Client stories: Martin Berg, CEO @ DX
I’m doing something different and exciting with this week’s edition. I've invited one of my amazing clients, Martin Berg, to tell his story about working with Inside-Out.
Ordinarily these stories are confidential, but Martin has agreed to tell his story in case it might help the next entrepreneur considering taking the plunge into working with a coach.
People ask me all the time what it's like to work with me. No matter what answer I give, it's necessarily filtered through my own biases and beliefs.
But today's issue, the story of Martin Berg, CEO of DX, won't be.
The CEO of DX tells his story about coaching
I've always prided myself on having very clear borders between work and home, but those borders started to become much more fuzzy in the fall of 2021.
We work with the entertainment industry, cinema specifically, and live events, so the pandemic was really challenging for our business, and we were forced to downscale and shift our strategy. By 2021, we had regained our footing, but it was still a very taxing time. “The pandemic's over. No, it's not. It's over. No. Yes. No.” We kept getting ready to start ramping up the company again, but then, “oh no. Gotta wait.” And on top of that, my youngest daughter (I have three children) was born in August 2019—so I had that whole dynamic as well.
I was navigating through it all as best I could, but a higher sense of stress and pressure had crept up on me without me noticing in any conscious way. I was bringing that home, which then created a vicious circle of not being so present at home and then not so present at work.
That’s when I met Ryan in a mastermind session he was leading. One of the first realizations I had during that group was that I had been moving very fast over the previous few years. I started by asking myself, “what's going on here? Why are these borders, which were so clear before, much fuzzier?” I was at the beginning of a journey of self-awareness, so at the time, even just asking those questions was enough. But as I Iistened to others and learned about myself, I saw how much more there is to self-awareness once you start thinking about self-awareness. I don’t mean self-awareness for its own sake. I mean self-awareness as a way to figure out what I want to do, who I want to be, and where I want to go.
I just kept wondering, “if I direct a bit more attention into what's going on for me, how could that be part of shaping the impact I have as a leader of the company, as a life partner, and as a dad?” I really wanted to explore the one-to-one dynamic of working with a coach, and so that’s when I started working directly with Ryan.
No answers, just challenging questions
One of the most valuable things about the work Ryan and I have done together is that he never offers a solution. The sessions with him are a destination where I go and pause for an hour—full stop—to dive deep with myself. I can bring a problem, and he will challenge me to view it from different angles or to dig deeper to understand it in different contexts. But it's not as if I bring a problem and then get a solution back.
Instead, Ryan offers frameworks or mental models that fit the problems I’m trying to solve or the issues that come up for me again and again. He has a really interesting depth of knowledge across a bunch of different subjects – as a founder, but also in psychology, neurolinguistic programming, and more – so he shares those things and, together we’ve even used them to construct new mental models that fit the way I think. Then I have a machine I can put a similar issue into later, so that I can deconstruct the problem and understand myself and my reaction to it more easily.
After working with Ryan for a while, I now occasionally even find myself meta-coaching. When an issue surfaces in my head, I file it away as a thing that I'd like to discuss with Ryan. And then I can’t help but think, “Okay, so how can I best describe this thing to Ryan? How can I give him the right kind of context? And what will I say when he asks me what I want out of the situation? What do I want?” I start playing that out in my head, and when I get some clarity, I imagine the challenging question Ryan might ask and come up with an answer to that question and the next and the next. So in the end, I play out how I think the conversation with Ryan might go, how he might push back or challenge my perspective on things. And suddenly, without ever even talking with him, I come up with the way I want to approach something.
What that means is that I’ve been able to explore authentic leadership through coaching, which, to me, is being able to lead while being true to my own values. I want to feel that I am myself in the way that I show up at work, the way I show up everywhere. If the dynamic in our sessions were “this is a place you go with your problems and you get a solution and then you go and execute that solution,” it just wouldn't have been authentic. But because of the way we build systems that reflect me and the situations I face, I’ve been able to discover solutions that sit right with me.
As far as the fuzzy borders, I wouldn’t say that situation has ever really been fully resolved, and that’s okay. Instead, I manage it through continuous effort and attention along with a combination of:
Acceptance (of what it is) instead of judging (how it should be)
Practice (presence, which for me means mindfulness and meditation, listening, and constantly clarifying my priorities)
Journaling to check in with myself and how I’m feeling
And, together with Ryan, I’ve found a helpful mental model in the idea of juggling, meaning juggling the different things in life that are important to me. It’s not about being perfect in every area of my life, but instead I try to keep the different areas of my life in balance. In practice, there’s continuous movement (juggling), so sometimes one thing might be more in focus or take up more mindspace than the others but as long as that focus moves from area to area and each one gets the attention it needs in the long term, I try not to be overly worried about the short term.
Mostly I look back and see that the way I once prided myself on having perfectly clear boundaries, almost like walls, isn’t what I need now. Instead, I have a different perspective and different tools that allow me to stay balanced and present in the different areas of life in a much different, and probably more sustainable, way than drawing these clear lines of separation in the sand.
The fear of the unknown
Another big part of our work together has been exploring how the fear of unknowns can consciously or subconsciously play into decision making or prioritization. And what I’ve discovered is that this subconscious fear plays a much bigger role for me when I'm not paying attention to it than I previously was aware of.
For example, we operated out of three offices in Norway before the pandemic, and when we scaled operations back up again afterwards, given that we had international expansion plans and ambitions beyond Norway, we decided to lean into the idea of hiring remote. We had no idea what challenges we would face, but I had a strong belief that this was the right direction even though there was a lot of skepticism.
In the past, I might have had a harder time making that decision, but in this case I was able to work through the fear and trust my intuition even though it was uncomfortable. What I understand about myself through coaching is that I’m an expert at playing out worst-case scenarios and connecting the potential pain of the outcome to the decision itself, even before it’s made. It was happening without me being aware of it (and it still sometimes does). Often my concerns are not logical, but by breaking those fears down and figuring out where they come from, I can defuse them and move forward.
In the case of hiring remote, not only did I overcome the fear, I actually leaned into it. We ended up bringing in the first two non-Norwegian speakers during that time, and then we flipped the company to become English first. All of a sudden, everyone had to write in English, every meeting happened in English. We've made a lot of changes in the company's history, but that was the deepest felt change. And the weird thing is that, despite the fear, it was so clear it was the right thing to do that my COO and I made the decision during a five minute conversation. I remember saying, “Yeah, we just got to do it.”
All through that transition, it was important to be able to check in with myself through my work with Ryan, which made it easier to follow through on that decision. A coaching relationship like this brings an outside accountability partner into your life, somebody that challenges you to define the next step in implementing something you’ve decided on or the next step toward solving a problem you need to solve. Knowing that I have an accountability partner who I’m going to check in with in a week or two and who will be tracking those commitments is pretty impactful. I’ve learned to be careful what I say I’m going to do because I know Ryan will hold me to it!
A fuller life
In the right context, I think everyone can benefit from doing this kind of work even though it’s sometimes frowned upon as soft. Why would I sit around and talk about myself for an hour when I could be working on the spreadsheets? For that reason, a lot of founders and CEOs wait for a crisis before they consider coaching, but I think it’s much better to get into it without that pressure. Because a crisis will eventually surface at some point, and for me, I will be much better suited to handle it now that I’m already on this path.
Being on this self awareness journey has been a profound experience for me, but it’s also expanded into my team as well. Pulling from some work I did with Ryan, now at DX we have a monthly management team check in that is not operational. It's typically a mastermind session where everyone brings one thing that takes up mind space, or that's important to them right now, to share with the group.
Ryan and I did the lifeline exercise in one of our sessions, and I brought that same exercise to our management team meeting. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s where people draw the ups and downs of their life so far, and then you spend 15 minutes walking people through it. It's a pretty raw and honest thing, but talking like that on a regular basis has been an important mechanic to build trust especially because we are a distributed management team, and we only see each other four times a year. These meetings have allowed us to find other ways to tap into being intentional and to build relationships that are deeper than just sharing KPIs.
Overall, I have a fuller life now than I did even a few years ago, and the stress I used to feel isn’t there in the same way. I attribute a lot of that to the transformational journey I’ve been on toward increased self-awareness and self-acceptance. I understand now that self awareness is not about being self centered. Instead the self awareness I’ve developed working with Ryan has helped me grow as a leader, solve challenges along the way, and ultimately (and most importantly) understand myself better and bring clarity to the kind of business I want to build, and how I want to live my life.
Things I read this week
One: Containers of Aliveness (Rob Hardy)
One of my favorite new writers is Rob Hardy, who's made it his mission to kill "content" and replace it with authentic writing, a cause I can get fully behind. In this article, he provides an alternative to all the advice to "niche down," which is both compelling and prevents you from actually having to pigeon-hole yourself. (Also, I've been using this model for my own writing, though I didn't call it CoA until now).
LINK >>
Two: Modernism reflects Schizophrenia ("The Matter with Things")
There's an argument that modernism as an art form was born out of a society grappling with an uncommon reliance on their left hemisphere (schizophrenia being an extreme version of this) due to the industrial revolution. I'll let you decide for yourself with the image below.
Three: Gratitude Checklist (Ed Batista)
I've been heavy into gratitude practices recently, especially using Ed's simple framework.
LINK >>
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Executive Coaching for Entrepreneurs
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I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency supporting founders to rapidly scale themselves as leaders, so they can thrive professionally and personally as their company changes the world. Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO, along with deep training in mindfulness, psychology, Neurolinguistic Programming, psychedelic integration and more, I have helped leaders from some of the fastest growing companies and VC funds in the world design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction.
I coach leaders how I want to be coached:
Focused on the person, not the role.
Focused on results, without the fluff.
To learn more about working with me, click here.