Practise Connecting With People, and Offering the Gifts You Can, Until We Heal The World

I didn’t know, when I read a book about building a coaching business, that the practices that it preached were about more than business development.

But they were.

Connect with people, Invite people into coaching conversations, Create powerful coaching experiences, Propose coaching engagements.

Those practices, outlined in The Prosperous Coach, turned out to be four ways to deepen and develop myself in ways that only enhance my life, inviting me more into presence, connection, courage and fulfilment. And taking me further from fear and isolation. With each practice.

I caught myself thinking of it yesterday, speaking to a group of research leaders at the University of Edinburgh about the Ideas Summit that will end our leadership programme, with each of them giving a short, inspiring presentation about their next big idea. Ideas that will genuinely change the world.

After years of working with the most exciting researchers at some of the UK’s leading universities, I’ve seen over and over again how people don’t make full use of the summit. All they are asked to do, beyond the presentation, is invite three people who they would love to connect with, speak to, hear about their idea.

The “reasons” given for not doing it are many, and often in some ways valid.

And as I was reflecting on this, I realised that me from eight years ago, sitting in their place, might have given many of those “reasons” myself.

But, because I read The Prosperous Coach, I have been practising making invitations to people for eight years. It is an art I have played with and practised, although my invitations are still based broadly on one dictated to me when I asked the question in the middle of a training call to a woman called Carolyn Freyer Jones, who almost certainly doesn’t remember that.

But it changed me. Gradually I practised: how do I authentically offer something to someone in a way that allows them to say No and encourages them to say Yes? How do I get through my fears of rejection, of imposition, of humiliation, and become someone who can understand they have a gift to offer, a possibility, and that they want to offer it... And offer it?

And the practice of becoming that person has rippled way beyond my business including, as I talked about with Lindsey Lewis in this interview on The Coach's Journey podcast, creating a truly amazing gift for my dad’s 70th birthday.

Ever since I worked with one of the authors of The Prosperous Coach and we tracked those four practises, I have noticed the power of Connection, too. When you track something, challenging yourself to do it more than you normally would, to change patterns, one of the moves I have noticed myself improving on is: when I notice a chance to do the thing, don’t hesitate.

If I’m trying to send 30 invitations in a month, I can’t mess around when a good opportunity presents itself.

If I’m tracking (semi-publicly) the number of people I have connected with over the course of a month, and I notice a good opportunity to do it, I can’t mess around. Make the connection.

As I practised connecting (or reconnecting) with people, I noticed something else sometimes happen. People would appear in my mind, sometimes coming back into it again and again over several days or weeks. Someone from my past, someone from my present. Someone who I didn’t really know but had met years ago, or just seen online.

And so the practice became to reach out to them.

Trust the intuition, and reach out.

Sometimes strange things would happen.

A colleague from a previous job kept appearing in my mind, with an intuition and excitement about inviting her to a coaching session. Over and over again, she appeared.

One day I got an email from her asking me about coaching. I looked again and again for the email I had sent her to invite her… it had to be there, otherwise why was she emailing me? But it turned out I hadn’t sent it.

She had just emailed me out of the blue.

What was going on? Why was she in my mind? What deep intuition or external presence had put her there, just as she was thinking about me?

Many times my connections or invitations been met – much to my surprise, although it shouldn’t be by now – with gratitude for an email or message received at the perfect moment?

These things, these intuitions.

Don’t ignore them.

Create a practice of reaching out, touching in, connecting, offering gifts.

Practise it until those smaller parts of you that fear learn that it is safe to do this, to offer genuine gifts to someone else, to reach out in connection.

Practise it until the world is healed.  

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with small edits and then post online. 

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