iMindShift with Steve Chandler

HOPELESSLY DEVOTED TO YOU

 

     John Lennon wrote these words that I LIVE BY "No short haired yellow bellied son of tricky dick is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me with just a pocketful of hope."

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Hey....TIME WARRIOR is now available in audiobook format! 

   GO HERE to get your audio: 
http://www.stevechandler.com/time_warrior.html

     The violence in the words "time warrior" was intended.  For although the work you do can be slow and easy, you must pull out your sword ahead of time to carve out periods of space and silence.

     Devoted time.

     It's your war is against interruption and distraction. Because if you can bring gentle sustained focus to a task, you'll never regret the results.

     As my friend and colleague Dusan Djukich says in his marvelous book, Straight Line Leadership, we stop.  We start something and then we stop.  When Dusan coaches his clients his recommendation is this: stop stopping.

     The more space we open up for ourselves the more problems we solve. The faster we achieve our goals.  The great philosopher Voltaire observed, "No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."  

     The key word in Voltaire's observation is "sustained."  We don't sustain. We don't take long, thoughtful, sustained walks. We don't sit quietly in space and solitude until a problem disappears (which it would) because we are too busy. 

     Or, we think we are. Same thing.

     We think we're busy, especially today, with the way our "phones" hook us up to the whole nagging planet. We are so connected now! We never have to be alone again!

     This is good?

     In most ways, it is. It's fun and exciting when I sit in my Arizona office and get an urgent text from a client in Scotland. The phone beeps and I grab it and check it.

     But what happens when I do that?  I interrupt my meditative train of thought and it might have been a train that was taking me to a HUGE breakthrough solution to a major challenge.  Beep, beep, beep!  And I stop.  I am on to something beautiful if only I would continue, but I stop.

     Are you a good piano player?  No?  But you took lessons, once, didn't you?  Yes?  What happened?

     "I stopped."

     Have you ever looked back on your life and wondered what would have happened if you hadn't stopped?  Piano, a foreign language, studying a certain subject, a distant love, anything.

     Management and efficiency studies in the work place tell us that one hour of uninterrupted time is worth three hours of time that is constantly interrupted.

    Or, as the old saying says, winners focus, losers spray.

    So the warrior element in how you relate to time is how violent a swordsman you are going to be before your day begins.  How much uninterrupted time will you carve out for yourself?  Will you be a true time warrior?  Because if you will, you'll love your timeless time. You'll be amazed what you can create when time not an issue.

     I travel differently now than I used to. When I go on a speaking trip I build extra time and space into my journey.  In the past, it was different.  I raced around like most everyone else, booking flights that left right after my speech was over.  Running through airports, chattering on my phone in taxicabs, coaching people on the fly! It was a chaotic storm of a life. It was frantic and even unfulfilling, always unfinished and incomplete. I was racing against time, trying to get ahead of myself, trying to break the sound barrier so that I could get into my own future.

     Do you know people who live that way? They try to live faster than the speed of sound. And then they wonder why they never hear anybody.

     What couldn't they hear? They were going so fast they couldn't hear the universe whispering to them. What was the universe saying?  The universe was saying "yes" to whatever they might ask for.  

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   "Some people have learned to live by keeping themselves under the constant threat of poverty, abandonment, and self-hatred if they don't perform up to whatever standard they have decided upon.  The problem with this motivational strategy is simple: If you keep putting a gun to your head, at some point you're going to want to pull the trigger."

~  Michael Neill

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     The new Coaching Prosperity School starts July 29 and 30 in Phoenix. Please express your interest.

     One of the most illustrious graduates of this school is Michael Neill.

 

"To bankrupt a fool, give him information."

~  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

     People make the mistake of stuffing their heads with words and numbers. They pile in more and more information hoping that sooner or later they'll have enough information to finally succeed at something.

    But information only goes so far…and if you get too overloaded with it, you can go bankrupt learning to succeed instead of going out there and succeeding. 

    Some people spenf their whole lives preparing to live.

    Which is why the programs life coaches offer always have a lot of action in them.  Transformation works better than information, and you can only transform through practice.

    Author/coach Michael Neill and I recently co-presented a six month seminar for 22 people from all over the world. It was called "Financially Fearless." During one of the last sessions, we passed out the above quote from Nassim Taleb on how to bankrupt a fool.

    We wanted to draw a dramatic distinction between information, a gluttony of which can bankrupt you, and transformation, which will leave you leaner and stronger. Most of the people in the room were coaches by profession. They were in the business of delivering transformation, so they got the point faster than most people would.

     I work with coaches every day. They have become my professional coaching focus. I love the work they do in people's lives. My role in coaching them is to help them build strong practices and make a good living so they can go on serving people in the profound way they do.

    Because it's hard to be good at coaching people to succeed if you are not successful yourself. You don't have a lot of real world experience to draw on. It's mostly theory. You mostly chat.

    Most coaches are so busy helping others reach their goals and live their dreams that they neglect their own financial strength. They forget to set up a strong system for growing their practice. That's where the work I do comes in. I've done a number of coaching prosperity schools where I help coaches gain a mastery level of business prosperity. They learn to acquire clients easily.

   In my school, there is no information. 

   Why bankrupt these coaches?

   It's transformation or nothing.

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     My old college professor Bill Roecker (on the right) is now a fishing coach. He takes people fishing and coaches them on how to make a big catch. He's the happy guy on the right.....better than being locked in a classroom with a student like me.

     Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish (a good coaching session is really a fishing lesson) and he eats for a lifetime.
   
     I just remembered a few variations on the "teach a man to fish" concept that I've always liked:

"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. 
Teach a man to fish; and you will not have to listen to his
incessant whining about how hungry he is."

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    "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. 
Teach a man to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks."

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     "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. 
Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. 
Teach a man to sell fish and he eats steak." 

THE ANGEL IN THE MARBLE

"I saw the angel in the marble,
and I carved until I set him free."

~ Michelangelo

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     Great coaches do work similar to a sculptor's best work. They see what's possible in their client, and then they help the client carve the rest away. Soon the client is feeling a freedom he has never known. This happened for me with my own coach Steve Hardison.

    The term "coaching" comes from the world of sports and also from the performing arts.  That's why they call it coaching instead of "consulting" or "advising" or "counseling."

    I remember a time when there was no coaching for people like you and me.  There was only coaching for athletes and singers and actors.  (Those superstars had strength coaches, voice coaches and dialect coaches; they had quarterback coaches, golf coaches and hitting coaches. For you and me? There were no life coaches.)

     But soon a personal growth movement began as the world got more entrepreneurial and creative. Individuals became more empowered. No longer did most people work for the same huge company at the same boring job all their lives and then get a watch and retire and wear the watch in the open coffin.  

     Creative people and innovative businesses were rising up. People changed jobs often, and even changed careers, and soon anyone who really wanted to succeed was considering hiring a coach.

     Why not?  Two heads have always been better than one.  If you want something achieved, are you not better with two people on the project than one?

     A lot of people have thought that this explosion of personal coaching is absurd. Why should the average person be hiring a coach? A life coach?  Are you kidding me?  Don't you already know life? Don't you even know how to live?

    People asking those questions were missing the point. This was not about survival. This was about thriving.

     Even today, people wonder if their ordinary life qualifies for "coaching." It's that whole "little old me" approach to low self esteem and false modesty. That's the very problem that coaching ends up solving. 
    
     Mocking self-help is the ego protecting itself. However, protecting the ego keeps me isolated and shrunken down to my most survivable self. So I feel disconnected, not only from the world, but from my own potential.

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     I've been putting on coaching schools for years now, so that coaches can learn to build strong practices.

    That's one of the things coaches forget to do. They forget to learn to become masterful at the art of enrollment and sales. But soon they notice that their life-changing work can't go on without clients. You can't transform a client that you do not have.

    My work with coaches over the years has produced 18 disciplines for attaining clients and building a strong and prosperous coaching practice. My six Coaching Prosperity Schools have lasted six months each time and transformed the client acquisition skills of some of the world's (now) most successful coaches and consultants.

    On June 3 and 4 in London, England, I will be bringing my teaching into a two-day intensive workshop....I'll be teaming up with one of my most profoundly successful graduates, master coach Rich Litvin. Rich is finishing a book on enrolling high-paying clients into your coaching practice, and he has 81 principles he'll be revealing for the first time ever in London. I've reviewed his principles, and they are profound and jolting...a strong antidote to the problem of being "stuck" with too few clients and an income that does not light you up.

    Please reserve your space with us and when you do, send me your mailing address so I can send your first practice-boosting gift package...this will be the beginning of many gifts you'll receive for being a part of our two-day transformative EXPERIENCE.

    Please click the link to find more information on our London event http://thatconfidenceguy.com/create-your-clients/.

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   A lot of people are coming to London to be with me and Rich Litvin (pictured above).

   Rich has worked with bestselling authors, physicians, Fortune 500 consultants and coaches to help them achieve inspirational results, create passionate relationships and build wealth doing what they love.  He recently worked with an Olympic Athlete who was struggling to fund her Olympic bid by selling calendars.  She had one conversation with Rich and the next day called to say she had raised $40,000 from a corporate sponsorship.

     But for much of Rich's life, although people thought he was really confident, it never really felt like that for him.  It looked like he was successful, but inside he felt nervous and insecure and he felt like a fraud.  He was terrified you would find out, so he learned all the tricks he could to appear more and more confident but he discovered it didn't work; and he ended up feeling less and less confident.  So Rich has spent the last decade learning as much as he could about how to build deep natural confidence.  He has traveled the world interviewing the world's most confident people.

     Most of Rich's coaching clients have already achieved a great deal in life, but they have one thing in common---they all feel like they are facing an impossible goal.  Rich has a track record of helping hundreds of people achieve "the impossible." 

     Rich is also the founder of The Confident Woman Salon, a program for a small group of elite, very successful women and he tells me he still gets nervous every time he walks into a party.  

      I interviewed Rich on one of my webinars and asked him about being nervous and whether he had butterflies before his interview with me.

       "That's the funny thing," he said. "Every time I talk about confidence on a radio interview, the irony doesn't escape me that I get nervous as I'm getting ready for that conversation."

        I love it that he calls himself out on that. A lot of people think that coaches who teach things have to be amazingly perfect experts in that category.  And the truth is the best coaches are people who really had to work hard---harder than most---to achieve things and to learn how to do things. 

    It's always true in sports.  You look at all the best managers and coaches and you never remember where they played the game because they didn't distinguish themselves as players at all---they had to learn the hard way---and that's why they can teach it so well.  

     So it's great that Rich talks about his nervousness because it allows his clients and everybody listening to my webinar to listen better. Because when something was hard for you to do I really want to hear about it.  When it comes naturally for you I tune out, and I think, "Ok, great, lucky you, I can't identify with you."  

     Rich says, "I've noticed, the more authentic I'm willing to be-the more willing I am to speak up when I feel nervous or insecure-the more I relax on the inside and those fears seem to disappear anyway."

     Rich works with some clients who want confidence for themselves and also want their partners to be confident. It's a common misfire I also see in my own clients: the desire to have family members change. Or, even more common, the desire to have my spouse or partner appreciate me more.

     It's a total distraction to want other people to change. It's misdirected energy, and it only leads to misery. A good coach like Rich won't go there with you.

     "When you desire something from someone else in a relationship (especially in an intimate relationship) that begins to be the downfall of the relationship," he says. "Whatever you want more of you need to look at how you can increase that in your own life."

     So when a man is projecting his own insecurities on his wife, he'll soon be longing for the romance of the early dating days to return. But insecurity is not an aphrodisiac.

     What is?

     "There is nothing more exciting for a woman in a relationship with a man, than to have that man be passionately in touch with his purpose in life," said Rich. "A man who knows what he wants in life---a man who is clear about what he is doing is a man who feels confident, grounded and solid … and there is nothing more attractive. So for the man who wants to inspire his wife (instead of fixing her), he can just go to that place of purpose. Just tap into that."  
     
    Does he mean that women don't love needy, confused victims who come home from work and blame everyone at work for how bad they feel?  That's not attractive?  Wow. Who knew?
Now you tell me.