How to use lessons about spaghetti sauce in your coaching
In this week’s guest post Lenny Deverill-West demonstrates how lessons from outside of coaching can be used by coaches to benefit your clients.
How to use lessons about spaghetti sauce in your coaching
By Lenny Deverill-West
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I was watching the clip above on TED by Malcolm Gladwell about how Howard Moskowitz, a food scientist, discovered 1/3 of Americans liked extra chunky spaghetti sauce.
To cut a great story short Howard tested lots of different types of Spaghetti sauce and after testing every conceivable type of sauce, Howard discovered that 1/3 of people liked extra chunky spaghetti sauce and that no other sauce company was servicing that need, by tapping into this gap in the market Prego, the brand he was working with, made $600 million.
What stuck out for me was that spaghetti sauce companies always researched their product by asking people what kind of sauce they liked, but no one ever said they liked extra chunky sauce, even though it turned out a 3rd of people actually did. So the spaghetti sauce companies had always provided their customer with, what their research had told them they wanted.
And this is a bit like coaching, we ask the client what they want and we coach them to help them get it, but what if they are like people who thought they liked traditional spaghetti sauce because that what they were brought up to believe spaghetti sauce should be like, but actually loved chucky spaghetti sauce? Michael Neill is famous for saying that most people do not really know what they want, and are just ordering off the menu for what they think they can have.
For example if you’re coaching someone who would like a change of career, promotion or looking to start up a new business, are they talking about doing something that really lights their fire, that they’d love to do and would make a difference to people or are they talking about doing something that they think they can, something that is already on the menu and doesn’t particular inspire them or make them happy?
I was talking to a colleague at work other day he mentioned that he wanted to build a career but did not know what he wanted to do, he mentioned that he was thinking or doing a qualification in carpentry, which is a great profession, hell we’ll always need carpenters.
When I asked why he wanted to be a carpenter, he said ‘he had looked at the local college prospectus and that was the only thing he thought he would be able to do’, in other words he had looked at the menu and picked what he thought he could have.
I went on to ask him what was he good at, and what would he like to do with his one and only life? He explained he is just great at dealing with people, putting on events for the company he works for and after a short conversation he stopped for a moment and looked off into the distance and then said that in fact he’d love to run his own event management business, but has never thought it was even an option.
Howard Moskowitz says “The mind knows not what the tongue wants” but you could also say “the person knows not what they really because they’re just looking at the menu of what they think they can have’.
It also struck me that in order to find out what kind of spaghetti sauce 1/3 of people liked, Howard and Prego had to create it because it previously didn’t exist, at least not on supermarket shelves.
So when you’re coaching a client around a new career try and spot if they are just ordering of the menu, or is there something else that they would love to be doing?
And go do that!
About the Author/Further Resources
Lenny Deverill-West is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner, Coach and Corporate Trainer based in Southampton.
Lenny spends most his time seeing clients at his Southampton practice and is also developing trainings courses and Hypnotherapy products that are due out early next year. For more information about Lenny Deverill-West visit www.startlivingtoday.co.uk.