Good morning and welcome to the Increasing Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua. This is episode

2069. I was recently reminded of a story from the 19th century Vienna where there was a doctor

Ingaz Semmelweis who noticed something very interesting happening in the hospital. In one part of the

hospital, many moms who had just given birth were getting sick and dying. But in another part of

the hospital where they were also giving birth, there were the midwives who were helping deliver the

babies and those mothers were staying healthy, and the babies were

staying healthy. So Dr. Semmelweis questioned the usual assumptions. Most doctors believe that

deaths were just a sad part of life, but he looked at it differently, and he discovered the real

reason. Doctors were going straight from working with dead

bodies or cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands. If you can imagine how

disgusting that is. He decided to introduce hand washing with a special soap and the results

were incredible. There were far fewer moms getting sick and dying.

But here's the interesting twist. Many of the doctors refused to believe him. They didn't want to

take on that protocol. They didn't want to change their ways and they questioned and they didn't

want to question what they thought they already knew

and it wasn't until many many years later when pastor pastor came along i don't know if i'm

pronouncing his name correctly and he discovered bacteria and then it was simulwise's simple idea that saved and it realized that Semmelweis idea

saved many, many people from dying. And I started thinking about this as it pertains to

coaching and coaches. And the story is a simple reminder that we need to question our own assumptions.

Sometimes the way we've always done things might not be the best way and we get stuck in our old

ways. We say that's the way I've always done it or that's the way I was taught. And small changes could be a different way of communicating,

a tweak to how we train,

...