Team Chicken

In January 2016, John Maxwell and 250 John Maxwell Team coaches went to Paraguay to instigate leadership change within the entire country. It was an epic project. By the time we left a week later, we had collectively trained over 15,000 people. The project was so large that when John met the Pope a few weeks back, 'Transformation Paraguay' was one of the things he asked John about. You know it’s a big deal when it hits the Pope’s radar!

Each day we would meet up with a translator and a driver and go out to a company or school or government building and train their people in John’s leadership principles.

I paired up with Eric on the first day, and it worked so well we worked together for the rest of the trip.

Our first gig was at a big chicken factory. It went really well and we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.

The next one was at a market .. it went really well too. We patted ourselves on the back all the way to the next one at a cheese manufacturers .. that one went well too!

The next day we went to a huge mega church with about 12 other coaches and 12 translators. They had hundreds of people to train.

Eric and I picked our room and then waited for the people to come. No one came.

When we looked outside and had a bit of a wander around, the coaches who’s rooms were nearest the entrance were getting all the people coming in. None of them were getting down to us.

‘We need to get them before they get grabbed by the other rooms!’ I said.

‘I’ll go up by the front door and charm them as soon as they walk through the door.’ Eric said. ‘I’ll send them down to you and you lock them in the room!’

So that’s what we did. Eric is a great salesman, and anyone who walked through that door didn’t stand a chance!

In no time, the other coaches were trying to cut us off, saying we had enough people already! So we kicked off our workshop with a pretty full room.

The first 90 minutes went quickly and we were soon stopping for a 10 minute coffee break.

‘How do you think it went?’ I asked Eric.

‘Pretty good,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure they are totally engaged though.’

‘Let’s start promptly,’ I said.

‘OK! I’ll kick the next session off.’

But when the 10 minute break was up, none of our room had come back. We took a walk around wondering if there was a line for the bathroom or something, but we couldn’t find any of them.

We went back to the room and waited for another 10 minutes.

After 25 minutes, four people came back in and sat down.

‘Where’s everyone else?’ Eric asked the translator.

He just shrugged nonchalantly.

‘Ok, we’ll kick off in about 2 minutes’ Eric said, trying to make it sound like everything was carefully planned.

Five minutes later one of the four people who came back said something to our translator in Spanish.

‘What did he say?’ we both asked the translator at the same time.

‘He said that the others aren’t coming back’

‘Why not? I asked him.

‘They were not meant to be in the JMT sessions’ the translator said, trying not to laugh, ‘they were just walking past on their way to a different training! You grabbed them and made them come in and they then felt they had to wait for the break to escape!’

We cracked up laughing. But it was very humbling to finish off the rest of the workshop with just 4 people in one tiny corner of the room.

Our last workshop was at the HQ of the biggest selling newspaper in Paraguay. Luckily this was the best one of them all. They loved it and we had a great time too. We were on the radio and they filmed an interview with us talking about the transformation project.

The next morning we laughed about our mega church experience over breakfast. Eric’s sales skills were too good!

(Unfortunately his Spanish was not at the same standard. I struggled to order a ham and cheese omelette as I can’t speak Spanish. Eric very confidently took over and 'Spanished' the waitress for about 2 minutes. ‘Thanks!’ I said. ‘No problem.’ 10 minutes later the waitress put my breakfast down in front of me .. it was a plate with a fried egg on it .. and a slice of processed cheese .. and a slice of ham!)

The whole trip was a fantastic experience and every workshop we did was a great learning experience. We probably learned the most from the mega church experience, even though it was disappointing. (The four people did really enjoy it though!)

A the week went on, in general, we got better and better. We interacted more naturally. We knew the material better. Our examples and stories got better. We relaxed more and had more fun.

And I think that is always the way with speaking. No matter what happens, if you stop and reflect, there is always a great deal to learn. If you keep moving forward, the trend will always be up. You’ll always keep getting better.

It can be disheartening at times when things don’t work out as you’d hoped, but it’s important that you learn what you can from it .. and confidently move on to the next one.