Engage - A Practical Guide to Understanding, Influencing and Connecting With People

2. HOW I BECAME AN ENGAGING EXECUTIVE

To demonstrate that anybody can become an Engaging Executive, allow me to share my story.

If you feel like you might not have what it takes to make this leap, understanding my story could help you on your own journey to becoming an Engaging Executive. I have been described as charismatic, charming and engaging, but I wasn’t always the person I am today. I was once a quiet, retiring kid. I had to learn how to become outgoing, how to interact with people, and how to do things I was uncomfortable doing. Being sociable didn’t come naturally to me at all. To demonstrate that anybody can become an Engaging Executive, allow me to share my story.

FROM SOCIAL MISFIT TO SOCIAL COACH

We all have things we naturally gravitate towards. Things that come easily to us. Things we just kind of get. Then there are those other things. The things we don’t like to do. The things we don’t want to do. These are often the things we feel less able to do.

As a child I always admired those people who seemed to be successful at school. There seemed to be two camps: those who were really clever, and those who were really popular. Very rarely did people seem to fit into both camps, although there were people who didn’t fit into either group – like me. That being said, sometimes there was that special person who managed to transcend the dichotomy. I remember a boy called Neil. He was in all the top educational streams, and he was also a charming boy, popular with both the guys and the girls.

As a 16-year-old boy I didn’t realise it at the time, but that intersection between being clever and being socially skilled was the key to success in the modern world of work. However, it wasn’t just that Neil was clever. It was what he was clever in. Neil was brilliant at mathematics and sciences. Now, if he had been into the arts or literature then the contrast wouldn’t have been so great. That’s almost expected. People who are ‘arty’ are quite often socially comfortable and expressive. That was what made Neil special. He was a scientifically minded person with social skills – an unusual combination, and a most powerful one.

THE SCHOOL YEARS

Then there was me … academically clueless and socially inept. Where did I fit into the land of the ‘clever kids’ or the ‘popular kids’? I guess I fell in the cracks, into the world of the dorks. I didn’t consider myself clever enough to be a nerd or interesting enough to be a geek. Most of the time when I was at school I felt lost and deficient. I used to feel overwhelmed in mathematics classes, and on numerous occasions, if you were very observant you would have caught me secretly crying at the back of the class while pretending to work out a calculation.

I was a very, very shy boy with little self-confidence. I didn’t mix socially with the other kids in my neighbourhood or at school once I got into my pubescent years. I found it very awkward. I didn’t know how to relate to them.

This phobia of talking to people was pervasive in all areas of my life. When relatives visited I would find as many reasons as possible to leave the room. When the phone rang I used to stare at it, afraid of who could be on the other end. I didn’t answer it in case I didn’t know the caller. If someone knocked on the door of our house, I would creep up and look out the side window. If I didn’t know who it was I wouldn’t open the door because they might try to sell me something and I didn’t know how to refuse.

This problem was still present when I was in my late teens.

When my Mum and Dad got divorced, Mum returned to her working-class roots, which was West London, near Heathrow Airport, and she took my sister and me with her. I ended up in a working class school in the rough part of town.

Given the fact that my self-confidence was at zero and I attended a school that was more a training ground for bullies than an academic institution, I didn’t fare too well. I was never great at exams, and back in the ‘good’ old days everything was about how well you did in the last three hours of a two-year course – there was no ongoing assessment like there is today. You can imagine the feeling of opening your exam results letter as soon as it arrives and seeing that two years of your work had been reviewed and deemed ‘unclassifiable’. Not even good enough to be ‘poor’. I did retake a couple of courses, but I never managed to get higher than a D. So I left school with little to show.

Once School Performance Tables were introduced the year I left the school, my school only had two stand-out statistics: the lowest amount of exam passes and the highest number of days truancy. It turned out I had gone to the worst school in the area.

MY ENTRY TO THE WORLD OF WORK

As a teenager, I had a neighbour who lived across the road called Pat. Looking back, it was Pat who set me on the long road to where I am today. Pat was working for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) as a member of the Civil Staff; in other words, not a Police Officer but a member of the public service who did the behind-the-scenes roles that freed the Police to be out with the public. About once a week Pat would thrust an application form in my face and tell me to go for a job at the Police Station. I kept insisting that I didn’t want to work for the Police, and growing up in a working-class neighbourhood that was never going to be a popular choice. Nevertheless, after constant bombardments from Pat, I reluctantly filled in the form. Shock, horror; I was invited to an interview.

I tried really hard not to get the job, but alas, I didn’t try hard enough.

So I ended up working for the Police just for a lack of anything better to do. It was an administrative job which was very repetitive and 100% paper based. We didn’t get computers for another six years.

By the age of 24 I knew that pushing forms around wasn’t for me. I still didn’t really know what was for me, but after a bit more thought, I considered it was time to learn more about what makes people tick. So I applied for a job in Human Resources (HR), which in those days was known as Personnel. At exactly the same time that I put in an application, the MPS was launching a brand new outplacement facility and they were looking for employees. The MPS had just undergone a review that criticised their organisational structure. So they threw a tonne of money at a state-of-the-art Outplacement Centre and packed it full of self-development gurus, psychologists and career coaches.

That was probably the luckiest break I’ve ever had.

A TURNING POINT

Now I didn’t really have any skills in Career Coaching but what I did have was a strong admin background, so I was hired as the ‘admin boy’ who could fill out the forms and sign people in and out of the centre. However, when I went there I saw an opportunity. I realised that because it was all unprecedented, there were no clearly defined roles, and managers were making it up as they went along. So, as the expression goes, ‘slowly, slowly catch a monkey’; I gradually asked to get involved in more and more aspects of the centre. I effectively did all the same up-skilling as my manager, who was a Chief Inspector. After a while, my manager gained trust in me and allowed me to assist the junior Police Officers who found their way to our centre, usually on the grounds of medical retirement.

I became very interested in what was happening. It was all about helping people to work out what they wanted to do when they left the

Police Service, and I thought to myself, ‘Hey, maybe helping people to find out what they want to do is actually what I want to do … ?’ I was promoted to be Centre Manager and I started to co-run the Outplacement course with one of the external consultants. The more I did that, the more my confidence started to grow.

That’s when my first life-changing event occurred.

MY FIRST LIFE-CHANGING EVENT

I’ll ask for permission to get a bit teary eyed as I talk about this significant milestone in my life. If ever there was a man to whom I owe career success, it is John; the man who set me free. The man who made me question who I was at the deepest level. The man who showed me how powerful having the right mentor at the right time can be.

I see my life in two halves: before I met John and after I met John. Coming from my past as a poor academic performer and a socially inept person, I was still carrying a lot of baggage and believing I was an academic idiot. I used to feel intimidated by anyone who had a university degree. If someone had a Master’s degree then I couldn’t even look them in the eye. In fact, as I started to become more friendly with people at the Outplacement Centre, I realised that many of them had Master’s degrees. On one occasion I was invited to a party by a friend who was a Psychologist. My first question was, and I kid you not, ‘Will there be anyone else there with Master’s degrees?’ To which she replied, ‘Of course’. So I told her I was busy that night. That was how it was in my inner world before I met John.

After co-delivering the Outplacement Courses with me for about a year, John took me to one side and did a Jedi mind trick on me. He could see...