Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall Goldsmith is a LinkedIn Influencer, executive coach a best selling author of over thirty five books. His most recent book is Triggers, a New York Times Bestseller. He’s been awarded the number one leadership thinker by Fast Company Magazine and declared one of “Fifty Great Leaders of America” by the Wall Street Journal.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Marshall’s success

Monitoring days and keeping track when it becomes off track

Result if you follow the steps in Marshall’s session

Learn to monitor your days and focus on what’s really important

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I was interviewed in the Harvard Business Review and ask what’s the number one problem of all the successful people I’ve worked with over the years and small business people are terrible about this one, winning too much.

What’s that mean? It’s important one to win. Meaningful? Win. Critical? Win. Trivial? Win. Not worth it? Win anyway. Winners love winning.

I’m going to give you a case study about winning too much that almost all my successful clients fail. My guess is you’ll fail it and almost all the listeners will sounds like this.

You want to go to dinner at restaurant x. Your husband wife partner friend wants to go to dinner restaurant y. You have a heated argument to the restaurant? Y was not your choice.

The food tastes awful in the services terrible. Option A, critique the food, point out our partner was wrong. This mistake could have been avoided if only, listen to me, me me.

Option B, shut up. Eat the stupid food. Try to enjoy it and have a nice evening. What would I do? What should I do? Almost all my clients, what would I do? Critique the food. What should I do? Shut up.

Now I’m going to give you a worse example. You have a hard day at work, hard day. You go home, your husband, wife or your partner. And the other person says, I had such a hard day today. I had such a tough day. You reply, you have a hard day? You know what I had to put up with today? You had a hard day.

We’re so competitive to prove we are more miserable than people we live with.

I gave this example to my class at Dartmouth and a guy at the back raises his hand. He goes, I did that last week. I asked him what happened?

He said, my wife looked at me, she said, Honey, you just think you had a hard day. It’s not over? Well, very hard to have the discipline when you’re a winner not to win all the time.

Always be right, always prove you’re better. Let me give you one positive example. It’s related to my book triggers. It’s in the book.

A young man sent me an email it had been in my class and he said, I want to send you an email today and say thank you. He says, I know you don’t remember me. I was in your class five years ago. He said, my wife called me up yesterday and she was having a terrible day.

I was just getting ready to point out how her problems paled in significance to my own, that I remembered your class and I stopped, I listened. And I just said, I love you, thank you for all you’ve done for the family.

And he said, I’m going home and I spent $25, I bought her some flowers, and I gave her the flowers. And I said, I love you, he said, is the best $25 I’ve ever spent. Thank you very much.

Well, that’s what my book triggers is about. We’re always going to trigger so it can be things that set us off. And we’re always killing impulse.

But if we can learn to become aware of what’s going on around us to breathe to stop, slow down the 275 mile per hour in our brain and realize I have a choice about my behavior, then we’re much more likely to become the person that we want to be not the person the world is creating.