Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the conversations with Coach’s podcast lessons, Episode lessons version. I keep wanting to call them minisodes because I’d like portmanteaus. But anyway, you know what this is? This is me, Kevin, talking to you again inspired, having my cup runneth over with inspiration from a lot of the conversations I’ve been having. In the last Well, it’s pretty regular. I was gonna say in the last month or so. But really, it’s been the last year and a half at this point. Anyway, I was having a conversation with a coach recently for the podcast, I don’t think it’s live yet. Actually, it might be anyway, you can check it out yourself. It’ll be in the it’ll be in the show notes. But we were talking about storytelling, which is obviously a pretty important aspect of a lot of a lot of coaches journeys, a lot of their coaching comes from their own story. A lot of coaches are directly like storytelling coaches, how to turn your story into something that can actually benefit not only you, but the people around you, the people you work with, et cetera, et cetera. So we were talking about storytelling. And we got to talking about stand up comedy. And it turns out that we’ve both had a similar admiration for the work of stand up comedy. Obviously, you know, what you often see is like, the hour long, special, or whatever, people want a big stage, Bright Lights, Big crowd theater, they’ve got this tight hour or whatever, we’re just like, each joke feeds into the next and there’s like this cohesive story, and there’s callbacks, it just looks like this, just perfectly assembled and well oiled machine. But the greats anyway, what you don’t often see, unless you happen to be a fan of that comic, or you go to seek it out, or you’re someone who just goes to comedy clubs, you don’t see the work that goes into that behind the scenes, and I say behind the scenes, but it’s not really behind the scenes. It’s all right out there.
These standup comics, they go up on stage, and they try out new material that go up there with notebooks and a glass of water and they try stuff out, they’ll often pause their performance to consult their notes, they will bomb. And by bomb, I mean, just be so unfunny and unentertaining. so as to have the crowd almost turn on them. And these are, these are people who make a living, they, in some cases, a very good living doing this, and they continually will go when they’re trying to material, and it’ll just fall flat. But what they’ll do is they’ll learn this worked, this didn’t, or this works here, if I put this after and this before it, the crowd responds to this, this crowd, this other location responded differently. And so they’re constantly gathering bits of information from what you would be tempted, you might be tempted to call repeated failures. And what a good stand up comic understands is that those quote unquote, failures are absolutely crucial to their craft. And I just love I love that concept. I love thinking about that, in the context of coaching and storytelling, it’s just business and just life in general, is how much of the required work is just about getting up there and doing it, just do it. And sometimes it’s gonna work, sometimes it’s really not gonna work. And sometimes you’re going to fail miserably, but that not but and that is part of the process. That is what allows you to refine your methods and grow your work and figure out what’s funny, or in certain other cases, what’s going to really impact your clients and what’s really going to impact the people you work with and work for, and the people that you’ve served. I find it completely fascinating. We actually in our conversation as we were talking, we kind of compared it to a science because there’s just a whole lot of trial and error. I mean, you think about the scientific method, you come up with a hypothesis. And then you test that hypothesis, I think this question will elicit the right kind of answer from my client and try it out. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t or work, it’s not really a one to one thing I’ll most often things don’t just work or not work, there’s just something in between where it kind of worked, or it made some progress, but you know, it could be better, or it kind of went sideways.
And so maybe you need to rephrase it or reframe it, ask it a different time or stage and the process is all sorts of ways to apply it. But really, there’s such a science to it is really trial and error with an eye and a heart towards greater service. You know, I think you all know this because you’re all driven in large part by desire to give back by that desire to serve your clients and your people with impact. So anyway, I find stand up comedy and the process behind it to be a fascinating way to look at the other things that we do in our lives. The other I mean performances, the other things we attempt to do for people and how we can grow and make them better in a way that makes sense. It’s not just you have it or you don’t most people who are funny professionally. They might be funny instinctively or I’ve always like you know, been funny at family gatherings. But they all worked there took us off. They all work their butts off to be funny professionally and that’s honestly. What separates them from people who are just funny at family gatherings, or funny in the group or, you know, funny on the phone or funny in the Zoom meeting? Anyway, there’s a lot there. I love thinking about this. I love talking about this. So I wanted to share that with you as a lesson that I got enhanced and refined by a conversation I had with a coach on this very podcast. So thank you for listening. Let me know if you identify with that. Actually, I feel like I feel like a lot of you would, but let me know it’s, it’s obviously the kind of thing I’d love to talk about. So I kind of say, I got some more for you in the can. So I’m going to talk to you again on these lessons-minisodes very soon.
