As guest speaker at the Jersey Business Productivity Conference, Jim Lawless spoke about taking the reins (literally) and conquering a range of new challenges. Emily Moore reports
“I BET that you cannot become a jockey and compete in a televised race within a year from now.”
Most of us, presented with such a challenge, would probably have laughed it off, said we had no interest in riding on horseback around a racetrack and returned to our day jobs.
But not Jim Lawless. As the keynote speaker at this year’s Jersey Business Productivity Conference explained, he accepted the challenge and, in the process, broke down all the barriers traditionally associated with taking risks and stepping out of your comfort zone.
As he welcomed Jim onto the stage, Jersey Business chief executive Paul Murphy described him as someone who “doesn’t just talk the talk but also walks the walk”.
“This is someone who doesn’t just talk about change but delivers it,” said Paul, adding that he hoped the following hour would give the audience “real food for thought”.
That first morsel to chew on came as a “proud dad” moment and was accompanied by a reflection on the school syllabus.
“If we are going to create a change of any kind, we have to do things we have never done before,” said Jim. “And if we are going to do things we’ve never done before, there is going to be an element of uncertainty and risk. With risk comes fear and that brings a big emotional and cognitive response, which we need to be aware of.
“My daughters are well educated. They can measure the area of a triangle but they have never been taught anything about cognitive responses and how different scenarios will trigger different neuro responses and impact their heart rate.
“But while this isn’t taught at school, that ability to understand our emotions and assess whether we should move forward or not is essential. We need to recognise that this emotion is normal and natural and that we have the ability to move past it.”
This, says Jim, is essential if businesses are to transform into purpose-driven organisations but he acknowledges that it is not easy.
“From a leadership perspective, we have to create that environment for our people so that they have the passion, the purpose and the permission to do new things,” he said. “Then we have to give them the skills they need so that, when they are at the edge of their comfort zone, they are able to step off.”
But this emphasis on change does not, he stressed, lie solely with leaders. In fact, each individual, he emphasised, had the ability to deliver that change.
“My framework to delivering change is very simple,” he said. “You hold the pen. You write your story and you write your next chapter. People may be used to their boss holding the pen but the idea that you hold the pen is critical if you are going to create any form of change.”
Using his typical blend of wit and thought-provoking insights, he continued: “We need to recognise that the opportunity we have to do this is temporary. One day, we’ll be sitting in a lovely nursing home, playing dominoes, looking back on our lives and the question won’t be whether we had an opportunity to make things happen; it will be what we did with that opportunity. Did we write our own stories, from our hearts, or did we let the tiger – our fears and anxieties – hold us back?”
In his quest to “tame the tiger” – both his own and those of the countless teams around the world which he has coached – Jim has developed the somewhat aptly named DARE principle of decision, action, result, evaluate.
“You are the sum of all the decisions, actions and results so far in your life,” he said. “While everybody holds some trauma and everyone has some luck, how we react to that and use it as a strength is our decision. Critically, if we want to get a new result, we have to take different decisions and actions. We have that power; we just don’t always think we hold the pen.”
But, as Jim admits, making those changes will inevitably trigger the tiger’s roar.
“The bigger the decision and the bigger the change we try to enact, the more we will come up against that big emotional response and the beginnings of imposter syndrome will appear,” he said. “Our natural response then, as the tiger roars, is to start playing the victim narrative and pull away from the new action.
“If we can’t overcome the tiger, we can’t progress as quickly as we need to in the 21st century, and the illiterate, as Alvin Toffler said, won’t be those who cannot read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
It was thanks to these motivational words, urging those in business to tame their own tigers, that Jim found himself “mounting up”, alongside the likes of Frankie Dettori in a competitive race.
“It all started when, after listening to one of my presentations, a client asked me what I had done,” reflected Jim. “He didn’t want my CV, he wanted to know whether I could use my ‘amazing framework’ to enact change and he bet me £1 that I couldn’t use it to become a jockey and race in a televised race within a year.”
When his momentary relief at being asked to perform in a “sitting-down sport” passed, Jim began to realise the enormity of the challenge.
“I was educated at a comprehensive school in the 1980s. I knew nothing about horses,” he said. “I was 36 years old at the time of the bet and weighed 12 stone, which meant that 25% of me had to find a new home if I was going to achieve the required maximum of nine stone. My initial response, therefore, as an overweight 36-year-old who had never seen a horse was that trying to become a jockey wasn’t a result I should be aiming for.”
But then he realised that was just his in-built narrative talking.
“Change starts with an event,” he said. “Often, the event comes to us and we wait until our comfort zone becomes so uncomfortable that we have to do something. But why not create that change? Why wait for something to happen?
“When you create the event, you face the tiger and avoid being one of those people sitting in the nursing home, playing dominoes, saying that you could have been a contender but your shot never came.”
Starting by “going on a diet, throwing away the candy and booking a horse-riding lesson”, Jim was slightly thrown when a friend then asked what he had done to help him win the bet.
“As I recounted my pride at having gone four days without eating any sweets, he responded with, ‘that’s not bold’. He told me to contact jockeys and trainers and enlist their help. The first people I contacted told me I was too old – really? I’ve seen Clint Eastwood ride horses – too heavy (I can change that) and that I didn’t know how to ride a horse (I can learn that).
“Then I met Gee Armytage, a trailblazing female jockey, who agreed to train me. I took on the challenge.”
And that was not the only challenge which Jim – who didn’t win the race but did win the bet – has undertaken. In his new, slimmer form, he then went on to achieve the title of deepest freediver in British history, becoming the first Briton to dive deeper than 100m on a single breath of air.
For this challenge, he said, the tiger roared twice – firstly when he told people what he was going to do and, secondly, when he looked at his schedule.
“To make change happen, you have to head in the direction of where you want to arrive every day,” he said. “Change happens in your calendar. If you don’t make space for it, it won’t happen. As soon as you start taking something out of your calendar to make room for change, the tiger will roar but, if you persevere, you will start to see the difference.”
One of the greatest challenges, Jim added, was “managing the voice in your head”.
“If you are going to step out of your comfort zone, you have to manage the narrative that says you have no right to be there,” he explained. “When I walked into the weighing room at the side of the racetrack, there was a voice in my head saying I shouldn’t be there. Frankie Dettori was looking at me as if to say I had no right to be there.
“You have to overcome those voices and recognise that your right to mount up isn’t dictated by the voices in your head. You have the courage to get out of that door and onto that horse’s back. And once you’ve done that, what have you earnt the right to do next?”
While not everything will happen immediately – “learning to hold my breath ready for my free dive for five minutes was never going to happen overnight” – Jim stressed the importance of consistency.
“You have to create disciplines and do the basics brilliantly, acknowledging that things take time to develop,” he said. “You have to trust in the future and commit your time to something, knowing that you won’t get an immediate gain. In doing that, you commit to completion.
“We have all been told that we need to leave our comfort zone but no one tells us what happens when we do. In leaving our comfort zones, we commit to crossing what I call the ‘ugly zone’, that scary place where you don’t know what will happen. But we have to cross it and we have to commit to crossing it before we start.
“There will be times, during that process, that we feel out of sorts but we have to keep going to innovate and to make things better for ourselves, our families and our economy.
“You have to move forward because, ultimately, you are holding the pen and writing the story. If you want to change the story, the tiger will roar but you have the power to recognise that and to choose, with the support of others, which chapter you will write next.”
