Selling in a Time of Corona – S2E6 – Coaching in a Time of Corona – Lauren Burns

Cathy Freeman 400m Sydney Olympics – Race call

Bruce McAvaney:      …. ‘Set’…’an almighty roar surrounds the stadium ……… Freeman’s going strongly …………..about half way …….this is where Cathy exploded in Atlanta …………..Freeman’s got work to do here ………… there's about 150 to go….it’s going to be a big finish …. Cathy lifting ……takes the lead …. Draws away … this is a famous victory …… a magnificent performance … what a legend, what a champion …. ‘

Elliot Epstein - intro: So, someone ate a bat apparently and the world turned upside down. Hi, I'm Elliot Epstein. And I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life coaching, consulting, training, and speaking about all facets of sales development, pitching, presentations, negotiation, the C-suite sales calls and all of the various components in the sales cycle in between. And now we find ourselves in a world that's very foreign. Welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona.

Elliot Epstein:          It’s been 20 years since we celebrated the Sydney Olympics, where we congratulated Cathy and now we’re coping with Covid.  Shortly after Australia finished revelling in our sporting achievements I met a small, suburban Melbourne girl who had just reached the pinnacle of her chosen sport, Tae Kwan Do to win the ultimate – a gold medal.

Lauren Burns’ story is now legendary, having competed on the world stage and won just 5 weeks after having her nose broken in training – twice in the same week.

Like so many other athletes, Lauren wanted to maximise her fame on the speaking circuit. We developed a great working relationship and she was a superstar on stage as well.

Twenty years on, when most of the Sydney 2000 athletes who tried their hand at public speaking disappeared off the scene, Lauren is still highly sought after and her presentations still pack a punch – literally.

So given a lot of people in business have asked me recently, over the Covid period about how to coach their teams, how I’m coaching sales people online and how they can generate peak performance in their people during a time of stress and disruption, Lauren was the perfect person to speak with. To discuss elite level coaching and what it takes to maximise performance, here is my chat with Olympic Gold Medalist , Lauren Burns.

Hello Lauren. Great to have you on board in Selling in a Time of Corona. It's been a while since we caught up. How are you?

Lauren Burns:            I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

Elliot Epstein:             It's a pleasure. Now we're going to talk about the wonderful world of coaching with elite coaching, which is relevant to a lot of business people, obviously. I want to go back, because it's the 20th anniversary, obviously of the Sydney Olympics, where you brought home glory with the gold medal in Tae Kwon Do. But I'm more interested in some of the backstory of the coaching that goes into that. And perhaps you can share with us what was involved in your life, especially leading up to the Olympics in how you were coached during that period for peak performance.

Lauren Burns:            Well, I've had quite a few different coaches and you know, when I think about the Olympic gold medal, I was the one that stepped out on that mat, fought the fights, and I was the one that had the gold medal hung around my neck. But when I think about that medal, I think about that it's everyone's medal, everyone that was involved in that journey. And I guess I had coaches that had different styles and all of them were really important and integral into making that a high performance team. So for example, my Korean coach Jin Tae Jeong, so he was the head coach of the Olympic team and he came out and he was quite young, came out from Korea in about ‘96, I think. And he had a lot of cultural things to really learn about, you know, how to deal with a team that was like …. ours was very strong, mature experience team.

We had a lot of strong women on the team. And so we had this sort of, I guess it was a tumultuous relationship in a way because I always, you know, stood up for what I believed in. I always asked a lot of questions, but what happened with our relationship is that because we've been very open and very honest with each other, and we had had some of those awkward conversations and thrashed things out, there was a real trust. And, you know, when we walked into that arena at the Sydney Olympics and I stepped onto that mat,  I felt like  there was a real congruence. He barely had to do hand gestures and I knew what he meant. And so when you look at attachment theory or, you know, any of those sort of psychological constructs, it's about quality relationships and having that trust and it doesn't mean that everything has to be really easy.

Lauren Burns:            So with him, it was a, you know, it was kind of a, as I said, tumultuous relationship, but there was a real strength there in the honesty and the way that we were able to work together as a team. And then I had a lot of incredibly supportive relationships. So my club coach Martin Hall, he was just, you know, he challenged me in ways that I'd never, ever been challenged. So he used to always push me to be an Olympic champion before I was one. So he'd say that,  everything that I was doing, everything I was eating, moving, recovery, warmup, cool down… was like, is that how an Olympic champion was, would do it, is that how you, Lauren, as the Olympic champion would want to do that thing? And so he always held me accountable to a really high standard, and I felt like he would just do anything for me, had my best interests at heart.

And I just felt like I could call on him at any time for anything. And then I had a lot of specialists that had an incredible amount of knowledge and were able to work with me, like my strength and conditioning coach. Everything was just very structured and specific and had a lot of detail and rationale behind why we're doing everything. So I feel like there were a few different elements and different coaching styles, but they all came together to form this team that was, you know, we all had the same goal and that goal was about high performance and to win an Olympic gold medal.

Elliot Epstein:             What's interesting about that, Laura and I think is the fact that the conflict is a normal part of the coaching process, that things are not designed to be smooth as long as they're honest, and that you have the ability to challenge each other in that process. And I look at my 20+ career years of coaching in business, and I think some of the best results that we have again, is when we have the honesty to call things out. So if someone's not performing, someone's not selling, someone's not leading the team properly. My job is basically to get paid to tell the truth, as yours have done. And, you know, the truth is something that gets lost because people are worried about sensitivity or people are worried about how the other person will cope with it. Now you were pretty young and standing up for yourself in a very competitive area. So what was it in the relationship that you built that enabled you to a) handle the critique in the criticism and b) stand up for what you believed in?

Lauren Burns:            Well I've had a very strong upbringing and I went to a school that was quite progressive. So I think I had quite a lot of a sense of my own self and I also really had a sense of what I knew would work from for me personally. And I also knew that I had a lot of injuries and not all athletes have that, but I had a lot of injuries and sometimes some of our conflict was around pushing me to train more. And, you know, because I had a scholarship with the Victorian Institute of Sport and I had a lot of really amazing specialists around me, you know, and I had the sports medicine doctor and the physio saying, you can't train; ‘You've just come out of surgery, if you train, you could then set yourself back three months.’

Lauren Burns:        ‘If you take one week off now, then you could be fine.’

But as an athlete, you always want to do more. So then when I had my coach pushing me saying, ‘Get on the mat … if you don't train, you're lazy’, you know, I wanted to try and I wanted to be like, ‘Oh, I'm strong and powerful’, and ‘I'm here’. But I had to say to him, ‘I can't, the medical staff are saying I can't train.’ And so he would get really cross at me, but then, he started to understand that actually that would be problematic if I trained. And so there were times when I did train and then I got injured again, and then it set me back. And so, you know, it was about setting that standard and saying, ‘I can't train, but I'll be here.’

Lauren Burns:            I'll be sitting on the sidelines, I'll be on the bike, I'll be stretching, I'll be doing this, I'll be helping out. I'll be watching videos, watching training, doing all these things. So it wasn't laziness. I'm not kicking back, watching, you know. I was actually like, I'm really committed to training and being here and I'll drive halfway across town just to sit on the side and stretch to show you that I'm part of this team, but this would be detrimental if I train. So it was sort of building trust in that way. And he was really just coming from a point where that was his learned way of coaching and learned behavior from Korea. It was much more like, you have to train and till you die there as well, like people get injured, you know, there's a lot of depth of athletes, you can just pick the next one on the list. So, we don't have that luxury in Australia.

Elliot Epstein:             No, we don't. Can you think of a time without mentioning names, can you think of times when you saw other competitors who didn't get value from coaching or for whatever reason didn't respond to that level of coaching?

Lauren Burns:            I think when you're going into high pressure environments and, you know, the Olympic games certainly is one, there's a lot of things, you know, people are often on tenterhooks and there's even personality clashes. And in my time in Tae Kwon Do, the martial art changed from being quite sort of backwards in a way to really coming forward, to being an Olympic sport. I saw a lot of people sort of get lost along the wayside because things weren't communicated properly or people push too hard. And I think that's probably the most common thing is doing things that were not scientifically advisable and pushing people. And then they got injured with injuries that they just could never return to the sport or just being treated in a way that was really not acceptable. But for me, my goal was always beyond that. And so I guess I had a way of compartmentalizing it and I just didn't take it on board. It was like, well ‘maybe I’m being an asshole’, excuse my French. It's not my problem. I'm going to the games and this is what I'm going to do. So I just put everything, I put it in. And I was like, ‘It's not my stuff’. So that's how I dealt with it.

Elliot Epstein:             Well, that's right. You suffer from it. And I see in business that you've presented to a lot of business audiences, so you know what I'm talking about, but there's a lot of preciousness in some people, people take things way too personally when their manager or me or their CEO or whoever, as long as you know that it's a trusted relationship, trying to get the best out of you,  that you know they're not being an asshole for the sake of it, which does occur. That's called bullying, and people should not put up with that. But in the general scheme of things, and I think that for whatever reason, there is a preciousness and a sensitivity and people taking things far too personally, when someone is trying to help them. And it affects their performance and it affects the love of the job and it affects the way they have ambition for their life.

Lauren Burns:            And I think there's also ways that you can make change. And sometimes it's not always within that conflict.

So one of the most life changing experiences I ever had was the first time I went to Korea and it was freezing cold, minus 15 degrees, we were training in the snow and the ice and the ground is like muddy ice, we're tripping over. And we had scarves around our faces that were just turning to ice on the outside. And it was pitch black. It's five o'clock in the morning. We'd driven two hours from Seoul to get to this martial arts university. And they actually, they beat us with bamboo canes. So I had welts on my backside two weeks later when I got back to Australia, they hit us so hard. And it was just an experience that was just absolutely, you know, it just was devastating.

So most of the team never competed again because we're just not used to that sort of treatment. But in terms of making change, you know, if I had have just yelled at those coaches or stood up, and said, ‘This is not acceptable’. It probably wasn't going to make that much of a difference at that point. We weren't an Olympic sport. And they said to us, ‘If you speak up about this, you'll never make another team again.’ So I went to someone at the VIS and I mentioned it to them and I never forget her face. Because she just looked at me and she's like, ‘It's okay, Loz. That'll never happen again. So she went up to the sports commission, and they said, ‘Okay, you’re becoming an Olympic sport, you can't hit the athletes. This is not going to happen.’

So in terms of making change, you know, sometimes it's not always about if something's not handled correctly or you're not being treated in the right way, you know, it's not always just, I don't think, I think it's good to be able to stand up for yourself. Definitely. But sometimes making change can come when you have a little bit more time to really think about it and to think of effectively about it. You can have a much greater and more impact. And I think that's what happened in this situation. It wasn't just about me personally, but what she did, me going into the VIS then that actually set a standard for every Australian team.

Elliot Epstein:             That's great. And standards are a good way of linking into talking about us over the journey, because you've been a corporate speaker since the Olympics. It's 20 years now of speaking both online recently, and obviously live to all sorts of corporate audiences about your messages and your Fighting Spirit, the name of your book. And one thing I noticed that, in our coaching relationship, when I helped you with some of your initial presentations, is that you are a) so coachable and b) so willing to try something compared to a lot of people in corporate life. And I'll give you one other example as well. So after the Olympics I coached a lot of Olympians who wanted to go on the circuit, but you, apart from us having a longer relationship, you wanted to do more and you wanted to engage with the process more, because you wanted to be the best presenter after being, you know, the gold medalist. You wanted to be the best presenter you could be. And it was, it was really, really interesting from my perspective how this was totally self-driven from you. And then all we did was add to what was already good. And then just add layers on top of that to get to the highest level of presentation. And you did, you were doing at some point, 100, 200 gigs a year, weren't you?

Lauren Burns:            Yes, that was pretty crazy. I mean, everyone said to me, you know, after the games, ‘Milk it for all it's worth, you'll get a year out of it and then you'll never speak again.’ But you know, it's been 20 years, 20 years, that's pretty much been my full time job. But one of the things that I really noticed, the difference in with working with you as well was, once the presentation changed from being just my story, but developed into ‘this is my story, but this is how it applies to the audience’, that's when I think there was a real shift for me as a speaker. And it was, I realized early on that me telling my story, people were really enjoying and then everyone had come up to me afterwards and go, ‘That's amazing. I could never do that’, or, ‘I don't know.’ And it was sort of like this distance between my story and their own lives. And I realized that I wasn't connecting the dots of, well, this is my story, but it's these messages within the story that apply to business, personal life, you know, or to different individuals. So once I was able to sort of weave in key messages, then everything really changed. And I think that's what's provided the longevity.

Elliot Epstein:             And you've done that really well. You really adapted that beautifully, which is the perfect link again, into what you're doing now, which is you're in the wellness world and you're coaching and speaking about wellness for individuals and for corporates. So tell us about that.

Lauren Burns:        So I'm just finishing my PhD at the moment, looking at lifestyle and mindset of elite athletes. And I never thought that I'd be back in the athlete world, but now that I'm coming to the end of this study, I've realized there's so many links with athletic performance and high performance. The research I've been doing with elite athletes, and I interviewed 10 World Olympic and Paralympic athletes. And I realized that these habits and skills and psychological attributes are things that are very applicable in so many different areas. So I'm really combining my background in sport and all the things that I learned through leading up to the games and in martial arts, my background in nutrition and naturopathy and now with the PhD studies with mindset and particularly around interpersonal relationships. So I've combined that all together into some coaching packages. So they're sort of one-on-one with individuals where we can really start to unpack what it is that they are wanting to look at and wanting to achieve.

Elliot Epstein:             That's great. So what do you think of the key outcomes, because you know, I’m an outcome-focussed person, what are the key outcomes for corporate, sitting here? So we've gone through COVID-19 this year. Some of us are still locked down as you and I both know. We're facing the challenges of high performance when it's been a difficult time already. I've got clients listening to this who have managers with teams going through this, I’ve got individuals that are going through their own stresses of performance, especially around sales performance. So, what sort of outcomes are you heading towards with this kind of coaching?

Lauren Burns:            Well, so I always start with health. I think that often underlies a lot of  things that we might be going through, whether it's fatigue or coping with stress. And so doing a basic sort of health assessment, always first, that's my first point of call, but I'm a massive fan of planning and you know, one of the things that I think with vision, creating goals, plans, short term, long term is that, you know I  always talk about them being like Mercury, they're like the element of Mercury that just flows and it changes and they're meant to be adaptable and malleable. And you know, it's great to write something down and say, that's what I'm going to do, but you've also got to be able to adapt when things, you know, well look at COVID, that's the perfect example of us having to, that wasn't in the plan, but this year, and so I think having strategies and tools and being able to, so I've got worksheets that I use that actually help people to understand the questions that they might not even be asking themselves before the planning stage. So to draw out some of those key elements. Even with, you know, with sales, it's, you know, I want to have this target, but then when you really start going into unpacking things, how's that going to happen and why, and really going into it a little bit deeper then when you do the sort of bigger plans, you know, makes a lot more sense.

And then, you know, having a coach or having commitments that you put into that plan is, you know, being accountable. And I think that's really important in driving success and perform.

Elliot Epstein:             That's great. So what's the website, Loz.

Lauren Burns:            Oh, just LaurenBurns.com, my website, it's all there. You can contact me and I can send out some information.

Elliot Epstein:             Great. It's been fabulous to catch up with you again. I'm glad you're still out there speaking and coaching because, I shouldn't play favorites with the people I coach, but just between you, me and the listeners, you've always been one of my favorites because of the heart that you put into things and just the quality person that you are. So it's been real fun to catch up. As Lauren said, if you're interested in speaking with her about wellness and her coaching go to LaurenBurns.com,  and I will see you again when you're not homeschooling.

Lauren Burns:            Yes. Fabulous. We'll actually, I have to say some of your coaching has been very valuable when I've been coaching my kids. They've just been doing their public speeches for school and their topics. And there's a few things that I hear coming out of my mouth. And I'm thinking, ‘This is just Elliot telling me to do this!’.

Elliot Epstein:             I’m haunting you!

Lauren, do take care of yourself, speak to you soon.

Lauren Burns:            Thank you so much for having me.

Elliot Epstein:             She’s still a star.

The key take-outs for you and me in the context of Selling in a Time of Corona are:

• Coaching is not a nice to have if you want peak performance , it’s mandatory
• You probably need more than one – perhaps it’s you, perhaps it’s me, or it could be a mentor with a different voice from another department like your CFO or Head of Customer Service or even a board member
• Professional coaching is about speaking the truth . I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen managers or so called sales coaches go soft on the real issues , because the manager wanted to be liked or because the consultant just wanted to get another booking. If you care about your team, you’ll care about the truth in making them better.

I’ll leave you with the words of the great US Football Coach, Bill McCartney who said;

"Coaching is taking a player where they can’t take themselves."

 

Stay Safe. Stay Positive.

Remember your ears are safe, Lauren lent me one of her Tae Kwan Do uniforms – a Dobok as Personal Protective Equipment for this entire podcast.

Take care of yourselves, till next time.