If I sound unreasonable…

Had the opportunity to catch up with one of the Adapt crew today in the form of Stubbsy for a coffee at @GoodBrotherCafe

He’d overheard my conversation the other day at Adapt when I was speaking to my business Coach about the difficulty in putting together an engaging newsletter. It was just taking up too much of my time and that’s really hard to justify when only half of your subscribers actually read it (mailchimp stats don’t lie…)

He’s keen to give me a hand and offered to write some useful articles for the newsletter related to training and life. I think Stubbsy’s sitting on a a heap of good ideas at the moment and so accepted his offer. To set it in stone I’ve given him a week to come up with something. The subjects a good one but you’ll have to wait and see the next newsletter to check it out.

I’ve been spending some time writing lately too. Spurred on by recent happenings at the gym I’ve jumped into Evernote and started to spew forth some semi coherent thoughts from my brain. I’ll get all gee-d up about a particular incident or event and want to start a fight. I like to debate. I like to tell people how it is (or how I think it is) and while sometimes that’s a good thing, more often than not my rants contain content that would surely start fights or emotionally crush an innocent bystander…

Thank God I’ve got a couple of people like my wife and Nick Hind to run my thoughts and articles by. These guys not only fix spelling mistakes but they’re able to decifer my rage, calm me down and get me looking at the bigger picture. They help me to turn something potentialy destructive into something constructive. I’ve asked Stubbsy if I could bounce some ideas off him too – He agreed. Poor guy.

After reviewing the feedback to a recent member survey, I mentioned that perhaps I needed to soften my approach for all the ‘precious flowers’ in the gym and write articles that were, well a little less confronting. I seem to always expect too much from my guys. I’m always pushing them to go for the next level and sometimes miss the small wins. I mean it’s fantastic that you just got your 1st ever pull-up but now you should go for ‘3’ then ‘5’ and so forth and so on. It could have something to do with my upbringing but that’s pretty much how I think about things “Nice work… Now what’s next?”

Stubbsy mentioned that he’d recently seen a book called ‘The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World‘ — From Amazon:

Renowned playwright George Bernard Shaw once said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” By this definition, some of today’s entrepreneurs are decidedly unreasonable – and have even been dubbed crazy. Yet as John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan argue in “The Power of Unreasonable People”, our very future may hinge on their work.

So it got me thinking. I Googled some more books and articles and came across another book: ‘Be Unreasonable: The Unconventional Way to Extraordinary Business Results‘ and the book’s basic premise was that people who expect unreasonable things achieve great results. — From their website:

Be Unreasonable is the antidote for excuse-making, tired thinking, and gutless action. That means, this book just might be for anybody who is in a leadership position, who has to make decisions, or who is responsible for results—with no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

That sounded like something I’d like to read and I brought a copy for my iPhone Kindle app straight away. I know, I know, now it just sounds like I’m justifying my bad personality traits but Stubbsy said that my ‘unreasonably’ high expectations of the members at Adapt always ensured that our guys and girls were achieving results and that if I only ever asked for things that were easily achievable people would look for a greater challenge somewhere else.

Where to from here?

For the time being while I might try and soften my approach for one or two people in the gym and keep my eye out for small wins to celebrate. But for the rest of you it’s business as usual ” Happy days for your first pull-up… Now show me 3″