Please note : This transcript is automatically generated and provided for your convenience.

Rob D. Willis: Murray, welcome to the show.

Murray Cowell: Hi, Rob. Thanks for having me.

Rob D. Willis: Thank you for coming on the show. You mark yourself online as the grizzled veteran of the corporate training world. And you have, was it 26 years, helping people transform. And I've got to say, from a personal point of view, you've taught me as much about training and learning as anyone else.

But for the listeners who don't know you yet. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and what you do?

Murray Cowell: Sure. Yeah. And I need to update my website, my LinkedIn profile, because Now that it's a new year, it's 27, 27 years that I've been running my own training business. And hence the kind of half joking reference to myself as a grizzled veteran of the training world. And so my [00:02:00] background is I started off in a corporate background.

I was in retail management for a few years. Then I had my first L and D job in 1990, and that was working for the pub company Whitbread. as L and D manager for Solent Inns, which is their managed house division on the South coast, or was doesn't exist anymore, but it was back then. And I then spent about 11 years working in HR before launching myself as an independent freelance trainer. And I started off working as an associate over the years. I've also sold my own training work directly to my own clients. And I've also worked on the senior leadership team for three, seven figure. Training businesses, whereas responsible for running much bigger training programs, designing and managing the delivery of them, coaching the sales team to close bigger deals, and also working with the client services team to make sure that people were getting good service with the training that we were delivering. And in amongst all that for 10 years I, I, in [00:03:00] 2008, I founded an internet marketing company. which gradually morphed into specializing in email marketing. And I ran that business for 10 years as well. So since 2018, I've been working with training business owners and solo training freelancers, helping them to grow and scale their businesses and finding more clients, raising their rates and reducing their hours of work.

And sometimes all three of those at once.

Rob D. Willis: yeah, that sounds very appealing, I must say, as a trainer and facilitator myself. But the holy grail of training, like what we're trying to do when we invest in this stuff, is making people do stuff

differently. Behavioural change. So, What do you feel having, I don't know how many people you must have trained by now, but what are the crucial skills for driving real behavioral change, would you say?

[00:04:00] Okay,

Murray Cowell: something that happens over a period of time. So, The kind of traditional approach of running a one day or a half day workshop or or even shorter, you know, a two hour online webinar is quite ineffective because it leads to a spike in performance at best.

It leads to a spike in performance where people might leave a training event full of enthusiasm, highly motivated. They've got some new ideas. They've got some new skills. If that's not supported, then that spike will be very, short lived because people's retention of what they've learned begins to atrophy. the split second they leave the training room. And so if they're going back into an environment that's not supportive of the new skills that they're trying to implement, then the training is going to fail because people will drift back to their habits and their habitual ways of doing things very, very quickly. And the, the, the, the, thing that makes [00:05:00] the biggest difference is creating a program of learning and thinking, moving away from this idea of one day training or hourly daily rates and really thinking about how do you deliver a program of learning that is actually helping to support people, so I think that's the core of the philosophy of, of how to bring about behavioral change.

Rob D. Willis: And when we talk about support, What are then the skills that you need to support someone adequately, would you say?

Murray Cowell: So I think of it as being what I call I think of it as a three legged stool that there are three areas of support

that you can provide to people after a training event that helps them to implement them. You need all three to really lead to sustained behavioral change.

One of them is providing tools and activities that help people to implement what they've learned. So that could be something really simple, like for example, if it is outbound calling, if you're training people, salespeople in outbound calling, you can provide them with a template or a [00:06:00] cheat sheet or some battle cards or something like that, that they can take back into the workplace that serve as a reminder, an aid memoir that reminds them of what they learned when they were on the training event,

the

second is metrics. So it's having some way of measuring whether or not people are doing. what they were trained to do. And in my mind, the best model for doing this is the New World Cook Patrick model, the reason that the, that these metrics are useful is because it puts into the client's mind, the idea that this is a partnership and we are going to work collaboratively together to help people, not just to learn something on the training event, but also to implement that in the way that they're working from that moment on for that point in time onwards.

And the third leg of the stool is management involvement.

So at the very least the, the line managers, the direct managers of the people who are on the training need to know in advance what people are going to learn, how to brief them effectively and how to review their attendance on the training program effectively as well.

And [00:07:00] what works even better is if you can give those people a role, if it's a training program that maybe is happening over at. let's say for for the sake of an example, a three month period, you actually can give leaders, managers, coaches, an active role in the training. So this creates an opportunity to get direct line managers involved in monitoring the extent to which people are displaying the behaviors that they've been trained when they return to the workplace. And of course, in order to do that, They need to know what those behaviors are and how to assess them. So this is a great way of kind of binding the training organization and the leaders and managers in the organization together.

Rob D. Willis: I quite agree.

And this is such an important thing, I think, for both training companies, and for companies that hire training companies. It's as much about the structure and environment as it is about having a great workshop, as you say. But what I really like talking about on this [00:08:00] show is, I guess, our guests superpowers, what made them really good at this stuff.

What do you feel are the key skills that you have? that have made it possible for you to create change in those who you have taught, trained, facilitated over the years?

Murray Cowell: Yeah. Well I, I think it comes down to an underlying attitude that everybody, and this is, this is an attitude that I have adopted. So this is a belief that I consciously hold,

and I don't care if it's true or not, but because my question is, is it useful in the context of bringing about behavioral change?

So the attitude that I've found most useful is that all of us are slightly incompetent, whatever we're doing, we're, we're all slightly incompetent. And for the large part, we are interested in being better at what we do. I think that that is, I mean, I actually [00:09:00] do largely believe that that is true for the, for the greater proportion of, the working population, that most people are not as good at what they do as they would like to be.

They want to get better and that we can all work collaboratively to support each other in getting better. So I think that is a way of thinking that underpins what I've just been describing, for example, and that what goes with it is, a an atmosphere of non judgment that there is no judgment involved in observing that we're not as good at what we do as we would like to be, that pretty much everything we do could be done a little bit better, that that isn't a judgment.

It's an observation. And the philosophy of non judgment to me is the absolute most fundamental Skill because it is a skill. It can be taught, it can be learned, and it can be consciously adopted. That, that makes success in the training room more likely. Because if you go on a training program as a, as a learner, and you feel like you're being judged, that that causes people to [00:10:00] close down immediately. So it's being able to create an, an, an atmosphere in the training room where people know. That it's okay to not be as good as you would like to be that nobody's judging you for that. And that we're actually all in the same boat together, including the people who are running the program.

Rob D. Willis: So can I just jump on that? Because you mentioned earlier about often a team is sent on training.

Murray Cowell: Yes.

Rob D. Willis: So there probably is already a sense of judgment, you're not good enough at that thing. Have you got an example of maybe, and you don't need to mention the company, but a time where you sensed that there was a real difficult feeling of judgment?

And how did you get around that or overcome it?

Murray Cowell: Yeah. I think the best example is an organization that shall remain nameless that we're doing a very specialist engineering activity for a branch of the military. Let's, let's call it, [00:11:00] let's put it like that. And they had brought us in to do appraisal training and They brought us in after they just had their appraisals, which didn't seem like ideal timing. But not only that, they, they told everybody your appraisal grade will be linked to your pay, your pay rise will be linked to your appraisal appraisal grade. So if you're a four, you're going to get that. Yeah. If you're an a, you're going to get 4%. If you're a B, you'll get 3 percent and so on and so on. And then just before the pay rises were due to be implemented, they told everybody we've had a bit of a bad year. So everybody's getting half a percent. and, and so people were arriving on the training. Because a lot of them were ex military. They're not the easiest, not always the easiest people to train. They can be very skeptical already, but they were arriving with their arms folded like that. What, what is the point of even having appraisals when the company is just going to take absolutely no notice of it whatsoever and screw everybody over? And I thought I was. pretty reasonable attitude to arrive with. And so there [00:12:00] was this kind of feeling that the whole thing was a waste of time, that there was no point in being there, that it didn't matter what you learned. It wasn't going to make any difference. And so, and we had a series of these to do pretty, pretty tough crowds to deal with. But my approach to that was to get them to kind of dump the negativity. So I, I would say to them at the start of the program. Okay. So it sounds like. You've spotted some flaws in the appraisal system. That they would say everyone would say yes to that. Obviously I'd say, okay, I, what I want to do is have two minutes for you to say every negative thing that you can think of about the appraisal program. And typically they'd run out after about 45 seconds. It had all been said at which point, and this is what I mean about the levity. I'll be going, Oh, come on. You know, you've got another minute. Surely you can find some more to say. complained about, about the appraisal system. So that would generate a bit of mirth. And then I was asking the question, do you think the appraisal system is going to go away? Do you think if, if you don't like it, that the company will pull the appraisal system? It doesn't seem like that's very likely to happen. [00:13:00] So given that you've got this suboptimal appraisal system in place, How about we think about how you can use that, you know, whether or not it's linked to pay rises. Let's think about how you can use the appraisal system to achieve some of your objectives with the people that you're managing. And I found that that, that kind of way of because what they were expecting, this is really, it's like upending people's expectations because they think you're the trainer, you're a shill for the company, you're coming here to defend a system that is indefensible and actually by starting off with this sort of the nonjudgmental attitude means that you can be real.

You can be truthful about it as well and honest about it. Yeah. We can all agree that this appraisal system is, seems to be quite badly broken, but it also seems like it's not going away. So how about we see if we can use it for good?

Rob D. Willis: It ties so well into things I've read about negotiation, about nonviolent communication. It's rooted in benefit of the doubt, [00:14:00] basically. We're all a bit incompetent and want to be better. It's not that they're bad people. You make people receptive by creating an environment which uses humor. You look at the reality, like this is what the problem is.

And then you begin to establish options on how you can get through it.

What else do you think has been really important in supporting that basic belief that you have?

That people are incompetent, they're interested in being better, and you're going to help them.

Murray Cowell: Yeah. Well another aspect that's very important is not shying away from giving people the truthful feedback I have a reputation for being very good at telling people the truth about what I see in their, their behavior and what the implications of that behavior are. But doing that from a place of real love, you know, really deep support. for them as human beings and what they're trying to accomplish. That's kind of how I think about it. And, and so that, that kind of combines with The ability to observe what's [00:15:00] really going on in the situation is, is not, not shying away from letting people know the things that they need to know in order to make the difference in order to make the progress.

Rob D. Willis: It's something we've discussed before, actually, that paradigm shift from good and bad feedback to helpful and unhelpful feedback.

Murray Cowell: exactly. Exactly. My question is, when would you give feedback to somebody that was negative? Because when you give a person feedback, it's you either are giving them feedback so that we can get the job done better, or you're giving them feedback that will help them develop as a person.

And both of those seem to be positive reasons for giving somebody feedback.

The negative feedback is, you know, I don't like your shoes.

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm

Murray Cowell: feedback that's got, that's actually got no, benefit for the job or for the individual. And, and I can't see any reason to give anybody that kind of feedback. So I, I kind of, the reframe that I think is useful is that all feedback is positive. That, that there are really, there are two types of [00:16:00] feedback. There's feedback to reinforce behaviors and feedback for change. But

both of them are positive because you're either trying to reinforce behaviours that you want people to continue doing, or you're giving them feedback to change so that they can either become a better version of themselves or they can become more competent at doing the job.

Rob D. Willis: , this is really important. And I think, again, it's not just for trainers, this is useful for managers, for anyone who has to deal with

people and wants to make people change in some way. But this is something which I feel one is not born with. So I would like to go a little bit before your work as a trainer,

You were working in HR, I know, in IBM.

Murray Cowell: That's right. Yeah. I was senior employee relations advisor there.

Rob D. Willis: How was change viewed in a cultural way super giant company like IBM.

Yeah.[00:17:00]

Murray Cowell: a process for, from my perspective, because I was working in a, in a, in a specialist area of HR and employee relations. Where, where I had most apart from case management, which was dealing with all the really extreme sickness, disciplinary and grievance cases, where I had most interaction with the, the rest of IBM was through workforce strategy.

So and in particular IBM at the time had, when, when I worked there, they had 000 people working for the company, about a third of those weren't employees. They were either independent. Contractors or their agency staff that was supplied by people like manpower in a deco and personnel selection, I think was the other one. And so I, I was responsible for the huge quantity of employee relations problems that having a non employed workforce created. And a lot of that was to do with the development of policy. As I was having to do that without any. authority over anybody and without any budget. I was there for five years and for probably most of the first year, I couldn't get anything done. Because I just couldn't [00:18:00] understand how to make things happen in this organization. And I gradually realized that the way to get things done in an organization like IBM is to find other people in the organization who are actually trying to accomplish the same thing, who, who have a similar set of problems, or at least there's some overlap between the problem that I had and the problem that they had and to create these kinds of alliances. that might be distributed over a large area of the organization. And you can find people in IBM who can make things happen very quickly.

So I can give you an example of that. I was reporting to the HR director at IBM and I noticed that a lot of managers were. paying people off instead of managing through the disciplinary process. So if somebody was underperforming, they would give them a big chunk of money to go away, rather than doing their job and managing their performance. And this was a time when IBM wasn't paying bonuses for the top performers because of financial performance. So you could be, you might be in a department where You've done your job absolutely brilliantly and you're not getting a [00:19:00] bonus. And this person's absolutely useless and they're getting paid, you know, a five or sometimes even six figure sum to leave the company. And I, so I was mentioning this to the HR director and she said, well, why don't you write a process? And I said, what do you mean by that? And she said, well, just write a process that people have to follow, which means that you have to authorize all the payments. I said, can I do that? She said, yes. So that, that meant that from, from that moment onwards, it was like a decree that went out from From employee relations, it says, in order to get a payment, because there are some situations where a payment is the best option, but you have to put a case forward that explains why it's better than you managing the, managing through the performance process, how it's impacting on every other member of your team and why it's a good, basically why it's a good investment of IBM's money to pay somebody who's not doing their job to leave.

So that, that's, that I think is quite an interesting sort of observation about change in

large organizations. It's about finding people who can make the change happen and building [00:20:00] alliances with other people who have similar problems or who have an interest in the problem that you're seeking to deal with.

Rob D. Willis: And using structure to make sure that it happens. It's, it's similar to what you talk about with learning as well. And in this book, the, the, the Heath brothers,

Dan and Chip Heath switch. and environmental change is such a huge part of it. You can't expect people to naturally put in all of this effort, all of this work, you need to change the actual structure around them to make change more likely.

And you do that with processes with allies, with resources, like you're talking about before as well. But what underpins all of it are those skills that you talked about. Non judgmental listening, creating an environment where people feel comfortable. Giving feedback, so actions are taken, people get better over time.

Can you think, before this, I mean, do you feel [00:21:00] you went into IBM with those skills? So do you reckon, when do you feel you really began to develop these key beliefs about people basically being, good want to get better and the seeing the importance of listening non judgmentally.

Murray Cowell: Yeah. Well, you, you mentioned earlier, they're not skills that people are born with. And I definitely wasn't born with them. My, my first awakening. To having any, any kind of concept of self awareness at work was when a manager of mine, when I was still in retail, I was working as a retail manager at the M27 motorway service station. And my manager came to me and said, we're sending you on an interpersonal skills course. And I, and I said, well, what are interpersonal skills? And she said, yeah, that's why we're sending you on the course. I didn't even know what that term meant. And, and I don't remember much about that course, but I remember that it was talking about different influencing styles and, and we, everybody on the course, we all identified what was our influencing style. It was the first time that it even occurred to me that there [00:22:00] was more than one style, because I just saw it's the way that I do it. Everybody else is wrong. So I had I had quite a learning journey, and it was really in my first when I've been working IBM for about a year, when I was put on a training course for in facilitation skills to, Train how to be a facilitator because IBM had an internal facilitator network and I wanted to be part of that.

And also I had to use a facilitated style in my job. And when I was on that course, the guy who ran the company that was running the training approached me and asked me if I wanted to help co deliver their training inside IBM as, as a kind of IBM insider co training with the

external company. So I started doing that.

That was that, that soon led to. Him giving me the odd course here and there that I was taking holiday from IBM and he was paying me to, to run the training with other clients. And then after a while he said, look, why don't you just leave IBM and come and work with me? And What actually happened was I [00:23:00] negotiated part time work at IBM.

So for the next four years, I worked at IBM part time and I was working with him and actually there began some really deep learning about myself through the mentoring that he was giving me and also the work that we were doing with, with other people. And Some of the kind of peripheral things that we were doing around that, like learning a little bit about things like transactional analysis and NLP. And so that, that was really where I had quite a, quite an intense period that went on for probably a good 10 years of very frequent self reflection and really forensic examination of how I was relating to other people and that might be. People in the training room, it might be clients I was working with.

It could be co trainers. It could be the client themselves. So, so really, and, and, and putting a lot of thought into thinking, how can I be better? How can I be better? And it's, it really dawned on me as a result of doing that, that, the. main problem that I see with [00:24:00] feedback is that everybody wants to tell everybody else how the other person could be better.

And they want, people want to tell you, this is what you need to do. So I would find you easier to work with. And my belief is that we should turn that round 180 degrees and actually say, what do I need to do? to make it easier for you to work, to make myself easier for you to work with.

How can I be, how can I make things better for you

rather than how can you make things better for me? And that's really at the, I think is at the foundation of emotional intelligence because having that kind of degree of self awareness and self reflection and constantly asking yourself, how could I be better? And what impact am I having on other people and how can I change what I'm doing to get a better result out of, out of other people?

I think that's really found the foundation of a lot of self development.

Rob D. Willis: And it is a long process, but I think the, that switch in [00:25:00] mentality about feedback could create, be the catalyst for this kind of self-reflection for lots of others. The book I think of is, thanks for the feedback by Douglas Stone, which says exactly what you're saying.

We can't rely on people to give better feedback to us.

And the point is not that you learn to give the best feedback ever, it's that you learn how to ask for feedback as well.

Murray Cowell: Well, and also there's a, there's the flip side to what I was just saying is is, is also true of what you're saying here, which is that when somebody else gives us feedback quite often it might be delivered clumsily. And the the most common way to react to that is to resist the feedback.

And this is a strong. component of why people resist feedback. It's not the only reason but it is one of the, one of the key reasons is the style in which the feedback has been delivered.

So another useful piece of work that each of us can do is to really make a separation between the style that the person used, which might've [00:26:00] been a bit clumsy.

It might've been a bit careless. They might've been rude. It might've been un uninvited non consensual feedback and, and separating that out from the content. What did they actually say? And where's the truth in what they said? Because even if you have a very strong impression that what the other person's saying is, isn't true, Something caused them to say it.

And it's useful to search for where's the little kernel of truth in the feedback that you're receiving and to be able to separate that out from all the stuff that you didn't like and let the kind of style and the things that you don't like wash over you a little bit. So you can really focus on what was the truth and what the person was saying.

Rob D. Willis: We had another guest on the show who said that receiving feedback is like being a detective. You need to search for the clues, see the patterns,

Etc. I would love to talk more about this. But just thinking back on your journey, from those, that stage, let's say, where you began this process of self reflection to be to becoming the grizzled veteran [00:27:00] of the corporate trading world.

If you were to turn that journey into a kind of business book, what would you call it?

Murray Cowell: I mean, I, I kind of think that it's this kind of blended approach that, that is really significant. And that was, that was another kind of point in the journey was that I'd, I'd started to get frustrated with the way that I was doing because we weren't following it up. We were doing four day workshops with no follow up at all.

And the most common question I heard on the fourth day was how do we keep this going? And we didn't really have a good answer to that. And I put forward various proposals about how we could support that that I didn't that didn't get implemented. And so I got very frustrated with that situation. When I discovered when I found out about natural training, so I was their solutions director for a couple of years. One of the strongest things that attracted me to them was that there was there. It was the blended learning journey laid out to me. for

me. And and I thought, yes, this is exactly what I've been looking for. So I think it's really something like I don't know. I think it's it's really [00:28:00] beyond, beyond the workshop, something like that, beyond the workshop, building learning programs that drive real behavioral change.

But straight away, I'm not happy with that job title because I think there's probably already a book that's called that. And But it, but it's, it's something along those lines. It's, you know, how do you, how do you take it beyond this, this kind of idea of training that is very well, very entrenched idea that training is a, is a single event that happens rather than something that goes on that happens over time.

Rob D. Willis: We need to think beyond the workshop, but in order to do that, we also need to slightly change the culture around training and workshops because one is met with the resistance. Well, we just want two hours or we just want this. Yeah. Mm

Murray Cowell: I've got an idea for it at some point, I'm going to do a spoof website called the tick box training, the tick box training company. You know, nevermind the quality, does it tick the box? And that that I think is what's going on when people are talking about two hour [00:29:00] workshops and then you've got kind of you know, I think it's an ethical question as a trainer. And the ethical question is, can you make enough of a difference in two hours? to justify what you're, what you're invoicing the client for that. And I think sometimes the answer to that can be yes. The tragedy of it is it's not, not as much of a change as you could create if the client was willing to invest a little bit more.

Rob D. Willis: Can we move just a couple of rapid fire questions before the listener challenge? So just very simple, a book you love about driving change.

Murray Cowell: Book I love about driving change. Well, we've already mentioned it. I think switch is a really good book about about driving change but i'm also i'm thinking of a couple of others that i've read just recently which is a nudge and misbehaving by richard thaler and and that whole area of Of behavioral economics, which I think is very very interesting, which is You the problem with classical economics is that it uses this homo economicus, this this kind of fictional character that is super rational, has [00:30:00] all the information and can accurately predict the future.

There's nothing like any of us.

I know I'm very interested in the whole field of behavioral economics

and understanding how do people really behave? How do people really react? And how can you work with that? Rather

than with this, this kind of model that, that is becoming increasingly outdated. So yeah, I'm very interested in, in books like that nudge, nudge and misbehaving in particular.

Rob D. Willis: Podcast you've discovered recently.

Murray Cowell: , there's, there are, there are a couple of podcasts that come to mind. One is the science of success. . He's very interested in what is the scientific basis for. Whatever the, the particular guest is talking about. So That's a pretty good podcast. And the other one that I really like is called clearer thinking and you know, the, the title is what it, what it says is it's run by a guy called Spencer Greenberg and his his approach is, is there's also a website, the clearer thinking website where he has lots of tools to help you discover your own kind of intrinsic values and unconscious biases and all [00:31:00] kinds of things and to, and to Manage your own thought processes so you can think more clearly.

I think that's a great podcast.

Rob D. Willis: Have you got a good question? I love collecting questions that you ask when there is resistance to change.

Murray Cowell: I would ask people what they see as being the alternative and asking that from a genuine place, because what often happens with change is the person who's driving the change thinks that they know the best way to do it. And what that means is, Blame can blame you too, is that there might be a better way of doing it and actually to ask people with genuine intent How do you see is being a way to respond to this change?

How do you think we should be doing it and to ask a series of questions that where the questions aren't just random? But they're kind of guided questions that are getting them to think through the reasons why we're going down this particular path But they're also, but also keeping your mind open to the [00:32:00] possibility that they may see a better way than the one that we've already gotten quite in place.

Rob D. Willis: Last one from this. Have you got a story, so movie, fiction, biography, just basically something which is not a how to guide, which you find inspiring or helpful.

Awesome.

Murray Cowell: He said he started he started live waste. He didn't start life as a Jane Monk. He wasn't born a Jane Monk, but he was he was taken on as a Jane Monk at the age of nine. And he, he, he broke away from from the Jane religion, which was a very difficult thing for him to do for various reasons.

But why, why, why if I'm really inspiring about him was. He in turn was inspired by a guy called Vinod Bhave, who who walked around India persuading landowners to give up land for free so that people could start ashrams on the land. And that's pretty incredible. You think about what size continent [00:33:00] India is. He walks around just getting people to to give away land. And he was very successful at doing that. And so Satish Kumar in turn, he decided that he didn't like nuclear proliferation. And so he and a friend decided that they were going to walk to every, to the leaders of the five main nuclear powers at the time and and ask them to stop. Create to stop making nuclear weapons. And so he walked from India, he went to Russia, to France, to the UK, and to the USA. I said five, didn't I? I think there may have only been four. And he took them packets of tea. that were, that were peace tea and just gave him this tea and said, you know, we, we want peace. And he actually got an audience with all four of with all four of those country's leaders. And I, and I think that's, that's incredibly inspiring. What I like about it is that he didn't ask anybody's permission to do that. He just went and did it. And he didn't think about. how difficult that task was to accomplish. He just started putting one foot in front of the other. [00:34:00] And he wasn't kind of overawed by the enormity of the task. And so I think that there are good lessons that we can take from that as solo entrepreneurs running our own businesses that we too have. what looked, what seemed like an enormous task in front of us. We don't have to be overawed by those tasks. And it is the simple process of putting one foot in front of the other and having the confidence that if you do that consistently and with good intentions, that you will get to your destination. And Satish came out wrote a great book about, about it, which is path was called both paths with no destination.

I think it's called and it's, yeah, it's a very good read. And I think he's quite an inspiring character generally.

Rob D. Willis: Actually, the perfect book for the conversation we've had actually, what we've been talking about. Last part is the listener challenge. And in this part of the pod, we give listeners a ritual or exercise to get a little bit of your superpower.

What have you got for us?

Murray Cowell: well I think based on the conversation that we've been having it's, it's easy to find things to complain about in, in, in most [00:35:00] people's lives. There are plenty of things going on that are suboptimal that you think are that could be better. And I find a really useful question to ask yourself is how am I involved in creating the problem that I'm complaining about? And I think that that because it's very easy to see these problems as being externally caused. So whether, whether it's your work situation or whether it's you know, problems with a colleague or whether it's a relationship issues with your spouse or your partner, or whether you've got financial problems or whatever the problems are. To asking yourself that question, how am I involved in creating the problem that I'm complaining about? I think is a, is a very good place to start to, to start nurturing that kind of habit of self-reflection and thinking, well actually I'm, I'm at the, I am the, the cause of my life situation and I'm, I'm also potentially the solution to my, to things that I don't like about my life situation.

And it is always the best starting place. With any kind of conflict with somebody else or any kind of problem that you've got is to look internally and think, what [00:36:00] do I need? What can I change? What is this teaching me about? Why could be doing differently? And if you get into a habit of doing that and doing that with a, with a kind of ritualistic kind of approach, you're always asking yourself that question. What is this problem I'm having teaching me about myself and how can I change to become a better person? And I often think of myself as being everything that I do is just being practiced for the better version of myself that I'm becoming.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah, it's inspiring stuff, Murray. Where can people go to find out more about you?

Murray Cowell: Well, my, my my main business these days is in helping other trainers, facilitators and coaches to become more successful at what they do. And so I have a website that's called the client find club and URL for that is client find. So the word client. And the word find is all one word dot club. So maybe we can put that in the show notes. And if, if you come today, you can sign up for the client find club is free to join. We have various activities that are going on that, that are all geared around creating a community of people, all helping each other to [00:37:00] find more clients and be more successful in business.

Rob D. Willis: Okay, awesome stuff. Also be sure to link to your LinkedIn where you share some great content on there.

Murray.

Murray Cowell: you.

Rob D. Willis: Thank you for coming on the show.

Murray Cowell: Thanks very much for having me, Rob. I've really enjoyed it.

Rob D. Willis: Me too.

That was Murray Cowell. What struck me most about our conversation is that it challenges what we think we know about driving change. We assume that success comes down to having an inspiring leader or compelling argument. That matters, but what's far more crucial is having the right people and the right structures.

And when you're working with people directly, the key is to listen without judgment and to give honest feedback. If you found today's conversation valuable, please take a minute to leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you know someone who's trying to implement change in their organization or team, send them this episode.

Murray's perspective might be just what they need. I'm Rob D. Willis, and you've been listening to [00:38:00] Superpowered, the unique stories of modern leaders.