The Podcast for Coaches
Powered By CoachVille.com
A powerful exercise to Energize Your Dream – Enjoy Challenges (5 of 9)
Our fears are the internal experience… the challenges are the external experience; everything that stands between the player and the peak experience they are playing for.
Imagine playing for your dream is like putting a game cartridge into a game console… you are put into a new world with situations coming at you. How do you respond?
We need to overcome our Industrial Age mindset that thinks we should know how to do everything already and a challenge means you are doing it wrong.
You can use the 4 ways to play as a starting point to look into the outside world for the challenges.
The Exercise:
This is a 2 column writing exercise:
Imagine yourself playing for your dream. Look out into the world for the challenges you encounter; write them in the left column.
In the Right column: Ask yourself the question: who is this challenge asking me to become?
What superpowers do I need to develop to rise up to this challenge?
Have FUN!
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
challenges, dream, fears, playing, players, situations, industrial age, talk, respond, metaphor, enjoy, console, experiment, coaches, linkedin groups, fun, champion, episode, task, world
SPEAKERS
David Buck
00:00 The Topic
One awesome way to energize your dream is to actively enjoy every challenge that you encounter. And then ask yourself this really provocative question. Who is this challenge asking me to become? This is the champion of dreams podcast. Let’s play.
00:33 Welcome
Hello to you ghost a buck here with you. This is the champion of dreams podcast, the podcast for coaches, powered by CoachVille.com where we are the champion of your dreams to be a great coach. And together, we champion the dreams of amazing players, making the world a better place all over the world. team play for transformation. This is episode number five for December the 27th 2020.
01:12 From embrace to enjoy
We are continuing our adventure through nine ways to energize your big dream. Remember, playing for a big dream is about pursuing peak experiences out in the world where you really come alive, where you contribute to the lives of other people. And today, we’re going to talk about a really provocative idea called enjoying challenges. Now I used to say embrace challenges. And that was pretty good. That was a step up from ignoring or hoping we don’t have any challenges. From the industrial age. We’ll get to that in a moment. But it used to be I used to say embrace. But now I think we need to go even bigger beyond embracing which is okay. I am glad this is here and I’m welcoming it into my life. I want you to go even further, I want you to enjoy challenges. And we’ll get into that and why that is so important in this in this episode.
02:22 Challenges are external; Fears are internal
Okay, so now first thing about challenges. I’ve been asking my players about challenges for over 20 years. And when I ask people about their challenges, most of the time, they start talking about their fears, or doubts or resistance or frustration, they talk about the inner experience. But this is why I strategically placed this episode after the one where we talk about fears. So I want you to first really understand this important distinction for yourself as a player. But even more important for your life as a coach is to think about fears, and all the fear related experiences as the internal experience. And challenges are the external experience. Challenges are what is happening and not happening out in the world.
03:23 What is happening in the world around you
Your fears, your inner experiences include doubt, confusion, frustration, isolation, resistance, avoidance, procrastination, all of these are fear. But that’s all the inner stuff, which is vital. It’s important part of what we do as coaches help our players understand their inner world. But we also have to help them understand what’s happening out in the world of the adventure, where they’re playing for their dream. And the idea is you’ve got this vision, your or your player has this vision for experiences they want to co create in the world. And then anything that gets in the way between your player and that experience is a challenge. The key is to see this as a fun thing. Like this is the fun of playing for a dream. All right, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
04:14 It’s like putting a game cartridge in the console
One thing I love to share here is a metaphor, maybe this is a little old school metaphor. I don’t know, when when I was a teenager, we had a video game console, it was plugged into the television, I guess people still have these things. And the idea was you had this console, but then you plugged a cartridge into it. And then that opened up a new world and then all of a sudden there you are, you’re in this world and you’re trying to figure out what to do. I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for having a big dream. It’s almost like you’ve got this life and not much happens until you plug a big dream into the console. And then all of a sudden, your faced with all sorts of interesting situations and challenges that come at you, as a result of putting this dream into the console, or starting up this dream and your life. So I think that’s pretty, a pretty awesome metaphor to just understand. When you have a big dream, you will start having new situations, new challenges, new things coming at you that weren’t coming at you before. But this is good, this means you’re playing.
05:31 Industrial Age Mindset… You messed up.
Now, this can be really difficult for our industrial age minds to understand. Because in the industrial age, we were taught to be task oriented, and problem oriented. Okay, so a task orientation means you’re supposed to know the right way to do it, and then just do it the right way every time and don’t mess up. And if you have a challenge, that probably means that you’re doing it wrong. Okay, so that was a really bad thing. If you have a challenge, oh, no, I’m having a challenge, I must be doing a wrong, I’m not gonna finish my task on time. I’m a bad person. This was a dreadful way to live. Because that’s not real life. Life is not about completing tasks. And you’re not supposed to live your life the same way every time. That’s not a good way to live.
06:21 Industrial Age Mindset… find the right way
All right, and then you had the problem orientation. And this is sort of similar to challenge except when it’s a problem, it sort of has this tone of, well, you’ve got to find the right way to solve the problem. There’s sort of this weird pressure, that you’ve got to find the right way. And it’s not fun. Whereas when you play, there is no right way, there’s just finding your way, there’s could be so many possible ways of how to respond to a situation. And it’s up to you to respond your way. That’s being playful. Okay, so it’s a big deal.
07:05 You are NOT supposed to know what to do
When you go out into the world for your dream, or when your players do, you have to understand, they’re going out there to play for their dream with an industrial mind. So the first thing that comes up as a challenge, they’re going to feel bad, like, Oh, I don’t know what to do, I’m supposed to know what to do. And that’s just this pervasive, strange Industrial Age thing where we feel like, we’re always supposed to know what to do in every situation, which is totally unrealistic, especially if you’re out in the world, going for a new dream, you don’t know what to do. But you do know that you can playfully respond to any situation. And again, the key is just to remember, oh, yeah, I’m playing for this dream. And when I face a new challenge, this is fun. Just really enjoy the process of growing and building your capabilities, which is what happens when you really enjoy challenges.
08:02 Challenges with the 4 pivotal moments of play
So another quick thing you can look at here is to remember these four ways of playing that we’ve been talking about relate, create, explore and experiment. Now when you relate for influence, so there’s certainly a lot going on the inside of you a lot of fears and doubts. But there are also challenges out in the world, the other person that you’re attempting to influence, maybe they don’t know much about what you’re offering. Maybe they they have their own doubts and fears. How do you respond to those? When you’re creating for expression? Certainly lots of challenges there, people’s attention spans are really short. How do you capture their attention for a few moments? How do you present something that really keeps them with you? are the folks in your tribe really resonating with what you are creating with them? And for them? How do you respond to the feedback that you receive or this silence that you receive? So these are, these are ways you can begin to look outside of you for the challenges?
09:10
Of course, there’s the inner ones as we know, those are the fears, etc. But look outside for challenges. Think about exploring for visibility, where do you find your people? When you do explore a new place? How do you figure out if your people are there you you know, you need to adapt to every new place. In some ways, joining new Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups or whatever kind of group you’re in is almost like going to a new country. So you want to go to it with an exploratory perspective and and be ready to face new situations and challenges. And of course, when you experiment for change the fourth way when ever you do something in a new way, new situations will happen that you need to respond to and It could lead to an awesome discovery. That’s the whole fun of experiment.
10:05 The Exercise
All right, so here’s the exercise, you get yourself into your comfy place for 15 or 20 minutes. And this is another two column writing exercise in the left column. You imagine playing for your dream, you’re in pursuit of your peak experiences. And then you look out into the world and the situations that you’re in the situations, you imagine. And you ask yourself, what’s the challenge here? You know, so for example, if you are relating for influence, and you can imagine, you’re talking to a potential player, and you really want them to say yes, but maybe they don’t understand what you offer, or you don’t know how to figure out what is their true deep motivation? How do you find that in that person? That’s the challenge. Now, you write your challenges down the left side, the out in the world challenges, then in the right column, here’s the big part. You ask yourself, who is this challenge? Asking me to become? Who is this challenge asking me to become? What superpowers Do I need to develop, or practice to rise up to this challenge? This is a really powerful way to put yourself into a cycle of growth and becoming, and it’s really, really fun. Remember, challenges are fun. And we are here to enjoy that. This is a really, really important step in playing big for your dream. And when you really become a player, you begin to seek bigger challenges. That’s when it really gets good.
11:52 Please Share This!
All right, this was super fun. sharing this with you feel free to share this with your players or anyone you know, who would love to play big in the world and especially anyone you know, who would love to learn more about coaching. Have an awesome day. I will be back with you tomorrow. Enjoy this exercise. And you can find a transcript of this episode as well as lots of other awesome things for coaches and players on our website, CoachVille.com. And until the next time remember, everyone needs a champion for their dreams. That’s why there’s coaches.