Barbell Shrugged - Ajit Nawalkha — The Strong Coach #12

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Ajit Nawalkha came from humble beginnings. Born to a middle-income family in Jaipur, Ajit grew up in an extended family of 23 other people under one roof. Space and money were scarce, and so as a little boy he dreamt of abundance.   Ajit made a decision to plant himself where he could grow. From starting as a trainee in a non-profit, Ajit has since held various roles including CEO of Mindvalley, Co-founder of Mindvalley Teach, Co-founder of Global Grit Institute and Co-founder of EPIC Businesses. He's also an author of the bestselling book, The Book of Coaching. Ajit has poured his heart into his upcoming book Live Big.   In this episode we talk about what a good coach is, why coaches don’t have clients, the principles that make a great group, understanding your dialogue with sales, why the world needs more coaches, how the world is progressing, and much more.   Come join us at www.thestrongcoach.com   -Mike Episode Breakdown:   0-10-  What a good coach is and how getting people the results they want.  Them discovering possibilities and them discovering it for themselves. Coaching is not deep trauma therapy or consulting.  It’s guiding and building performance in people. Coaching is becoming mainstream.   11-20 Having to work on your craft and that’s why coaches don’t have clients. Also, coaches are looking for clients in the wrong place. Coaches are going to people but not the businesses that need them.  Go to where high performers are going. Am I good? Then where do I go to get them? Understanding your dialogue with sales.   21-30 Why we need more coaches and how the world is progressing because we have an abundance of education and communication.  Every human being needs a little support understanding the world today. The dangers of this and getting bad information from people.   31-40 Principles that make great group. 1. Understanding You. 2. Methodology and the way you create change for your clients 3.   Business and the training on what it takes to build a business.   41-50  If you know about something then you learn from the next thing and from different people. Understanding the counter perspective of the perspective you know.  Ex. Learn psychology if you are a health coach etc. Find more fun things for your clients to have a fun experience with you. Making learning a directed learning and not reactive learning.   --------------------------------------------------- Show notes: https://shruggedcollective.com/tbs-nawalkha ---------------------------------------------------     ► Travel thru Europe with us on the  Shrugged Voyage, more info here: https://www.theshruggedvoyage.com/ ► What is the Shrugged Collective?  Click below for more info: https://youtu.be/iUELlwmn57o ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

The strong coach has their own house in order first. The strong coach is the steward of their client's dreams. The strong coach learns and implements quickly. The strong coach is as dedicated to unlearning as much as they are to learning. The strong coach leads from the heart and directs the mind with intent. The strong coach has a growth mindset. The strong coach serves without the need to sacrifice. The strong coach understands that attention is your most valuable asset. The strong coach transcends survival and is operating from a space of creation. The strong coach transforms dreams into goals. The strong coach has a healthy

relationship with their purpose. The strong coach develops vision for themselves and their clients. The strong coach cultivates their energy. The strong coach chooses effectiveness over efficiency. The strong coach understands priorities. The Strong Coach creates their optimal environment. The Strong Coach knows when to say yes and when to say no. The Strong Coach is continually training their attention. The Strong Coach communicates consciously. The Strong Coach creates conditions for growth and development. The Strong Coach operates with integrity.

The Strong Coach operates with integrity. The Strong Coach operates consciously from their values. Join the Strong Coach community today at thestrongcoach.com. Now for our interview with Ajit Nawalka, who runs a different kind of coaching business. Enjoy the show. My style. my style all right so uh for the strong coach podcast we we go all the way we got the guy that wrote the book of coaching so like how much better can you get than that uh we have uh ajit oh fuck already forgot your last name nowalkalka. Nawalka.

You just told me. I keep trying. So, yeah, we're hanging out. We're in this house here in Austin, Texas. And we've crossed paths quite a few times. And I'm really stoked that we get to have this conversation now. And especially since we were talking about the EverCoach program, and we got rapping about, oh, what are you up to?

What am I up to? Oh, this seems like we're having similar conversations. And the coaches that you're impacting are coaches in every aspect of coaching. Yeah. So, you know, we're specifically – this show is specifically for people in the fitness industry, but I shared with people in the first season that it was my exposure to coaching outside of health and fitness that taught me what coaching really was. Um, what

is, what is your opinion on, uh, what a good coach is like when, when someone says I coach people, what does that look like? What are they responsible for in somebody's life? on what a good coach is. Like when someone says, I coach people, what does that look like? What are they responsible for in somebody's life? So coaching, the essence of coaching is transformation. And the essence of coaching is the ability to get somebody to go to a result that they desire, or sometimes they're not aware of, but bring it to their awareness

and then help them get there. And that's really the essence and the summary of a good coach is if you are able to get people the results that they want, you're a good coach. That's as simply as I can put it. But there is a lot of elements that play into it. Like getting somebody a good result is not a function of you telling them something. It's a function of them discovering and then maybe you are showing them what are the different possibilities and then they have to make that decision for themselves. So it's a multi, it's a mix of many things. It's not, hey, here I go. And like there's often this confusion and this happens in coaching industry so much is, okay, I have to heal people. No,

you don't have to heal people. You're not a therapist. And yes, there is healing that is involved, but you're not taking care of trauma. That's not coaching. That's therapy. And we got to understand that difference. If you're just going in and saying, oh, I just tell people what to do. That's consulting. That's not coaching. And the reason why I'm making this distinction is because often people either think it's about taking care of people's deep trauma, or they go, okay, I will tell people to do ABC and become a consultant. Or I've called that being a trainer.

Or a trainer. Yeah. Just literally going, hey, this is what you got to do. Right. Now the mix between these two. So some elements of therapy and some elements of consulting is what really makes a coach. And that's the best way to describe it. So it does, yes yes deal with traumas but

not deep trauma which can be psychologically so challenging that if you don't do a good job that you can actually scar them for life oh i i've been on coaching calls with people before and we start getting into something i go just so you know there's something there and we're not going to handle it today. That's not for us to do. Yeah, because that's where they maybe need a therapist. And it's okay, sometimes coaches are therapists too. And if you have that certification, if you've done that, not just certification, if you've done practice around it, it's okay.

It's great that you can handle it, but that's not what true coaching is. True coaching is, simply put, coaching is about building performance in people, which is why it has elements of therapy and elements of consulting, because that will allow you to be able to get greater performance out of people that are already sometimes high performers, sometimes they're not, but you're helping them get a better version of themselves,

a greater version of themselves. It seems like, to me, the coaching industry is exploding right now. Is that just me or is that something that is really happening? Well, there's two factors to it. First is that Facebook is wonderful and so is Instagram. So often we are looking at our feed and thinking something's happening, but it's not really.

It's just really good advertising that you're seeing. The algorithm knows that I'm interested in talking about coaches. Exactly. Like they're listening to us right now as we record this podcast. And beware, you're going to see my ad next. But we know that's the effect that we have right now because of the social media noise that we see. But coaching is becoming more mainstream. Recently, Seth Godin wrote a book called This is Marketing.

And if you actually pick up that book, you'll see he has referenced coaches maybe five times in the book. That's a big deal. Seth Godin is a mainstream marketing author. Yeah. And he's talking about coaching. It's got to become mainstream. Secondly, we know personal coaching alone topped a billion in revenue in 2018. We also know that Google has aggressively started to hire and a lot

of other Fortune 500 companies are aggressively hiring coaches in the companies. When these kind of things happen, it means coaching is becoming mainstream. The challenge is there are not enough coaches in the world as much as coaching is required. Well, I mean, I'm seeing a lot of coaches not, you say that, but I hear a lot of coaches saying they have a hard time having enough clients. So here is where coaches might have a hard time getting clients. There's two reasons to that as well that's coming to my mind right now. It's firstly is probably because you're not a very good coach. And that's when you're not a very good coach, what happens is you would go and you will try to present yourself and hopefully display that you're a coach, but the person that is

actually experiencing you is like, meh. And so what happens is you go, oh, I don't know why I'm not enrolling, right? The reason why you're not enrolling is first you have to work on your craft. And to work on your craft, first you have to go out and do all of it enough time. It's like, think about it like this. If you wanted to become a doctor, I know this is a comparison

of an extreme profession that I'm making, but if you wanted to be a doctor, you couldn't just jump in and say, all right, I'll do the biggest surgery ever. No, you're gonna be assistant first, you're gonna do training for a couple of years, then you will become a doctor. Now, coaching is not as complex as being a doctor, so you don't have to do four years of university and then many years of fellowship. You can go into it much

faster, but still you got to hone your craft and you got to know your basis to be able to actually do it. Second is most coaches actually look for clients in the wrong place. Most coaches look for clients everywhere, but without thinking about that there is a particular place where people is most coaches actually look for clients at the wrong place. Most coaches look for clients everywhere, but without thinking about that there is a particular place where people are actually looking for them, right? So if you want more clients, go to companies instead of going to people. That's the big difference. When you go to a person, usually what happens is the person has to look at their budget. They don't have an existing budget for coaching. Nobody has a budget for coaching per se. They might have some budget for their education, but that again is not enough in

magnitude of what they have, what you need for coaching because coaching is a personalized service and so it should be priced like a personalized service. But a corporation or a company always has a budget for coaching because they're always looking for coaches to be able to help their leaders and their executives and so forth, right? If you're looking for coaches, one-on-one personal coaching and not going through companies, look for people who are already high performers, right? And go where high performers go. Don't go to a cafe and try to enroll a client because when you go to a cafe and enroll a client, high performers are not just hanging out in cafes. Sometimes you might get lucky, but a lot of times there's nobody who's hanging out there

who's a high-performing individual. They might be hanging out at different places. They might be hanging at different events. So the question you want to ask is, firstly, am I actually good? And if not, then go work on that art, right? Secondly, where are you going to enroll? Because actually getting clients is not that hard, right? The reason why coaches feel that is because of these two factors.

And actually, one more thing that happens, which we talk about in the book as well, is your dialogue around sales. Because what happens often is people think, okay, I've talked to five people, everybody said no. Well, five people is not a big enough data set for you to be able to say if people want coaching or not coaching, right? Make 100 offers and then let's talk about it. If you enroll five or seven out of them in your first round of 100, you're actually doing great. You're talking about 7% conversion on sale. People are terrified of having that conversation. Yeah, because they think it's something bad that they're doing, but it's not. It's something great

they're doing. It's almost like handing out money to people, right? There's a coach, his name is Steve Chandler, and he wrote a wonderful book called The Prosperous Coach. And in the book, he, not in the book, but I think in a different case study, he talks about how you can remove that block around sales for you immediately. You can think about it like this. Coaching is like handing out $100 bills to everyone. Think about it like this. Let's say your hourly rate is $200, right? Let's just take the base rate that the coach has, $200 an hour. If you invest that 30 minutes with somebody, having a good, meaningful conversation, inviting them into something that's powerful for them, that's $100 that you just gave away. Now it's easy to have that conversation, isn't it? Because now you're not thinking,

oh, how can I enroll the client? You're thinking about, I'm giving $100 to this person. There's no reason for me to hold back, right? So it's about reframing your mind to be able to really think how to think about sales versus thinking about, oh, I have to sell. So I must schedule this and get over my fears and tell myself in the mirror, I'm good enough. No, you don't need any of that.

Show up, show up and reign, deliver great value to your clients. And if you will, need any of that. Show up. Show up and reign. Deliver great value to your clients. And if you will, clients will say yes. Yeah. I've told a lot of people, a lot of coaches, to just make it. It's your first coaching session. Yeah. I just haven't signed up yet.

That's a great way of putting it. Yeah. Yeah. So why do we need more coaches? What's happening in the world that coaching is becoming more necessary? So think about it like this. The world is progressing so fast, it's hard to put our heads around it, our minds around what's changing. Think about it like just in the past five years, five, seven years, the way we communicate with each other is completely different. The way each other is completely different.

The way we date is completely different. The way we think about health is completely different. The amount of education that's around in health and workouts and the amount of research that's getting done is insanely more available. Previously, you had to dig up what was the research. You had to read a whole book to understand a point.

Right now, because of social media, because of all the ease of communication, it's thrown at you. You have good and bad information just thrown at you all the freaking time, especially if you're interested in the topic, right? That means every human being needs a little extra support in being able to really navigate and find what's right for them, right? Because when you get an information overload, when the world outside changes so fast, like think about it. If you are somebody who is in the dating field right now, oh my God, if you're a dating coach, it's terrible times for you. Previously, you could tell people to act in a particular way, not act in a particular way. You could train them through. Right now, it's happening on a swipe left or a swipe right. People are deciding based on a photograph if they're good or not good to go

out on a date with. It's insane how hard it has become in the world today to be able to operate compared to just five years ago. I'm not even talking about a decade ago. Five years ago, our reality was different. Two years ago, America as a country was different, right? Since we are having this conversation. So think about it from that context to handle so much change. We are not designed for this. This amount of change used to take decades before it showed up. This is likely why the topic of neuroplasticity is so popular right now.

Yeah. And psychedelics because it's like performance enhancing drugs for changing quickly. Yeah. Because if you don't, well, you'll just be the same. You'll be the same. And human beings have always wanted to be the better version of themselves. But now, let's, for example, like outside, while we were not having a conversation, we were talking about psychedelics for an hour.

The amount of information around just that one thing has never been this much not so freely available that you can have a full dialogue and understand the brain implications of taking a psychedelic, for example, right? It's just, it's a mass of information and coaches are the ones that can actually save us to make sense of this chaos so it's not only if you are a coach it's almost like and i don't want to put that pressure on anyone but it's kind of our responsibility to show up a little bit because if we don't we are we are it's like you know it's if you know that you could help and you didn't help in a situation how bad you feel that's how i feel as a coach right now is i can help and you didn't help in a situation, how bad you feel, that's how I feel

as a coach right now, is I can help and I'm not doing all that I can. That's terrible. I am actually not helping the world in the world that I live in and that has given me so much, right? So we don't only need coaches. We really, really need them and we want them to show up with responsibility because the world needs us so bad. Yeah. And in health and fitness specifically, you were talking about how much information is coming in. I mean, we have dating apps, you know, as a dating coach.

That's wild. But also online, if you go online and you've shown any interest in health and fitness, which means if you're listening to this show, then you're getting hit with ads constantly. There's tons of misinformation out there. And then there's a lot of dogma as well. There's like, you know, this is the only way if you do, if you don't do this, you're good, you're bad or, or this or that. And that I think in health and fitness, it's people are confused about what the right thing to do for them. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and it's again, like you said,

because it's so easy to make a video today and just put it on Facebook. And if it has juice enough and drama enough, it'll go viral. It's crazy amount of misinformation that gets disseminated through channels like that. It's not validated. It's not really confirmed.

It's just some hypothetical stuff that maybe it was proven for one person and now it becomes everybody's truth. And it's not really confirmed it's just some hypothetical stuff that maybe it was proven for one person and now it becomes everybody's truth and it's so unhealthy for the world it's like the latest do you know this thing uh dna altering thing called crisper that has come out i've heard about it yeah i don't know much about it so it's this crazy tech that has come out which apparently you can alter your dna i'm still studying about it. And the crazy idea is, think about it, somebody on YouTube is teaching that to everybody to order for like a hundred bucks and alter their DNA. Now, I'm sure people who are listening to this podcast are not silly enough to do and actually order it and do that stuff to themselves, but

there are people who are doing it. And somebody is actually putting up YouTube videos and getting thousands of people watching it and doing that stuff to themselves. Think about how dangerous that is. Yeah, man. I hear so many coaches say things like, I'm tired of seeing these Instagram models post things online and giving advice. And it's just, it makes them want, they're like, I just don't want to post anything. So what do you, I mean, and you're talking about, there's this responsibility that we have as coaches to show up in the world and show up for people who need it. And yet I think a lot of coaches are getting discouraged by the fact that some girl can just post pictures on Instagram and then start giving really

not great advice? What do you tell that person? Ramp up their Instagram game or what? Firstly, yes. Why not? And it's from a place of love that I say this, and I'll tell you why. Think about it like this. If let's say today, and let's take the extreme example.

Let's say Hitler was in power right now of the world. Would you fight it? If the answer is yes, then why wouldn't you fight this, right? I know this is a very extreme example that I gave right now, which might have a lot of social challenge and social concern around the way I presented this case. But the case is the same. If there is bad information and bad insight and bad experience people are having, instead of saying, how do I counter this as a good person,

is to say, no, I'm going to fight this. I'm going to play my role. And who knows who's going to win, who's going to lose. And it's not a competition per se. But our job as human beings is to move the society forward. Our job is to make positive progress. And if we won't do it, who will, right? If we can move the line just a little bit, and I'm not saying you will win this competition, you'll end this competition, you will be able to take down everybody that's sending bad info.

I'm not saying any of that. But what I do know is if some of us or all of us move the line just a little bit, we will move the humanity towards the positive direction, irrespective how much force is there to of us move the line just a little bit, we will move the humanity towards the positive direction, irrespective how much force is there to put us in negative, right? Because all of us are powerful than one of us, right? So that one Instagram model shouldn't stop you because know that there are 10 of us who also may not be putting up bikini photos, but we are able to push the line because we are 10 saying, no, we are going to create the

positive change. Even if the other person maybe is not bad meaning, it's just, they don't know any better and that's fine. Eventually there'll be time where they will know better too. They're doing the best they can. If I look, I look at information I was putting out five years ago and I go, please don't follow that. I do realize it's on the internet forever, but I've learned a lot since then. Don't listen from the beginning. Listen to it now and then work your way back. Yeah.

So think about it like that, right? So everybody's doing the best they can. We don't have to get demotivated by it. We have to do the best we can. And if you believe that you are the person who can move the line in a positive direction, well, why hold back? So if it needs you

to ramp up your Instagram, ramp up your Instagram. If it means that you will double down on your current clients and like really serve them so hard, go do that. Whatever that is, however it shows up, the intent and the direction we should lead from is that we are not going to stop because somebody else is not doing a great job. That's for them to figure out. For us to figure out is what's the job I am doing and how best I can do it. Love that. What are the – we were talking earlier. You were talking about the three – is it three pillars or three principles that make a great coach?

Yes. Three fundamentals, three principles, three pillars, however you want to say it. They're the three elements that we found with every coaching, every coach and every coaching business, what makes them or doesn't make them in context of the success that they truly deserve.

And first is always you. By you, it simply means that you as a coach, if you're not doing the work on yourself, if you are not learning yourself, if you're not going deep enough yourself, it'll be very hard for you to be able to be a powerful coach, to be an extraordinary coach, to be a successful coach, right? So that's the first element, that's the first pillar and you got to understand yourself really well to be able to do that. The second is methodology, which is some of the most ignored things as coaches. Coaches work a lot on themselves and they work a lot on the third

pillar that we'll talk about, but often they miss the second part, which is methodology. Methodology is what is the way you create change for your clients? It doesn't come through just because you're a certification. A lot of coaches go, oh, I'm certified in this, so I'm good at it. No, that's not how it's built. Methodology is ever-evolving because you as a human being always evolve. Society always evolves. You need to keep evolving, and your methodology needs to become better every single day. And you need to be really strong and have a strong foundation on over-encompassing methodology so you can create great results.

I'm glad you're saying that because I know so many coaches that go and get a certification and then in their mind, once they get the certification, they're good. It's like they've been looking at that for so long that once they get it, it's like, oh, now I can rest. Yeah. Now I can change anybody's life. Theoretically, maybe. Right. You can give the tests and that's great, but that's not a methodology. If you want to be an extraordinary coach, if you want to be somebody who really transforms lives, you got to keep working on it and you got to get better at it every single day. It's like a painter who learns to make a few strokes and then stops, right? He's never going to be an artist. He'll just know how to do those three strokes. But those three strokes are not enough to be a beautiful artist that people crave to work with

or crave to get their paintings, right? So that's kind of how methodology and coaching is. You constantly want to evaluate and look at it and revisit it. And lastly is business, which is, again, something that you focus a lot on as coaches. And there's a lot of training around being able to build the business some of them are really bad trainings some of them like like yours is really good ones but you gotta you gotta be able to learn from the right type of people so you can build a business that actually has a foundation and not just something that is a quick buck around which is a lot of times that's the kind of insight that that happens in business education, is either coaches get scared from business education, which also happens a lot.

It's like, oh, I don't understand it. It's so complex. Or the other side is they get really bad information on one person's one angle and one story versus saying, hey, it's a business. You need to understand it fully. And so you've got to sort out those kind of knowledge and information and use that to be able to build your business around it. So it's you, your methodology and your business as that's how we kind of segmented. So you are clear that none of these pillars are individually going to make you successful.

That's not what happens. You got to work on all three at all times. It's almost like a, it's a circle you can say in a way. So the more you work on all three the bigger your expansive circle becomes and better you become as a coach yeah i uh going back on that business piece one of the the things that i see coaches do in the industry is um for some they don't want to embrace the business learning about, but they'll just simply do what other people are doing. Like they had a coach at one point or they, um, they see that their friend is a coach or they know that this guy down the road is a coach and he charges this amount of

money and does it like this. So I'll just do it that way. It's like, they don't even really put any thought into it. I think that, I think that a lot of coaches like the way i i teach is very principle driven where i go look you can make it however you want you can get creative and i think that most coaches are copying somebody else who's also not doing very well they just think they're doing really well they're like oh it looks like they're that coach crushing crushing it, so I'm going to do what they do. And then wake up one day and go,

wow, my business looks a lot like theirs, but my bank account's empty and I hate every day. Yeah. So very, very, very true. You hit it like on the head. It happens so often with coaches and honestly for entrepreneurs is we look at somebody else's reality and we say, I want that. Or that looks good.

That will look good on me too. But here is the thing. It's like looking at somebody else's clothes and saying, I will take that clothes exactly how they are wearing it. Right? I'll take the color. I'll take the size. But they might be a different size. They might like different colors and their skin tone might be different.

And so their clothing won't look good on you. Sometimes it might, but most of the times it won't. And that's the difference between you looking at somebody's business and just literally copying it versus looking at somebody's business and going, oh, okay, that's inspiring. Let me see if it makes sense to me. Let me adapt it to who I am, right? The big question is to see what is business, what is true business for us, not what is true for them because that's like looking at the outside and trying to define what our inside should look like versus going, what's my inside looking like

and what do I need to create on the outside so my inside can also be satisfied. We often create businesses that look like other businesses like you said and then we hate it and we hate it because like oh my god there's so much work to it there's so much of this stuff that i have to do that i don't like i and and then it becomes this dreaded cycle of a business that we end up not even liking so let's not chase somebody else's somebody else's life let's

chase our own dreams let's chase our own future as we want to create it and learn from the other experiences. Of course, let's learn from the best people that we can. And like you said, think about the principle, learn as principles, because principles are adaptable. Principles, you can take it and you can make whatever you want with it. Strategies and tactics, you copy, but they don't replicate so well. Yeah. The level of personal work, work on self, has to be pretty high to get very good at business, in my experience. Oh, yeah.

For people to get – you're talking about, oh, create the business you really want to match the life that you want to live, what's going on inside of you. And if you haven't done that own work on yourself, how are you ever going to build it? Like I've watched countless coaches build a business that starts making money and then they hate what they built. They go, oh man, this is not even, this isn't even what I wanted. And I go, well, what do you want? Well, I don't know. And it's so funny.

That should be the first question, right? What do I want? Well, I don't know. And it's so funny. That should be the first question, right? What do I want? Like, that's the question we should start with. But we end up starting with the question of how can I have that, right? Looking at somebody else or looking at something in the outside world and say, I want that and I want that and I want that. And so saying, what is it inside that I really am seeking? What is it that I really, really desire from my heart instead of looking

outside and wanting things based on the outside reality versus the inside reality? I say this all the time. Business growth is a lot about personal growth or is almost completely about personal growth. If you will grow, your business will grow in the dimension it needs to grow, right? So dimension could be impact. Dim could be money, dimension could be just few clients with great impact. It could be whatever, but you need to grow for the business to grow. Yeah. If somebody's business isn't growing, if it feels stagnant, you would then ask them, you know, it's you. Yeah. What's happening in life? Let's look at your life, right? Let's evaluate where you're going. And if it's usually in the way they're perceiving things, right?

It's usually the perspective that they're walking in with and going. They're either operating from scarcity. Like there's patterns you can find when business is not growing. It almost always falls back on how the entrepreneur is operating on a daily basis. Yeah, a lot of the coaches I know, they end up building a business they don't want and then they end up working a crazy amount of hours. Maybe they want the house and they want the car and they want the location and they want this many clients, but then they end up working like seven days a week and not being able to take a vacation.

They build themselves into this box and they have burnout. I come across coaches a lot that they are experiencing burnout like it's too late. By the time I talk to them, they're like, fuck it. I don't want to do this anymore. They're ready to walk away from the whole thing. How do you keep...

What's your message to coaches to keep them from hitting that burnout in the first place? And what do you tell coaches that have hit that burnout point where they're thinking, I'm going to have to give this whole thing up and go get a regular job again? So burnout or any type of frustration that might get built in the business is a lot to do with expectations that you have for the business. Often burnout or some kind of frustration around business

is because they look at where they should be by this point and they start to compare themselves with that, right? What we need to understand about expectation is it's a figment of our imagination. It's not there. Like there is no one place you need to understand about expectation is it's a figment of our imagination. It's not there. There is no one place you need to be or should be or could be. It's only a place where we say, okay, let's put that projection up there, and that will be my expectation, and that will be my goal,

and if I don't get there, I will feel constantly frustrated, constantly not good enough, and eventually I'll feel the burnout. Right? The way to counter it is to firstly understand that you're getting frustrated because of your expectation, not because you're getting frustrated. It's not because of the journey that's frustrating. It's the expectation that's frustrating you. The journey, if you experience it like the journey, is actually the journey. It has the highs, it has the lows, it has the goods, it has the bads. Exactly how a journey needs to be, how life is. How life unfolds, it's exactly how it's unfolding. So you don't have to feel frustrated. Now, if you're already at a point, at the breaking point of saying, I'm about to give up, right? And this is not going to work

out for me. See for the reasons why you're about to give up, right? Most of the of the time again it will probably be because you invested in a bad program and now you're frustrated because you were you thought that that was the thing like that was the final program that i had to do that would finally make it for me right so you relayed your expectation on somebody else and wanted somebody else to do the job for you right or even if you didn't want them to do the job, you were doing the hard work, you hoped that they would live up to your expectations. And maybe they didn't, right? So that's one reason why you might be at that breaking point. You might be at that breaking point because you are doing 10-hour days and it's not going through, right? And if that's the case, you got to ask why are you working 10-hour days, right? What is it that you're doing in

your business and in your life that is getting you to work that hard? Because coaching of all businesses is not about the number of hours, it's all about intellectual capital. So it's not about the number of hours you put, it's about what you put in the hours. Coaching is like primed to be an intellectual job, it has nothing to do with any other thing, right? So that's kind of where you are kind of trying to find out where is it, what is leading to this breaking point. Usually what I've found is if you are about to experience burnout or you're experiencing burnout is you just need to create a greater vision of where you want to go. And usually the vision drives you hard enough that you can go past that point of burnout and actually live in a place of inspiration, right?

So it's kind of the opposite poles. Burnout is frustration. You're not feeling like you're going to get anywhere and just like done with everything. Inspiration is a driver, right? So if we can move you from frustration to inspiration, we can probably get you past the point of burnout. So it's a self-coaching moment, you can say, in our conversation right now where I invite you to firstly see where is this frustration, where is this expectation, where is this burnout

coming from? And as you identify that, look at your vision and see if you're still excited to go there. Most likely you are because you always were excited to go there. And if that's the case, find those reasons that are causing that expectation, that frustration, and take them out of your life. You're in complete control of how you construct your life. You're in complete control of saying yes and no to people and yes and no to clients. You're in complete control of who you will coach and who you will not.

The challenge is you're getting everything else in the way and to prove it to you, you're not in control. But you are in control. So go ahead and step back, get back in control and you will find that you'll get past that frustration and that breaking point. What do coaches need to be doing to advance their methodology?

Learning. They need to be learning a lot more uh methodology is all about you looking at many different things so again okay so let me take one step back what happens with methodology often is people get obsessed with an idea and then they learn a lot about that idea one thing yeah one thing they go okay language language is what makes great coaches let me learn everything about language. And then they will do every damn certification possible in language because according to them, language is all that matters.

Or something like that. This happens in fitness. I've got to learn everything to do with the barbell or macros. Yeah, and that's just all in. And that's the only thing that i know that that's what i call as as a as a as a theory of learning where you're repeating the same cycle right and and if you repeat the same cycle all you know is the same cycle right and you're almost validating everything that you know every single day right it's like it's like the facebook algorithm right now right

it will just validate whatever you believe because it will keep showing you news around the same item. I've had people complain about their – I was visiting my brother and he's like, Facebook, I hate everything. People post in my feed. My feed is full of shit. And I go, my feed is full of really good stuff. And I knew what was going on.

I was like, pull out your phone. I pull out my phone. It's like, all my shit's super positive. Why is your shit so negative? Because whatever you feed into it, it just gives you more of that, right? So that's kind of how your recurring theory of learning is. You're just learning the same stuff. What you want to do instead is you want to learn disjointedly.

It's called disjoint learning theory where you are basically saying, if I know about language, the next thing I'm going to learn disjointedly. It's called disjoint learning theory where you are basically saying, if I know about language, next thing I'm going to learn is about body. If I know about barbell, I'm going to go learn psychology, right? And I'm going to learn from disjointed sources. So not always the same teacher.

You want to find different teacher. And the reason why you want to find a different teacher is because that's the only way for you to know what's a contradicting theory in your coaching practice, right? And if you don't have contradicting theories at all in your coaching practice, you're probably not learning, right? Because it's always going to be a contradicting theory to whatever you think is the right theory. And that's what good research looks like.

That's what good education looks like, that you understand the counter perspective of the perspective that you present so you can effectively coach. So if you are an expert in the area, go find the other areas because the other areas will actually make you better in the area. I'm not saying change your niche. So if you're a health coach, continue to do health coaching, but go learn psychology because it'll actually help your health coaching. Go learn NLP.

Go learn about spirituality because it will help your health coaching. Still be a health coach. Still be a trainer. But learn about other stuff. So when you present, when you show up, when you are dealing with the situation with your clients, you're not boxed in and going, the only solution that I have right now is the same solution that I offered last week. There is nothing fun for your client to follow through with you. Find more fun things for your clients to follow through with you. Find more fun

things for your clients to also have a greater experience for you. Love it. Love it. Any advice on the personal, the self-work? Well, self-work is an ongoing process. So here's something that I invite all coaches to do. And this is something that most coaches don't do. Everybody makes a calendar, right? Everybody has a mailing calendar. Everybody has a sales calendar. Everybody has a holiday calendar. It's surprising to me that there is nobody who has a learning calendar or we don't put up learning calendars.

We make learning almost as a reactive thing, right? I went on Facebook. i saw a great blog post i read it right that's not directed learning that's reactive learning there's nothing proactive about that learning your learning is disjointed but so disjointed that there is absolutely no connection point to anything right so there is no meaning to that madness right that makes a lot of sense yeah but you can make learning proactive. You can go, okay, so I know in the coming year, I want to get excellent at X, Y, and Z. If I want to get excellent at X, Y, Z, whatever that is, language, body, psychology, whatever that is, you go, okay,

I want to become excellent at it. What am I going to do? Am I going to do a certification? Am I going to read five books on it? Am I going to take two programs on it? I'm going to find the best programs. I'm going to do that. What are you going to do? How are you going to learn? And what's your learning calendar like? If your learning calendar is strong, and it could include events, it could include everything, right? It's a learning calendar after all, right? If your learning calendar is solid, you will grow. You've guaranteed growth. You're not reactive to growth. You're proactive to growth. It's like saying when we design our businesses, don't we make our annual business plan?

We do, right? Our six-month business plan, we do. Why don't we make our six-month learning plan? Why don't we make our year-long learning plan? Make your learning plan at least six months, if not a year. Maybe you can't see so far out because you don't know the events happening end of next year. Fine, make it six months, but have a learning plan that guarantees growth. Love it. Where can people find out more about what you're up to? So you can find out more about what I am up to right now at livebigthebook.com because that's the book that's recently came out. What's that again? Livebigthebook.com. L-I-V-E-B-I-G-T-H-E-B-O-O-K. Livebigthebook.com.

Just go there. That's my latest book that just came out. And with the book, there is a free program that comes and there's multiple ways to connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, and all the good stuff if I'm there because I'm also very little there,

but I am there. So I will still react and respond and I respond myself. And secondly, if you're a coach, I think the best thing for you to do is one of, not the best, but one of the best things to do where we talk a lot more about the ideas that we discussed today is to get the book of coaching, which is the book that I wrote earlier last year.

And you can find it at thebookofcoaching.com. So you can just go to thebookofcoaching.com and it'll redirect you to a page which will offer you the book and the audio book absolutely for free with that book. So go ahead and get that and we can get connected through that too. Perfect. Is there any Instagram photos people need to be watching? You're doing selfies in the gym or the beach or something?

You will see photos of my kid because sometimes I get obsessed with him and people are like, stop posting discused photos. But I just became a father. So that might be, that is one thing that yes, sometimes I'll annoy you with. But on Instagram, usually I am, I write differently on Instagram.

I know it's a photo platform, but I'm a writer. So I end up writing a lot instead of photos. So I do have the photos because that's Instagram. But you will see i have long posts which are actually very educational i i hope to educate inspire and motivate through my post those are my drivers of writing everything that i write there so hopefully it'll do that

awesome go give them a follow thanks for joining us today thanks thanks for joining us today make sure to go over to Stitcher, iTunes, Himalaya, wherever you're listening. Please give us a five-star review. Positive comments, they go a long way. And if you're a coach, make sure you're following us on Instagram at TheStrongCoach.

And last but not least, go to TheStrongCoach.com. Hit that application button if you're ready to dive deep. See you next week.