M.E. and L&D: Exclusive interview with the #1 Executive Coach in the UAE, Dr. Corrie Block
'M.E. and L&D'. Giving you a glimpse into amazing people's pasts, to inspire your future.
In the first edition of M.E. and L&D, we are truly blessed to have been able to interview the incredible Dr. Corrie Block. Dr. Corrie Block is widely recognized to be the #1 Executive Coach in the UAE. He's a globally acclaimed business strategist, and the celebrated author of several books including Love@Work, Business is Personal, and Spartan CEO. Having started out as a serial entrepreneur, failing forward, and overcoming bankruptcy (twice), his aim is to help millions of people find meaning at work, change their lives, and live their dreams.
We hope you enjoy this insight into his incredible story as much as we do!
Let's start at the beginning. What was your very first job, and how did it shape your initial thoughts about your career?
At the age of 14 I started working at McDonald's. That was an amazing start. I can still remember all of the steps for assembling an order. I remember being trained very well, and consistency, quality, and cleanliness as our values. I worked at McDonald's for nearly five years and it absolutely had a formative impact on my work ethic, management style, and team building philosophy.
Can you share a defining moment or turning point in your life that steered you towards your current career path?
Even though I had lots of mentors, teachers, and coaches as a serial entrepreneur in my 20s, I had never considered myself to be an executive coach until one day one of my clients asked me to help him communicate better with his team. I said, "What do you mean? You want to learn communication techniques?" and he said, "No, not exactly. I want you to teach me to talk to my people the way that you talk to them." Spending time with CEO's, Chairmen of the Board, and other executives one-on-one, helping them to become better leaders, stronger managers, and more effective communicators, has been an amazing turning point for me. Executive coaching is an incredible privilege, it's a calling that I didn't know I had until I was called to do it, and now I can't imagine myself doing anything else.
Also, I've been bankrupt twice, I've started and exited 5 successful companies, I've started and buried two other failed companies. I've also completed 4 postgraduate degrees, lived and worked on three different continents, and published a few successful books ... I suppose each of those were different turning points as well.
Who were some of the key mentors or figures that inspired and guided you during the early stages of your career?
In the early years of my entrepreneurial 20s I had a number of different mentors that helped me. Many of them are listed in the acknowledgements at the beginning of my book Love@Work, so I won't repeat that list now, but what they all had in common was that they believed in me more than I believed in myself. Each of them spoke to me not as I was but as I could be. Whether it was in business, communications, relationships, leadership, they all saw me as the best version of myself, and spoke to me as though I already was that version. And I'm eternally grateful for each and every person in my life that had higher expectations of me than I had of myself, because they taught me that I'm capable of so much more than I could ever have imagined.
This is one of the reasons why I've chosen executive coaching as the pinnacle and likely the endgame of my career. We are all primarily restricted by our own limiting beliefs. Most often we can't become aware of those limiting beliefs, much less confront, challenge, or change them, unless we are in the presence of someone that we respect and trust who sees us without those limitations. They see us as better than we see ourselves, and we trust their view more than we trust our own. I want to do for others what my mentors did for me.
What were some of the biggest challenges or obstacles you faced when starting out, and how did you overcome them?
In 1998 Estonia was post-Soviet and pre-technocrat. There were no incubators, no accelerators, and no VC's. The government was barely functioning, and weren't even any supermarkets. My first wife and I ate potatoes for a year because we couldn't afford better food. I was also in a foreign country, I didn't speak the language, I was going through culture shock, and I had no money. We got part time jobs teaching English at a local high school while starting our first company in the education sector. It took almost a year before we had finally identified a problem that needed to be solved in the market, and from then we were cash flow positive.
My biggest strength during that time were the people around me. My first wife was an amazing partner, our families back in Canada were super supportive, and I had built a great network of influential people in Estonia. I also had really great staff who were passionate about what we were doing together and the changes we were trying to make in the country. The other people on my team were the authors of books that I was reading at the time. People like John Kotter, John Maxwell, Max DePree, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, Henry Mintzberg, Edgar Shein, Stephen Covey, Marshall Goldsmith, these were my gurus ... and I devoured books by the hundreds during those years. John Maxwell said it best that a leader with no followers is just a guy taking a walk, but I'll add that a leader, no matter how many followers they have, is only as strong as the team they surround themselves with, and I had a very, very strong team.
What’s been one accomplishment you are most proud of? and what's one thing you want to accomplish in the future?
This is a really difficult question actually because I'm much less proud of what I've accomplished than I am of who I've become as a result of those accomplishments. I collect competencies so for me finishing a doctoral degree, writing a book, completing a certification, starting a company, winning an award, doing a TEDx, learning a language ... these aren't really accomplishments to me, they're just hits that I get in my ongoing learning addiction. What I'm most proud of is when I achieve something in an area where I don't feel prepared, talented, or competent, like overcoming bankruptcy in the 2008 financial crisis, getting my family safely out of Yemen after one of my employees was assassinated, overcoming my phobia of heights to become a certified skydiver, and raising my kids into adults, those are the things I'm most proud of. I'm proud of those things because I wasn't talented, I wasn't prepared, and I wasn't competent going into them, and yet I was able to adapt in the moment and not only survive but get stronger as a result. I think they call that post traumatic growth.
In the future I want to go to sleep at night knowing that I'm improving the quality of a million lives every month in some way. I don't know how to measure that yet, though I know that social media followers is not a meaningful metric for me, but I want to improve the quality of a million lives a month. That's my BHAG.
Looking back, is there any advice you would give to your younger self when you were just starting out in your career?
I would tell myself not to take the game too seriously, but to take the players much more seriously. I think I was so focused on myself, my ambition, my focus, that I may have marginalized and excluded people that wanted to be closer to me personally. I would tell myself to be more empathetic and to connect better with the people around me. Don't love the game, love the player.
The rest I would do exactly the same. When my friends were climbing corporate ladders in Canada, I was building companies and raising kids in a foreign country. When my friends were on the beach, I was on the street. When my friends were in the club, I was in the library. I would tell myself to just keep doing exactly what I was doing: read books, learn languages, do the hard things ... do hard things because they're hard and because doing hard things is the only way we get stronger faster and more capable.
Want to know more? Connect with Dr. Corrie Block on LinkedIn to explore his amazing insights further and stay up to date with all his upcoming talks and publications.