The Power of Personal Development and Coaching - Erik Tengen, Oaky

Josiah: 0:00

How are you thinking about developing yourself, both personally and professionally, to become the best hospitality professional you can be? Today, we're learning from about how he thinks about this and what works for him. Erik, I appreciate you making time to talk. The reason I initially reached out was a post that you made a couple of weeks ago, where you talked about the role of personal development and coaching in resilience and performance as a leader, and I wonder if you could share with our listeners that journey of personal development, how you thought about that.

Erik: 0:56

Yeah, so in my role as CEO and father and husband, there's a lot of it's a roller coaster life, I would say, and resilience to me means the ability that you have to never, never, ever give up, no matter what, a kind of a growth mindset where life is always going to throw you curveballs and you should expect that to happen. That's just part of it. There's no time for pity or something like that and just crawl in a little hole and cry about things, but learning how to deal with it. And that, for me, has been a huge learning journey in terms of becoming more and more mature, about understanding kind of what works for me and there, hence the post about coaching. Like, first and foremost, I think if you want to be resilient, you have to be fit, so working out is important for your body and your mind. I used to be doing a lot of cardio and then I had our second child and he's still very young, so now I wake up. I love that. I start waking up at five every morning thanks to my youngest boy.

Josiah: 2:04

Built an alarm clock.

Erik: 2:07

He forced me into the 5am club and I was getting a little bit older and he's sleeping till like six, but I'm still waking up at five. So I hope that will become a great habit. But what I do with him is I do like a Tabata workout. You know what that is? Yeah, very fast, yeah, exactly, it's like seven minutes and you start to sweat a little bit and then after that I do like a seven minute meditation around gratefulness. So that's how I start every day and it's really adorable now because I do that with my baby in my lap and it really can feel his energy doing that. So it's pretty incredible and I used to many years ago, my gratefulness meditation would always be about stuff that had happened in the past that I would be grateful for. But at some point me, my wife, we would just said let's just talk, let's just think about stuff that will happen in the future, rather. So it becomes kind of this also visualization exercise and that has been like really amazing for me in my life. And also part around resilience, because when you start every day feeling truly grateful about things that are about to happen, yeah, it does something to you. That, I think, is very, very, very nice.

Josiah: 3:19

You just start the day excited and ready to go right and so physically you're kind of fired up. You know, mentally you're in a good place. And I wonder if you could speak to me a little bit about the role of coaching as well. And do you recall that moment when you first decided I would like to work with a coach? What was that for you?

Erik: 3:40

It was quite recent actually, because I'm fairly new in this role and we have an American VC and through them I've met a lot of coaches. But I find them, for my taste, to American, like they're amazing and like incredible serial CEOs. But I then asked them questions like yeah, so what's your relationship like with your kids and with your wife? And they're like no, I'm more focused on the work stuff. So for me I want to be ultra successful, but not at the expense of being a bad father or bad husband. You know, 15 years down the line. So that balance for me was very, very, very critical. And very soon after I took the role as CEO, I found this Dutch guy who I thought I could really relate to because he had this balance. He had this incredible calm, calmness about him, and what I love about having him as a coach, or a coach in general, is that I'd never read books, but I listened a ton on a blinkest and really a lot to podcasts. I consume a lot of content, but when you just hear someone talking about it or you read a sentence, there's no depth. And what I love about coaching is that you can ask the why and the how and really like harness the wisdom of someone's understanding of a situation. And where did they get that information from? Why did why did that make them feel or think? And my coach certainly doesn't have all the answers in the world, but he's seen things that I haven't seen and he's seeing them from a different lens. And coaching to me, like I'm very inspired about seeing perspectives from other people's point of view and then picking cherry picking, kind of what I like from that. So what, what is it about, josiah? That I think is really amazing. And you have this like incredible positive energy that I can take with me and say that is amazing. I don't want to be like that. But maybe you do other things that I don't agree on, and then then I'm fine with you know, just discounting those. So a coach for me really brings much more depth than than just reading, reading something. But this is like that. He has been a CEO coach for me for like a couple of months or six months or whatever. But you, we also have mentors, we also have friends who like play like mini coaches, and early on in Oki I realized that if you just dare to talk about maybe even isolated topics with, with bespoke people who you respect in terms of what their feedback will be on those topics, then you can also get a lot of insights, and people love to share, man. That's like my biggest learning. Everyone loves to just share their experience, and if you just find someone who you think will have interesting things to share, then yeah, that's a good strategy, I guess.

Josiah: 6:28

That's interesting. I was talking to someone the other day about finding mentors, and especially on the executive level. When you're looking for that, what I'm hearing from you is looking for someone with an interesting perspective that could speak to you. Is there anything you've learned in terms of how you ask these people for advice or how you spend time with them that you picked up?

Erik: 6:51

One thing that I think all of them having common is they love that I'm extremely like, coachable, like like I. What does that mean? Like it to me? It means and I also love Helping people who I, who I deem coachable. So it means that when they talk to me, I'm, first and foremost, I'm very passionate and I'm extremely curious, like I'm. I go deep man, like I ask how and why and like a lot so I really truly understand, like the underlying reasons for doing x, y and z. And then I will always follow up with them and say, man, this was incredible, like transformational, like within a week I've done. Like I remember he gave me homework, I was done with that stuff, and like same afternoon he's like dude, we're moving so fast, like, but that's just my, my general curiosity, so like doesn't feel like a chore. You know, I just like I love that aspect of self development. So I think that that's maybe key and, in general, just be a nice, normal, normal, normal person, older, older people who have gray hair and are tremendously successful. I feel like they are very willing to share because why not they? They want to give back. I feel like there's a common theme that I see, I also go back to my old hotel school and do I always say yes when they asked me to do a guest lecture, because I Wouldn't be where I was if people wouldn't have helped me. So I think it's absolutely the right thing to do to give that back to to students that are embarking on an entrepreneurial journey, maybe and I also got a dad coach last week.

Maybe let's say I didn't think I was the best dad in the world. Yeah, and I could be better, and I don't feel like reading books and I have this enormous Interest around entrepreneurship and business and I felt quite guilty that I I never consumed any content when it came to parenting, so I would very much just be winging things, you know. And Then through, yeah, via, via, I found this dad coach and I called him up and we had like an hour and a half walk and it's incredible, man, like the amount of the different, how differently I am and parents will hear this Like I used to be so pushy and just come and take him out of whatever he was doing and come, let's do this now, and he would freak out like all the time it would happen, and now I'm super thoughtful, planning everything and, like, the energy and the contact that I have with him who's not four years, four years old is just remarkably different, and that was literally last week.

Josiah: 9:19

So that like yeah, that's another sign like coaching can can be incredibly Effective, I would say so I appreciate you sharing that, because I think you touched on something that that got my attention the difference between maybe an American style of communication or coaching and Potentially a more European one or a more integrated one. I think that's what I'm hearing from you, because you talked about how you start your morning with this intense workout. You start it with some meditation, some visualization, and then you talk about kind of the coaching and the personal development. But for me that that means a lot because you know, I grew up in San Francisco, I've spent most of my life here, I've spent most of my career in technology Startups, and I'm used to kind of the pace of that and I've seen so many executives, so many leaders Burn out all of their personal relationships. And it's great. You built this big company, you sold the company, you have millions, you know, fantastic. But like, does it even matter at the end? You know, and and so I I don't know. I just commend you for taking this more integrated approach to development. I