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This Epic Life Podcast


Mar 4, 2020

I wonder how many more of us would become masters of our craft— if we only had the patience it takes to get there, while sometimes sucking at it.

In the coaching industry over the last few years, there have been few people mentioned more often than Michael Bungay Stanier. Michael’s juggernaut success with The Coaching Habit inspired hundreds of thousands of busy managers to ask better questions, rather than telling people what to do.

Michael gave me an advance copy of The Coaching Habit when we first met in 2015 through our mutual friend Karen Wright. Since that time, it’s been amazing to watch the book set a new standard in business books that are actually fun to read, while also becoming a case-study in successful self-publishing— with nearly 3 quarters of a million copies sold.

This week Michael is back with his latest book, The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious, and Change the Way you Lead Forever.

We get into his approach to following-up such a career-defining success. We also go deep into ways to stay curious just a little bit longer, versus offering more advice to people. This seems simple, but its benefits are profound. Michael shares what’s on the other side of a life built from curiosity. Michael is also one of the funniest, most genuinely kind people I’ve ever met.

We also cover his quirky origin story, which led from Rhodes Scholar to Coaching Rockstar.

A little about his formal bio:

Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of six books including The Advice Trap and The Coaching Habit, the best-selling coaching book of this century. Named the #1 Thought Leader in Coaching in 2019, Michael is the Founder of Box of Crayons—a company that’s trained more than 100,000 leaders, managers and individual contributors around the world to be more coach-like. 

In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching, and was shortlisted for the coaching prize by Thinkers50, the “Oscars of management”. Michael was the first Canadian Coach of the Year and has been named a Global Coaching Guru since 2014. Michael was a Rhodes Scholar.

In his words, his goal is simple but difficult: “to help people stay curious a little bit longer, and rush to action and advice-giving a little more slowly.”