Hello and welcome to our sparring session. In our sparring sessions, we invite our guests to showcase their skills in a realistic scenario. In these sessions, don't look at what I do. Look at what our guests does and learn from their style. In some sessions, I'm pretty easy to deal with. But usually, my goal in these conversations is to become the embodiment

of your worst nightmare, someone who's unnaturally persistent, unnecessarily difficult, and at times

a little bit socially awkward. I want these conversations to be more difficult than it would be in

real life, so when you encounter these types of situations, you'll know exactly how to handle it.

We do the exact same things in our trainings and in our one-on-one coaching sessions with clients.

I strongly recommend listening to the accompanying episode with our guests before listening to the sparring session.

That'll give you a little bit more context and help you to develop a better understanding for the scenario.

So without further ado, let's jump into this sparring session.

In this session, I'm playing the role of a hard-charging CEO who's difficult to work with.

I was told by my team that I should work with Chris, but I'm very, very skeptical.

So Chris's goal in this conversation is to create a connection, get a better

understanding of my perspective, and subtly persuade me to give coaching a chance.

Hi, Chris, is it? Yeah. Nice to meet you. I'm, you know, same old, same old. I'm a busy

man. I've been growing this company for about seven years, but there's some people who can't really keep up with my pace, and they're kind of getting all up in their feelings.

So they reached out to you to talk to me, and here we are. So I don't know what we're doing, but I'm checking boxes. And let's just get to it.

Great. Well, I'm really glad to spend a little time with you today, and I understand,

I feel a little weird when you're being invited to work with a coach. So why don't we just

start with a little bit of sort of understanding a little bit more about what your perspective is

of why we're talking? So what is your understanding about why we're working together?

I am one of the co-founders, and I manage a team of about seven developers here in Silicon Valley.

And we are hard charging. We're moving forward. We're constantly growing. We grow at a rate of probably

about 15 to 20 percent every year. So we're winning. So I don't really see the problem. Some people

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