Ecological conferences.

Oh!

Yeah, uh, obviously we went to Berlin last year, and that was amazing. That was great fun. That was incredible. I have been looking around at other ecologically focused conferences, and there are some skill acquisition ones, there are some more academically inclined ones, but there are not many. No. There are not many, and when I look around at the research and the conversations through the ecological approach, there are lots of coaches talking about it. But there's not what I would say a, a, a go to, um, there is a go to conference, but you have to go looking for it. One, one just moment. There are coaches talking about it? Oh yeah, well, football, basketball, fencing, yeah, like, coaches. Sports coaches, I should have been specific, sorry. Yeah, sports coaches are talking about it. Uh, in skill acquisition. Even though I don't like the term skill acquisition, because I feel like it should be skill development, but, eh, we can argue back and forth on that. So yeah, these conferences that sort of exist, there are some big limitations, For me at least, and let me know if you agree. First, you have to fly to them most of the time because they're not in England.

Yeah, we need to do,

yeah, yeah. So, an English one would be nice.

Yes, please.

Second struggle is the conversation is extremely high level.

You

don't, you can't really, they're academically driven conferences. You can't really go in unless you've consumed a dictionary. No. Like, if you're not familiar with affordances, constraints, attractors, metastable attenuation, bifurcations, if those words scare you, the conference is going to go way over your head. Yeah, but for the first couple of talks at least. Yeah, so I feel like we need a Ecological psychology for beginners conference But who would attend? The people that are interested, that don't have the time to embed themselves within all of the research. I would say Embed themselves within the research, yeah. When I look at the Discord, the Ecological Dynamics Discord, there are loads of coaches in there interested and talking about the constraints led approach. But the constraints led approach is Isn't necessarily ecological psychology, because saying oh, there is a constraint here is different from saying We are using constraints to try and help people perceive affordances. Yeah, it's different, isn't it? It's very much like An ecological approach isn't just constraints and affordances. Yeah. Differential learning design. There's so

many beautiful and sexy things that don't ever really get spoken about because it's always constraints. I suppose it's because there is very much, one of the things that I've been thinking about over the last kind of couple of weeks, or week a while now, is like, designing An offer that is using the ecological approach but doesn't require anyone to know the ecological approach. Which is because, because in my industry, I'm not 100 percent sure. I know that people want something different. They want change because they're tired of the same old, same old ways of working and it just doesn't make sense and there's no It's just all been boiled down to, at least in the business space, do less, do only one thing, and yet there's a big, wide group of people who are like, yeah but I If I could just do one thing, that wouldn't be the problem. Sure, great, I can just do one thing, let's boil it down to one. But when there isn't one thing going on, when there's a lot going on, you've gotta think about something else. So they know that the approach that is mentioned everywhere doesn't make sense. But I don't know whether they entirely know why. I think it does make sense. But I think that It doesn't match their It makes sense, but it doesn't match their experience. It doesn't match what they are How they experience life, how they experience their business. And it's like, Oh, I just have to fix this problem, make it better. And what if there isn't a problem? And all that lovely stuff. So is it for them?

I mean, when you look at the ecological approach, the instructional design that most business coaches use, the feedback is knowledge about. It's knowledge about the thing, not knowledge of the thing. So enabled, uh, If you want to use an ecological approach to what I would say is business coaching, for lack of a better term, you would need to look at practice design. So looking at their day of doing business, the actual practice of doing business, and then either adding constraints, removing constraints, soliciting affordances, developing expertise in certain skills during the practice. So having an hour long conversation about how your business went this week. isn't useful if you're looking at it from an ecological perspective, because you're now talking about the thing. It's now instructions. It's not knowledge of, it's knowledge about, and the feedback isn't necessarily being Getting, getting in there in the weeds, isn't it? It's getting

right in there.

Yeah. Uh, yeah,

yeah. And

that's, that's what your approach would be. It's, okay, we're going to practice business. We're going to do the practice of business. We're going to, we're not going to talk about it. We're going to do it.

I think it's really exciting and that is something that I've, one of my clients who I've been really leaning into the ecological approach with, without them really knowing. I've spoken about it a little bit because they're actually an academic, which says a lot, and so we have been talking and I've just been using the approach and all of a sudden everything just clicked. What, for them? And it was, it was very similar to, I think, it was definitely very similar to my experience, but all of a sudden, everything just clicked. Why? Huh? Why? Uh, good question. Things just don't Oh yeah, now it

works. That's a good question. I don't know. Because there's timescale, timescales obviously of analysis. I guess this relates to what I was talking about, uh, with a couple of the, couple of people in the ECOD space. We were talking about fractals. But, yeah, for people that aren't familiar with fractals, the, I think the best explanation or analogy used is the coastline of Britain. When you look at Britain and you try and measure the coastline, if you take a ruler of whatever length and you measure it, you get One measure. If you make the ruler smaller, well, now it's gonna be a different measure, and make the ruler smaller, it's now a different measure. All of them are accurate, but at different scales, and that's, you know.

Yeah, yeah, going back to what you were saying, it's very much like, it wasn't one thing that clicked. It was just a bunch of small little things, like little pieces of land, as you were talking about with, with our wonderful country. Like, and how. It was just a load of little things that all happened in a completely random, what feels like a chaotic order. Oh, I wonder why. Um, and it just, there was a moment for me. It was a Critical

state.

A vertical state. Critical

state, that's the terminology, come on.

Alright, cool, alright, fine. There was a critical state, where basically it just was like, boom. Okay, cool.

I, the way I described this in the call, so we had a Teams call, why we use Teams, but if you're listening, Daniel, apologies, but Teams is just, yeah. Um, so we were on this Teams call and The way I described this critical state was I, I know you don't drive, but you've probably experienced this being in the car when there's a roundabout and everyone gets around about the same time. It's kind of like a, a wild west of who's who, who's going to, who's going to go first? Who's going to move forwards first? Because you're meant to give way to the right at a roundabout. If you've approached at the same time, you all look at each other like, right, who's pulling, who's gonna, what? And then it'll, someone will make the move. Most of the time it's me because I can't be bothered to wait. If I slow down and the other person on the right is stopped, I'm like, right, I'm going then. But there is, there is a moment where you, you all look at each other and you're like, who's gonna make the first move? And that to me is the critical state. And all of the different fluctuations that have happened before that, the fractaled, the fractaled, I don't know if that's a word it is now, um, state of dynamics of each of those cars. They're autonomous cars, autonomous vehicles, doing their own things, going all over the place. But it gets to this roundabout, this point, where it's like, where we've got to navigate, we've got to do something to keep moving. And that state, that fractals, that critical state, I think, is the aha moment in learning. It's the, oh, I get it now, that makes sense now, or I can do that now, or right, I see what I need to be attending to, like education of attention or education of intention. The individual has self organized all of the specifying information to a point at which they can execute. Whatever skill behavior it is with a different level of understanding whether that is deeper or more shallow Depends on the context, but they have now found a state at which It's critical and I think for me inside of learning environments practice design. It's it's easier to get to those critical states through practice design than it is through instructional design. That's from my experience.

Yeah, agree, agree.

But talking about all of this at a conference, a group, a group conversation, the group conversation I was in, there were four other coaches, all of which are very versed in the field, and they could read an article, a 20 page article about fractals. Fractal mathematics is extremely complex, and all of the sports coaches could talk about it. One's in fencing, one's in tennis, uh, a couple in football, one's an academic doing a PhD, and then myself, who's just this, like, orange guy talking about stuff, uh, but, but we, we were all at the level at which we could communicate through this language. The conferences are very similar, from my experience and from the conversations I've had with others about the conferences, and obviously it costs to go to the conferences. So how do we spread this ecological approach, taking the ecological approach, through physical events, through in person events, if you're not a sporty person, so you're not going to go to the Scalak conferences, and you're not an academic, so you're not going to go to the, uh, Hey, here's some complicated physics and maths and thermodynamic shit. Yeah. How do we get you to one of those conferences before you add a me?

That's a good question. That is a really good question. How would I?

I mean, even listening to the podcast episodes talking about it, if you go to a podcast episode talking about ecological dynamics, nine times, well, 99, 10, 99 times out of 100, it's going to be about sport. It's either MMA, baseball, basketball, football, tennis, cricket, golf, rugby, like. All of the sporty things.

I mean that's kind of what we have here, like my intention is you're the one with all the complicated words and I'm trying to translate them and probably end up using them too in the end.

If we're going to communicate, we need to be able to communicate using similar terminology, otherwise we'll be speaking past each other.

Yeah, that's true. But how do we, how do we introduce that? So what

we have I feel is trying to do that because I, from my experience at least, I would say I'm not necessarily translating, I guess interpreting.

Interpreting is a more accurate. Yeah, no, interpretation is more.

Because it, yeah, I'm, even though I'm using the words, certainly more than you do sometimes, Yeah, it's, it's, It's not a, hey, here's a sentence of lots of jargon, and you have to follow everything I say. I try and then expand, or go into And try and translate it

into a practical example. I think it's exactly what is needed for a conference that is designed for people who are not those other people. Familiar with the jargon, yeah. For those who are not familiar with the jargon. And one of the things that I found even doing Berlin was it was, I think we both said it was very theoretical, but it was very theory based and not really practical based. Action based. Action orientated? Yeah, it wasn't very actionable, which people often like, especially when they get confused. Yes, like, what's the point? Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, this is great. I love talking about these geeky nerdy things that we spoke about with the Snap, the Crackle, and the Pop, but How does it make a difference? Yeah, how does it make a difference? How about it? What do I do? Yeah, and I think, I think this podcast is part of it. Maybe we need to do a conference. I'm glad you said that because that's what I was thinking. What? Maybe we need to

do an ecological Taking an ecological approach, as And it's interesting you say that. What I would love to do is bring individual, obviously we've spoken with Scott and I've spoken with some other coaches, it'd be great to speak to the coaches, the sports coaches, and seeing how they apply ecological dynamics outside of the sport. Yeah, like real,

real like, Tasty, juicy stuff. 'cause that's the bit I find most interesting. It's like, how are you applying it here? Mm-Hmm. Like, I think going back to our, um, pop episodes, the philosophy of practice, like those whole view going deep into how you do what you do and why you do them, and all of that was probably the most fascinating experience that I had. It's then as we kind of, and then each time we go into this experience of like talking about this, and then about that, and then about this, and then the exact, like, It was really interesting to, I just like knowing how people do things. Because everyone, especially in the business world, there's a lot of talk about what you should do versus what you actually do knowledge of.

Precisely.

And that is the interesting thing. And it would be so cool to have, and uh, most people in business think they don't know.

It's funny you say that, I've been speaking with some of the, uh, I don't want to say professional athletes, because they're not professional, they're trampolinists, but some high level athletes in trampoline, and asking them to articulate how they're learning the skills, like the bigger skills, the more complex skills that many people don't even dream of doing, they, They've struggled to articulate it and they're using typical language. Oh, the coach just told me to do it. I just, it was natural talent or I just, yeah. But that's, that's what the coaches say because the coaches don't know how to explain it. So they're saying, oh, they were just naturally talented or I asked them to do something, they just did it. And you're like, yeah, but there must be reasons why. Uh, and a lot of the other explanations go into. They use words that they know to explain the experiences, but it, I don't think it's accurate. So they say, oh yeah, I'm just focusing, I can see where I'm at. What do you mean you can see where you're at? When you're doing three full twists and two front somersaults and the, you can't see anything, it's just a blur. But they can see it. Where they see it, I think, is the interesting question here. I'm still midway through a conversation which It's, it's hard to have the conversation because obviously I know where I think we're going to go, but I don't want to lead the person there. So I'm asking them open questions to see what they answer. Um, which is a fun experience in itself. But they are saying that they see the moves, but they're not visually seeing the moves. I don't think they are. And what they said is they feel the moves afterwards. They're like, oh yeah, I just, I just feel where I am. I'm like, ah, so feeling and seeing are different. Like they are actual different things. They're different senses. You have haptics and then you have vision. So when they say, oh yeah, I can see the skill. I see where I am in the skill. I think it's their perceptual system, the body as an embodied, embedded organism. can see it. And it's see being, uh, an alternative or a synonym, a replacement, because they don't have the, uh, the ecological terminology, they are perceiving the skill. They are perceiving the skill, not seeing the skill. And that to me is a practical example of how trampolinists, gymnasts, acrobatics, um, When they're using traditional cognitivistic approaches, they're saying, oh yeah, I can see the skill. I need to spot the end deck. Or I need to spot the trampoline. I need to spot the floor. Yeah, but are you actually seeing the floor when you're doing Miller's and Rudy's, Randy's, Striff's? Like, no. Yeah, spinny flippy shit. Cool, thank

you.

Um,

it kind of, it, it's in business, it's often spoken about as intuition and gut. It's kind of, I'm kind of hearing the same, it's like, oh yeah, because I sent an email talking about this a little bit, and the reply was, yeah, I call this my intuition, and I'm like, what's your perceptive system? I like, I like the word perceptive system. It's nice. Perceptive system. It feels good. And it's very much, and I, yeah, I realised I wrote that a while back, and You're remembering. I am. Yeah, I'm remembering. Hang on a minute. You popped it out of your storage though, didn't you? Hang on, hang on. Cool. Put the memory stick back in again, you know. Defrag. Um, whatever. You gotta re you gotta re encode that. Mmm, yes. Yeah, let me re encode that in a moment. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, so when it comes to all of this sort of

Oh! Update on the um, family thing. Now, I keep being challenged when I use So, you know, we were talking last week around, um, Aidan going, Well, it's not my brain, but it is my brain. Yes. Now they're doing it to me. Oh, nice. I love it. It makes me laugh, because Well, no, it's not my brain, but it is my brain. But, okay, it's not really It's all of It's my perceptive system.

It's you. It's me. Yeah, it's you. Again, it's that, it's that vulnerability of just accepting actually, you know what, that's just me. It's my experience right now.

Yeah, yeah.

I, when, uh, it's interesting, uh, I'm, so, being half deaf, obviously, I know a little bit of sign language, uh, BSL, but I'm learning, that's why we're doing it today, on Sunday, not Saturday, because I'm learning BSL I, I'm, I'm committing myself to learning more BSL. And they said, oh, so what do you do? What's your job? And I was like, well, I research. And I had no idea how to communicate ecological psychology in BSL. So I just spelt it. I had to fingerspell ecological psychology. And, and they said, well, there's a couple of signs for psychology, which I'm like, okay, but normally when you, when you're signing in BSL, it's an action. How do you action ecological? And they were saying, well, you could do, well, you could do tree. And I'm like, yeah, but it's not environmental psychology, it's ecological. So I'm like, it's an animal and the environment. And they said, I don't know, you're gonna have to make it up. So I'm gonna have to, in some way, make it up. Which, right there, made me think, wait, so, me learning a language, like, um, BSL, and having to essentially create my own way of communicating the research that I'm doing, there is an emergence of communication within BSL. There is an emergence of communication because ecological psychology hasn't been communicated through BSL. Yet, to my knowledge at least. So, the language that we're using in sign, similar with verbal, but the verbal communication of this language elsewhere, it's, it's going to have to emerge. So, when we're talking with other individuals in conferences, the language, I think needs to emerge in the culture, needs to emerge in the conversation, because you can't just loan the intelligence to the individuals coming into the conference.

No. No.

Because we don't believe in loaning intelligence, or the, the loan of intelligence when it comes to empiricism and gaining knowledge, etc, etc. I don't want to do a philosophical deep, deep dive right now, but No, you don't. No. I Discord this morning. I literally woke up and went straight into Locke and Aristotle.

Oh, good morning to you too.

Exactly. I woke up, looked at my phone, I had a ping in Discord, in a Discord server, and they, they were asking about um, constructivism. I was like, oh well, Locke and Aristotle, and then we've got Descartes, blah blah. So I, I sent this message, carried on, and when I read it back I was like, there's so many errors in there, like spelling errors, where I'm just typing on my phone in bed. But yeah, so that's what I woke up to this morning. And, and where, where I see the potential in conferences coming is combining practice design actions, um, with conversation, because I don't, I don't think you can have a truly ecological conference. Because ideas need to be communicated. But, I think there are, there are conversations that can be had which are closer to the practice than a lecture.

Yes.

So, I would prefer to have people come on and talk about their philosoph philosophy of practice in a conversation on a podcast than meet up at a conference somewhere.

Yeah.

Which makes me, which makes me think, okay. The ecological conferences that are out there, I would argue, are designed through cognitivistic approaches of learning. Which is somewhat hypocritical.

So how do we design an ecologically

valid conference? And that is the question that I got stuck on, which is why I put it in for us to talk about. So what

would it look like? What does it need? What are the pieces? People.

Cool. But, but, this. To me, the practice itself, if you take sport and you look at the practice, you have the activity itself, the activity, the thing, and then you have a coach guiding whatever the practice is. Right? So if a coach is coaching another, this is gonna a bit go a bit meta. If a coach is coaching, or the coaches,

yeah,

right. Then they, the coach is constraining what the coach could do. And that's what I think we're looking to do with this conference, because I imagine most individuals going to the conference won't be students. They are students, because everyone's learning. But they're going to be individuals that are likely going to be using the ideas to educate. Yes. They would be teachers, business owners, coaches. People that are likely looking to use whatever approach we're talking about to help other people learn. So it would be. An educator's education conference. Yes. Yes. Which means we would need, I think, environments or practice of education for there to be feedback, guidance for. Mmm. So it's almost like you would need a Is it a

conference or is it a workshop? Precisely.

What's the difference?

It sounds more like the name than the expectations attached to the name. Because it would, it would Although it could be deemed, uh, is there a hybrid where it's both, where it's having the conversation, as we were saying earlier, we're having the conversations and there is that standing up and listening and teaching because that is the constraint of the environment that we're in as a conference. And then there is also the workshopping in between. And so it's kind of a, it's kind of all of it. It's a little bit of like, we do this piece, and we also do this piece. It, it, and it needs to be very much, yeah. I

see, I see it as a coaching session, so the, inside of the Ecological Dynamics, like the, uh, Jiu Jitsu and the rest of it, their workshop, their event, as it were, was, okay, here's a coach coaching stuff, and other coaches are going to coach things, and they're going to get, Feedback about practice design, about different ideas, and that's what happens inside of sport. You, you do a, a talky bit, sometimes a talky bit's a bit long, but then you go into the workshopy bit, so you sort of have a conference and then a workshop. To me, that's just a coaching session, right? That is just practice. You need a little bit of instructional design, like a loan of intelligence to build up the practice. You need to impart some sort of constraints. For the practice to continue, you can't just say, right, now go do the thing. The coach needs to explain what the constraint is, design the game before actually doing, playing the game. And that's how I see potential conferences designed ecologically. is you have the, the game, the game rules, the game constraints laid out, and then the individuals go and explore the environment, ideally with the individual guiding different views, then coming back and continuing conversations and feedback. We've seen it. That's what workshops typically are in sports coaching at least. I imagine they exist in business? I don't know. Okay, maybe not. Not that I've experienced.

They've primarily been very much. Information. Lectures. Lectures.

Right. Yeah.

It is very much, it is, it is talking about the thing. Sometimes there are workshops, but still even then, I think the thing, the closest that's happened, was something that I ran, where it was very much a practical, we're going to do this thing now. And so, some of it, so I suppose it's, you've got the copywriting stuff, So copywriting kind of workshops where you are writing copy, where you are actually act in, act like actually doing it in that session. So those are really good kind of workshopy things. Um, they're often done online. Um, and I suppose the same.

I, I think from what I've seen in conversation, the events and conferences that are starting to happen more, that obviously covid is out down and people are traveling more is people are. looking for activities. Like what's a good activity to do here? I'm like, that's coaching, you're constraining practice design, right? It's not a hey, what can I what activity what team building activity can I put into this conference? No, it's What, what's your practice design? If you can't design practice, I would argue you're not an effective coach. Like, if, if you're asking other people, Hey, what, what drills, essentially, can I put in my conference? You're, you're doing the, the, the controller coach. Oh, I, I need, I need instruct, like, I can give the instructions, but I need to find a game to put here to make it fun. Yeah,

you need to find a thing to make it thing so that it can think.

It's like, I want a list of exercises that I can give my participants to do. Like, no. No. If you're saying, here's a list of exercises, you're saying it's going to work for each individual, which doesn't work. We know it doesn't work, because everyone learns differently. So it's not a, oh, here's an exercise, or here's an activity to do. It's a, okay, this is the practice design that we're going to use, and the constraints we're going to use, to help you. find, for lack of a better term, the solution to the problem. From my experience anyway, business coaches are looking at conferences like that.

No, they're looking to, I mean, I, whenever I go to a business conference these days, I'm not looking to learn very, like, as in the traditional, I'm not looking to be educated. There we go, that's better. I'm not looking to be educated. I'm looking to be in a room with other business owners. And hear about how they do things and what they do and why they do Like, that's the bit that I find It's the bit after the talkie talkies, where I hear people talking about I don't know. Uh, a lot of the co A lot of the talks that I experienced recently, There was It was a lot of like, Talking about, and there was, it was like, okay cool, but what? But what, what can I do? What actions can I take? How, what, what am I supposed to do? You give, you give How do I solve the problem? Like, how do I solve the problem that I have? And, and that, it was a really interesting, because the one person I didn't think who would do that for me, actually was like, oh cool, this is really, I can actually, action and do something with this. It's not just, uh, Here is how I work, and you will listen. It was very much a, here's an actionable approach that you can take, here's, here's, here's a tool. It was based on, on, on using an app, unfortunately. But also, it was beyond the app. It was talking about why and how and where and when. I was like, oh, cool. Okay, cool. That's interesting. And although it still isn't specific enough, which I don't think it could be in that room, because there were 600 other people, and I don't think that would be even possible, for 600 even, with 600 other people, in that current, what is it possible? How would it be possible?

I was going to say that that's the better question. How could it be possible? Because there's self organization if so self organization You can have millions of creatures self organized together. Yeah, so 600 people should be able to self organize It just depends on the constraints of the environment that you've created Put in there. Yeah. Because they all, they all got to the room

and, and they, they were all sat in the same tables, so everyone was sat in the tables with people that they knew. Mm-Hmm. what?

That, that to me is a more interesting question when it comes to conferences. How do you create practice design in a conference environment, workshop environment that. Can help guide individuals solve problems together because I don't, as much as people think They go to conferences to get the answers I don't think that's what they go for because most most people that I've spoken to after the conference They enjoy the conversations with people after the talks and yeah the in between bits That's more enriching for them because they're hearing how other people are solving problems

Yeah, because that's the bit I find interesting. So why don't we just emphasize that bit?

I don't know. That would be what I would want to do. So yes, breakout rooms are useful, but breakout rooms would be, okay, now you've been given a Game. A practice design. You've been given constraints. You have a task to complete. Go complete it. Obviously, in physical movements, that could be, okay, you have two mats. There's five of you here. You can't touch the floor there. Get to the line over there. So, five of you stand on the mat. Then one moves it around. You try and problem solve. And you work together to figure it out. And the process of problem solving, you can see how other people in your group work together. Breakout rooms in conferences is the same principle or on tables.

I'm just thinking about from a business perspective, I'd be so interested to see a bunch of coaches doing this, because the result would be, oh

you just do this! We need to do this, but you have all five of them saying, we need to do this, and you're like, well no, you've got to work together. Yeah, it would be really interesting to, to, to see that. They're called team building exercises, but they're not team building exercises. They're problem solving, it's practice designed for problem solving.

It's almost like creating a problem and then putting it in front of them and seeing.

That's what coaching is. That is what coaching is. The coach lays out the task and says, right, this is what you're going to try and do. In football, try and score the goal. In basketball, try and get the ball in the hoop. In football, if you say, right, get the ball in the goal and no one's standing in your way, just pass it along the floor. Great. Now someone stands in the middle. Okay, you're going to have to curl it around them. Now you've got two people. Okay, well, I'm going to have to move slightly to the left. And now kick it. Well, what if they move? Well, now I'm going to have to get past them. I'm going to have to kick it over them. And you change the task, task constraints, to elicit different solutions. And those solutions are going to change. In business, it's exactly the same thing. You could quite literally set up a business problem and give it to four people and say, right, you need to solve this now with your expertise. Now all four of them. Oh, I want to do that so bad. If, if you were to say, okay, you, you have five potential clients, how are, how are you gonna plan this in a two hours? You have to speak with five clients in two hours. How are you gonna plan it? All four coaches will come at it drastically differently and work, I think experiencing how each coach. solves that problem is more beneficial as a conversation starter or as a practice design than someone at the front lecturing going well you could do this and you could do this and you could do this. Because after that five, ten minute conversation of you four coaches exploring the problems. That's a mastermind

in business. They label it as a mastermind. That's just practice design. That's just coaching. Which is why they're so bloody expensive. They make it so expensive and inaccessible to anyone who is new. Doesn't have money. Huh? That doesn't have money. Basically, yeah, people who are This is something that I've been thinking about so And I've been having a conversation with another, uh, with a business friend around this, of like, I recognize, I think you prompted me on this, uh, two sessions, two, a couple of weeks ago in one of our previous podcasts, like, who do I want to help? Because I could help people get the 1 percent of the 1%, because it would be 1 1%, and I could do that, but, but the bit that I'm interested in Is the, the, the ones that make the biggest impact, like, for them, and it takes them from the, you know, the 50 percent to the 80%, you know, it's using arbitrary numbers because arbitrary is, meh. Timescales and factors and all that. Yeah, it, taking, like, Because the biggest difference, like, for me as a coach that I can make is for people who are not, who don't feel that they're there. Whereas people at the top of their game, you know, the six, seven figure business owners, sure, I could help them too, absolutely. Like, some of this stuff will take, get, squeeze that little, little tiny bit more out of it. And I think that's where most of the, If we call it productivity, it's not productivity because it's practical design. Where most of the productivity experts are, it's that 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 1%. Whereas I'm more interested in, in, in the practice design element of the being able to create and to,

to, it's more exciting. The, to, to add some labels, because you know, we love labels. Inside coaching, you can either be a performance coach, Or a participation coach. And performance coaches are high performance coaches. They, they work on the getting Usain Bolt to increases 100 metres speed by like 0. 1 of a second. But then the participation coach, instead of working with one only athlete for a week, they work with 300 participation people to just get them active, get them doing stuff. That for me is where my interest is. I want to be a high performance coach in participation

individually. Yes. Yes, that is exactly, I was just like, I want to bring the high performance things that we, that high performance coaches use into the business world of people who are participation, who are just, who are just in business because they want to be in business, not because they want to earn a million pounds, not because they want to, but because they want to win. Be excited about all of the little things that they do, because they have so many ideas, they have so much inspiration, they have so much excitement, for lots of, lots of things. Specifically for my, my people. It's like, lots of things that they want to do, and that's

overwhelming. That to me is like in sport, you've got the people doing the physical activity, like they're not down the bottom of the ladder, they're physically active, but how do you, how do you keep them active? How do you keep them engaged? Because once, once you've done the same drills over and over by a coach, it gets boring, and then you And it's similar inside of business because, I mean, this is just experiences after all. We're just adding labels for context here. But inside of business, if you've done the same thing over and over and over again, and either you're not getting the same results for whatever reason, or you're getting bored of doing the same thing, a coach, someone to help you through that, Like, that, that's what the coach is for, they're helping you to guide, to continually either maintain, sustain, improve, whatever it is that you're doing, the activity that you're doing, whether it be business, sport, life, etc. And that for me, the coaches for me there, should be doing the exact same thing as the high performance coaches. I think the only difference between the individual, like the, the, the only difference would be the individual and where their performance is at to, to gain a improvement on something you're already very, very good at takes far longer because you're well trained. Yeah,

and it's more interesting to work with. I like seeing results and seeing them fast. Like, just, just to see a client go from being constantly overwhelmed, feeling like they don't know what they're doing, to being able to launch a retreat in two weeks. Like, after, after, after working with them for like a number of months, all of a sudden, just within two weeks, launching and marketing and all of a sudden, just. Done. That's the bit I find fun. That's the bit I find interesting. Critical state. Yeah, yeah. That's the critical state for me.

Yeah. The issue with that, or some people would see it as an issue, is it's not of high ticket. Don't give

a shit.

Well, no, I know. But that, that's, that's, but yeah, that is exactly the conversation.

We've panic. That's the issue. Well, well, well, yeah, but you, you know, you could help more people and bigger people and, and charge so much more and, and, and charge your worth. And we, I to charge my wife, no one could bloody afford me. And that's kind of the point for most people who are in our position, they couldn't afford the changes we could create.

And that is why I think the ecological approach to a conference, whether it is a mastermind webinar, whatever you want to call it, I think if you were to design like that, more people would benefit because it's more effective learning experiences. But it takes more effort, it takes more time, because the ecological approach, taking an ecological approach, is effortful. Because it's effective. Yeah, it requires work, it

requires you to oof. Requires you to oof. Yes, you're welcome. That's the high quality content you expect here from us.

I guess the, the closing question would be for either for anyone listening that's interested and sounds like oh that sounds like a good idea or for John yourself because obviously you're here is I would like to speak with more individuals about their like philosophy of practice on here as conversation.

Yeah, it'd be really good. I want to get people on here to talk about their whole, why they do the way things they do and be so interesting.

And I. I want to emphasize, I don't want it to be, I know what I do, so I'm gonna tell you. It's a, I have no idea what I'm doing, let's explore this.

Yeah.

Like that, that's, that's the sort of stuff that I'm, I'm quite happy to hear. But also, when it comes to a conference of introducing people to taking an ecological approach, I think online would be the easiest view, easiest way to do it. Um, and potentially running sessions like that, but I'm, I'm not sure. I I, I have an idea that I'm not going to say just in case it comes back to bite me in the bum on the recording. So I'll, I'll, I'll share you in a, I'll share it with you, uh, afterwards. I, I

was thinking, because one of the questions I was thinking about, um, on one of the things I was reflecting on is, so, the ecological approach, and, and the, the approach that I follow, is very much constrained by the number of people, I feel. And so, in, like, I, I, I, The best results come from working one to one with someone, because then you can get very specific. But obviously, there are only so many hours. So either I'm doing 50, 60, 70, like, lots and lots of hours, which, unfortunately, I can't. That is a constraint I have. Or, what would it look like? scaled up? I hate that phrase. How would you help more than a couple of people? Yeah, how would you help more than a couple of people? Because obviously what we do is quite, um, dive quite deep. And so how would you help more people? And this sounds like a potential possibility, because it's people helping people, and it's going through the approach of like, here is a problem, how would you solve it? Let's discuss it, let's go through it. Like, is the mastermind element of it? Where there is a little bit of almost teaching, I suppose, to set the constraint and then moving on. It's basically like a group program. Basically, if you want to put a label on it, it's a group program where you take a small number of people through an experience. And in fact, one of my business buddies is actually doing that with the marketing and with the marketing right now. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, that's, that's a nice way. And you don't have to charge Tiago Forte numbers. To do a cohort based course, you know, I mean, it requires effort and work,

and I don't, I don't like the cohort based course label because a lot of the time it's still, like, for, for an ecological perspective at least, from an ecological perspective at least, because a lot of the time it's still A person giving you information, like, it's, it's the teacher tells the student what to do, it's the transfer of knowledge, it's less practiced design, there's not actual doing the thing, and I feel like a lot of people are scared as well to do the thing, because they're worried about they want to think about

doing the thing, they wanna, they wanna think about doing the thing, they wanna have conversations about the thing whilst not doing the thing, because doing the thing is scary, because what if you get it wrong? Yeah.

Exactly. And I feel, I feel like the conferences, the courses, the cohort based courses, and other courses, if you have something that you can template, if you can template your course, then it is instruction design. It's not practice design. Because you're just telling people what to do, or telling people your experience. They aren't doing the practice. If you're there constraining practice, then you're coaching.

Yeah, and the assumption is you use the videos to constrain practice, but

Yeah, that, that is a set it and forget it, which isn't what the constraints led approach is. You don't set it and forget it because everyone will react, behave differently, especially when you have multiple affordances or potential multiple solutions to a problem. If you see something as the coach that isn't effective, but it's effective for the task constraints that the individual has at that moment, the coach then needs to intervene in some way and either add a constraint, remove a constraint or do something to dissuade the ineffective solution. If the coach believes it's ineffective, otherwise it might just be a unique solution to a problem that you haven't thought about. And if it is, then you telling people what to do is the limiter. It is the parameter that's getting in the way, which is what I think a lot of, um, cohort of eight courses do. Which is why I don't take many of them. Yeah,

yeah, that's really interesting.

But that is, that's effective. But it's a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of work, a lot of commitment. And they are, I would argue, communities. More communities than conferences. Yes. So, but yeah, I think we'll leave that one there. Because obviously we've got another one to do today. I don't know what the shimmy was. Don't know, just excited, yeah? It's exciting stuff. All right, see you next week. Bye. Bye.