Uncoachable?
I’m the first one to admit, as we’ve known from previous post, I don’t know everything and I don’t pretend to know everything. I try to be as transparent as possible.
It was the mid-2000s and there was a rumor that I was difficult and not coachable. It’s true that sometimes I don’t listen to people and I think that I can do it better my way. Or I’ve put in enough hours and I have a certain style that works so I’m not willing to adjust and change my style. But in this particular incident, about 10 years ago, I needed to learn the best practices of how to become a Dale Carnegie sales instructor. So they sent in the toughest coach that they could find.
They sent in one of the people that actually worked to write the Dale Carnegie sales course during various iterations. He was told that I didn’t listen to advice, I was inflexible and that I had to learn the hard way. Which at times is very true. This wasn’t one of those times.
This is a time when I sat and viewed myself as a clean slate; I was going to absorb whatever this man told me. We were a few hours into our training session and he had this weird look on his face. I asked him in a soft voice, “What are you looking at?” He smiled and leaned back in his chair saying, “I don’t understand Catherine, you’re not inflexible. And you seem to be listening to me just fine. You are extremely coachable and flexible… you are highly coachable and highly flexible. You’ll be just fine after some more practice.”
It’s because of that coaching session in my sales career that I knew it was OK to say I don’t know. I knew it was OK to go and ask for help.
Three years ago I had another mentor that I would come to when I needed help with negotiations. She was one of the people early on that thought I was inflexible. But when I didn’t like the way a deal was going I had no problem texting her or calling her for help.
Even though I was one of the top sales performers within the Dale Carnegie network through my 8 year tenure with them, it took me until year 4 to understand that I could learn something from every single sales call that I had. Once I understood that little nugget, I became more comfortable admitting that sometimes I needed help, even being at the top.
