Daniel Sá Nogueira – inspirator and coach

Arcada had invited Daniel Sá Nogueira for a lecture on leadership, coaching and changing the world. No small topic! This Portugese guy is by now quite famous for his life coach courses and his inspiring lectures, and I can see why. Daniel spices up his lectures by regularly pausing for loud energetic music and getting the audience to engage in high-fiveing, jumping and shouting. And it works. The participants can’t help but do as he says and then feeling a bit silly, which in turn puts a smile on everyone’s face. Daniel also trains people to become life coaches. You can participate in his courses, also organised in Finland, and become a certified life coach.

The event at Arcada on 30 January 2013 was a two hour lecture/workshop on leadership, coaching and changing the world. Mostly it was a workshop on you as a person: your passions, strengths, values and causes. When you have figured those out with the help of some practical advice from Daniel, you are set for both leadership and changing the world. What he says does make sense and the practical advice we went through in the workshop did make you think about yourself in a different and quite eye-opening way. He told us to figure out what we are really good at and focus hard on that, not forgetting our weaknesses but letting them pass instead of wasting energy on trying to change them too much. We are all bad at a lot of things and should instead celebrate and use our core skills, whatever they may be.

Leadership, Daniel says, is essentially the same process where you identify the organisation’s core values and get everyone to follow them. Daniel adopts Steve Job’s theory on A-players and B-players, where B-players are really good people and workers who perform well, but will never change the world, whereas A-players are the ones who will really make a difference. Daniel explains that most innovations and changes in the world occur due to someone being pissed off at something and doing something about it. When you think about it, it sounds just about right.

Last but not least, Daniel wanted to inspire us into action. And also in this he succeeded. He said the world is full of people who think “I can’t” or “I won’t”. What the world really needs, is people who think “I can” and “I will”. Take your core values and use them to be an A-player and change the world. In order to illustrate this, he showed us a short video clip about an absolutely amazing guy, Tony Melendez (External link). Please watch it, I think you will be inspired!

/Sandra