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Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Michael Joseph
Text copyright © Sara Milne Rowe, 2018
Illustrations by Simon Pearsall
The moral right of the authors and illustrator has been asserted
All names have been changed except in a few instances where clients have granted permission for their stories to be shared.
ISBN: 978-0-718-18397-4
To my mother, Vita, and to my business partner, Simon, without whom this book would never have emerged.
Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practising dancing or to learn to live by practising living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.
Martha Graham
Wishing to be better at something lies at the heart of most of the conversations I have with people. What they mean by better is always different. For me, better is energy-giving, flourishing, stretching, thriving, making progress one step at a time. Better is healing. Better is about believing you can be – and do – more than you thought. And at the heart of becoming better at anything is the ability to make better choices. That’s what I help people to do.
When I meet any client, step one is finding out what specifically they wish to be better at – and it’s not always straightforward. As we work together and discuss their situation, their strengths, their hopes and ambitions – they often realize that what they actually want to be better at is not what they were thinking when they walked in. Here’s an example close to my heart:
Back in 2000, after having had both my children, I chose to move on from my full-time job as a teacher in an inner-city comprehensive to set up my own business – in performance coaching. It seemed to make perfect sense. A natural segue from helping, nudging and challenging teenagers from all cultures to focus and do their best, to helping, nudging and challenging people from all backgrounds to have more impact, to be more confident and more successful – whatever that meant to them. Taking that leap of faith was a risk. And there were many times in those early days when the responsibility of building a business left me feeling uncomfortably challenged, overwhelmed and frankly just not good enough. No one in my family had ever started a business, and I needed to be better at understanding how to build one. Or so I thought. After months of frustration I finally worked out that, in order to do that, first of all I needed to be a lot better at managing myself in those moments when feeling ‘not good enough’ hit me. I made a commitment to do just that: to be better at being my own judge; to allow myself to choose when and if I was good enough and what I needed to do to be just that.
I knew that learning to manage this feeling would take effort and practice but, if I could crack it, it would definitely be worth it. I began to pay more attention to those moments when it surfaced. I became a scientist around my own feelings and behaviour, and started to keep a record:
Continuing to fall victim to these old feelings wasn’t my idea of fun, but at least it meant I had plenty of data to analyse, experiment with and learn from. I noticed some patterns around my reactions and what prompted them. Now I had this bulk of evidence, the question was, how do I interrupt those feelings, lessen their impact and enable myself to perform at my best?
I make no apology for using the word perform, by the way. It is a huge part of my background and, I believe, lies at the heart of becoming better … at anything. When clients say, ‘I don’t want to perform and pretend to be someone I’m not,’ I will often ask, ‘How do you know you’d be someone you’re not? What if you discovered you could be more than you are?’
One of my favourite quotes is: ‘We can act our way into a new way of thinking as well as think our way into a new way of acting.’ By acting or performing our way into a new way of thinking, we can sometimes unearth elements of us that we didn’t believe were possible.
That’s what I had to do. I needed to find some practical ways to perform better: to manage myself and become more resilient so I could create the business I wanted. I started to consider those situations in my past when I had worked to be better at something – becoming a better dancer as a child, a better violinist as a teenager, a better teacher as an adult. I decided to extract the key ingredients that made up being a better performer in each of those situations, and build them into useful practices. As I examined them more closely and experimented with the outcomes – first by myself, then working with family, friends and clients – I gradually developed a set of core practices. Finally, I had a toolkit that I could call on to choose a better set of responses and take back control.
I now help people all over the world to develop their own simple and practical ways to achieve what they want: whether that’s to be better at communicating with their child, leading their team, managing themselves under increasing pressure, reaching a goal, or even setting up their own business. As their coach I work with them to define clearly that certain something they need to be better at, and to apply the practices that will help them achieve it.
I never intended to write a book. I was cajoled by clients who said things like:
So here it is.
A practical, useful book – a human manual – to help you make better choices so you can do and be better when it really matters. A book to pick up whenever you think you need it, whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, be it dealing with a difficult conversation, coping with anxious children, facing challenges at work or managing yourself when you’re up against it.
In this book I describe the method I use with clients: the SHED method. It includes a series of practices, personal routines and rituals that have evolved from thousands of hours’ coaching hundreds of people, from CEOs to students, from professionals to parents – practices and routines that have helped them to make better choices, whether for themselves, for colleagues or for family and friends, and which can do the same for you. The tools and techniques in this method are derived from personal performance experience, are supported by science, and echo the habits of high performers who’ve built tried and tested ways to remain at their best – often achieving more than they thought possible. If you follow this method, arming yourself with a bespoke series of practices and clear steps, you too will be able to make better choices in the moments that matter to you and to those around you.
Crucially, to be better for others, the work has to start with you. It’s much harder to be better for others when you yourself are feeling exhausted, out of control, frustrated or ‘not good enough’. To be better for others, you need to know how to choose to get the best from yourself. That is the aim of this book. Just as other manuals help you get the best out of your washing machine, vacuum cleaner or boiler, this book can help get the best out of you. And, like any other manual, it has a troubleshooting section at the back, with handy tips to dip into when you want to find a quick and simple answer.
If you were sitting in front of me now, I would ask you, ‘What do you want to be better at?’
If the word better feels scary to you, you’re not alone. For some, it can feel energy-sapping rather than energy-giving – a million miles from flourishing or thriving. For many it smacks of old school reports (‘could do better’) or brings up negative and unhelpful comparisons (‘they do it better than me’). For some, the concept of becoming better at anything demands a level of self-belief or awareness that they perhaps feel they lack, or a level of determination, grit or self-preservation that sounds exhausting when they feel strung out as it is. If you are one of those people, I invite you to step forward and answer this question: How much better dare you be?
In answer to that question, many people I meet start by describing their current reality. For example:
As far as they are concerned, for them to become better, someone or something else has to change first:
However, when they start to connect instead with what they can do – with what they can control – I witness a shift in their motivation to choose to do something different. Once I sense this, we return to the question: ‘What do you want to be better at?’
Here are some common responses:
Once people can begin to articulate something specific that they can do, take responsibility for and control, a sense of choice begins to take root, and they move from being a spectator to a participant.
My aim is then to help them build their desire to achieve their ambition by asking more questions:
This last question is important, as it helps clients to mark where they are when they set off, and offers them a simple way of measuring progress as they continue on their journey.
Of course you might already be very good at what you want to be better at, so, for you, better means becoming exceptional. Many people I work with find it hugely energizing to keep learning to be even better.
Recently I was working with a client on a keynote speech to his entire company. He performed really well and the audience feedback was excellent – the average score his speech received was 8.1 out of 10. I sent him the footage. Within an hour he had downloaded it, watched it and sent me a return email saying, ‘Thanks for this. I’m happy with the audience reaction and how I came across. Personally, I would rate my performance at around 7. I’m telling you now that by my next presentation I want to be scoring 9.’ Some people would be happy with an audience rating of 8.1. But, for him, being better meant pushing himself even closer to 10.
So, here’s the question. Where do you want better to take you?
This book will help you on your journey, sharing examples of how others have gone from:
You choose what better means to you. Decide what you want to go from and what you want to become.
One reason the concept of becoming better can scare us is that it requires us to step out of a place that we recognize and have possibly grown comfortable with. Something that describes us. A label. A few of the most frequent labels I see or hear are:
I regularly meet people who carry this kind of label, either one that they’ve chosen for themselves or have been given by others. They wear it believing it is who they are. It limits them. It doesn’t have to.
That’s not to say, of course, that all labels are limiting. Quite often the people who come to me are anxious because they have been given a positive label by someone else and fear they can’t live up to it. They ask me to help them test that assumption. What would it take to believe and accept that label and maximize it? What else might be possible?
Over the years I’ve witnessed students and many clients who felt they couldn’t do something because it wasn’t them. So they didn’t try. I’ve also met many who were courageous enough to have a go, realize they can do it, and flourish once they discover that they can be more than they thought. Having a fixed sense of who we are can hold us back when we want to up our game and be better at something. I regularly witness people who have trapped themselves into a way of thinking that limits their journey before they’ve even embarked on it. Old patterns of thought and action can box us in. They give us a limiting sense of who we can be. When we’re brave enough to try something else – to have a go and learn from the experience – we can often change what we understand to be possible or worth doing, and ultimately who we believe ourselves to be.
One label that hits us all at some point – from those around us, from ourselves, from society – is the label ‘too old’. In 1979, a scientific research project run by Professor Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, looked to prove what was possible when a group of old people were encouraged to step away from that label. The results were extraordinary.
My mother used to say, ‘Old age has nothing to recommend it.’ And when Professor Langer announced that she was looking for elderly men in their seventies and eighties for what she described as a ‘week of reminiscence’, it was no surprise that the group was pretty soon full with volunteers.
What she didn’t tell them was that they would unknowingly be taking part in a study of ageing – an experiment that would drop them right back to 1959, to the world they had inhabited twenty years earlier. Langer was interested in the connection between the mind and the body. If she rewound their minds twenty years, what kind of changes – if any – would the body show?
No surprise that, as the elderly gentlemen were coming forward, Langer felt pangs of concern. ‘You have to understand, when these people came to see if they could be in the study and they were walking down the hall to get to my office, they looked like they were on their last legs, so much so that I said to my students, “Why are we doing this? It’s too risky.”’ However, the experiment continued and the men were split into two groups and transported to a retreat outside Boston, Massachusetts, for a week.
The first group would be reminiscing in the traditional sense: discussing what they used to do back in the 1950s and remembering what life had been like.
The second group would be reminiscing in an experimental way. They were placed in a time warp and were asked to act as if it were actually 1959. They watched films released at that time, listened to music from that period and discussed events such as NASA’s satellite launch that year and Castro’s seizing control in Havana, all – and this is the important factor – in the present tense.
Professor Langer hoped that, by placing them in an environment connected with their past and their younger lives, she could help their minds reconnect with their younger, more able selves. She made sure there was nothing that could remind them of their actual age. When they arrived, she didn’t help them with their bags. ‘I told them they could move them an inch at a time. They could unpack them right at the bus and take up a shirt at a time if that helped.’ Once they got inside the retreat, there were no rails on the walls, no gadgets to help old people. The same men who had been ‘on their last legs’ were now totally immersed in a time when they were twenty years younger.
The men spent a week not being treated as incompetent or sick, and pretty soon Langer could tell it was having an effect. She noted that they were walking faster. Their confidence had improved. They were making their own decisions and even making their own meals.
By the last day, one man had even decided he didn’t need his walking stick. And while they waited for the bus to arrive and take them back home, she asked if one of them wanted to play a game of tag. By the time the bus arrived, the old men were in the middle of a spontaneous game of touch football!
The experiment had returned the men to 1959 and they certainly felt much younger mentally, breaking the shackles of the ‘too old’ label. But what about physically?
Professor Langer took physiological measurements before and after the week’s experiment, and the results were stunning. The old men’s gait, dexterity, speed of movement, cognitive abilities and memory all measurably improved, while their arthritis lessened and their blood pressure dropped; astonishingly, even their eyesight and hearing got better. Both ‘reminiscence’ groups showed improvements, but the group who had lived as if it were twenty years earlier improved the most. By encouraging the men to think younger, their bodies followed and actually behaved as if they were younger.
In my opinion, this is a powerful example of what can happen to the mind and body when people break away from a limiting label. In this book, I’m inviting you to break away from any limiting labels you might have acquired, to leave them behind you and choose a useful first step to move forward. To train your mind and body to help you define the label you want, and live up to it.
Being better requires certain skills, and if you wanted to be better at a sport, a musical instrument or a language, you would want to learn from the best. You would also want someone on hand to guide you, observe you, push you to get better and help measure your progress. Someone to give you honest feedback and help you reach your ambition – be it winning a medal, reaching grade 8 or becoming fluent.
Learning to walk, as a baby, is a great example of how we acquire a skill. We learn from parents, siblings and peers – those who know how to do it. We stand up, we fall down, we try again and again until we get better at it. We are cheered when we succeed, we are encouraged when it’s difficult, we are set challenges to walk a bit further until, eventually, we can do it without thinking.
There isn’t an athlete, musician or performer I know of who doesn’t deliberately practise to improve too. They have a coach to help them work out the key skills they need to practise. The same is true if you wish to be emotionally better – better at managing you.
This book offers simple ideas, tools and techniques to help you choose the way you want to be, rather than letting your habits decide for you. See it as your portable performance coach, helping you work out how to prepare yourself, manage yourself and stretch yourself.
So, standing in a space free of any limiting labels, with a clearer sense (hopefully!) of where you want to get to, I want to ask you the key question again:
If you’re still finding it tricky to answer – which many people do, by the way – try this:
Now …
Write those thoughts down if it helps.
When I ask people to think of something they have already achieved – to connect with their strengths – and from there jump into what the future could be like when they are better, they immediately appear more hopeful and confident, and want to go after it. Revisiting strengths you already have and building on them is a powerful way to develop and grow. In my experience, we all have a lot of them if we really look for them.
So, let’s continue:
Finally, make a note of how you would rate yourself on this ‘Be Better Scale’:
Great. Now that you have a sense of where you are starting from, we can head out on your journey to be better. And remember. Getting better can be easier than we think.