You Become What You Repeat

Coaching is built around insight. Ask the right questions. Hold the space. Let the person arrive at the answer. They own it. They name it. They feel the click.

Books work the same way. The moment when you read something and think, That is me. It is one of the most satisfying intellectual experiences. 

Dancing at Creative Mornings, Charlotte, NC. Photo by Igor Gorlatov.

Yet, a person can read ten books on leadership, attend three workshops, complete two 360-degree assessments, and walk into the office on Monday morning and do exactly what they did the Monday before.

The Gap

The distance between understanding and embodying does not close with more understanding, or more “what did you notice?” conversations. What closes the gap is reps.

In a session with a technical leader, I stopped asking questions. He had just spent a minute explaining a problem to me.

“Say it again,” I said. “Two sentences. No more.”

He tried. It was rough.

“Again.”

He compressed it further. By the fourth attempt, the same message took 27 seconds. He could hear the difference, now in his own voice. It was a rep.

In our next session, I asked him to rehearse four real conversations from his calendar for the following day. One landed cleanly on the first attempt. He paused.

“I should practice before every meeting,” he said. “Like going to the gym.”

Reps Are Uncomfortable

Reflection is comfortable. You discover something about yourself and leave feeling like you grew. 

Rehearsal is different. It takes the insight out of your head and puts it under pressure. You do the thing badly. Then you do it again, a little less badly.

Saying the words out loud on a coaching call, under a constraint, with someone listening, is hard. Harder than talking about why you over-explain. Harder than reading a book about executive communication.

The constraint removes the escape routes. Two sentences only. Now say it as if you have 30 seconds with your CEO. Now say it as if the board is in the room.

The discomfort is often the signal that you have reached the part that reflection alone cannot change.

The Fourth Attempt Is Not the First Attempt Again

Dancing at Creative Mornings, Charlotte, NC. Photo by Igor Gorlatov.

We tend to think of repetition as duplication. Say the same thing enough times and eventually it becomes automatic.

But the fourth attempt was not simply a cleaner version of the first.

The first time, he was searching for the point while he spoke. By the fourth, he could hear the moment when he started adding an explanation he did not need. He could stop earlier. The clearer version had become easier to find.

Something changed between those attempts. Not dramatically. He had not become a different communicator in five minutes. But a response that was unavailable to him on the first try had become available by the fourth.

Rehearsal is not doing the same thing again. It is becoming capable of doing something you  could not quite do before.

What You Repeat Compounds

Choose one leadership behavior you are trying to build. Maybe it is being more concise. Naming your point of view earlier. Asking a harder question. Delegating instead of stepping in. Saying no without a long explanation.

Then choose three real moments from the week ahead when you will need it. Before each one, rehearse the behavior out loud. Keep it concrete. Say the opening sentence. Practice the question. Try the shorter version. Do it again until it feels less new.

After the meeting, ask yourself one question:

Did I use the new behavior when the moment arrived?

Do not try to redesign your whole leadership style at once. Pick one move. Give it reps.