Repetition

Ged: [00:00:00] Good morning. Good afternoon, Milan. How are you? It is afternoon your time. Morning my time. Afternoon your time.

Milan: As we usually do this. So I am slowly but surely wrapping my day up. I do have a few client calls ahead of me, but not that much. Not that many. And yeah. How about yourself? What is, what’s ahead of you

Ged: I’ve got a pretty easy day today. Yeah. I’m gonna be doing some work in the garden, such as the is the joy of working three days a week.

Milan: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Ged: Mm-hmm.

Milan: Very, very

Ged: Yep.

Milan: Am, you know, returning from some travel, so I have little more intense couple of days catching up, but hopefully I’ll get to a similar pace as yourself pretty soon.

Ged: Okay, so what are we talking about today, Milan? This is the next card cast in the series. What’s our topic today?

Milan: Well, looks like we’ll be talking about [00:01:00] repetition.

Ged: Okay, repetition.

Milan: One of my. Exactly. One of my favorite cards actually is just, you know, it was just a little joke. I don’t really remember what it started, but you know, I did realize that, you know, there’s quite a few cards. At this point, you know upwards of 50. And of course we’re coming back to the same topics from different angles.

And it, it is just a way of, you know, what is the topic of the day? It’s the nature of it. If you write something twice a week, sometimes similar ideas come and originally I was thinking about. Somehow filtering, but then no, not really because it might be relevant to somebody else at that point, or they just might need a different point of view.

And, you know, we work with repetition a lot after all. You know, the first rule of rhetorics is that repetition is good. And the second one is that repetition is good. So [00:02:00] why not just talk about that?

Ged: Yeah. Well, in in what way do we use repetition as coaches? I mean, it’s a, I mean, it is in, in some respects, when you say repetition, you think of an adult conversation with. A child, you’ve gotta say something to a, to a child know, 5, 6, 7, 8 times before they start, but before it starts to register. And, and people see that as a negative thing, but in the work that we do, repetition is, is good. And it’s often intentional and it’s to be encouraged. But how, how do you use reposition?

Milan: The point is that if you’re doing something again, you get better at it. Right. It’s practice makes perfect really, and you know it you know, in a time when I was writing software, when you lost a piece of coat and then you had to write it again, it was usually faster and better

Ged: That’s true. You go through that mental refactoring process that means you can optimize and remove things that weren’t there before and do it a little bit more [00:03:00] elegantly.

Milan: Exactly. And you know, and when we are going through the steps of the, you know, three heck wheel, you know, for building up a company strategy, when we are working with our clients, we go around and we are not done right.

Ged: Yep.

Milan: We go around again because. The situation could have changed. You know, we are now, year later, perhaps right?

Sometimes longer. The company might be growing into different markets. So the market map is different. The core customer could have evolved along with the product being evolving. So. You go back through those processes. Now you have a leadership team that knows the tech knows the techniques, knows the tools, so it goes faster. The quality grows, right? Sometimes in the beginning we say, okay, this is good enough, right? Just got it out. That’s good enough. But later the standard of good enough goes up by the process of repetition. So. Yeah, the, just because you’ve done something in the past doesn’t mean that you [00:04:00] shouldn’t do it again.

That’s why we white sheet some of those exercises, like if we never done them before,

Ged: Absolutely. Yeah. As you say, do doing it again. You are coming at it from a position of a different knowledge set. You know, you’ve, you know, maybe six months or a year have passed, so you can go through and you can refine. You can validate and you can improve on prior work, and each time you do it, you get a little bit better.

And the same goes with, you know, when we, you know, the, the, the structure that we use in our, in our, in our annual and quarterly sessions now, even before we get to strategy, you know, we reinforcing core purpose, we are reinforcing core values. We are reinforcing the big, hairy, audacious goal. And I’ve, in the past I’ve had a few companies where the CEO has said, well, we’ve already done this.

And I said, well, we did it three months ago. He said, yeah, but it hasn’t changed. Okay, well let’s just make sure it hasn’t changed now, and the team are liking the fact that we are doing it because this is often the only time they hear it. [00:05:00] But the CEO was thinking, we are wasting time. Oh no, no. We’re not wasting time.

We are not wasting time at all. This is good reinforcement.

Milan: Probably all, all of us coaches had the same experience. The, the words might be slightly different. In this particular case, again, we’re doing core customer again, right? Well, you know we’ve done that. I said, yeah. And do you think you got it right? Well, we’ve done that. I said, yeah.

Do you think like you have product market fit? Look at your sales numbers, right? You are obviously not where you need to be, and you know. My guess as a coach or my not a guess, but my evaluation of the situation was that we didn’t get a core customer, right? So we don’t know how to talk to them, so we need to do it again because we learned more from the interaction with the market since we’ve done it last time.

So, yeah, it was a time to do it again. Is good.

Ged: And you may be, [00:06:00] you may be repeating, but you are asking it from a different knowledge base and you’re probably asking it a different way. So you know the concept, the context is different. So you can, you can go into it with additional insight and a different perspective that often unclogs or Unblocks.

That thing that’s getting in your way, that’s stopping you from getting where you need to be. I, I often have conversations with CEOs where I ask them the question, how many times do you have to tell a CEO that you need to tell your team 5, 6, 7, 8 times before things start sinking in? And it, I have to tell this, I have to ask that question to the CEO about 5, 6, 7, 8 times before they suddenly get it.

Ah. That’s what you mean. That’s the fourth, fifth, sixth time you’ve told me that. I understand now. And that, that shows them that they have to do the same with their teams. Because the first time, straight over the head, second time, barely [00:07:00] registers. Third time some flicker of recognition. Fourth time.

That’s familiar. Fifth time, right? We’ve done this before. We’ve said this before. We’ve heard this before. And then 6, 7, 8 times, that’s when it starts registering. But you have to keep on with that repetition. ’cause if you don’t, it just doesn’t sink. It does, does not register.

Milan: You know, you mentioned values and they’re such a great example of this. Right. Like you want to come to values from so many different angles along the way, because otherwise, otherwise they don’t think you need to. It’s like, you know, when we are coaching a leadership team, one of the things we are actually doing is to teaching them a new language, right? They are. Or helping them to develop their own language rather than teaching them, because it is different in every team, obviously. Right. But the important word here is a common language. And how do you learn a language by repetition? Just [00:08:00] doesn’t work in any other way. Right. So they need to practice doing those things. That’s why we do things like left and right. Right. That’s why, you know, we did a cart on the safe method, right? You will not learn that. It’ll not become natural unless you repeat it almost endlessly.

And again, going back to values, you know, that’s why we put them into into CEO letters every week. That’s why we build good news around around values because. You actually want to get to the ninth, 10, 11th time of repetition when people are almost sick of hearing that. Right? Because that’s when you know that it actually registered that it’s that it sits there because then the language has been adopted.

Ged: And when and when they start laughing at you in a good way, you know that the message has got in. We know this, you can stop telling us every single time we know this. Yeah,

Milan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s, you’re

Ged: Yeah.

Milan: Right. Yeah.

Ged: Yeah.

Milan: Are, those are very precious moments when we feel like, [00:09:00] okay, we’re getting somewhere here.

Ged: Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. And it, it takes time. It takes time, and you’ve just gotta let that play out. You just gotta let it play out.

Milan: Yeah.. You know, you’re saying it takes time. I am working with a client now when the time is viewed factor and we need to accelerate everything. And the way we are doing it is that we are just meeting more often. We’re doing the same things, but we’re just doing them in more compressed ways.

So we get those repetitions in, over a shorter period of time. That normally would be the quarters and the years, but you know, we’re trying to get it two weeks and months. Right.. Because sometimes you literally need those repetition cycles the new habits to develop, the

Ged: Yeah.

Milan: To develop and the habits.

Ged: So you are in effect living in dog years with that client?

Milan: Pretty much. Pretty much,

Ged: Yeah.

Milan: And

Ged: Yeah. A quarter is a [00:10:00] year. A month is a quarter. A week is a month. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Milan: Much. Yes. And every Tuesday is a groundhog day. Yeah.

Ged: Yeah, because you’re doing the same thing again, again. But as you say, the more often you do something, the better you get at it, the more consistent it is. The common language comes out, the common grammar comes out, and everyone just moves along faster. Yeah.

Milan: And the reality is that, you know. It might appear that you’re doing the same thing, but you’ll never do the same thing the knowledge is different. The environment is different. Even if there is just a week, you know, there’s something happened since we did it last time. It’s like the, you never step twice into the same river because you change, and the river changes too. Right, so we learn something and we might react to completely exactly the same situation in completely different way because of what happened between r and them. So doing the same exercise again, doesn’t actually mean repeating what we’ve done before. It’s just [00:11:00] using the same tool,

Ged: Yep.

Milan: With better

Ged: So, yep. So read the same book again. Go to the same place again. Have the same meal at the same restaurant. It’ll be different every single time. Mm-hmm.

Milan: Yeah. And, and, you couldn’t, couldn’t say it any better. The, you know, the book is, is a great example, right? And when you have a really good author, you can read it five times and every time you find something new in there, right? The same thing with a good movie, right? Because the first, you get the first layer of the onion, and then you’ll get the next one.

Then you get the next one, and you’re getting closer and closer to the core. And some of the things, some things just need to be consumed repeatedly for you to get all the way to the bottom.

Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm. So on repetition. Repetition is good and it’s intentional, but did we say repetition’s good.

Milan: Repetition is [00:12:00] good.