Written by: Joe Nabrotzky, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Think of the last time someone came to you with a problem. If you’re like most managers, you interpret that gesture to mean they obviously realize your incredible wealth of knowledge and thus came to the source of all truth to solve it. After all, you were promoted to be their manager because you were so good at solving these types of problems before. All too often, managers who do not yet know how to coach then pull from their prior experience and jump directly into solutioning.
The problems with this approach are plentiful. First, when the employee runs into another problem, you’re training them to continue to come to you to solve it verses build the capabilities to think and resolve issues on their own. Second, many times you thwart an innovative and potentially better solution that’s different from what worked for you in the past. Third, you usually have less buy-in from the Coachee since they didn’t really have a part in creating it, and people support what they co-create. And fourth, you may have jumped to the wrong solution if you didn’t take the time to really understand the problem. To a hammer, every problem is a nail.
The No.1 fail in most coaching conversations is that the coach is not sufficiently curious.
Not curious enough to keep asking questions
Not curious enough to help the Coachee truly understand the current, holistic reality
Not curious enough to have the Coachee brainstorm options
Not curious enough to understand the context before jumping into presenting their own content
Soulful curiosity is the fuel for great coaching conversations!
The mindset of a great coach is to realize that their job is NOT to solve the problem. Instead, the Coach’s focus is to provide a space for dialogue to increase awareness, brainstorm options, and help the Coachee commit to a way forward. The Coach’s job is to ask questions to pull out what the person already has within them - to help the Coachee explore, experiment, and learn ways of working, thinking, and being. When I’m coaching, I repeat this mantra in my head, “A great solution is within the mind of my Coachee and I’m going to keep asking questions until they discover it.”
We recommend using two models to get the most out every curiosity-filled coaching session:
The GROW Model
The BEAR Model
The GROW Model
The GROW model, developed by Sir John Whitmore, is a simple and effective way to structure the coaching session, and is the coaching model of choice for most of the Fortune 500. It allows you to stay curious and laser focused on asking the right questions to uncover the Goal, Reality, Options, and Way-forward (which spell GROW).
During the Goal portion, you want to understand where they want to go and may ask questions like:
What is the real challenge or opportunity for you?
What do you want – define success?
Or in the context of the coaching discussion, getting clear on the specific outcome the Coachee would like from the coaching discussion?
To uncover the Reality, the Coach wants to explore the gap from where they want to go and where they are at, and may ask:
What is the current situation?
What have you tried? What’s worked? What hasn’t?
Where are you stuck?
What’s your sense of the obstacles to reaching the goal?
What are you currently thinking, feeling, and doing?
When exploring Options, leverage questions like:
What strategies could you use to overcome each obstacle?
What may be the impact of that option?
What are the pros and cons of that option?
What else (keep brainstorming what other options could work)?
And even a question that is less coaching and more mentoring like, would you be open to hearing what’s worked for me in a similar situation?
And finally, to determine the Way Forward, ask:
Which option(s) interest you enough to move forward with?
What will you do by when?
What might get in the way?... How would you overcome that?
What resources or support may you need?
How will you measure the progress and know if you reached the desired goal?
While we personally use and train leaders on the GROW model, after observing these coaching conversations for years, we noticed a concerning trend, which is the number two failure.
The No.2 fail is that the Coach and/or Coachee do not understand how behavior change occurs in order to effect it.
When defining the Way forward section within the GROW model, you’ll usually end up with an action the Coachee commits to take. Actions that you both are hypothesizing will either solve their struggle or help them reach the desired result.
But what do you do when the Coachee knows exactly what to do, and even commits to taking that action, but can’t seem to consistently change their behavior?
And before we start judging others for their perceived lack of motivation or discipline, the same happens to each of us, all the time. Think about your last New Year’s resolutions…how many are you still following through on? Or how about that commitment to exercise more, or eat better, or make more sales calls, or stop yelling at the kids, or whatever actions you at one time committed to take, but failed to deliver?
Example:
Susan, a Senior Sales Leader, was coaching Rick, her sales rep, with the goal of doubling the number of Rick’s closes from 5 to 10 sales a month. When discussing the Reality section in GROW, they uncover that Rick is only doing 20 calls per day verses the recommended 40 calls. And those 20 calls a day are producing 5 sales a month.
When Susan was helping Rick to brainstorm options, a simple solution was to double the calls from 20 to 40, with the intent that it would lead to doubling the sales. Rick then left that coaching session with the commitment to now make 40 calls a day.
While this could be a great goal and action to take, where we’d see it turn sideways was during the follow-up meetings if Rick consistently fell below the 40-call goal.
What tool or framework would help Susan and Rick uncover what was going on in this new Reality (making 20 vs. 40 calls), and how can he overcome the obstacles that are keeping him from reaching 40 calls?
This is when applying the BEAR Model – which gets to the core at influencing human behavior -dramatically improves the coaching experience, especially when used within the GROW model.
Instead of just focusing on the action, the BEAR Model provides a deeper understanding of the root cause that’s driving those actions – the holistic view of all the obstacles standing in the way to get where we want to go. Without knowing what’s causing that action – or in this case inaction – it will be nearly impossible to create a way forward to changed behavior and improved results.
The BEAR Model
Any time you’re trying to influence human behavior, whether it’s your own actions or the behaviors of another person, that individual must enter a house. We’ll call it the Change House. And this Change House has five rooms. Only after walking through each of the five rooms can one come out with different results.
While you’re going through the rooms in the Change House, you can choose to wear your curiosity cap, compassion or critical coat, and your courageously act or fearfully stop sneakers. For example, when going into the Emotion room, if you’re not used to feeling and processing emotions, that’s when some may choose to put on their fearfully stop sneakers and either freeze or flee out of the room. While others will choose to courageously act and keep moving. If you’re wearing your curiosity cap, it means you’re truly interested in exploring each room.
As you enter the Change House, you bring your story, it’s simply your interpretation of how you make sense of the world around you. If you’re going through the Change House unconsciously, then you’re not even aware of what’s causing you to feel frustrated, or why you took a certain action, but behind the scenes, this chain reaction process of your Beliefs causing your Emotions, which propel your actions and results is always occurring.
The first four rooms spell out BEAR, as each letter represents an important sequential part in the process and is the reason why we call it The BEAR Model.
B stands for Belief.
E for Emotion.
A for Actions.
R for Results.
While you have complete control over your BEARs (Beliefs, Emotions, Actions and Results), it’s helpful to separate out those areas from the areas you don’t control. We call everything outside of your control your “Circumstances”.
Circumstances are neutral facts that are outside of your control. You form beliefs or a sentence in your mind for what those circumstances mean; those beliefs drive your emotions; emotions fuel your action or inaction, and the combination of those actions create results. Said in reverse, your results are caused by your actions which are caused by your emotions, which are caused by your beliefs…it all starts in your mind with what you choose to think.
Let’s go through each room:
Circumstances:
Circumstances are things in the world that are outside of our control.
Circumstances are not good or bad or based on opinion since they are completely neutral, and facts cannot be problems.
If you’re adding ny adjectives, judgment, or value to that fact, you know it’s no longer a circumstance.
Circumstances are the only part of the BEAR model we cannot control. We choose and control all the other components. We sometimes go extreme and either think we control everything or nothing, but that is not the case. We can’t control our circumstances, but we can control everything else…our beliefs, emotions, actions and therefore results.
B is for Beliefs:
We think thoughts all the time; those thoughts that we accept to be true, we call beliefs.
And there is a continuum of beliefs. On the far left are fleeting thoughts that consciously or even subconsciously pop into our brain, that we barely attach any belief to, and on the far right are beliefs we hold deep in our core.
We interchange "Beliefs" and "Thoughts"; consider them the same thing.
Every belief falls into one of these categories:
Beliefs about yourself.
Beliefs about other people.
Beliefs about what the past was, present is, and future could be.
For many beliefs, you usually have an if/then combination. For example, If you believe that debt is bad, THEN you would avoid financing your vacation on a credit card. Or IF you believe that exercising won’t help you become healthier THEN you probably won’t go to the gym, or IF you believe no one wants to buy your product, THEN you probably won’t keep calling to try to sell it.
Many of the beliefs or thoughts you have are helpful. They help you function. But some of our beliefs actually don’t serve us, they can even be harmful. In some cases they can even cause us unnecessary suffering and confusion.
E is for Emotions:
An emotion is a feeling. It’s a vibration in your body.
When you’re in the Emotion room, have it be a simple, one-word view of how you FEEL.
I feel sad, I feel happy, content, grateful, frustrated, focused.
We interchange "Emotions" and "Feelings"; consider them the same thing.
There’s your circumstance, what someone did or said, etc., then what you make it mean (your Beliefs), and then how you feel about it (your Emotions).
Think of it this way: the thoughts that you are thinking trigger an emotional fuel, and this fuel is a chemical that is released from your brain and then travels throughout your body. It feels like vibrations throughout your body. That emotion-generated fuel, if let’s say it’s anger, anger makes our heart rate speed up, it sometimes makes our throat tighten up, for some it makes them feel physically charged and their arm wants to reach out and punch something. Or when I feel the emotion of embarrassment, the embarrassment fuel that vibrates through our body causes our face to immediately feel a flush of heat and our cheeks turn red.
When we talk about emotions, it is not the same as sensations in the body. Jody Moore helps us understand the difference by sharing that a sensation starts in the body and then travels to your mind. Things like the sensation of being physically cold. It starts in your body and then tells your brain, hey, I’m cold, do something about this. Or sensations of feeling physical pain – you scrape your knee, and your body has pain shoot up to your mind to say, hey, something is wrong here, take care of it.
And sometimes we have sensations in our body that we don’t have control over, like chronic pain or physical sickness. Emotions, on the other hand, start in the mind and then travel to the body. They start in the brain in the form of a thought, something you believe. Your brain then releases a chemical, like a fuel that then flows and vibrates throughout your body.
A is for Actions:
Actions are what you do or don't do; your behaviors
All of our action or inaction comes from our feeling. It is all based on our emotions.
When you feel angry, what you may do will be different than when you are feeling caring or loving.
That’s why we call it emotional fuel since those feelings power us to take action.
R is for Results:
The Results are what we create and therefore have in our lives.
The combination of all our actions or inactions are what produce our results. And they can be considered positive or negative results. Results we like and results we don’t like. But they are all results.
You either get or don't get what you want.
Every result in our life is perfectly aligned to the beliefs, emotions and actions that led to those results.
The result does not mean it is the desired end goal of the individual, rather the result we are referring to in the Change House is the consequence of the actions as it relates to the individual.
The results are a direct loop that prove out whatever thought you were thinking, as it is the physical manifestation of the mental thought.
Continuing with the sales rep example, we’d want to dive deeper into what was really happening and why Rick was stuck. The failure mode we see in this situation is so many leaders would continue to focus on the action – to make more calls, but a great coach would help Rick uncover what is driving those actions or inactions.
When exploring the A for Actions room, Rick would discover the number of phone calls he is currently making each day. And when Rick goes into the Belief room, he’ll uncover what he’s telling himself in his own mind when he picks up the phone after having been turned down the last 20 calls. While we call it the BEAR model due since Beliefs cause Emotions, which cause Actions, with deliver results, when going through your Change House, you can start in any room and go in any order, as long as you walk through all five.
If while in the Belief room, Rick uncovers he was thinking a thought like, “I am a failure,” or “no one wants to buy this product,” or “I can’t take one more rejection today,” then it makes perfect sense why he didn’t want to make the 21st call. Those thoughts in his mind (the B for Beliefs room) caused him to feel rejected or discouraged (the E for Emotions), and while feeling those negative emotions, the A for Actions is that he doesn’t keep calling.
It's at moments like this when we remind you to choose to wear your curiosity cap, compassion coat, and courageously act shoes. For example, the first time some leaders realize they have a belief like, “I am a failure,” the natural tendency is to be critical. “How can I be thinking a thought like that?” is a common statement we hear the first time some explore their Belief room. This is why we encourage you to wear your coat of compassion, and allow yourself to play the role of a watcher, discovering what your brain is thinking without judgement. Stay curious by asking yourself more questions to uncover your other beliefs, and keep courageously acting by continuing to walk through all the rooms.
As a coach, we encourage you to not only discover the actions and results, but to uncover the beliefs at the root of problem. Focus on getting the right seeds that will then produce the desired fruit.
T. Harv Eker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, shares a great analogy to help us focus beyond the actions and results. He wrote,
“Let’s suppose you’ve just written a letter on your computer. You hit the print key and the letter comes out of your printer. You look at your hard copy, and lo and behold, you find a typo. So you take out your trusty eraser and rub out the typo. Then you hit print again and out comes the same typo.
‘Oh my gosh, how could this be?’ You just erased it!
So this time you get a bigger eraser, and you rub even harder and longer. You even study a three-hundred-page manual called Effective Erasing. Now you’ve got all the ‘tools and knowledge you need. You’re ready.
You hit print and there it is again.
‘No way!’ you cry out, stunned in amazement. ‘How could this be? What’s going on here?’
What’s going on here is that the real problem cannot be changed in the ‘printout,’ the physical world; it can only be changed in the ‘program,’ the mental, emotional, and spiritual worlds. Wealth is a result, health is a result, illness in a result, your weight is a result. We live in a world of cause and effect.
The only way to change your ‘outer’ world is to first change your ‘inner’ world. Whatever results you’re getting, be they good or bad, positive or negative, always remember that your outer world is simply a reflection of your inner world. If things aren’t going well in your outer life, it’s because things aren’t going well in your inner life. It’s that simple.”
So, what is our inner world?
It’s a combination of our beliefs and the ways we direct our mind toward goals. Whatever you think you can or cannot do and set your heart upon will eventually find a way to manifest your belief and prove you right.
For Rick, our Sales Rep, after exploring each room in the Change House, his current, unintentional BEAR Model could look something like this:
In this example, the circumstance outside of the Sales Rep’s control is a customer says, “Please don’t call me” and hangs up the phone.
That sales rep then formed beliefs or a sentence in his mind – in this case, “No one wants to buy this product”. That belief drove him to feel discouraged, and that emotion caused him to not make another call. And the combination of those actions (or in this case, inaction), created the results he got.
By exploring the Change House (labeling what is in each room in the BEAR Model), Rick can now see that the reason why he is not making more calls is due to some belief that is propelling that eventual action. As Rick becomes aware of that belief, he can identify it as an obstacle standing in the way of the desired behavior change. The next time another customer doesn’t want to be bothered, unless Rick’s aware of the thoughts going through his brain, Rick will not have the emotional fuel sufficient to take a different action.
While we’re coaching others or even when self-coaching ourselves, when looking at the Reality section within the GROW model, think of it as entering in the Change House so you can C your BEAR and discover the whole picture of current, usually unintentional Beliefs, Emotions, Actions and Results. When trying to solve a struggle or reach a result, everything can be categorized into one of those five rooms – C, B, E, A, or R.
Before you try to change, take time to fully become aware of what’s inside each room in your current reality. Keep your curious cap on while you discover what you’re Doing (Action), Feeling (Emotion) and Thinking (Belief).
When you’re ready to create different results, you enter a new, more deliberate Change House that allows you to up-level your Beliefs, Emotions and Actions to get there. In other words, you BEAR UP. As you start to BEAR Up by creating new beliefs, that will then trigger new emotions, actions and results.
BEAR Up
One of many strategies to up-level your beliefs as you BEAR Up is to create thoughts that move you to a future desired thought, but that you can believe now. It’s called laddering-up or bridging your thoughts.
Using our sales rep example, Rick discovered he had a thought in his current model of, “No one wants to buy this product.” When C’ing his BEAR, he realized that belief was not serving him. But it’s probably not realistic to assume he can immediately jump to a new Change House and immediately create a thought like, “Everyone wants to buy this product”.
We’re not saying you fake it till you make it. The new thought must be something that (1) you actually believe and (2) should feel better to think in order to produce a new emotion and behavior.
Think of it as a big cliff with your current thought on the left and your future desired thought on the right, and you’re trying to find a way to go from one side to the other.
To bridge your thoughts, what you can do is find another thought that is slightly closer to the other side, a new thought that (1) feels good to think and that (2) you can believe now. Maybe it’s, “It’s possible that someone wants this product”. Or “There are times when someone wants this product.”
See how that thought, even though not much better, creates a different, more empowering feeling?
Now, that doesn’t mean that all is perfect, and he’s arrived, but it’s a small shift to where Rick wants to go. Eventually, the Sales leader can help the rep to keep adding new thoughts until he’s created a bridge that takes him to the new, more empowering belief. Perhaps she trains him on how the products have helped others, or he sees how other reps are closing sales and believes that he can get a similar outcome.
Another strategy to up-level your beliefs is to add, “I’m just thinking a thought” to the beginning of any belief. “I’m just thinking the thought that no one wants this product.” Or “I’m just thinking the thought that I’m not good enough.” This helps you start to see your thought is not the reality. Instead of having your circumstance be “I’m not good enough,” you realize it’s just a thought you’re thinking.
A key to know if your circumstance is incorrectly really a thought is if when you state the Circumstance, it generates an emotion. If it does, you know it’s a thought and not a neutral circumstance…and since it’s a thought, you can change it to feel something different. It brings the control back to you.
Another strategy is the turnaround. You turnaround the thought with the opposite and see what parts of that opposite are also something you can believe. What if the thought is, “I don’t love my wife.” The turnaround is, “I love my wife.” You can probably find ways that both of those statements are true, depending on how you ask the question. I could ask you, “Why don’t you love your husband?” and there are many reasons why you have thoughts that could prove why that’s true. But if I asked, “Why do you love your husband?” you’d have many answers to prove why that is true to you also.
For those that want to explore humility, try this one on, “I might be wrong about” and insert your thought there. “I might be wrong about not being able to lose weight and keep it off.” “I might be wrong that no one will answer my call.” As a coach, this is a thought I repeat often as it forces me to remain curious and ask questions verses thinking I need to reveal the solution.
Another strategy that is helpful with big dreams is to begin the belief with, “I’m open to the idea that…”. “I’m open to the idea that I can find a spouse I love.” “I’m open to the idea that I will not raise my voice in anger to my kids.” “I’m open to the idea that I can become a morning person and wake up at 5:30am.” Or “It’s possible that…”
For our sales rep, when Rick is considering what options to take within the GROW model, not only will it include making those 40 calls as an action but will also include potential new thoughts he can try out that could produce the emotional fuel needed to make those calls. As his coach, the leader may need to explore other self-limiting beliefs, perhaps beliefs about himself, the customers, the product, or what the future could be.
The new, deliberate BEAR model this sales rep could create when BEAR’ing up could be to try on a new thought like, “I’m one call closer to finding the person who is ready to buy today,” or “There is someone out there who needs what I’ve got; my job is to find them” or any other thought that (1) feels good to think and (2) is something he can truly believe. Those new beliefs then cause an emotion of excitement or dedication that powers him to keep making calls. Look at the different outcomes from the current model to the future model, and all without the Circumstance having to change.
Your Identity Thermostat
Each of us has an internal identity, which are the beliefs you hold about yourself – it’s your self-worth. This identity is like a thermostat. A thermostat that you get to set. You have several internal identity thermostat settings at any time. You set the temperature for your wealth, the level of your health, your relationships, and so on.
For this analogy, let’s say that the warmer it is, it means that things are going well. Warmer means good.
Let’s take the example of your identity around money. Without knowing it, you set it to 75 degrees Fahrenheit or about 24 degrees Celsius. If you start to make more money, and that temperature heats up from 75 to 100 degrees, then 125, and higher, and you’ve not worked on that internal thermostat of beliefs, or how you feel about you, you will find a way to get your life back down to the 75 degrees type of wealth.
You will find a way to give away or lose that money to get back to where you believe you deserve, your personal identity to where you’re comfortable. Likewise, if we set our personal thermostat to 75 degrees and life starts going poorly, maybe you just found out your top customer canceled their big order, or the relationship with your spouse stinks, or you just added more love to your love handles, your personal thermostat implanted within your thoughts has two choices.
First, you can lower your personal thermostat fueled by negative thoughts and attract more and more cold or negative things into your life until your new belief is that you are a 75-degree type of person, or that you are in a 75-degree type of workplace, with a 75-degree type of boss, and a 75-degree type of marriage.
Or the second approach is you will go to work to kick on the heat to get your world back to where you believe it should be. The good news is that even when you raise it to 100 degrees, you’ll find out you’re capable of 120, and then after 120 you’ll see that it could be 140, and so on as you continually raise the bar on what’s possible.
Many of those you coach have set their identity thermostat to 30 degrees and still wonder why it is so cold in the room; why their life isn’t what they wanted. They complain that the room or their circumstances are too cold.
As their coach, you can help them see that if they can set the thermostat, why not set it where they want it? To do that, we must re-visit the thermostat, realize it is still set too low and raise the temperature to what is really wanted.
If someone wants to have a company that produces results of 100 degrees, yet they have beliefs that only put it at 30 degrees, they will never fully realize that vision. Or if they do, it’s short lived as life will find a way to keep them at their set temperature, but nothing more.
Many of those you coach will think that their identity thermostat will change after they reach a future goal, but that’s not how it works. You raise your identity thermostat first through what you choose to believe and then you create those results.
Good luck as you use the BEAR Model and the GROW Model hand-in-hand in your coaching sessions, both with others and when you self-coach. The art of leadership is not to know all the right answers, but to ask the right questions. As coaches, you provide a space for dialogue, awareness, and actions to develop others and amplify performance in every area of life.
Contact Joe@GlobalLeaderGroup.com and request free access to some of the modules in the Gaining Confidence and Manage Your Mind and EQ (Emotional Intelligence) on-line experiences, which goes into much more detail on how to apply The BEAR Model.
Joe Nabrotzky is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Global Leader Group, a leadership firm that helps organizations FIND & BUILD leaders.
His purpose is to inspire people to live and lead more deliberately from the boardroom to the family room. After struggling and then growing a profitable business of his own, he dedicated the rest of his career to becoming the Leadership Guide/HR Business Partner he wished he had as a former CEO and desperately needed as an entrepreneur, manager, and dad.
Through an MBA and multiple HR/OD/Leadership certifications, combined with a decade as an HR Executive in a successful fortune 100 company, he’s proven how to build leaders internally or find and hire them externally.
Mr. Nabrotzky has led people in every major region and lived all over the world, including a few years speaking only Portuguese in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and recently returned to Utah with his wife of 18 years and four children, after five years living off lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Global Leader Group, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Global Leader Group is a leadership firm of proven practitioners who share a deep-rooted desire to make a difference by helping organizations FIND & BUILD leaders to deliver excellence. They do that through three main pillars:
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