About twenty days ago, I was in a coaching session with Sami, a brilliant yet exhausted sales director. For months, he had been struggling to get his team to adopt a new strategy. Nothing was working—roadblocks, resistance, lack of enthusiasm… He was convinced the problem was them: They just don’t want to change.
I asked him a question that stopped him in his tracks:
— What if the problem isn’t them, but the way you’re seeing the situation?
He frowned, hesitated, then replied with frustration:
— I don’t understand…
So, I explained:
— Imagine your perception of the world as a map. It helps you navigate, but it’s incomplete. What if your team had a different map, with paths you can’t see?
I saw his expression shift. Silence. Then a deep sigh. Sami had just realized he had been looking at the situation from the wrong angle. He assumed his team was resisting change out of laziness or lack of ambition. But when he truly listened to them with this new perspective, he discovered a very different reality: they were afraid. Afraid of losing loyal clients, afraid of not mastering the new approach, afraid of not being good enough.
His mistake wasn’t in his strategy—it was in the way he introduced it. He had been imposing his map of the world instead of exploring theirs.
That day, everything changed. He stopped explaining and started asking questions. He sought to understand their perspective, to translate his vision into their language. And as if by magic, the resistance disappeared.
The map is not the territory. What you believe to be the truth is merely an interpretation. And until you recognize that, you risk fighting battles against walls that exist only in your mind.
So ask yourself: What if your biggest obstacle isn’t the world around you, but the way you see it?
#Leadership #Coaching #NLP #Mindset #PersonalDevelopment #CorporateCoaching #ManagerCoach #Communication #Change #Transformation