Paul underachieved for years, then missed the criteria one quarter and was put out of the community for six months.
His real problem was never the work or his technique, it was his attitude.
One reframe changed it: he was not selling, he was finding people to help.
Losing a client used to knot his stomach, until he learned he could be himself and still fill a practice.
He made Expert as himself, and now enjoys rebuilding from scratch in a new market
There was a quarter, years into this work, when I did not meet the criteria to keep my designation and, just like that, I was off the island. Out of the community for six months, cut off from the QCEs and the rooms where I did my best thinking.
I could have waited a single quarter and slipped quietly back in, but I decided not to. If I was going to come back, I wanted to come back in a way that made sure this never happened to me again.
Before EOS®, I was the one who fixed things
I did not arrive here as a natural rainmaker: I am a math major who became a CPA and then a computer consultant, twenty four years of it at a big consulting firm that is now Accenture, mostly with small and mid sized companies. I loved that work, but in my last few years I enjoyed it less, so I left.
After that I ran a peer group and coaching business for owners through an outfit called TAB, the Alternative Board, a little like Vistage for smaller companies. I facilitated their monthly meetings and coached the owners one on one.
What I had always wanted, underneath all of it, was to teach. I did a little substitute teaching after I left the firm, and even looked into teaching at a university. When I came across EOS®, the role was teacher, facilitator, and coach all at once, and the teaching part lit me up. I think I have a knack for making complicated things land simply, and the model is already simple, so my job was to explain it well and stay out of its way
I am not a naturally creative person, and I never had the itch to build my own thing. I was happy to take a proven system, learn it cold, and stay true to what it was meant to be. It felt like being handed something beautiful and being told, do not mess this up.
How I am wired
It helps to know how my brain works, because it explains the trouble I got into.
I am a Kolbe Fact Finder, a nine, the kind who wants the numbers and the details. For years I was the only nine in the room: I used to sit up front, and Gino and I would parry back and forth. I would correct him on something now and then, and he would find a way to prank me back. Troy Schuette came along as the second nine eventually, but there were never many of us.
On DISC I am an S and a C. I like people, I am not particularly assertive, and they do not give me as much energy as some other things do. I went to boot camp in 2011, one of twenty five people around a table in a private room off the bar of a hotel in Detroit. There are close to a thousand of us now. Set aside Don and Gino, and I am eleventh in tenure, which is a strange and nice thing to be able to say. None of that tenure, though, made me good at the part of this job I dreaded.
The number I kept not looking at
For a long stretch I bounced between ten and fourteen clients and called it fine. Thirty to fifty sessions a year, enough to feel busy, enough not to look too hard at the number. The people around me were kinder to me than I was to myself. They would say “Paul, come on, you're better than that, you should have twenty clients”. And I knew they were right. That was the part that stung: I knew there was more in me, and I was not planning or executing like a person who believed it.
So when the quarter came that I missed the criteria, part of me was not surprised. Back then there were only two designations, and when I did not meet the criteria one quarter, well…
I was out.
Six months on the outside. Chicago, my home community, never let go of me during that stretch, and I am grateful for it, but I still had to sit with a plain fact: I had underachieved my way out of the room. The forced pause did one useful thing, it made me get serious about the part I had been avoiding.
What took me the longest to see was that my problem was never the work. Put me in front of a leadership team and I am steady, I can teach the model in my sleep. A coach and friend of mine, John, used to describe business development the Sandler way, as three parts: your behaviors, your attitude, and your technique.
My technique was fine, my behaviors came and went, but my attitude was the anchor dragging the whole thing down, and I had been trying to fix everything except that.
Underneath it was a story I told myself. I am not a salesman, and I did not want to be one. Being an S and a C, not the type to work a room, felt like a disqualification for the whole business-development half of the job.
The sentence that changed everything
John moved that story with one reframe, and I still remember the relief of it landing.He got me to see that I was not selling at all: help first is a core value, and it is my number one. So the sentence I started saying to myself was simple.
I'm not selling, I'm trying to find people to help.
If I can help them, wonderful. If I cannot, that is fine too, and I go and find someone I can. The pressure came off, and for the first time business development felt like something I was allowed to do as myself.
The knot in my gut
The old way had lived in my body. For years, losing a client sat in my stomach. I remember an Implementer walking up to me right before a meeting to tell me he was talking to a prospect I wanted, and that they had decided to go with him.
I felt it drop, a physical knot. A later coach gave me the line for exactly that moment.
“Some will, some won't, so what? Someone's waiting”.
You click with some people and not with others, and when you do not, you go and find the next one you do.
I have worked with about seventy five clients over the years, and maybe four or five were never really a fit as people. That leaves around seventy who were glad to have me in the room, which is more than enough for the part of me, the part in most of us, that wants to be liked.
Once I understood that I could be fully myself and still fill a practice, the knot let go, completely. When I lose a bake-off now, or hear that another Implementer is talking to a company I am talking to, it does not touch me the way it did. I can wish it well and move on to the next conversation.
Becoming myself, not Gino, not Paton
The work itself changed as I stopped performing. Early on I leaned hard on teaching, because the material was new to me. Now, past seven hundred and fifty sessions, I rarely open the guides. Knowing the model frees me up to watch the room instead, to read the body language and the faces, to listen for the thing under the words and ask the question that surfaces it. If you know the arc from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, I lived it.
Being calm did not get me out of the hard parts: you still have to enter the danger and name what a team is avoiding, but I just learned to do it my way.
I do not shout and I do not swear, I simply point out what I am seeing and ask a difficult question quietly. I was never going to be Gino Wickman or Mike Paton, and once I stopped trying to be, I got better.
It took me eleven years to reach Expert, and let me tell you: I will not pretend that was quick. I once had a slightly competitive back and forth with another Expert about which of us had been slower.
But I got there as myself, and that has held up.
