Coffee and Coaching
For those who don't know yet, one of my… - well… Let's call them "hobbies", yes - hobbies is coffee. Brewing it. Drinking it. Learning about it. Enjoying the social aspect of it. Of course, there's a lot to be said about coffee, rituals, and community. But today, I'd like to share a reflection I had during one of my coaching sessions.
My coaching sessions are either in-person or online. My in-person sessions always start with me brewing coffee for me and my guest. We use this time to catch up, check in, or warm up, depending on the session. After that, we sit down and get to work while at some point, I check about the coffee. All this makes it understandable that at some point, a coffee analogy will surface in our conversations. Moreover, this whole ritual makes it only understandable that learnings from the process of coffee brewing to seep into our work.
Today, I was talking about small increments of change. For a while, I was working on changing things in small increments. That, of course, makes the change more attainable and realistic. In building skills, I think that "slow and steady wins the race", and devouring a whole whale is only possible one bite at a time. I probably used such methods long before I was brewing coffee. However, it was only when I started brewing specialty coffee that I found the words for one of the most common methods I use.
Those who work with me often jokingly complain about my love for "trying things to know". One of my collaborators has made it a running joke that he pays me so that I try things using him on stage. And to a certain extent, that is true. I am a firm believer that even though our experience teaches us a lot, at the end of the day, everything our experience teaches us is just a starting point. Even (or maybe especially when) a certain skill becomes second nature or an instinct or a hunch, it is still a starting point. It's only until we try something in its own context that we can be sure if it works or not. So we can safely say that I'm a big fan of trial and error. Nevertheless, trial and error has a method and I was only able to verbalize that method after starting to brew coffee.
Brewing the perfect cup of coffee depends on myriads of factors: water temperature, the water itself, the beans, their grind size, the brewing method, the way the brewing method is used… And of course, the only way to get that perfect cup, especially when you get new beans or maybe change countries (the quality of water changes or the elevation changes and with it the pressure that affects many other things) is by trial and error. The best and fastest way to reach that perfect cup for you is to try changes to one factor at a time. For example, your cup may be too sour and you decide to start by changing the grind size. It is extremely important to change ONLY the grind size while keeping all the other factors exactly the same, and try a few different sizes before you settle on a new grind size. This might be obvious to many of you, but what I learned the hard way is that during the second or third iteration, my experience kicks in and says something along the lines of "Oh but changing the water temperature will also help", and since I feel that I'm getting closer to my perfect taste, I change the water temperature as well either to get there faster or to experience a bigger change or some other reason. It is at this stage that we should be disciplined enough to stick to changing grind sizes until we get to the perfect one before we attend to changes in water temperature. Of course, the more you do this, the faster it becomes. What becomes faster is your knowledge of how many clicks you need to turn your grinder to get to your desired taste faster. You might also get so good at it that you get the ideal grind size from the first or second try. And that is great and that is one of the payoffs of experience. Yet, to know the full potential of the range of the taste you can extract from that bean, you will have to change them one factor at a time, even if you are certain about what change you should do to a given factor.
When I shared this with my collaborator, his eyes twinkled and it made perfect sense to him even before I tried to explain what I meant when it came to the specific skill we were working on. Since you probably weren't there throughout the whole set of exercises, translating this to skill building might not be that obvious. If that's the case, write me and let's have a chat about it.