Walt Disney tried to join the army but failed the physical exam. Then he joined the Red Cross and served in France for a year or so before coming home to start a little company called Laugh-o-Grams. He went bankrupt.
And by failing at that he acquired the new directions he needed to become the successful Walt Disney and create the studios we all know and love.
Without failure, no success. And it's more than that: failure is the very road to success. By trying things, being out there in life, we learn what does not work. And by knowing what doesn't work we get closer to what works. Every day.
If we stay in the game.
If we don't demonize failure or become superstitious about what failure means.... if we don't take failure personally we can continue to fail.
To learn to play a piece on my guitar I have to first fail to play it. Then fail again.
This is why older people have such a hard time getting themselves to learn something new. Learning requires failure and grown-ups have developed a deep fear of failure that kids don't have.
To learn a language, you have to embarrass yourself and fail to say the phrase properly and let people laugh at you. What grown-up wants to go through that process?
* * * * * *
"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness
to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.
That is why young children, before they are aware
of their own self-importance, learn so easily."
~ Dr. Thomas Szasz
* * * * * * *
Randy Stuart sent me a fantastic comment in response to my current blog on the secret power of FAILURE in my life.
"My friend Marc, a fantastic photographer, was getting frustrated by not getting into any of the many photo contests he had entered. Not just not winning, but not even getting in. He arrived at a beautiful plan which he called the Epic Fail. His new goal was to try and fail as grandly as he possibly could. And if he failed enough, eventually he would fail at failing...and thereby succeed at what he was after to begin with. Fail so badly that you win by failing. Genius!"
Now that we have had a little over two months of this Coaching Prosperity School experience (there were six schools before this one), I can say I'm more than pleased with how well we are achieving our objective.
Our objective is to teach coaches how to get clients. That's it. Simple, pure and strong.
And I am getting emails about successes coaches have already created doing this school, even after only two months (we've had a very uplifting LIVE two-day conference/workshop in Phoenix, twp phone-in Webinars, peer coaching, many daily messages direct from me to our coaches, and mailings of books and CDs) ....
You can join any time. Your year starts the moment you join. If you wait a day you miss that day's message.
Why are coaches reporting successes already? Mostly because what we teach is radical and unorthodox, so it's an exciting experiment for a coach to try. So they actually try it. They DO things.
Most other coaching-training programs get it wrong. I've studied most of them in the past year (hoping to learn things to add to our school) and I find that their systems for getting clients are old-school marketing ideas that would work ONLY if the service or product were a very low-priced item, like a CD series or an eBook or a Teleseminar. Their sales and marketing systems do NOT work for acquiring good coaching clients.
In fact, they are counterproductive. In my many years of coaching coaches I have never even once seen a coach successfully use these marketing techniques for anything other than the lowest priced memberships, free sessions, eBooks, etc. I have never seen them work for getting coaching clients.
We teach enrollment, invitation, conversation and demonstration. We teach it because it works when applied. We teach many levels and variations, and they all work. They've all been real-world successful.
We also provide community. Real live colleagues to work with and develop lifelong friendships with. Coaches getting to know other coaches to create the bonds that strengthen confidence and a feeling of belonging.
One of the downsides of being a coach is that sense of isolation. Being "lost and afraid in a world I never made." You don't want that. That will not encourage success. You want other coaches in your world building you up and cheering you on... even sharing their secrets with you on how to get clients, how to charge bigger fees and how to build a very prosperous career. In this school, we are family. At our workshops we learn a lot of profound things, but we also have fun. We go out to meals together. We even sing.
This thing called coaching prosperity doesn't have to be such a dismal grind. It can be a real joy.
As much fun as all this is, I never want to lose sight of the principal objective: clients. If you are a coach in my school, I want you to have clients; in ever-increasing numbers at ever-expanding fees so that coaching for you becomes as reliably rewarding, financially, as being a doctor or lawyer or company CEO would be.
Why shouldn't the best profession in the world be rewarding?
That's why I'm so pleased that the coaches in this school are reporting to me that it is happening for them. And we're only a couple months old. Wait till the Chicago workshops kick in! (end of October. You can still go.)
If you're considering my school send me your address and we'll send you a gift pack. Email here: stephendchandler@cs.com.
And yes we teach coaches how to fail. If you are in the right kinds of communications, failing to get clients much of the time, your practice will grow. Only fear of failure can stop you.
Most coaches don't get clients because they keep trying to take short cuts. Our school teaches the LONG CUT.
Most coaches never learn. They never get the knowledge necessary to build prosperity... in fact, they avoid that knowledge which is why they attempt marketing and PR and salesy SHORT CUTS to getting clients.
We teach the knowledge of the long cut.
H. L. Mencken once wrote, "The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex-- because it puts an unbearable burden on his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious."
www.coachingprosperityschool.com
I like where we are at w/ salary and bonus. My only thuoght is to increase the amounts available for total compensation for Coordinators. For Wyoming to remain in the hunt for FCS caliber recruits and coaches, we must ante up in that regard. DC, is receiving commensurate salary in relation to the rest of the coachs in the remaining MWC schools, except Boise State. Once we reach that level of noteriety more compensation would be appropriate.RG- see what you can find out about Rafe Kiely, and his interest in WYO- a big O lineman in Illinois. ESPN indicated an interest in our program and a possible visit.Thanks again. Go Pokes
Posted by: Handayaniie | August 14, 2012 at 11:08 PM