Sharon Norton-Marshall

It’s like I now have an acute awareness of self-responsibility, an awareness of being the driver of my life and all of my actions and any non-actions that they are directly contributory to the outcomes, either positive or negative.

It’s like prior to the course, I had some awareness, but now having concise clarity around what we put in has a correlation to the result. It really has been quite a shock, which made me sad I had not discovered it earlier in life. I wonder where I would have been and what I might have achieved if I’d discovered these skills and strategies sooner in life.

Yes, it has. Most recently, there was a great example of how using a toolbox of accumulated learned skills really came to the fore.

My manager was on holiday and my director was also off. I had a very unhappy client challenging us, and he had directed a challenging email to us in which he had alluded to the fact that my manager had acted in a way which was less than professional. One colleague suggested that I left it for when my manager came back as they knew that this client was a tricky client. I also wrestled with, should I involve the director, who is also the business owner, who was also away from the office.

I knew this was something I needed to react to in a timely manner or the client would have more fuel for his dis-ease. There are many skills learned and examined during the course, and you become very aware of taking what we call ultimate responsibility in positions in which you’re left being depended upon. And this was one I felt that I should be able to be depended upon in the absence of other managers. So I decided to confront my fears and I wrote the response email to the client, which I very carefully crafted.

It turned out that he called me the next day and he actually thanked me for my response, which he called considerate and well-balanced. He praised me for the response, as he could tell I’d not written it in five minutes. So we ended up both laughing over the fact that I had revisited it several times over the whole day, and he then proceeded to give me another property to handle for him. So he gave us more business, which was a really good outcome.

What I’ve noticed is the difference in ME and how I respond to other people.

I have maybe had a few raised eyebrows or I met with people not quite knowing how to respond when I challenge them on the why of an exercise I may be asked to do. I now want to know what they want as an outcome. And I seek to understand the purpose of an exercise, especially when I don’t believe it to be a high payoff activity or in line with an earlier instruction I may have been given.

It’s like I’m not prepared to tolerate the contradictions of orders given, and so I now challenge them, such as, ‘Well, earlier you asked me to do X, and now you’re asking me to do Y, which feels confusing to me. Which one do you see is the priority for me to focus on?’ Well, this gets met with some interesting reactions.

I’m basically calling their sh*t. Well, during the course, I was encouraged to be a disrupter. So it was one of the most cathartic parts of the course for me. And whilst we do learn how to do this powerfully, and it’s a fantastic skill to hone in on a clear directive for progress.

The biggest difference for me is the belief that motivation is not just a terminology in the way that it’s generally used by society in a somewhat negative sense, as in, ‘I have no motivation’.

The realisation during the course, and what I am now incredibly conscious of is that motivation is not something you just have. You have to create it. And to create something, anything, needs a system, a process. And this course gave me, and can give anyone, the structure of how to create motivation and keep it going.

It starts with a clarity of vision and encourages us to use clear visualisation of what we want as an outcome and the steps in order to build towards that becoming a reality, even if we don’t know the ‘how’. And knowing these processes have helped me considerably in both my personal and my professional life.

I’m someone who has suffered with depression for many years, and I’ve tried many courses, and I’ve read much about the mind.

I’m not suggesting that this course is a cure for depression, but I wish dearly that I had had the opportunity to be part of this when I was younger, and most definitely when I was setting out, starting up my own business. I did well, but I often lost hope and direction, and it was hard at times, even when I thought I was doing well and I did think I had a structure.

kept telling myself I wasn’t motivated enough. Heck, my own mentor told me, ‘You’ve got the wrong mindset.’ The thing is, no one actually taught me how to get a better mindset. Despite reading *Extreme Ownership* by Jocko Willink, a book I love and I recommend, this didn’t actually teach me relatable skills through exercises.

The skills I learned in this course, and particularly the delivery by my wonderful coach, Nicky Thackray, are totally invaluable. Because of her coaching, I became fired up and passionate about great leadership again. The course very much mirrors my own passions around what great leadership is, and it made me want to rejoin a corporate organisation to be able to use all of those new skills. So I did just that. Many thanks.