Ian Howell

Having a Balanced Purpose

I have been a big fan of the athletics coach, Frank Dick for a very long time. His famous speech that references Valley people and Mountain people is a powerful metaphor. If you haven’t heard it, I recommend you do. In today’s parlance, it picks up the difference between the mindsets of abundance (Mountain people) and scarcity (Valley people). For Mountain people, life is full of opportunity and possibility. They live for the test of change and enjoy the resilience required to bounce back from the bumps and bruises that come with the mountain territory. Whereas with the Valley people, the concept of achievement is not losing, so playing for the draw to them is all that’s needed. Their idea of fitness is being fit to survive.

These binary terms, I feel, are not so helpful in the world we meet today. I meet people who oscillate between these different states, which in itself feels exhausting. The incessant desire to achieve and be seen to be having your “Best Life” is causing tremendous FOMO anxiety. Having recently provided content in a Clubhouse conversation that explored how people maintain motivation to keep fit, I was struck by a couple of thoughts.
Firstly, it was the need for external accountability to encourage people to train and secondly, the assumption about the desire to compete. I notice that a huge amount of fitness motivation is predicated on becoming “more competitive”, i.e., the desire to see how much better you are against random strangers and that being the measure of success. There were lots of other great and interesting tips and ideas on the chat which all of which made sense, but ultimately and here is the rub, the externalised incessant pressure to turn up and then beat others is simply not sustainable. What happens when the external accountability stops, or you get beaten by faster runners? Do you stop, or can you keep going? There will always be someone better, faster, stronger!

It appears to me that it is far more sustainable to link motivation to how you “perform” against your ownstandards and goals, at whatever level that may be. I have long recognised that externally driven motivation is a rocky road. At the heart of any happy person I meet is the contentment that they are satisfied in themselves.

It is the balance between understanding the value and distance of the journey they have made so far, combined with an appropriate optimism regarding what is still to come. In short, there is “Balanced Purpose”. “Success”, if you want to call it that, then becomes normalised, as it is just how they “are”, rather than something that happens on occasions when pushed to do so. As you can imagine, this makes the idea of
“going for a run” natural and QED they do more running and now you are in a virtuous cycle.

The coach’s role is to shine a light on these areas and help the coachee recognise the value of looking up the mountain and identify what is important to them personally and recognise the journey taken so far. Add this to pinpointing what are the steps they can and want to take to move forward and you have a useful model. I recently picked up a new Frank Dick quote, which I think brings us full circle.
“Great coaching is far more than guiding athletes to be better than they are. It is first in guiding them to understand who they can become; next to believe that they can achieve that; then to take ownership themselves of getting there.”

If you would value some performance coaching to help you on your journey, I would only be too happy to help – Contact me through www.RocketCoach.co.uk
Best Wishes & Stay Safe

Value your team and the unique skills they provide

What is a sales leader?

Rocket defines you as someone who knows their team and builds your goals around their skills. Ultimately you understand that investing in them, making each person feel valued never stops paying you back.

Stuart Dennis   – Head of Entreprize 

Ian is an exceptional coach. I’ve worked with him on several transformation projects and he has delivered excellent results. Not only does he give teams process and structure he gives them confidence to operate at a higher level than they had done previously. He builds strong relationships with the teams and the individuals within those teams. His belief and positive impact create a great atmosphere for teams to learn and develop. Ian is the real deal a very gifted coach.

Relevance is the most important sales goal

Making a sale is not the ultimate end game. Value is.

If you are not showing your customer how what you do makes their life better/easier why would they want to buy whatever you may be selling.

Colin Hartshorn  – Senior Manager 

I’ve worked with Ian over a number of years. I have found him to be a warm and approachable person devoid of ego or judgement, 3 things key to building the rapport needed for a meaningful coaching relationship.

Ian is very generous with his time and resources and is always available with well thought through feedback and searching questions designed to make the coached do the work needed to draw their own conclusions. I would have no hesitation in recommending Ian to anyone new to having a coach or to those experienced professionals looking to enhance their goals and achieve key milestones.

Every great coach has a story

Rocket has always been about you, and your journey to becoming the best coach you can. It is these stories which make my work possible

Rebecca Clayton – Head of Global Marketing 

Ian has been a remarkable support for our business as a coach for our global Lead Management team. He created and coached a framework to build skills and confidence around sales opportunity qualification. Ian worked with a dozen people based in three time zones, and he has helped to produce a material increase in performance year on year.

Standing out from the crowd?

During these lockdown periods I have had unprecedented demand for direct coaching support. Many of these requests have been in the form of wanting help in managing the process of finding new roles as a consequence of the Pandemic. It is with great pride that I can say almost all of the candidates, that I have been coaching with these needs, have now been offered and accepted new roles. So, despite it being such a tough jobs market it has been possible to stand out from the crowd. Each one of these coaching situations is a unique story in itself, however I thought in this article I might share some of my observations and approaches that have helped, especially as now there is even more reason to be positive  with   vaccines becoming available shortly and the possibility of normality is appearing on the horizon.  

Releasing the untapped potential in your sales team

Ian Howell is the Head Performance Coach in  the Rocket Performance Group. Working 

across the globe to help businesses to untap  the potential in their sales team; he is also a 

highly respected rowing coach working in the  UK and USA.

The Power of Belief

In research undertaken in the education sector, it has been clearly established that the biggest impact on pupils’ performance is the belief held by the teacher on the potential abilities of the pupil, rather than any dramatic difference in the inherent abilities. The same is true in sales; the culture of the sales team is set by the behaviours of sales leadership; ‘sales leaders  get what they create.’

Releasing the untapped potential in the showroom

Ian Howell is a performance coach working across the globe to help businesses to untap the potential in their sales team; he is also a highly respected rowing coach working in the UK and USA. With a career that started in the automotive financing industry, we asked him for his thoughts on up-tapping the potential in the showroom.

Change expectations & challenge conventions

In my extensive experience, sales teams typically deliver the results they deserve. Often constrained by historic conventions and self-limiting beliefs, the self-fulfilling prophecy that what you “think” is what you will get. 

The role of the coach

I was encouraged  to read from the latest Forbes research that 74% of leading companies see coaching and mentoring as the most important role of managers and business leaders. However, I do have concerns as to what organisations understand as coaching. So often quality assessment is masquerading as a substitute for development and only serves a measurement purpose, rather than any real ambition to elevate performance in a sustained and meaningful way.