00:00:01 I'm Kim Avery author of the prayer powered entrepreneur. And I challenge you to focus on your calling as a Christian entrepreneur. One way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader, Welcome to episode 699 of the inspired stewardship podcast. And they were very frustrated because they felt like no one on their team really knew how to work with them.
00:00:35 And no one on the team really knew how to understand what they were asking them to do. And so one of the first things we did is we stepped back and we actually looked at the communication styles that all of the different members of the team had welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be,
00:00:58 then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired search of podcast. Learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about investing in yourself through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about what the open Gates model is, how this applies to how we use our talent.
00:01:33 And I give you an example of this model and how it can apply to improving your communication. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible
00:01:57 to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. If you listen to Tuesday's episode where I explained the open Gates model,
00:02:25 you can skip ahead to about minute eight and a half, eight 45, and pick up there where we talk about talent. If not listen in, as I explained, the open Gates model. So one of the models that I like for framing and thinking about coaching and building habits and self-development or change when it comes to looking at ourselves and thinking about how we grow and how we change.
00:02:53 It's an idea that I first learned about from a coach mentor of mine named coach Tony. And he talked about this idea of open Gates. See that the idea that a lot of coaches have is they focus on changing one kind of behavior. Maybe they, they focus as a habit on helping people build a new habit through building up tiny habits. In fact,
00:03:18 Tony first started looking at coaching and building habits when he invented a, uh, a habit tracking app that has since gone on to become coach.me. And this idea was that we could start with tiny Keystone habits and begin over time to build up on those and you would see change and growth, but then he began to look at this over a large number of people using this app.
00:03:46 And he began to look at how many people were consistent and successful in changing their habits. And what he found is, as he began to study this, it was somewhere in that, you know, eight, five to 15% range, somewhere between five and 15% of the people seem to be successful in building a new habit. And that often even when he brought on coaches,
00:04:09 the coaches would try to attack that through sort of a single piece of advice. And the epiphany that Kony had is the truth is that the coaching that we do, the change that we make has to be more complex than any one single piece of advice for any of us. It's the reason why perhaps you've seen somebody else successfully begin to go to the gym or change their health or change their money or something else.
00:04:38 And we think to ourselves, I want to do that too. And so we asked them, what did you do? What was successful for you? And they share the one or two or three things that they did, then you try them and you fail miserably. And so the framing that Tony came up with and it, and it comes from other research that comes out of NLP and some other things like that was that really,
00:05:01 and truly we are made up of a series of things and they're not, hierarchial, it's not like one thing comes before or after another, but instead they're all necessary. They're interconnected. And this includes our mission, our identity, our belief, our capacity, our habit, and our environment, and that to successfully have change happen. All of these have to be open.
00:05:26 All of these have to successfully be addressed at different times. Different ones of us have different ones of these that are open or closed or available for change successfully in different ways. So if you begin to figure out that you want to build a new habit, then you're attacking that habit gate. But if your capacity or your belief or your environment or your mission,
00:05:54 or your identity are not ready, then that habits not going to stick. And oftentimes for many of us, one or two of these Gates, sometimes even three or four, all of them are closed. And we have to begin to address opening all of them before we can make successful change. And for many people, coaches and therapists tend to focus on mission,
00:06:19 identity and belief while trainers and weight coaches or athletic coaches, which is these kinds of people spend their time on capability, habit, and environment. I mean, think about it a lot of times, when you think about like a life coach or career coach, they spend a lot of time helping you figure out why what's important to you. What matters to you?
00:06:42 That's around these ideas of mission, identity, and belief. Those are really all kinds of beliefs about ourselves and others. By if you get into the more tactical, the more practical the application, the actual execution of things, then you tend to be working around capability, habit, and environment. But the interesting thing is it's not one or the other.
00:07:06 It's all of these that are important. So real quick definitions, you probably kind of came up with definitions in your head for each of these. But to give you a little bit of framing environment is literally the external things around you. It could be as simple as setting an alarm on your phone, how much time you have availability. It also could be certain physical.
00:07:27 All activities are physical access to a computer is needed. If you're building something around computers, habit is the idea of incremental change over time. It's, it's the consistency piece. It's not just one and done, but continue to work at it over time. Capacity is about the skills and strategies that we use. It's both the tactical, the little day to day stuff and the strategic,
00:07:54 the bigger picture strategies that we use to actually improve or change in an area. And then when we transitioned to belief, belief is about those internal all beliefs that we have about ourselves and about the world world, including the ones that we don't even know are there, the ones we haven't ever articulated to anyone. And then identity is a type of belief,
00:08:17 but specifically it's the beliefs you have about yourself. So belief is more about how the world works and identity is about how you work, work. And then mission is about what's important to you. What you do really value, not what you say, you value, but what you really value. That's why sometimes when people begin to change habit, they stopped doing it because they figured out that there's something that's more important to them,
00:08:43 something better for them to do. And all of these are part of this open Gates model. So when we think about those Gates identity, mission, belief, habit, capacity, and environment, we can apply that filter to just about anything that we're trying to do or develop. So one of the areas that I work with people on is around leadership and communication.
00:09:08 There's this idea of interacting with others as a leader, helping them to develop themselves and developing ourselves to be able to communicate better. And so, as I coach people in this, again, these Gates come up, usually people are focused on when you think about communication, making other people understand and do things, communication and leadership. Oftentimes when people come in to coaching on it,
00:09:35 they want to know how to make people understand them better, or make people follow through better or do what I'm asking them to do better. And if you think about it inherent in them, that question, that, that habit building kind of question are some questions about belief and about identity. No, because immediately we have to assume that we are the better communicator and that others are having trouble understanding.
00:10:05 And often one of the first things that I try to work people on is flipping that and recognizing that the truth is one of the problems we have when we communicate is we know what's going on in our own head. We know what we intend. We know what we mean. We know our own head, we know what's going on inside of ourselves. And so we just assume that other people do.
00:10:28 So I was working with a leader one time on learning how to communicate better with their team. And they were very frustrated because they felt like no one on their team really knew how to work with them. And no one on the team really knew how to understand what they were asking them to do. And so one of the first things we did is we stepped back and we actually looked at the communication styles that all of the different members of the team had.
00:10:55 And as we began to dissect that, and I showed to the leader through using discs, kind of how different members of their team approach communication in different ways. Suddenly the leader began to recognize that part of the problem is they were speaking to people in the room one way, but those people actually looked at the world with a different set of lenses. They thought about the world a different way.
00:11:19 And in this case, the leader was a high D kind of person, very results driven, but almost everyone on their team was much higher in the S and in the C kind of component. And so the, the leader was often giving directions, like, just do it. You know, this is what works, just do it. And then they were getting frustrated because the members of their team were asking for more information were,
00:11:44 were asking how this would apply to other situations. They wanted more details. That was the sea coming out. And there were several members that, that often felt like the leader was being aggressive to them. They would express that they felt like they were being yelled at. And the leader began to understand that it was less what they were saying and more about their tone and their approach that has a high D what they felt was normal communication to somebody with a very high S would often feel overly aggressive.
00:12:18 And so, as they began to learn that and take ownership of that, they began to modulate how they provided instruction to their team. What's interesting is they also began to recognize that the way they interacted with their customers needed to change. And over time in the next year, their business grew. And they actually began to expand and add more members of the team because they were focused on improving themselves so that they could improve communication.
00:12:48 They changed their identity and their belief about communication. They increase their capacity. They created an environment where people understood each other and focused on communicating better. And because of that, their business grew and succeeded. This is an example of thinking through, what's actually close. That's keeping you from achieving what you want to achieve so that you can begin to open them up and make tremendous change.
00:13:18 Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent.
00:13:54 Or if you're in the U S you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips, that's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact.