- Adam came off an annual with his favorite client around session 100 feeling like he had it figured out
- Within two months that client stopped meeting, and his practice slid back six months
- The real lesson of his first two hundred sessions: it doesn't get any easier
- What it built was emotional capacity, a next play mentality, and knowing when to hold back in the room
- He also learned he isn't his mentor Tzvi Schwartz, and stopped apologizing for being himself
I had just wrapped an annual with my favorite client, and I thought I had this whole thing figured out.
They had flown their entire company to Florida for their national sales meeting. They wanted me down there a couple of days early, not to work, just to be part of the vibe. Then we ran the annual, and we came off it feeling so good about everything that had happened: the company was growing, the team saw the value, I was doing impactful work. This was around session 100, and from where I was standing it looked like the view from the top.
Then it all just stopped.
Within the next two months, their business ran into situations you could only call acts of God. Nothing anybody could have seen coming. We had April on the calendar, canceled April and did an IDS™ instead, just to figure out what was going on and when we would get back on the same page. We aimed for July, but July didn't happen. We still haven't been back in the room, though I'm in touch with them, and maybe one day we will.
Everything comes in threes, and that was only the beginning.
Slowly, client by client, my practice slid back to where it had been six months earlier. I was a year and a half into this, not three and a half, so six months was a serious chunk of the whole thing. It was hard. I had to refocus and rebuild my flywheel, and I had to do it right after being handed what felt like proof that I was good at this.
That was the real lesson of my first two hundred sessions: it doesn't get any easier.
Building emotional capacity
What that stretch forced me to build was emotional capacity.
This work has peaks and valleys, runs and slides, and if you ride every one of them all the way up and all the way down, it will wreck you. The model I keep in my head is Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer of all time.
He can blow game seven of the World Series and come back the best closer in the league the next year. That is the next play mentality, and it took me three and a half years to build any real version of it.
The core value I wrestle with most is humbly confident. At my first QCE, Mark O'Donnell had all of us write down the core values and sit with how we were living them, and within three to six months of starting I already knew which one was mine to work on. I am as driven as they come. No matter how good my practice gets, it will never be good enough for me, and most days I think that helps me more than it hurts.
But humbly confident cuts both ways. A conversation I keep having with Tzvi Schwartz is that arrogance is acting ungodly, and that beating yourself up is its own kind of arrogance, because it assumes you are the one holding all the cards when there are bigger things in play.
When things go well I can get very high on myself. When they don't, the imposter syndrome doesn't just knock, it knocks me down. Learning to sit in the middle of that is some of the hardest work I do, and it shows up in the session room. I have learned to dial myself back, to let the team beat each other up a little and figure things out for themselves, instead of jumping in radically every time I see the wrong conversation happening.
Knowing when to hold back turned out to be a skill, not just a temperament, and most of what I have since changed about how I run a session comes straight out of it.
Learning I'm not Tzvi
Before boot camp I followed Tzvi into every session he would let me into. Nineties, Focus Days, a couple of annuals, until the team asked me to step out for the team health work, which was the right call. I learned an enormous amount watching one of the best do it. I also learned that I am not him. We are wired similarly and we care about the same things, but our personalities, our humor, the analogies we reach for, all of it is different. He is never irreverent. I can be. I have, as one of my clients puts it, about the fastest brain to mouth speed he has ever heard.
For a while I tried to present like the person I thought an Implementer was supposed to be. It doesn't work. I have no poker face, and it pains me to be anything other than myself. My favorite movie is The Big Lebowski, and there is a line where one character tells his friend, "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."
Somewhere in these two hundred sessions I learned to be a little less of that, and at the same time to stop apologizing for who I am. I show up in jeans and sneakers. If a team needs me in a suit to take me seriously, we were going to have a hard eight hours together anyway.
What I hold onto now, on the days the practice feels like it is sliding again, is that it can climb back just as fast, and that a lot of people are working hard to get even close to where I already am. I try to be grateful for that: I believe it is all from God, and that I have been put in the right place at the right time to take my freak flag public.
