Michael Bungay Stanier - Do More Great Work
Our latest Spotlight is with Michael Bungay Stanier, founder of Box of Crayons and author of the Wall Street Journal best seller, The Coaching Habit. Michael is one of our biggest influences and we are pumped to have got the chance to talk with him.
We were impressed with Michael level of insight and practical wisdom, his levity and sense of perspective on what true success takes and his refreshing level of honesty and openness.
In our conversation, some of the highlights we spoke about included:
- How it can actually take a very long time to figure what impact you want to have on the world
- Why knowing your potential death date can give you focus!
- That showing up time and time again means that eventually something good will come
- When things go wrong, it is rarely just all about you i.e. don’t take failure personally
- How talking a calculated risk led to self publishing a book that has sold 250,000 copies!
- Why it is important to set up structures to keep yourself focused and moving forward
- How a side hustle can help you test what you think you want to do…because often what you think you want to do, isn’t ultimately what you really want to do
- How to actually make your impact in the world by doing a “great work” project
- How a single question can actually help you cut through overwhelm and find focus
- The Finland Bus Station metaphor and why “staying on the bus” can give you clarity on your purpose
Michael Bungay Stanier: Founder, Box of Crayons
Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons ... a company best known for teaching 10-minute coaching so that busy managers can build stronger teams and get better results.
Michael left Australia 25 years ago to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University ... where his only significant achievement was falling in love with a Canadian ... which is why he now lives in Toronto, having spent time in London and Boston.
He has written a number of books. His latest, the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit, has sold nearly a quarter of a million copies ... and been praised as one of the few business books that actually makes people laugh out loud.
He’s proudest of a book called End Malaria, a collection of essays on how to have more impact in the world that raised $400,000 for the fight against malaria.
Michael was the first Canadian Coach of the Year ... pretty good for an Australian. He was recently named the #3 Global Guru in coaching, which caught him by surprise, as he’s not entirely sure why.
Balancing out these moments of success, Michael was banned from his high school graduation for “the balloon incident,” was sued by one of his law school lecturers for defamation, and his first published piece of writing was a Mills & Boone short story called “The Male Delivery.”