Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the conversations with coaches podcast, slash lessons colon that that dot lessons part whatever part this is anyway, it says this recurring series of basically just some of the cool, awesome stick with you for a while insights that I’ve gotten from a bunch of the coaches I’ve spoken with over the last year and a half or so it’s, it’s just fantastic. Like I said, I’ve explained this many times, but I always feel like I should, every once in a while, refresh that explanation, I just get so much good stuff from the coaches, I get to talk to just in the telling of their own stories, how they became a coach, what their business and their practices like today, who they coach and how they coach them. And just just in the natural course of the conversation, if you listen to any of the episodes, you understand, just such gold comes out. And to the surprise of no one many of these coaches in fact, pretty much all of them have a have a way with words. And so I just like to spin some of them back out in various forms. Sometimes it’s just something that gets, you know, I’ll hear it in different ways four, or five, or six or a dozen different times over the course of a couple of months. And I just end up kind of getting into my head in a certain way, I’ll noodle on and I’ll write it up on my whiteboard. And we’ll just kind of follow me through my day and my week and my month and my year and maybe stay with me forever, who knows. But it’s what I like to spin them back out and share them. And today, I have one something that kind of came up again.
But for the first time in a little while in a particular way and a conversation I was recording yesterday with a coach that I’m very pleased to introduce you to in a few weeks when her episode airs. We were talking about, among other things, the nature of competition, and how oftentimes we find ourselves thinking of competition is like a zero sum game where it’s like, you know, we’re, you know, competing against XYZ person in our niche. And this is, you know, this can be applied generally, of course, but also speaking fairly specifically, maybe you’re competing with people in your department, other companies in your, in your industry, who knows what it could be. But there’s a temptation to only think of competition in that sort of zero sum lens, when there’s winners, there’s losers, there’s a finite pie, and to also have that understanding of competition, leak into competitive analysis. Now, I’m speaking a little bit as a marker here, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. But still, I want to contextualize a little bit. Competitive analysis is a really, really important aspect of business and marketing, full stop knowing what the people who are in your business are doing, what’s working for them, what’s not working for them, is a really important part of understanding what’s going to work and not work for you and maybe what you can and should be doing right now. And maybe going forward. It’s really interesting, a lot of fascinating details can come out of this. But this coach I spoke to, like I was gonna say I’ll save her name for when her episode airs. But she said something interesting, and she was speaking extemporaneously about about this subject. And a phrase popped into my head as she was talking that I was getting excited to say myself, I was like, Oh, she reminds me of this, this analogy, I like to use a lot.
And as she was closing out her thoughts, she said, the exact words that were in my head, which, again, unsurprising but still delightful, when a coach is like you’re on the same wavelength. They know what you’re thinking, they know what they’re saying, they know what they’re thinking they know the right words, the right dive, it’s kind of perfect, but we were talking about this idea of competition and competitive analysis. And what looking at and engaging with competition can really do. And she was comparing and contrasting it with how in coaching, a lot of times, what you’re trying to do is to go to the limit, you know, reach for the stars, you’re basically trying to, you know, raise the ceiling on what you can do to go places you’ve maybe only dreamed about before, but you’re beginning to make your dreams a reality. You know, it’s really like, you know, seems like pie in the sky stuff. But like, this is what coaches do professionally, and they’re good at it. But then we started talking about and she mentioned how competitive analysis and competent competitive analysis and competition were really does is it raises the floor, it allows you to understand what the foundation is, what the like, the lowest level, like the minimum viable, whatever it happens to be is. And I really, really gravitated towards looking at that facet of competition, and having an understanding of both its importance and its limitations. And I really, really liked that where, I mean, it’s pretty much right there. It’s pretty simple. What understanding the competition can help you to do is to understand things that you should be doing. Maybe everyone should be doing maybe how you can differentiate, and it does raise the floor brings you up to a certain level where it’s like, Okay, I’m gonna be I’m gonna be at least this good at XYZ when I’m going around doing this thing.
But it doesn’t really doesn’t really raise your ceiling. Then there are other things that coaches talk about. We’ll talk about in later episodes. Certainly, actually, we’ve talked about that in past episodes, where you can really raise the roof reach for the stars and like really attain your dreams. But I liked a really, really, really liked thinking of competitive analysis as a floor raiser, not a roof raiser and understanding it in that way, allowing me to use it better to understand the nature of the information and where it’s going to be most valuable. I’m still playing with noodling around with like, I’m like, I’m in my basement with a guitar trying to pick out some chords I’m noodling around with this idea, thinking about how it applies to my Well, my professional life, the work I do for our clients, for our clients, and also just in my personal life. So this one’s a little bit like three quarters baked, it’s been in the oven for a little while, and then maybe the dough is rising, I’m gonna stop mixing my analogies at this point, but I want to share it with you, and share what my thoughts were at the present moment regarding competition, of course, and competitive analysis and raising floors versus raising ceilings and how that all kind of interacts. There was one thought I do want to leave you with though, and this is something that’s been with me for a very long time. It’s an an old African, say, it’s an old quote, it’s actually, to my knowledge, it’s more or less a paraphrase of Bible verse. But it’s essentially it means a number of things. It’s mostly how we make each other better. But um, I won’t say the whole quote, but it’s as iron sharpens iron. So one person sharpens another, forget where it’s at, I’m sure you can, Google as iron sharpens iron, and I’m certain it’ll come up and, you know, some some meaningful way.
But I have always, I’ve always loved that I’ve actually had that in my head in my heart for a very long time, my life, and always just was a good reminder of just the way that we can. As human beings, we make nature the better, you know, sharper, more, more full to our purpose, you know, iron, sharpening iron, like the sharpening, meaning, you know, a blades and making cuts and things have a purpose can act, and have always really, really, really liked that and thinking about that, in terms of competition, how it sounds zero sum game, you know, obviously, there are winners and losers to everything in certain aspects defined in certain ways. But really, it’s just your, your competitors. And this, I find this to be so true in the coaching industry, especially. But more and more true with the internal workings of companies that seem to be either headed the right direction, or already doing some of their best work. And that it’s the competition actually helps everyone to improved better, and not in some, like negatively defining way where there’s a winner, and then a collection of losers, or neither, you know, even defined that way. It’s just defined as this sharpening, where everyone is spurring each other on. Well, in ways both direct and indirect, intentional and unintentional. But by design, but the very structure of the way the company, the organization, the team, the family is working. So it’s one of the toss that in there at the end as well. Like I said, there’s some there’s some ideas here that you’re noodling with each other playing in the band, I guess, no, I have this image of a jam band in my head, which is apparently know where you’d like to be right now. I wanted to share it with you. And I say this sometimes, but I should say every time let me know what you think about this. Like I’m, I’m very curious to have conversations like this.
A lot of times we’ll start to touch on ideas like this during the podcasts. And because we try to keep things short, we often get right up to the cusp of really diving into like the deep end of conversations like this, and then we cut things short. I think it’s the smart move. I think it keeps things succinct and accessible and still really valuable. But man, am I tempted sometimes to deep dive on stuff like this and really go exploring. So let me know what you think. shoot me a message. If you want to come back on the pod for like a part two or part three in some of your cases, and chat about something like this or this. In particular, let me know because yeah, I’m still I’ll still be down here in the basement of my mind noodling on a on a bass guitar trying to find those chords. Until then. I’ll talk to you soon.
