February 19, 2025 • 39 mins
Vadim Arefiev, a senior Agile coach and founder of the Success Charge Academy, shares his inspiring transition from a full-stack Java developer to a human-centric coach.
With insights from a pivotal encounter with Agile legends Gene Gendel and Jeff Sutherland, Vadim discusses the profound fulfillment found in helping others unlock their potential. Through personal stories and experiences, Vadim highlights the importance of resilience and the power of personal narratives in overcoming adversity.
Discover the art of building trust and enabling change within teams, as we draw parallels between sports coaching and software development. Vadim explains the "flip it" technique that transformed a resistant team member into a collaborator and the value of servant leadership in recognizing individual strengths and aspirations.
This episode also introduces the concept of positive intelligence, offering strategies like square breathing and gratitude routines to reshape thought patterns and foster resilience. Vadim's expertise provides a roadmap for maintaining a positive attitude amidst rapid technological changes, emphasizing the authentic empowerment that comes from choosing a positive perspective.
Connect with Vadim on LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/va3
Check out Vadim's Success Charge Academy:
http://successcharge.com/
Read about Vadim's ministry for the homeless in Brooklyn:
https://www.homelessny.org/
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to the Agile Within.
I am your host, mark Metz.
My mission for this podcast isto provide Agile insights into
human values and behaviorsthrough genuine connections.
My guests and I will sharereal-life stories from our Agile
journeys, triumphs, blundersand everything in between, as
(00:29):
well as the lessons that we havelearned.
So get pumped, get rocking.
The Agile Within starts now.
Before we dive into today'sepisode, I'd like to take a
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Impact Agility specializes intraining and coaching through
(00:49):
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(01:13):
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unlocking their full potentialTo explore free learning
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Visit impactagilityco Onceagain.
(01:35):
That's impactagilityco.
Well, hey there everybody, Ihope you're having an absolutely
fantastic day.
I have a friend who is comingon as a guest today and his name
is Vadim R5.
Vadim, welcome to the show,buddy, hey hello everybody.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm happy to be here, mark.
It's always a pleasure to seeyou, but it's the first time for
me.
Amazingly enough, first time inyour great postcard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm ready toroll.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
So Vadim I consider a friend.
I also consider him a mentor,so I've been through some of his
training courses before andhe's an absolutely awesome
teacher and a mentor, so it's abig privilege to have him on the
show.
A little bit about Vadim he isa senior Agile coach, an Agile
advocate, and he's the founderof the Success Charge Academy,
(02:29):
but also, if that wasn't enough,he is also a coach for the
homeless and we're going to hearmore about that in the podcast.
So Vadim has over 17 years ofexperience as an Agile coach and
a trainer.
He has multiple certificationsand credentials in Agile, scrum,
less and Safe, and those enablehim to provide effective and
(02:51):
engaging coaching, mentoring andtraining to various roles and
levels in organizations, and hismission is to help teams and
individuals to achieve theirfull potential and deliver value
to their customers.
All right, vadim, you hail fromthe city of Brooklyn in New
(03:13):
York.
So if I were coming to Brooklynfor a day and had never been
there before, what's one thingthat Vadim says that I could not
miss doing?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, I have a little crazy answer to this question,
right, I think if you will, mark, travel through New York City
and I can catch you and I cansay that, hey, you know all
about this, famous things ofBrooklyn, you know Coney Island
attraction and amusement parkand Brooklyn Bridge and all of
(03:42):
this, that's not thatinteresting.
But what would be interestingand fascinating, if you will
stop by in Sanjongi Foundationfor the homeless which I'm
running, and people can say that, hey, coach, you must be crazy,
it sounds dangerous and all ofthe criminals inside.
But, guys, you will be reallyamazed.
(04:04):
You will get in, you will beinvited to drink tea or you know
former homeless folks, they canoffer you an awesome dinner,
like restaurant level dinnerwhich they're making themselves,
right, and they can startsharing stories.
And these stories really, it'snot just fascinating, it's
(04:25):
really heartbreaking stories,right, how people end up on the
street of New York and then themost amazing is how they climb
up and they keep climbing upwith our help and with God's
help.
That is my part of my life, Iwould say.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Vadim, you're such an inspiration.
Thank you for sharing that, andif I do find myself in Brooklyn
, I will absolutely look you upand we'll stop by 100%, thank
you.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Thank you, Mark.
We would need you as a coachfor sober life of my homeless
folks.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Well, the title for today's show is why I Chose to
Be a Human-Centric Coach.
So, fadim, I'm curious whatexactly is this human-centric
coach that you speak of?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
For me it's probably not just a reason of being a
coach, but probably a reason ofbeing myself, right, it's a
central of my self-identity, Iwould say.
I was coding, creatingdifferent programs as a
full-stack Java developer foryears and I always felt that I'm
(05:38):
not serving my mission in life.
Yes, I can create cool programsand, you know, I was very
nicely compensated, thank Godfor this.
But every day I was gettinginto work felt that, you know,
I'm occupying space of somebodyelse.
It's not me, right I?
(05:59):
You know, for me, just to sitdown in front of computer and
look at my own program, I mean,when something starts working
and I felt, you know, minicreator, that's great, great
feeling.
But I was always about helpingother people, right, and I think
this is my real purpose in life.
(06:20):
And when, many, many moons ago,I met Gene Gandel first and he
introduced me to Jeff Sutherland, that was, you know, changing
of my life to a degree.
Right, I became his student andit was funny how exactly we met
.
You know, I came to histraining and he says that well,
(06:43):
you have a little accent here,by the way, are you Russian?
I said yes.
He said, oh, wonderful, I wasin the US Navy and I was killing
Russians in Vietnam and I said,professor, we are going to be
friends From this moment on.
Dr Jeff became my belovedprofessor.
(07:04):
He gave me a lot.
You know what was the mostinteresting, the most important
you know, behind this?
Agile principles, agilemanifest, 12 principles, all of
this right.
All of a sudden I saw that wecan serve a human being, not
just.
You know to have businessrequirement and some kind of
(07:26):
contract style, a relationshipbetween me as a developer and my
upper management and my product, which was a big mystery for me
.
All of a sudden I found that,hey, it's so natural and it's
all about how to be servantleader.
For me, ideal picture ofservant leader is an
(07:47):
illustration to gospel rightJesus Christ standing and
washing feet of his disciple.
And all of a sudden I saw thisin this agility, inside of the
heart and mindset of guys likeJim Gendel and Professor Jeff
Sousel.
And that was it.
And I said, hey, you know, Idon't need to be a director.
(08:10):
I was already a director of alittle little corner of New York
Mercantile Exchange.
They gave me power of fightinghiring.
I didn't enjoy it at all, butwhen I was able to serve my
developers and then my belovedclient.
All of a sudden, the picturechanged completely upside down.
(08:34):
As I said, I immediately foundthat this is my purpose in life.
Life, right, I need to come andhelp other folks to stop being
just a machine of you know,producing kind of somebody who
(08:57):
can be easily exchanged withchat DPT nowadays, right, but to
creative human being and I'mready to spend my life serving
this human being.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
This is probably why I'm a human-centric coach, so I
identify very strongly with thatas well and have a lot of the
same belief systems.
You and I have talked aboutthat outside of the podcast.
I want to get into this and Iwant to know.
Vadim, so you've worked at somevery, very large organizations.
(09:25):
That's right, and I'm sure whenyou walk into engaging with
like one of these huge globalbanks, that you probably hear
terms like it's all aboutprocess, process, process, and
they're bringing you in to bethe process guy to whip
everybody into shape that wehave to install this process
(09:48):
Maybe talk to us about you don'tstart with process, you start
with people, and maybe we canease into.
I want to know some times whereyou've had to work and maybe
you butted heads with somebodywho did tell you no, it's not
about the people, it's about theprocess.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Well, all the time, all the time, all the time, mark
.
Even recently, you know, I hadan interview with this gentleman
and you know I started trainingmy mindset.
You know my internalenvironment, right, how do I
think what is my most valuablethings and less valuable?
And all of a sudden, thisfellow, he said stop, coach,
(10:27):
you're lying to me.
I said hold on a minute, whatdo you mean?
He said you cannot behuman-centric when you're
running PI planning.
Let's say, I said, why not?
And you know his argument wasreally.
You know, for me it was like wow, even if this guy is going to
give me an offer, I'm not goingto work for this guy.
(10:48):
It's practically opposite ofwhat I think and what I believe.
Right, he was a big advocatefor like process-centric.
That's the way to go, right.
But you know, for me, if we allbecame process-centric, if we
all say that PI it's like in thebook, well, let's open up
(11:08):
Safebook and it's step numberone, step number two, three,
then human being is disappearingfrom this picture, right, and
what is happening Then?
We will be focusing on planning.
Hold on a minute, you know,even like idea of PI planning is
all about alignment.
One human being, let's say abig executive with a set of
(11:31):
other human beings who areworking for this big fellow, how
to align and as soon as you'retalking about alignment, you're
talking about communication andcollaboration one set of humans
with another set of humans.
So we are talking about humancentricity is so important.
Again, it's super importantalso to find a good balance.
(11:55):
So if let's say I will comeback to any big enterprise, any
big financial institution ofUnited States, right.
And if I will say that for me,human centricity is let's focus
on ICF-based coaching, what wecall it right, international
Coaching Federation says thatthere is no consulting, only art
(12:17):
of powerful questions.
You know, we need balance.
Sometimes we need to beconsultants.
We need to say that guys, guys,hold on a minute, let's focus.
We need to deliver tomorrow,right.
If you don't deliver, I loveyou.
You know I am human-centric,but we are going to lose job,
right, because upper managementwill be super unhappy and client
(12:39):
another super important humanhe's going to be unhappy.
So it's all falling apart.
So, guys, let's focus.
What would be the easiest andthe happiest?
That's the key word thehappiest way to deliver this
product.
You know, in human centricity, Ifound the key element is how to
(13:00):
engage my team, enlighten them,engage them.
You know I was runningexperiments in one of these big
companies I don't want to sayname yeah, yeah, we launched
trains and we said that, okay,pi planning.
We're all excited about PIplanning.
I don't think my developerswere excited.
(13:21):
So they all came because bothsaid that you have to
participate.
Right, and it was first virtual, 100% virtual PI planning.
Because of pandemic.
We were running it virtuallyand for the sake of experiment.
When we said that, oh, we aredone with day one, guys, let's
(13:42):
go home, let's enjoy all youknow, do whatever you know, you
can turn off your camera.
And then I can see that 25% ofthe audience, they didn't even
notice that we finished day one.
You know I, I started timeboxing.
You know measuring how manypeople didn't know that
(14:03):
something changed in the roomFor half an hour?
They didn't even close thesession.
So they turn off cameras, theymute mics and they enjoy their
life.
So companies keep paying a lotof money for this huge event.
Majority of them didn't careand 25% is like obnoxiously
(14:27):
ignore this event.
So I said this is not humancentricity.
I need to do something toinvite them all.
Then it will be real PIplanning, then it will be real
alignment and everything.
We decided to have a breakevery 15 minutes and run some
kind of questionnaire quiz, somekind of funny game and making
(14:51):
sure that everybody can answer.
Everybody's involved.
It's a big deal.
How to train my team to turn oncameras, especially if we are
dealing with classicalintroverts?
And there are a lot of talentedprogrammers, data science folks,
qa engineers 100% introverts.
They don't feel comfortable toturn on camera Again.
(15:11):
This is my human centricity.
I love them and I need to coachthem to bring them in in a nice
way.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
This sounds a little cliche, but there really is an
art to it.
As an effective coach, I feellike you have to be able to find
how to light the fire in yourteam members.
This is a company and thecompany makes money, and if the
company makes money, then wehave jobs.
So everybody can't just dowhatever they want to do.
But one of the lessons that Ilearned very early on, way
(15:41):
before I even became an agilecoach and a scrum master, vadim,
was when I coached my son whenhe was younger and we were
playing recreational league,basketball and like in middle
school and you had some kids andI remember distinctly there was
one of the taller kids that waspicked for our team.
I put him in a position ofcenter and a center is one that
(16:05):
stays near the basket, getsrebounds, block shots, and they
really stay close to the basketand I could tell that he just
wasn't really happy aboutplaying in the game.
I took him aside and I said hey, you know what's what's it.
You don't really seem likeyou're.
You're having a lot of fun.
He was like well, coach, I liketo shoot the ball, so I don't
(16:27):
like to be inside and I like toguard other players that play
outside.
So I said, okay, I tell youwhat.
We really need somebody to playinside.
But what we're going to do isthere's certain times that we're
going to let you play a guardwhere you can shoot the ball,
because I did notice he did havea skill for shooting the ball.
But there's going to be timeswhere I'm going to need you to
(16:50):
do what's best for the team andyou're going to have to play
center for us and you're goingto have to rebound.
And what a difference that madeto this young man's perspective.
Because now he understood, hecame to life and he came to me
like coach.
What do you need me to do?
Because he understood.
And that taught me that youreally do have to have those
(17:15):
conversations with your team.
And how do you light them up?
How do they understand how youcan make them better?
But then how can they help theteam to be best?
And it correlates the same insoftware teams.
You have some team members thatthey just want to work on the
front end, some team membersthat they really could care less
about working in JavaScript andall the JavaScript frameworks.
(17:37):
They just want to do back-enddevelopment or middle tier.
There are some that just wantto work on new technologies.
They don't want to work on oldtechnologies.
So how do you really dig in andget to know these people on the
team, find out what theirpassions are, but then don't let
them just run wild, becauseagain, we do have a mission to
meet and to be able to cometogether as a team.
(17:58):
And what are your thoughts onthat, vadim?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
You know I love your example of enlightening a young
man, young player.
This is awesome.
So what I would like to do withmy teammates, right, I would
like to introduce myself andstart building bridge of trust.
I remember I was working forone company, right, and I was
able to build this good bridgeof trust with.
(18:23):
I remember I was working forone company, right, and I was
able to build this good breachof trust with everyone except
one player.
He was very, very senior and Ididn't figure out what exactly
he wants, right, I was knockinghis door, scheduling 101, and on
101, his regular style is yes,yes, coach, yes, no, no, yes,
yes, yes, yes, no.
(18:43):
So he closed the door ofcollaboration and it was very
difficult for me to likepenetrate it and to find some
kind of little, little window ofopportunity right to squeeze in
right, and, sure enough, hestarted feeling that, hey, you
know, this coach is not helpingus.
And he started running aroundright and talk to every single
(19:07):
other person and complainingright, saying that why do we
need this coach and all of thisscrum stuff?
It doesn't work.
Can you see, guys, it doesn'twork.
And I was able to see likenegative effect.
So I brought him in and I saidhey, hello, let's do one thing
Today.
You're going to be a scrummaster.
No, no, no, no, no, not me,Hold on a minute.
(19:29):
No, that's not it.
I said hold on.
You know, you have your ownidea of what would be the best
for the team.
You don't want to share it withme, that's okay.
You know, b is scrum master.
And now, all of a sudden, herealized that whatever he did,
it's actually a killer for theteam.
It's not helpful, but it's.
In fact it works like a real,you know, killing and murdering
(19:54):
the team dynamics, right.
And then he said that, oh, allright, so, guys, let's probably
change idea.
Let's go to a different angle,to a different direction.
From somebody who was fightingwith me, he became a big fan and
I realized that, you know,whatever I did on 101 didn't
(20:16):
work.
But whatever I did, with oneoffer that be a team coach,
scrum Master yourself all of asudden this is flip it technique
, right, that's what we call incoaching, flip it.
You know, he realized the valueof what Scrum Master will do,
or team coach will do, right,and he starts thinking
(20:40):
differently, right.
So it's very hard to to explainhow to find a key to every
single soul.
There is no one size fits all,there is no one easy recipe.
You know, guys, I'm going togive you, you know, medicine.
It's going to work across andyou're going to be healed.
You know, we all know that itdoesn't work like this, even in
(21:04):
the fairy tale.
It's amazing that each humanbeing is so different.
It's the entire universe insideof one man, right?
And if we treat this person asa huge value by himself or
herself, right.
If they feel it, then it makesa difference.
(21:24):
I remember I was coaching oneteam, also in big financial
institution, and I scheduledone-on-one and my day was very
packed, so I didn't have a lotof free time and all of a sudden
I'm talking to this scrummaster.
It was a young lady and I saidin two seconds I said, lady, you
know what?
There is no point to talk aboutdynamic of your team, to open
(21:46):
up my coaching agreement.
You know I love to have visualagreement with a little Kanban
for our 101, right, and whatexactly we are doing and all of
this data for team dynamics.
I said we are not going to evensee this today because I can
feel that you, young lady.
You need a lot of help, right,because I feel that you are
(22:12):
depressed.
How can you enlighten your teamif you are depressed yourself?
Right, can I help you?
Can I offer myself, not as anagile coach, as a life coach,
and I started offering herpositive intelligence.
I graduated from this positiveintelligence school, right, I
love this technique.
And all of a sudden, this ladywaked up After this one hour.
(22:35):
She said hour.
She said, oh, my life isdifferent now.
Now I can come to my team and Ican be a different scrum master
.
All together.
That was the most valuable forthis scrum master, not talking
about regular, super important,but regular stuff.
I think it's.
It's it's important tounderstand that we all are
(22:56):
servant leaders, servant firstand then leading somewhere.
Like you know, number 16 in mypriority right, my mindset, my
time, whatever needs to be done,right To support them, to help
them to find individual problems, and you know dreams of
(23:25):
achievement, right, and I cansupport them on this.
That makes a difference.
You know from my humble opinion.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
That's a great story, and it reminds me of another
story that you and I weretalking about, where you were
coming into an engagement andyou were going to be working
with an individual and they werequite skeptical and basically
told you that he didn't want youaround.
Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
that story?
Exactly, yes, it was also inone big financial institution.
I was an agile advocate,Interesting role.
That was the first and so farlast time when a bank hired me
as an advocate, because it wasdifficult for technical leaders
and business leaders tounderstand what exactly is this
(24:08):
lace right Office of excellence,you know, trying to get in and,
like Marines, occupy the spaceand move them forward.
So they get scared and theystart hiring guys like me, you
know.
Be my advocate, explain to mewhat is going on, protect me
from these enemies, right?
And I decided that, hey, asalways, I need to build my
(24:31):
rapport with every single majorplayer.
So I called one manager at atime, right, and I'm calling
this fellow and introduce myselfHello, you know I'm an Agile
advocate.
He said, sorry, I don't want totalk to you.
I said what Excuse me?
You know we need to worktogether.
He said, no, we don't have towork together.
I don't want to talk to you.
You know I'm very busy and Idon't need any Agile advocate.
(24:54):
I said, okay, great.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
How about if Boy, you talk about not even getting a?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
chance.
Yes, absolutely, just get outof here.
Right, that's it.
I said that, hey, I can be yourAgile Samurai.
Behind your back he said holdon a minute, I'm doing Agile for
15 years, he said, and I don'tneed any Agile Samurai.
I said, wonderful, hello,you're doing it for 15 years,
you're an agile samurai and I'man agile samurai.
(25:19):
So two samurais, it's an army.
And he started laughing andsaid okay, you win, get in for
101.
And that's how I startedpenetrating this wall.
But again, if a person is fixedwith his mindset that much he
(25:40):
definitely doesn't want to evenhear about anything, right, then
there is a root problem.
You know, it's a fixed mindset,what we call it right, root
problem of understanding.
And before this gentleman, thisparticular gentleman saw a
little value of all, all agileactivities.
You know, he wasn't active atall, but seeing value can change
(26:02):
attitude.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
So there's an aspect of coaching, of actually
practicing what you preach.
I've had very large helpings ofhumble pie served to me where I
recognized that while I wasadvocating for change, I wasn't
open to change myself.
Make sure that you practicewhat you preach, because you're
(26:25):
not going to get very far ifpeople see that you yourself are
not open to listening, and Iwould also share that.
I try to be open about myfailures, what I try to learn
from them, and show that I'm notdefined by my failures.
I mean very rarely do you comeacross some failure that you
(26:46):
occur at work that you're notgoing to be able to recover from
.
Sometimes it is I'm not goingto say those don't exist, but
more times than not our minds goto a dark place and try to make
it bigger than it is.
And so if we take the attitudeof, well, I'm going to try
something and try to learn fromit, maybe I should try doing
smaller experiments instead ofdoing big agendas to be able to
(27:12):
learn from them.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
This is so true, mark , so true.
One of the key elements we allcoaches right, need to coach our
coaches, our audience, ourbeloved partners, right is that
pain by itself is an incredibletool.
You know, let's say we wouldn'thave any pain, we wouldn't be
(27:34):
able to feel any pain.
What will happen?
By accident, we'll put our handon a stove and we will just
burn it down, right, because wehave this awesome ability to
feel pain.
We will immediately learn andget out of this hot spot.
Amazing technique which can beconveyed in coaching, right, is
(27:56):
hey, appreciate this sensitivityof pain, but do not hold your
hand on the stove.
So you get this experience, getout, and then you know what is
happening with our mindset.
We keep our hand on the stoveall the time, years by years,
and this feeling of pain iskilling us internally.
(28:20):
So I love this concept ofpositive intelligence.
You know famous coach Chisod,you know he says that.
You know we have this trainsyou know he called it trains
inside of our mindset and eachtrain travels again and again in
the same railroad and makesthis railroad very deep.
So it's very difficult for atrain to change direction.
(28:43):
So you know, something happened, something bad, bam, and all of
a sudden, the train goes thesame way and we feel depressed,
we feel in, dis-powered insteadof in-powered.
Right, what we can do easily,like I'm saying to all my
coaches, right, you can practiceone element from positive
(29:04):
intelligence just squarebreathing.
Just square breathing.
It takes a few seconds, pam,you know four seconds to inhale.
Four seconds, stop thebreathing, four, a second exhale
and stop again for four secondsand then inhale again, pam, pam
, pam, few cycles and all of asudden, the strain pam, stop Now
(29:26):
.
Second step you need to turn itto positive thinking instead of
negative.
And the easiest way startsaying some kind of gratitude.
We call it gratitude routine.
Another minute or two minutes,right.
Just say that you are thankfulto God or to universe, whatever
(29:46):
you feel comfortable with, rightand for what?
For material things, fornon-materials, for this current
of blessing you have, and evenfor something that you called
negative.
If somebody attacks you on thestreet, if you lost something
important, you lost your job.
Start saying thank you for allof this because you get your
(30:08):
awesome experience and youbecame stronger.
And then you made one steptowards universe or your God,
right, and all of a sudden youfeel differently.
You feel that, hey, I learnedmy lesson, you know, I know that
this stuff is hard.
I'm not going to get very closeto it, but I'm not burning my
hand on this stuff anymore.
(30:30):
Right, I appreciate experienceand I go forward.
And the same way we can explainto all development teams, right
, that, guys, it's okay to failin a little format.
Get your experience, do not getdepressed because you failed
and be much more focused on yournext step up.
(30:52):
Right?
Speaker 1 (30:52):
And that's how you can do it right.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
It's constant experiments in a little format.
It's called fail fast.
As we all know, in agility,fail fast.
Another great example I joineda few meetups with coaches from
US Marines troops.
I was fascinated to find outthat Marines in the United
(31:18):
States right now they have agilecoaches and scrum masters.
I was like, wow, that's totallycrazy.
Why do you need such structure?
Why do you need agility for?
Tell me more.
And they said imagine how itused to be.
Right, there is a military order, we go this way and that right,
you know there is a militaryorder, we go this way and that's
(31:38):
it.
And if there is a setup ofenemies, they're waiting for our
troops.
Order was done and everybody isgoing to be killed.
Instead, one person can findout what is happening.
So it's a running experiment,right, and saying that guys do
not go this way, let's go aroundand pivot and pivot again, and
(31:58):
that's how this set ofexperiments we can get to the
goal much faster and with lesspeople to be killed.
That's a lesson learned and Iget excited about it.
I was like, wow, it works, evenin military.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
I'll be honest with you, vadim.
I struggled with that for along time and I heard the
constant advice of give yourselfsome positive reinforcement,
look at it as an opportunity tolearn.
I didn't internalize that Forsome reason.
It just didn't work for me andit seemed corny and I just felt
like I wasn't being truthfulmyself and I don't know what
(32:36):
exactly triggered it.
The turning point for me was toacknowledge okay, I can react
one of two ways.
I can focus on the negativeaspects and stay there, or I can
focus on the positive.
The control is mine.
I get to choose how I want toreact to it.
That's what is in control to me.
How I want to react to it.
(32:58):
That's what is in control to me, right, even if I did something
that failed and I'm like, yeah,but you know it failed because
the software didn't work, thistechnology, these people but
what I could control was how Ireacted to it and what I did
with that decision.
And I don't know what lightningbolt that was with me.
But ever since that point, itreally has been more authentic
to me to have that attitude.
(33:19):
Just to stop and ask myselfthat question, mark, you've got
two options.
You can focus on the negativeand stay in self-loathing and
pity, or you can focus on thepositive side of it.
It's my decision to make, I'min control, so all for that is
free advice.
I don't know if it helpsanybody else, but yeah, I really
struggle with that because Ijust felt like it wasn't
(33:41):
authentic.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Absolutely, absolutely.
And think about how quickly ourlife is changing, especially
with AIs right now.
I mean, speed of change is justgetting faster and faster and
faster.
It's like spinning, like arocket right Going forward.
So you better learn fast.
Exactly, you better learn fastand you better stay totally
(34:04):
positive on your little failures, because without little
failures nobody can survive.
Nowadays it's what we call VUCAwar right.
It's volatile, you don't knowwhat's going to happen next, and
you should feel that, hey, I'mgetting experience, wonderful,
wonderful.
Let's focus on positive, as youjust said.
You know, let's be in thankfulmood, in thankful note, in
(34:30):
whatever is happening.
Right, thank you for experience.
Let me go forward.
Right, let me analyze it.
Thank you for experience, letme go forward, let me analyze it
.
And I think, as coaches, moreand more, we need to understand
human mindset.
We need to bring this positiveintelligence message to our
teammates, because life becameso stressful without this
(34:54):
technique, it's hard to survive.
It's that easy, right?
And in fact, if we startpreaching and spending, not like
100% of your time as a scrummaster, but certain percentage,
right, will be enough to startchanging dynamic of your
(35:15):
teammates towards positivity andhappiness.
And that's it.
You know, I think as soon as weadd this drop of happiness to
your team dynamics, all of asudden your productivity, your
effectiveness is getting up.
It's so correlated.
I mean I can't believe this.
You know, in my life, in myexperiences, you know, I can see
it's proven again and again, Ican find countless examples.
(35:42):
That's how it works.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I think that's an incredible way for us to end our
discussion here.
Vadim, If our listeners outthere want to get in touch with
you, what's the best way forthem to do that?
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Oh, that's very easy.
Everybody can go tosuccesschargecom, my little
academy, and there is a bigbutton.
You know schedule one-on-onebook appointment.
It's totally free.
You know I love to share.
You don't have to sign in forsomething in my school.
No, you know, I'm dedicatingone hour of my time to help you.
(36:16):
Anybody who is scheduling, whois calling me in, and I will be
more than happy to talk to you,to share what I have and to
learn from you as well.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
That's awesome.
We'll be sure and put a link tothat in the show notes to make
it easy for our listeners outthere.
And what about your homelessministry that you have?
Tell us about how we could getconnected to that if we want to.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Oh, absolutely.
It's also very, very easy.
Nowadays it's all throughwebsites, homelessnyorg, and you
can see many stories, littlevideos, how we are feeding the
homeless, how we are trying tocoach them and bring them out of
this horrible, horribleenvironment, horrible style of
life.
(36:58):
Right, it's not easy at all,but even when you can see that
one person is climbing up,climbing up and that's, you know
, it costs like life right.
All values in your life will benot even equal to this.
And we have a lot of people whoare standing in their own feet,
(37:21):
getting married, coming back tosociety as good members of
society, and they're helpingothers right.
That's great.
I'm looking at them and youcan't even recognize that this
person was lying down in thesubway or under a bridge right.
All of a sudden, you know youcan see intelligence, educated
(37:42):
and ready to share and ready tosupport others, human beings.
That's a real transformation,amazing transformation from one
creature to a real human being.
That's why we are doing it.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Well, Vadim, thank you so much for coming on the
show.
Thank you for your ministry andfor serving those that are
homeless in the New York areaand in Brooklyn.
Let's have you back on the show, my friend.
It's been a pleasure,Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
I will be more than happy to come back and all
audience, you know, all folkswho are listening.
Thank you for spending thistime to be with me and with this
amazing host of the show, Mark,and I hope I will see you
around.
All the best.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
All right, that brings it in to another episode
of the Agile Within.
We'll see everybody later.
Thanks for joining us foranother episode of the Agile
Within.
If you haven't already, pleasejoin our LinkedIn page to stay
in touch.
Just search for the AgileWithin and please spread the
(38:55):
word with your friends andcolleagues Until next time.
This has been your host, MarkMetz.
Welcome to the Agile Within.
I am your host, mark Metz.
My mission for this podcast isto provide Agile insights into
human values and behaviorsthrough genuine connections.
My guests and I will sharereal-life stories from our Agile
journeys, triumphs, blundersand everything in between, as
(00:29):
well as the lessons that we havelearned.
So get pumped, get rocking.
The Agile Within starts now.
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Impact Agility specializes intraining and coaching through
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That's impactagilityco.
Well, hey there everybody, Ihope you're having an absolutely
fantastic day.
I have a friend who is comingon as a guest today and his name
is Vadim R5.
Vadim, welcome to the show,buddy, hey hello everybody.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm happy to be here, mark.
It's always a pleasure to seeyou, but it's the first time for
me.
Amazingly enough, first time inyour great postcard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm ready toroll.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
So Vadim I consider a friend.
I also consider him a mentor,so I've been through some of his
training courses before andhe's an absolutely awesome
teacher and a mentor, so it's abig privilege to have him on the
show.
A little bit about Vadim he isa senior Agile coach, an Agile
advocate, and he's the founderof the Success Charge Academy,
(02:29):
but also, if that wasn't enough,he is also a coach for the
homeless and we're going to hearmore about that in the podcast.
So Vadim has over 17 years ofexperience as an Agile coach and
a trainer.
He has multiple certificationsand credentials in Agile, scrum,
less and Safe, and those enablehim to provide effective and
(02:51):
engaging coaching, mentoring andtraining to various roles and
levels in organizations, and hismission is to help teams and
individuals to achieve theirfull potential and deliver value
to their customers.
All right, vadim, you hail fromthe city of Brooklyn in New
(03:13):
York.
So if I were coming to Brooklynfor a day and had never been
there before, what's one thingthat Vadim says that I could not
miss doing?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, I have a little crazy answer to this question,
right, I think if you will, mark, travel through New York City
and I can catch you and I cansay that, hey, you know all
about this, famous things ofBrooklyn, you know Coney Island
attraction and amusement parkand Brooklyn Bridge and all of
(03:42):
this, that's not thatinteresting.
But what would be interestingand fascinating, if you will
stop by in Sanjongi Foundationfor the homeless which I'm
running, and people can say that, hey, coach, you must be crazy,
it sounds dangerous and all ofthe criminals inside.
But, guys, you will be reallyamazed.
(04:04):
You will get in, you will beinvited to drink tea or you know
former homeless folks, they canoffer you an awesome dinner,
like restaurant level dinnerwhich they're making themselves,
right, and they can startsharing stories.
And these stories really, it'snot just fascinating, it's
(04:25):
really heartbreaking stories,right, how people end up on the
street of New York and then themost amazing is how they climb
up and they keep climbing upwith our help and with God's
help.
That is my part of my life, Iwould say.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Vadim, you're such an inspiration.
Thank you for sharing that, andif I do find myself in Brooklyn
, I will absolutely look you upand we'll stop by 100%, thank
you.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Thank you, Mark.
We would need you as a coachfor sober life of my homeless
folks.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Well, the title for today's show is why I Chose to
Be a Human-Centric Coach.
So, fadim, I'm curious whatexactly is this human-centric
coach that you speak of?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
For me it's probably not just a reason of being a
coach, but probably a reason ofbeing myself, right, it's a
central of my self-identity, Iwould say.
I was coding, creatingdifferent programs as a
full-stack Java developer foryears and I always felt that I'm
(05:38):
not serving my mission in life.
Yes, I can create cool programsand, you know, I was very
nicely compensated, thank Godfor this.
But every day I was gettinginto work felt that, you know,
I'm occupying space of somebodyelse.
It's not me, right I?
(05:59):
You know, for me, just to sitdown in front of computer and
look at my own program, I mean,when something starts working
and I felt, you know, minicreator, that's great, great
feeling.
But I was always about helpingother people, right, and I think
this is my real purpose in life.
(06:20):
And when, many, many moons ago,I met Gene Gandel first and he
introduced me to Jeff Sutherland, that was, you know, changing
of my life to a degree.
Right, I became his student andit was funny how exactly we met
.
You know, I came to histraining and he says that well,
(06:43):
you have a little accent here,by the way, are you Russian?
I said yes.
He said, oh, wonderful, I wasin the US Navy and I was killing
Russians in Vietnam and I said,professor, we are going to be
friends From this moment on.
Dr Jeff became my belovedprofessor.
(07:04):
He gave me a lot.
You know what was the mostinteresting, the most important
you know, behind this?
Agile principles, agilemanifest, 12 principles, all of
this right.
All of a sudden I saw that wecan serve a human being, not
just.
You know to have businessrequirement and some kind of
(07:26):
contract style, a relationshipbetween me as a developer and my
upper management and my product, which was a big mystery for me
.
All of a sudden I found that,hey, it's so natural and it's
all about how to be servantleader.
For me, ideal picture ofservant leader is an
(07:47):
illustration to gospel rightJesus Christ standing and
washing feet of his disciple.
And all of a sudden I saw thisin this agility, inside of the
heart and mindset of guys likeJim Gendel and Professor Jeff
Sousel.
And that was it.
And I said, hey, you know, Idon't need to be a director.
(08:10):
I was already a director of alittle little corner of New York
Mercantile Exchange.
They gave me power of fightinghiring.
I didn't enjoy it at all, butwhen I was able to serve my
developers and then my belovedclient.
All of a sudden, the picturechanged completely upside down.
(08:34):
As I said, I immediately foundthat this is my purpose in life.
Life, right, I need to come andhelp other folks to stop being
just a machine of you know,producing kind of somebody who
(08:57):
can be easily exchanged withchat DPT nowadays, right, but to
creative human being and I'mready to spend my life serving
this human being.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
This is probably why I'm a human-centric coach, so I
identify very strongly with thatas well and have a lot of the
same belief systems.
You and I have talked aboutthat outside of the podcast.
I want to get into this and Iwant to know.
Vadim, so you've worked at somevery, very large organizations.
(09:25):
That's right, and I'm sure whenyou walk into engaging with
like one of these huge globalbanks, that you probably hear
terms like it's all aboutprocess, process, process, and
they're bringing you in to bethe process guy to whip
everybody into shape that wehave to install this process
(09:48):
Maybe talk to us about you don'tstart with process, you start
with people, and maybe we canease into.
I want to know some times whereyou've had to work and maybe
you butted heads with somebodywho did tell you no, it's not
about the people, it's about theprocess.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Well, all the time, all the time, all the time, mark
.
Even recently, you know, I hadan interview with this gentleman
and you know I started trainingmy mindset.
You know my internalenvironment, right, how do I
think what is my most valuablethings and less valuable?
And all of a sudden, thisfellow, he said stop, coach,
(10:27):
you're lying to me.
I said hold on a minute, whatdo you mean?
He said you cannot behuman-centric when you're
running PI planning.
Let's say, I said, why not?
And you know his argument wasreally.
You know, for me it was like wow, even if this guy is going to
give me an offer, I'm not goingto work for this guy.
(10:48):
It's practically opposite ofwhat I think and what I believe.
Right, he was a big advocatefor like process-centric.
That's the way to go, right.
But you know, for me, if we allbecame process-centric, if we
all say that PI it's like in thebook, well, let's open up
(11:08):
Safebook and it's step numberone, step number two, three,
then human being is disappearingfrom this picture, right, and
what is happening Then?
We will be focusing on planning.
Hold on a minute, you know,even like idea of PI planning is
all about alignment.
One human being, let's say abig executive with a set of
(11:31):
other human beings who areworking for this big fellow, how
to align and as soon as you'retalking about alignment, you're
talking about communication andcollaboration one set of humans
with another set of humans.
So we are talking about humancentricity is so important.
Again, it's super importantalso to find a good balance.
(11:55):
So if let's say I will comeback to any big enterprise, any
big financial institution ofUnited States, right.
And if I will say that for me,human centricity is let's focus
on ICF-based coaching, what wecall it right, international
Coaching Federation says thatthere is no consulting, only art
(12:17):
of powerful questions.
You know, we need balance.
Sometimes we need to beconsultants.
We need to say that guys, guys,hold on a minute, let's focus.
We need to deliver tomorrow,right.
If you don't deliver, I loveyou.
You know I am human-centric,but we are going to lose job,
right, because upper managementwill be super unhappy and client
(12:39):
another super important humanhe's going to be unhappy.
So it's all falling apart.
So, guys, let's focus.
What would be the easiest andthe happiest?
That's the key word thehappiest way to deliver this
product.
You know, in human centricity, Ifound the key element is how to
(13:00):
engage my team, enlighten them,engage them.
You know I was runningexperiments in one of these big
companies I don't want to sayname yeah, yeah, we launched
trains and we said that, okay,pi planning.
We're all excited about PIplanning.
I don't think my developerswere excited.
(13:21):
So they all came because bothsaid that you have to
participate.
Right, and it was first virtual, 100% virtual PI planning.
Because of pandemic.
We were running it virtuallyand for the sake of experiment.
When we said that, oh, we aredone with day one, guys, let's
(13:42):
go home, let's enjoy all youknow, do whatever you know, you
can turn off your camera.
And then I can see that 25% ofthe audience, they didn't even
notice that we finished day one.
You know I, I started timeboxing.
You know measuring how manypeople didn't know that
(14:03):
something changed in the roomFor half an hour?
They didn't even close thesession.
So they turn off cameras, theymute mics and they enjoy their
life.
So companies keep paying a lotof money for this huge event.
Majority of them didn't careand 25% is like obnoxiously
(14:27):
ignore this event.
So I said this is not humancentricity.
I need to do something toinvite them all.
Then it will be real PIplanning, then it will be real
alignment and everything.
We decided to have a breakevery 15 minutes and run some
kind of questionnaire quiz, somekind of funny game and making
(14:51):
sure that everybody can answer.
Everybody's involved.
It's a big deal.
How to train my team to turn oncameras, especially if we are
dealing with classicalintroverts?
And there are a lot of talentedprogrammers, data science folks,
qa engineers 100% introverts.
They don't feel comfortable toturn on camera Again.
(15:11):
This is my human centricity.
I love them and I need to coachthem to bring them in in a nice
way.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
This sounds a little cliche, but there really is an
art to it.
As an effective coach, I feellike you have to be able to find
how to light the fire in yourteam members.
This is a company and thecompany makes money, and if the
company makes money, then wehave jobs.
So everybody can't just dowhatever they want to do.
But one of the lessons that Ilearned very early on, way
(15:41):
before I even became an agilecoach and a scrum master, vadim,
was when I coached my son whenhe was younger and we were
playing recreational league,basketball and like in middle
school and you had some kids andI remember distinctly there was
one of the taller kids that waspicked for our team.
I put him in a position ofcenter and a center is one that
(16:05):
stays near the basket, getsrebounds, block shots, and they
really stay close to the basketand I could tell that he just
wasn't really happy aboutplaying in the game.
I took him aside and I said hey, you know what's what's it.
You don't really seem likeyou're.
You're having a lot of fun.
He was like well, coach, I liketo shoot the ball, so I don't
(16:27):
like to be inside and I like toguard other players that play
outside.
So I said, okay, I tell youwhat.
We really need somebody to playinside.
But what we're going to do isthere's certain times that we're
going to let you play a guardwhere you can shoot the ball,
because I did notice he did havea skill for shooting the ball.
But there's going to be timeswhere I'm going to need you to
(16:50):
do what's best for the team andyou're going to have to play
center for us and you're goingto have to rebound.
And what a difference that madeto this young man's perspective.
Because now he understood, hecame to life and he came to me
like coach.
What do you need me to do?
Because he understood.
And that taught me that youreally do have to have those
(17:15):
conversations with your team.
And how do you light them up?
How do they understand how youcan make them better?
But then how can they help theteam to be best?
And it correlates the same insoftware teams.
You have some team members thatthey just want to work on the
front end, some team membersthat they really could care less
about working in JavaScript andall the JavaScript frameworks.
(17:37):
They just want to do back-enddevelopment or middle tier.
There are some that just wantto work on new technologies.
They don't want to work on oldtechnologies.
So how do you really dig in andget to know these people on the
team, find out what theirpassions are, but then don't let
them just run wild, becauseagain, we do have a mission to
meet and to be able to cometogether as a team.
(17:58):
And what are your thoughts onthat, vadim?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
You know I love your example of enlightening a young
man, young player.
This is awesome.
So what I would like to do withmy teammates, right, I would
like to introduce myself andstart building bridge of trust.
I remember I was working forone company, right, and I was
able to build this good bridgeof trust with.
(18:23):
I remember I was working forone company, right, and I was
able to build this good breachof trust with everyone except
one player.
He was very, very senior and Ididn't figure out what exactly
he wants, right, I was knockinghis door, scheduling 101, and on
101, his regular style is yes,yes, coach, yes, no, no, yes,
yes, yes, yes, no.
(18:43):
So he closed the door ofcollaboration and it was very
difficult for me to likepenetrate it and to find some
kind of little, little window ofopportunity right to squeeze in
right, and, sure enough, hestarted feeling that, hey, you
know, this coach is not helpingus.
And he started running aroundright and talk to every single
(19:07):
other person and complainingright, saying that why do we
need this coach and all of thisscrum stuff?
It doesn't work.
Can you see, guys, it doesn'twork.
And I was able to see likenegative effect.
So I brought him in and I saidhey, hello, let's do one thing
Today.
You're going to be a scrummaster.
No, no, no, no, no, not me,Hold on a minute.
(19:29):
No, that's not it.
I said hold on.
You know, you have your ownidea of what would be the best
for the team.
You don't want to share it withme, that's okay.
You know, b is scrum master.
And now, all of a sudden, herealized that whatever he did,
it's actually a killer for theteam.
It's not helpful, but it's.
In fact it works like a real,you know, killing and murdering
(19:54):
the team dynamics, right.
And then he said that, oh, allright, so, guys, let's probably
change idea.
Let's go to a different angle,to a different direction.
From somebody who was fightingwith me, he became a big fan and
I realized that, you know,whatever I did on 101 didn't
(20:16):
work.
But whatever I did, with oneoffer that be a team coach,
scrum Master yourself all of asudden this is flip it technique
, right, that's what we call incoaching, flip it.
You know, he realized the valueof what Scrum Master will do,
or team coach will do, right,and he starts thinking
(20:40):
differently, right.
So it's very hard to to explainhow to find a key to every
single soul.
There is no one size fits all,there is no one easy recipe.
You know, guys, I'm going togive you, you know, medicine.
It's going to work across andyou're going to be healed.
You know, we all know that itdoesn't work like this, even in
(21:04):
the fairy tale.
It's amazing that each humanbeing is so different.
It's the entire universe insideof one man, right?
And if we treat this person asa huge value by himself or
herself, right.
If they feel it, then it makesa difference.
(21:24):
I remember I was coaching oneteam, also in big financial
institution, and I scheduledone-on-one and my day was very
packed, so I didn't have a lotof free time and all of a sudden
I'm talking to this scrummaster.
It was a young lady and I saidin two seconds I said, lady, you
know what?
There is no point to talk aboutdynamic of your team, to open
(21:46):
up my coaching agreement.
You know I love to have visualagreement with a little Kanban
for our 101, right, and whatexactly we are doing and all of
this data for team dynamics.
I said we are not going to evensee this today because I can
feel that you, young lady.
You need a lot of help, right,because I feel that you are
(22:12):
depressed.
How can you enlighten your teamif you are depressed yourself?
Right, can I help you?
Can I offer myself, not as anagile coach, as a life coach,
and I started offering herpositive intelligence.
I graduated from this positiveintelligence school, right, I
love this technique.
And all of a sudden, this ladywaked up After this one hour.
(22:35):
She said hour.
She said, oh, my life isdifferent now.
Now I can come to my team and Ican be a different scrum master
.
All together.
That was the most valuable forthis scrum master, not talking
about regular, super important,but regular stuff.
I think it's.
It's it's important tounderstand that we all are
(22:56):
servant leaders, servant firstand then leading somewhere.
Like you know, number 16 in mypriority right, my mindset, my
time, whatever needs to be done,right To support them, to help
them to find individual problems, and you know dreams of
(23:25):
achievement, right, and I cansupport them on this.
That makes a difference.
You know from my humble opinion.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
That's a great story, and it reminds me of another
story that you and I weretalking about, where you were
coming into an engagement andyou were going to be working
with an individual and they werequite skeptical and basically
told you that he didn't want youaround.
Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (23:45):
that story?
Exactly, yes, it was also inone big financial institution.
I was an agile advocate,Interesting role.
That was the first and so farlast time when a bank hired me
as an advocate, because it wasdifficult for technical leaders
and business leaders tounderstand what exactly is this
(24:08):
lace right Office of excellence,you know, trying to get in and,
like Marines, occupy the spaceand move them forward.
So they get scared and theystart hiring guys like me, you
know.
Be my advocate, explain to mewhat is going on, protect me
from these enemies, right?
And I decided that, hey, asalways, I need to build my
(24:31):
rapport with every single majorplayer.
So I called one manager at atime, right, and I'm calling
this fellow and introduce myselfHello, you know I'm an Agile
advocate.
He said, sorry, I don't want totalk to you.
I said what Excuse me?
You know we need to worktogether.
He said, no, we don't have towork together.
I don't want to talk to you.
You know I'm very busy and Idon't need any Agile advocate.
(24:54):
I said, okay, great.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
How about if Boy, you talk about not even getting a?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
chance.
Yes, absolutely, just get outof here.
Right, that's it.
I said that, hey, I can be yourAgile Samurai.
Behind your back he said holdon a minute, I'm doing Agile for
15 years, he said, and I don'tneed any Agile Samurai.
I said, wonderful, hello,you're doing it for 15 years,
you're an agile samurai and I'man agile samurai.
(25:19):
So two samurais, it's an army.
And he started laughing andsaid okay, you win, get in for
101.
And that's how I startedpenetrating this wall.
But again, if a person is fixedwith his mindset that much he
(25:40):
definitely doesn't want to evenhear about anything, right, then
there is a root problem.
You know, it's a fixed mindset,what we call it right, root
problem of understanding.
And before this gentleman, thisparticular gentleman saw a
little value of all, all agileactivities.
You know, he wasn't active atall, but seeing value can change
(26:02):
attitude.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
So there's an aspect of coaching, of actually
practicing what you preach.
I've had very large helpings ofhumble pie served to me where I
recognized that while I wasadvocating for change, I wasn't
open to change myself.
Make sure that you practicewhat you preach, because you're
(26:25):
not going to get very far ifpeople see that you yourself are
not open to listening, and Iwould also share that.
I try to be open about myfailures, what I try to learn
from them, and show that I'm notdefined by my failures.
I mean very rarely do you comeacross some failure that you
(26:46):
occur at work that you're notgoing to be able to recover from
.
Sometimes it is I'm not goingto say those don't exist, but
more times than not our minds goto a dark place and try to make
it bigger than it is.
And so if we take the attitudeof, well, I'm going to try
something and try to learn fromit, maybe I should try doing
smaller experiments instead ofdoing big agendas to be able to
(27:12):
learn from them.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
This is so true, mark , so true.
One of the key elements we allcoaches right, need to coach our
coaches, our audience, ourbeloved partners, right is that
pain by itself is an incredibletool.
You know, let's say we wouldn'thave any pain, we wouldn't be
(27:34):
able to feel any pain.
What will happen?
By accident, we'll put our handon a stove and we will just
burn it down, right, because wehave this awesome ability to
feel pain.
We will immediately learn andget out of this hot spot.
Amazing technique which can beconveyed in coaching, right, is
(27:56):
hey, appreciate this sensitivityof pain, but do not hold your
hand on the stove.
So you get this experience, getout, and then you know what is
happening with our mindset.
We keep our hand on the stoveall the time, years by years,
and this feeling of pain iskilling us internally.
(28:20):
So I love this concept ofpositive intelligence.
You know famous coach Chisod,you know he says that.
You know we have this trainsyou know he called it trains
inside of our mindset and eachtrain travels again and again in
the same railroad and makesthis railroad very deep.
So it's very difficult for atrain to change direction.
(28:43):
So you know, something happened, something bad, bam, and all of
a sudden, the train goes thesame way and we feel depressed,
we feel in, dis-powered insteadof in-powered.
Right, what we can do easily,like I'm saying to all my
coaches, right, you can practiceone element from positive
(29:04):
intelligence just squarebreathing.
Just square breathing.
It takes a few seconds, pam,you know four seconds to inhale.
Four seconds, stop thebreathing, four, a second exhale
and stop again for four secondsand then inhale again, pam, pam
, pam, few cycles and all of asudden, the strain pam, stop Now
(29:26):
.
Second step you need to turn itto positive thinking instead of
negative.
And the easiest way startsaying some kind of gratitude.
We call it gratitude routine.
Another minute or two minutes,right.
Just say that you are thankfulto God or to universe, whatever
(29:46):
you feel comfortable with, rightand for what?
For material things, fornon-materials, for this current
of blessing you have, and evenfor something that you called
negative.
If somebody attacks you on thestreet, if you lost something
important, you lost your job.
Start saying thank you for allof this because you get your
(30:08):
awesome experience and youbecame stronger.
And then you made one steptowards universe or your God,
right, and all of a sudden youfeel differently.
You feel that, hey, I learnedmy lesson, you know, I know that
this stuff is hard.
I'm not going to get very closeto it, but I'm not burning my
hand on this stuff anymore.
(30:30):
Right, I appreciate experienceand I go forward.
And the same way we can explainto all development teams, right
, that, guys, it's okay to failin a little format.
Get your experience, do not getdepressed because you failed
and be much more focused on yournext step up.
(30:52):
Right?
Speaker 1 (30:52):
And that's how you can do it right.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
It's constant experiments in a little format.
It's called fail fast.
As we all know, in agility,fail fast.
Another great example I joineda few meetups with coaches from
US Marines troops.
I was fascinated to find outthat Marines in the United
(31:18):
States right now they have agilecoaches and scrum masters.
I was like, wow, that's totallycrazy.
Why do you need such structure?
Why do you need agility for?
Tell me more.
And they said imagine how itused to be.
Right, there is a military order, we go this way and that right,
you know there is a militaryorder, we go this way and that's
(31:38):
it.
And if there is a setup ofenemies, they're waiting for our
troops.
Order was done and everybody isgoing to be killed.
Instead, one person can findout what is happening.
So it's a running experiment,right, and saying that guys do
not go this way, let's go aroundand pivot and pivot again, and
(31:58):
that's how this set ofexperiments we can get to the
goal much faster and with lesspeople to be killed.
That's a lesson learned and Iget excited about it.
I was like, wow, it works, evenin military.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
I'll be honest with you, vadim.
I struggled with that for along time and I heard the
constant advice of give yourselfsome positive reinforcement,
look at it as an opportunity tolearn.
I didn't internalize that Forsome reason.
It just didn't work for me andit seemed corny and I just felt
like I wasn't being truthfulmyself and I don't know what
(32:36):
exactly triggered it.
The turning point for me was toacknowledge okay, I can react
one of two ways.
I can focus on the negativeaspects and stay there, or I can
focus on the positive.
The control is mine.
I get to choose how I want toreact to it.
That's what is in control to me.
How I want to react to it.
(32:58):
That's what is in control to me, right, even if I did something
that failed and I'm like, yeah,but you know it failed because
the software didn't work, thistechnology, these people but
what I could control was how Ireacted to it and what I did
with that decision.
And I don't know what lightningbolt that was with me.
But ever since that point, itreally has been more authentic
to me to have that attitude.
(33:19):
Just to stop and ask myselfthat question, mark, you've got
two options.
You can focus on the negativeand stay in self-loathing and
pity, or you can focus on thepositive side of it.
It's my decision to make, I'min control, so all for that is
free advice.
I don't know if it helpsanybody else, but yeah, I really
struggle with that because Ijust felt like it wasn't
(33:41):
authentic.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Absolutely, absolutely.
And think about how quickly ourlife is changing, especially
with AIs right now.
I mean, speed of change is justgetting faster and faster and
faster.
It's like spinning, like arocket right Going forward.
So you better learn fast.
Exactly, you better learn fastand you better stay totally
(34:04):
positive on your little failures, because without little
failures nobody can survive.
Nowadays it's what we call VUCAwar right.
It's volatile, you don't knowwhat's going to happen next, and
you should feel that, hey, I'mgetting experience, wonderful,
wonderful.
Let's focus on positive, as youjust said.
You know, let's be in thankfulmood, in thankful note, in
(34:30):
whatever is happening.
Right, thank you for experience.
Let me go forward.
Right, let me analyze it.
Thank you for experience, letme go forward, let me analyze it
.
And I think, as coaches, moreand more, we need to understand
human mindset.
We need to bring this positiveintelligence message to our
teammates, because life becameso stressful without this
(34:54):
technique, it's hard to survive.
It's that easy, right?
And in fact, if we startpreaching and spending, not like
100% of your time as a scrummaster, but certain percentage,
right, will be enough to startchanging dynamic of your
(35:15):
teammates towards positivity andhappiness.
And that's it.
You know, I think as soon as weadd this drop of happiness to
your team dynamics, all of asudden your productivity, your
effectiveness is getting up.
It's so correlated.
I mean I can't believe this.
You know, in my life, in myexperiences, you know, I can see
it's proven again and again, Ican find countless examples.
(35:42):
That's how it works.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I think that's an incredible way for us to end our
discussion here.
Vadim, If our listeners outthere want to get in touch with
you, what's the best way forthem to do that?
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Oh, that's very easy.
Everybody can go tosuccesschargecom, my little
academy, and there is a bigbutton.
You know schedule one-on-onebook appointment.
It's totally free.
You know I love to share.
You don't have to sign in forsomething in my school.
No, you know, I'm dedicatingone hour of my time to help you.
(36:16):
Anybody who is scheduling, whois calling me in, and I will be
more than happy to talk to you,to share what I have and to
learn from you as well.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
That's awesome.
We'll be sure and put a link tothat in the show notes to make
it easy for our listeners outthere.
And what about your homelessministry that you have?
Tell us about how we could getconnected to that if we want to.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Oh, absolutely.
It's also very, very easy.
Nowadays it's all throughwebsites, homelessnyorg, and you
can see many stories, littlevideos, how we are feeding the
homeless, how we are trying tocoach them and bring them out of
this horrible, horribleenvironment, horrible style of
life.
(36:58):
Right, it's not easy at all,but even when you can see that
one person is climbing up,climbing up and that's, you know
, it costs like life right.
All values in your life will benot even equal to this.
And we have a lot of people whoare standing in their own feet,
(37:21):
getting married, coming back tosociety as good members of
society, and they're helpingothers right.
That's great.
I'm looking at them and youcan't even recognize that this
person was lying down in thesubway or under a bridge right.
All of a sudden, you know youcan see intelligence, educated
(37:42):
and ready to share and ready tosupport others, human beings.
That's a real transformation,amazing transformation from one
creature to a real human being.
That's why we are doing it.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Well, Vadim, thank you so much for coming on the
show.
Thank you for your ministry andfor serving those that are
homeless in the New York areaand in Brooklyn.
Let's have you back on the show, my friend.
It's been a pleasure,Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
I will be more than happy to come back and all
audience, you know, all folkswho are listening.
Thank you for spending thistime to be with me and with this
amazing host of the show, Mark,and I hope I will see you
around.
All the best.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
All right, that brings it in to another episode
of the Agile Within.
We'll see everybody later.
Thanks for joining us foranother episode of the Agile
Within.
If you haven't already, pleasejoin our LinkedIn page to stay
in touch.
Just search for the AgileWithin and please spread the
(38:55):
word with your friends andcolleagues Until next time.
This has been your host, MarkMetz.
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