week. Think how much of it you have already forgotten or, or just ignored because it wasn't that good. Or even if you followed it, then got a bit disappointed because it's still not that good. Right. That's kind of how people feel about your advice too. So advice doesn't work that well and even doing something doesn't work that well to help people learn. I mean, people maybe get some sort of insight around that, but mostly they just do the thing and then they carry on. The learning happens when you create something space to reflect back on what just happened. And one of the things that questions do is it kind of stops the rush to action and actually forces people to stop and make connections. I mean, people will know that they probably had a moment where they've asked a great question and the person doesn't have a fast answer. They don't have that kind of quick response. And you can tell because their eyes will kind of look up to their left. And as they're kind of searching their brain to try and figure that out and what you're actually seeing there is new neural pathways and connections being made. It's a really cool moment. And I think that's the power of questions. That's what's so powerful, is they create that learning moment that drives that new insight and. Drives that new moment of aha ness and learning that we're looking for. And I'm just pulling open the book because the very first quote in the book, page 11, it's a quote from Jonas Salk. And he said in five words what I've just tried to say in 150 words. And he says this. What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question. And I'm like, exactly that what he just said, that thing there, that's what I'm hoping people get to understand, which is what questions do, is they open.

Their portals of discovery and you juxtapose it with advice. So the typical model is, well, let me just tell you what I think you should do. And when you use your model and definition of coaching, it's about eliciting and kind of inviting the best within someone out rather than telling them what you think is the best. Can you talk to us about the advice monster and how we all have.

To Before I talk about that advice monster, I do want to just say this. What I'm not saying here, Brian, is now, never tell anybody anything. Only ever ask questions that doesn't work. I mean, Daniel Goleman, best known for kind of popularizing emotional intelligence, he wrote an article for Harvard business review probably 15 years ago now, I guess I think it was the year 2000. The article was called Leadership that Gets Results. And it's interesting because he says, look, there are actually six different types of leadership. Strong leaders know how to use all sets at the appropriate time. Typical leaders use two, maybe three of those styles. Coaching is one of those styles. And what Goldman found was it was the most underutilized of those leadership styles, even though it was a key driver of engagement and motivation. And even I think it was number two or number three on bottom line profit. So don't think that I'm saying never tell people what to do, only ask questions. That would just get annoying for people. But what I can bet is that for most people, coaching and that curiosity and asking questions is an underutilized tool. And we're just trying to balance things up a bit. And what we're trying to balance against is the advice monster. And this is what the advice monster looks like. And if people want to take something away from this conversation, maybe it's this. Notice your own internal advice monster and how it will start bubbling up, because once you start becoming aware of it, you're starting to notice the trigger that starts you changing the habit. So the advice monster, somebody comes to you and starts going, blah, blah, blah. And within about 30 seconds, you're like, oh, I know, I need to tell them. Kind of stop listening. Now. I'm just now waiting for you to take a breath so I can interrupt and give you my solution. And here's why the advice monster is so seductive, because you feel like you are adding value. Okay, that's the first surface layer on this. This is how I help. If I'm a manager, a leader, a person, how I help is I tell people the smart stuff that I know. But beneath that, it gets a little murkier because it's also, here's how you stay in control. Here's how you stake the claim to be the more important person in this relationship. Here's how you frame what's going to happen and make sure that that person follows your suggestions. And it all becomes a little more seductive around this. Now, one of the models we talk about in the book is about the neuroscience of engagement. Now, the neuroscience of engagement. Here's what you need to know. Five times every second at an unconscious level, the brain is going, is it safe here or is it dangerous? Is it a place of risk or is it a place of reward? If it is a place of risk, if it is a place of danger, if it is not safe, people disengage. And when they disengage, their prefrontal cortex, their thinking brain disengages. It gets down into the amygdala, the kind of fight or flight response. If you are actually a place of safety, of reward, then actually you think smarter, you think better, you maintain your higher thinking capacity. It's a much more powerful place for people to be. You assume positive intent, all sorts of good things like that. And there are four factors that drive engagement, that allow the brain to decide whether it's safe or dangerous. And the four factors spell the word terror. T E R A and they stand for tribe. In other words, are you with me or against me? Expectation, do I know what's going to happen or do I not know? Rank, Am I more important or less important than you? And autonomy, Do I get to make some say in this? Do I have some choices, or are you making all the decisions for me? So here's where this is a long answer, but I'm getting to a point here. Trust me, Brian, when you give somebody advice, here's the impact on the terror quotient. In other words, basically, are people engaging with you or disengaging? Their terror quotient will often be pushed downwards because tribiness gets broken up a little bit. It's not us, it's me telling you expectation actually probably goes up a little bit. So that's a good thing. Rank goes down, you're smarter than I am. Autonomy goes down. You're telling me what the answer is. If you ask the question, what happens to their terror quotient is it goes up, you're helping me, you're on my side. Expectation goes down maybe a little bit, but rank goes up. You're trusting me to figure out my own answers, as does autonomy. But as their terror quotient goes up, yours, the questioner might go down a little bit. Because when you ask a question, what happens is, things get a little less certain for you, a little more ambiguous. Was it a good question? What are they going to say? Where's this conversation going to go? Was this the right question? What's going to happen now? So I think at a. Below the surface, that's part of why this shift of behavior we're talking about from Advice giving to curiosity is trickier than it might seem because actually, it just actually feels safer and nicer to tell people what to do, even though it's not as effective in terms of actually allowing them to become self sufficient and have the impact that they're hoping for and to do more. Great work. I can't remember what your question was, Brian, but that's my very long answer to it.

That's great. Well, we just got introduced to the advice monster and I appreciate that awesome kind of tour through neuroscience. Just the effectiveness of tapping into other people's insights and giving them that sense of comfort, et cetera. Let's chat about the questions a bit. So to start with, what's your favorite question?

You know, there's a question I talk about as the best coaching question in the world. It's the AWE question. It's number two in the book. And the reason for the AWE question, AWE is that that's the acronym for what the question is and what the question is. It's simple, it's short, it doesn't seem like it could possibly be the best coaching question in the world, but it stands for and what else. And what I love about this question is that it kind of supercharges all the other questions because the insight behind it is twofold. The first insight is this. The first answer the person gives you is never the only answer and honestly is rarely the best answer. The second insight is really powerful and it's this. If you're asking the question and what else? It's a self management tool to stop you leaping in and your advice wants to go crazy and you taking control. It allows you to stay lazy. And here's the thing we bang on about in the book, about the importance of you being a lazy manager, a lazy leader, a lazy coach, which is not to say you stop doing anything, it's to say you allow the other person to do the work, to make the connections, to expand their capacity, to fulfill their potential for their sake and for your sake. So if I had to only have one question, it would be the and what else question. Because you can take any of the other questions. Let's pick the third question. What's the real challenge here for you? And what else is the real challenge? And what else is the real challenge? Right. So now what's the real challenge here for you? And you can see how with and what else and what else we've just deepened that conversation and moved it somewhere more interesting right away.

Hmm, that's cool. So it's most Effective. And it's your favorite.

You know, it's like a utility knife. It kind of manages to kind of have a horizontal impact, not just a vertical impact, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So give us an example, like a practical example, perhaps not a managerial one, but just, you know, we're living our lives and someone says, something's going on, the advice monster comes up. How do we approach it?

I think it might tap into those two questions that we've talked about before, because as soon as they say, oh, here's what's going on in my life, you're like, oh, I think I pretty much know what you should be doing.

Here 30 seconds or less.

Yeah. So resist that. Because almost certainly the first thing they talk about isn't the real thing. It's just their best guess. It's their best attempt to describe it. Sometimes people actually end up talking about a kind of solution to an undisclosed challenge. So your best bet is to stay a little curious as to what's really going on. So you go, okay, Brian, I hear what's going on with you. Help me out here. What do you reckon the real challenges around that for you? Yeah. Okay, I understand.

Wow.

Right? Is there anything else? Anything else there? That's a real challenge for you? Okay, Right. All right. I mean, there may be nothing here, but let me ask you, anything else here around that? That's a challenge for you, a real challenge. Okay, so you've got three interesting things here. If you had to pick one of those to look at, which would you go for? What? This one over here. Okay, interesting. So again, I don't know, but what's the real challenge here for you? And what you're doing is you're helping them find the core, the heart of the problem, the heart of the challenge, and you're both being incredibly supportive and useful to them, and you're not sullying them with, well, here's what I think you should do. Because often, honestly, the last thing people want is your smart ideas on how to do it. They want something else entirely. So that's one way of handling that. Let me give you another way of handling that. That may even be a smarter way of doing it. Somebody comes up to you and goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you've got the advice monster twiggling. And you're like, I need to add value or, I need to show my deep love or friendship for this person. And part of you wants to go, leave him. He's a disaster. You should never have started dating him in the minute the first place. Or you may want to be going, I totally agree. Your haircut's a disaster. You should. I can't believe you've gone out wearing whatever it might be. But here's a simple way to stop you leaping in and to slow down and actually help them and help you figure out what's required here. Ask them, so how can I help? So what do you want from me? Start a curiosity. What do you want from me here? Now, in the book, we call this the lazy question. And it's paradoxical, right? Because it's like, if you're asking, well, how can I help? That doesn't sound like a lazy act at all. But it's called a lazy question because so often when somebody goes that, what happens to us is we trigger into action and we get busy and we get. And we try and be useful. And so often that's just not the thing that's required. And what asking, how can I help? Or what do you want from me? Does is it actually allows that person to actually ask you for what they want rather than hint at it. And then you get to decide, do I say yes or do I say no, or do I say maybe?

The whole time you're describing that, I just saw the looking up to the left neurons working and the processing and just really creating the safe space for an individual to explore their own truth. And really, us just coaching them, guiding them in that process, which obviously increases the autonomy and a sense of humility from the questioner. That's really beautiful, exciting.

I mean, honestly, somebody comes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you go, so how can I help? They go, you know what? I just needed two minutes to get this off my chest. I'm done. And you're like, fantastic, bye. And they're happy, and you're happy. And you haven't spent the next 45 minutes now coming up with a solution, a solution that they don't even need or they want. And to your very point, it's got all of that neuroscience, that terror quotient that drives a sense of engagement and commitment to them playing out the whole time.

I love it. We've obviously barely scratched the surface, but in the context of what we've talked about so far, what have we not talked about, if anything? What else?

I'm having my own questions used on me. I see what you're doing. Jiu jitsu Brian. Interviewer. Right, okay, here's the one. What's the other thing that I would want to share with people? I think I would want to make the connection and we kind of touched on it already, but just let me kind of make the point. And we can use this as a way perhaps of wrapping up for folks, which is to come back to that sense of one of the most powerful things you can do is to be a teacher for people, help people learn. But to do that, you need to understand how people learn not by telling, not by action, but by creating a moment of self reflection. So the very final question in the book is called the learning question, and it's a simple one. And it's this. What was most useful or most valuable about this for you? So let me turn this on you, Brian, so I can do a little jujitsu as well. So Brian, from this conversation, what was most useful or most valuable for you?

The sense of humility, of being willing to kind of subjugate, the sense of I know what's right and to really slow down and to just slow down and to be willing to invite the other person to experience their experience more deeply and really for them at the same time give us the invitation to do so with them rather than us dominating and needing to assert our control, as you said. And I also find that question incredibly useful. You talk about it in the book, about why it is and presupposes there is utility to the exchange. And it's again that make it stick retrieval process of I'm going back through my memory banks and if I want to have something stick between the ears rather than go right through it, this is such a great way to do it.

And for people to realize that the conversation they've just had with you has been a useful one, which they may miss otherwise. So for the folks that are listening into this, what I would suggest is I'd ask you what was most useful or what was most valuable for you here? Variations on that are what you want to remember from this conversation. What was the aha moment for you? What do you know now that you didn't know before? These are all variations on that final question. What was most useful or most valuable for you? And if the people who are listening in want to actually extract the value from this podcast and this conversation, it's worth taking a moment just to write something down and capture what was the.

Aha moment and then go explain it to someone like they're five as the make it stick and end. Very nice, Barbara Oakley Wisdom. I love it. This is great. We're going to release this. We're recording a little before Michael releases, but we're Going to release it right around the date of its release, the Coaching Habit. Find it on Amazon, wherever you get your books, Michael, where else can they learn more about you?

Perfect. Thanks for asking. Well, if they want more about the book, the coachinghabit.com and there's bits and pieces there, of course, and a bunch of free stuff and videos and the like. If you want more about us, Box of crayons, all one word biz. B I Z or B I Z depending on where you live in this world. And that's kind of the hub from which everything goes. If you're on social media. The place I hang out most is LinkedIn and would love to connect with people on LinkedIn and I am the only Michael Bungay stanier in the whole of LinkedIn. So look, if you want to check out the book the Coaching Habit and here's the thing. February 29th, this is launch week, it's just started. And there are some really cool bonuses that you can pick up if you buy one. If you buy more than one. So I'd really encourage you, if you want something to sweeten the deal of an already amazing book at an already incredibly cheap price, then TheCoachingHabit.com is the place to go. And Brian, thanks for asking about that.

Right on. Of course, TheCoachingHabit.com and follow Michael on LinkedIn. Check out everything else he's got going on. Truly phenomenal, Michael. Thank you. I appreciate you.

Brian. It's a pleasure.

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