Life Coaching

Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org, and in this video we’re going to talk about life coaching.

Let’s crack into this one. We’re going to talk about what life coaching is, how it all works, give you a taste of what it can do for you and how it can potentially transform your life. Let’s break into this.

First of all, let me start off by saying I am a professional life coach. This is something I like to do, beside just studying a lot of personal development material, which is really my first passion. I also love to coach people on it. I love to share my ideas with people. I like the approaches life coaching offers, the tools, the techniques and strategies that come with that discipline.

I love to apply that to problems in people’s lives. There is something unique about coaching that’s different than just advice giving and information, and training and education, which are also really valuable, and I’m really passionate about those. But there’s something about coaching that’s a little bit different and unique.

What Is Coaching?

Let me talk about what coaching is. Basically, coaching, if you’ve never heard of it before or done it, it goes like this: if you want to improve some aspect of your life, somewhere where you’re having a challenge or you’re struggling or you’re just kind of stuck, and you want to do better, what you really need is a third party’s objective perspective.

You want someone who will hold you accountable for taking some actions, making some changes and can help you see new insights into your problem, and maybe share some expertise and give you some education and strategies and techniques to get you out of it, to deal with your own psychological issues.

Then you might want to consider hiring a coach. A coach will help you go from the kind of baseline normal level of quality you have in your life to an amazing, optimal level of quality. That’s the intent.

With some individuals — and this is really the difference between therapy and life coaching — with therapy, the therapist focuses on people who are in severely dysfunctional states, people that are crippled by depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, manic-depressive disorder, maybe they even have some kind of biological medical conditions, physical conditions with their brain that they’re working through. Maybe they need medication to fix that stuff.

These are more serious problems. Here, what we’re doing is taking someone from a dysfunctional level to a baseline normal life. Coaching is about taking someone from a functional level to an optimal level, creating a kick-ass life. Taht’s what Actualized.org is about. I love to see how we can squeeze that last drop of potential out of you, just like squeezing a lemon.

That’s what coaching is about. Practically, some of the logistics of coaching — coaching is usually done once a week. It’s done over the phone. I tend to find few coaches coach in person. It’s just not practical to do that. It’s also unnecessary. It’s not very convenient. Although, in certain environments, like corporate environments, a lot of times coaching will be done face-to-face.

Usually, coaching is done over the phone. It’s usually done once a week. One call per week and I usually see coached doing between thirty minutes per phone call to fifty minutes per phone call, somewhere around there.

The way that it works is that you get on the phone, you tell your coach your problem or your challenge, and then the coach starts asking you questions to help you get to the bottom of it, to create clarity for you, which then you can use and you can go off and do the things you need to do to start addressing that problem.

Maybe it’s just a mental shift you have to do, and the problem gets resolved right there over the phone. Sometimes it’s even as simple as that. You can have big and profound breakthroughs and revelations while being coached. This all depends on your problems, your sensitivity. It also depends on the quality of the coach.

How good are they at asking you the questions that will get you to shift your thinking? To think about something from a different perspective that you haven’t considered before. This is the real value of coaching — the perspective component. A lot of people discount this, or they fail to appreciate this is even possible.

What Can It Help With?

You’re so stuck in your dysfunctional relationship, you’re so stuck procrastinating on starting that business, you’re so stuck in your current career and not being able to go into that dream career you have, you’re so stuck with these things that you think that there’s no way out. A lot of times, that’s in your head. That’s all in your head.

You’re literally creating a cage inside your mind that you are trapping yourself in. That’s totally unnecessary. With a few new perspectives, new tools you can start to break out of that. Another great thing about coaching is that coaches will hold you accountable.

A coach holds you accountable for the things you say you’re going to do. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Coaching is a serious professional relationship. You have to be committed. You have to show up on time. You have to schedule time out of your day. You have to be there, be focused for the call, and you have to pay for that.

When you’re shelling out your money, you’re shelling out your time, that already shows you’re committed. When you actually say that “You know what? I have a challenge here. I really want to fix this challenge, and I’m tired of struggling through it. I’m tired of waffling around it. I’m going to commit my time, my money, my resources, my energy to get this fixed.”

Just when you make that decision, and you lay out the cash, and you invest your time, all of a sudden that already puts you into gear. Then, an extra layer on top of that is that your coach will be asking you about the assignments you’ve been working on. He’ll ask you about the action you’ve been taking. He’ll challenge you to take more action than you otherwise would.

He’ll challenge you to set higher goals for yourself. When your coach does this, just you can see from that process — if the coach i always increases your goals a little bit more than you would’ve naturally, if the coach is always following up with you and asking you whether you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, what you promised yourself to be doing, then that is going to create extra motivation.

It becomes a little bit more serious in your mind. This is not some sort of vague promise that you are just going to flake on, because you’re paying for it, because your coach is going to question you about it. The coach might be disappointed in you if you don’t do it. It lights a fire under your ass.

How Does It Work?

How does coaching actually work? When you’re sitting there on the phone, what is the actual process there? Usually what happens is that you come in there, the coach will ask you what you want to get coached on. The coach should be really good about this. The coach should not be pushing his agenda on you.

It shouldn’t be about “Well, I’m going to fix your life for you.” It’s very much the opposite of that. The client takes the initiative. You come to me and you tell em your problem. You tell me “OK, Leo, I want ot get coached on this problem that I’m having at work, because at work, I have this one coworker who always rubs me the wrong way.

I always get angry at them. I find that it gets my mind totally off of work, and then I slip up on my projects and I miss my milestones. That’s creating a serious problem for me. I want to work through that. Let’s find a permanent solution.”

Then I’ll be like “OK, great. Let’s look for a solution.” Then I start asking questions. Then it just goes back and forth until we get you some deep insight about what kind of actions you want to take, and about how you’re thinking about the situation.

There’s two components here. One is how you see your world, and what you think about it, the beliefs you have, your psychology. The other one is about what is your action plan. What are you going to do about it? After you’ve got your psychology down, you still need to go out there and take some action, in most cases.

Coaching is great for getting you to drill down and clarify exactly what you need to do. A lot of times, we will end the call with some action items for you to do, some homework assignments, maybe some journaling exercises, some visualisation exercises, affirmations, or just an action item plan for how to start that business, or how to start that gym routine that you wanted to start, improve your health, relationship, whatever.

We work through that and the next time we meet, the following week, I’ll ask you about the assignments you’ve done, have you done them, have you not done them, why haven’t you done them, what have you learned from them. We talk about all that and we just go on, and then the next challenge comes up, and we talk about the next challenge and that’s how it repeats.

Coaching is powerful. It’s a little bit difficult to quantify the power of coaching. Some of these things that we help as coaches to get you, the client, to create in your life can be subtle and profound on the same level. A little bit paradoxical here.

By subtle I mean we can help you get a transition or a shift in your psychology, how you think about relationships, how you think about business, maybe get rid of some limiting beliefs that you have about money, or your health, and really open up the floodgates for you to go out there and create amazing success for yourself.

It’s really easy to discount the value of that. I’m not just saying this because I need to create a job for myself. I’m saying this because people and human psychology have a hard time understanding abstract things and evaluating, putting proper value on abstract things. That’s why it’s hard sometimes to sell personal development.

All these videos I’m shooting, on the one hand people can tell “Wow, this is something that can really change my life”. On the other hand, a lot of times people will look at it and say “Well, it’s kind of obvious. It’s common sense. What is that going to do for me? Is that really going to change my life?”

When you take that kind of attitude to it, then what you’re doing is like taking a diamond in the rough and throwing it out because it’s not all pretty and sparkly. It’s not always quite obvious. You need to have the long term wisdom to see what this can do for you.

Who Is It For?

If you’re thinking “Well, my life is pretty good already. If I’m already fairly successful, I run a good income, my health is good, my relationship is good.” then I’ve got to tell you coaching is actually perfect for you. There is the next level. It’s about taking it to the next level. You might be asking yourself “Why do I need a coach? Coaches are for people who have screwed up lives.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. People that have amazing lives are always working on their lives. That’s why their lives are amazing. In fact, it’s people that are screwed up that generally either don’t have the foresight to know they even have a problem, so they don’t hire the coach, they don’t have the money because they’re so screwed up psychologically that they can’t have a decent paycheck, so they don’t even have the time or money to hire a coach.

They don’t see the value in it. For them, they have more urgent problems. They need to keep their electricity on. They need to feed their kids. They need to make sure their marriage doesn’t crumble. Something drastic like that. Whereas with people that already have pretty successful lives, they always want to take it up to the next level.

You’re going to be surprised at how high you can go. That’s another thing coaches are great at. We can help you see the potential in you, that maybe even you don’t fully acknowledge to yourself. Sometimes we have a hard time acknowledging our own successes and our own potential.

You need someone like a coach, a mentor type figure in your life, someone who’s going to say “You know what? I see more in you. I see you’re working on this job, but I know you can go and start your own business.” Or “I see you’ve already started your own business, but I know you can triple the earnings of that business.”

Or “I can see you’re having this relationship, but we can take it to the next level. We can get all your relationships and all your interactions to be improved if we, for example, work on your communication skills, or your understanding and your empathy skills, understanding other people, emotional intelligence, stuff like that.”

That can be really powerful, when we see potential in you, that even you do not see. That’s a lot of times why even a coach will need a coach. I tend to fall into that same problem too. Sometimes I don’t see my own potential. I get a lot of value out of coaching, even though I know how to coach, and I know a lot of stuff that I’ve studied from personal development.

Coaching A Coach

I get a lot of value out of being coached by somebody else, because it’s a new perspective. That’s just like somebody pushing you forward, someone who believes in you. Not in a fake way, but in a genuine way. They get to know you as your coach. Your coach will know you, will know intimate details about your life, and they’ll know your strengths, they’ll know your weaknesses.

They’re not going to bullshit you. They’re going to tell you like it is. At least a good coach will. Ultimately, what can coaching do for you? I’m not shooting this video to pitch my own coaching services. I do coach, and if you want to check that out you can, on my coaching page at Actualized.org.

Really, feel free to hire any coach out there who you like, who you resonate with, who you click with. What coaching can do for you, I think, is really cut the learning curve of your development. If you’ve been doing personal development, you’ve probably realized and you’ve probably struggled with this issue where you go out there and read one book, you read some magazine article, maybe you listen to a video like this.

You go out there and try to make some changes, try to implement something. Then you come up against a wall. You keep hitting your head against the wall, and you’re stuck, and you know there’s something more but then you get discouraged. You don’t know how to do it.

Maybe you’re even making progress, but that progress is slow and painful, it’s very grindy. I’ve been there. I’m speaking form recognition. This is what coaching can do. Coaching can cut your learning curve. We can’t eliminate it for you. I want to be really clear about this.

We’re not going to go out there as your coach and take the action. We’re not going to promise you a million dollars. We’re not going to promise you a new business, a new car or a new wife, or a new husband, or a new girlfriend or boyfriend, or anything. In fact, we really need you to be extremely proactive in this coaching relationship.

You need to be coming up to us with the challenges and problems, asking questions. Then we can get you the answers you need. What a coach can do is cut that learning curve. If you are wise, and you really understand what your life progress and growth is going to look like, you know that if you’re doing it right, you have a slow, steady upward path, if you’re doing personal development.

If you’re not, then your life is going down the toilet, by either a slow or maybe even a quick downward path. We definitely don’t want you to be there. If you are going down that road, definitely consider a coach, immediately, or perhaps a therapist.

Cutting The Learning Curve

If you’re on that slow, upward path, and you see there’s more there, and you just feel it, you know there’s something more, and there’s just something you don’t understand, something you don’t know, and you see there might be another way, then a coach will cut that curve for you, so you’re not struggling as much.

We can point you to the resources you need. We can point you to the ideas you need. Sometimes that’s all it takes, just one idea. Don’t discount the power of one idea, applied consistently in the right place in your life, at exactly the right time. That can have a huge shift.

Really think about this. Think about how serious you are about improving your life. Also consider that coaches, some of the best performing people out there in the world, CEOs, professional athletes, these people have coaches. They have mentors. How do you think they got there?

Tiger Woods has a coach, even though Tiger Woods is an amazing golfer and he probably golfs better than his coach. Why does he have a coach? Because the coach can give him new insights. The coach can give him a third perspective. The coach can share information that he studied that maybe Tiger Woods didn’t have time to study.

The coach can inspire him. The coach can see potential within him. This is the same with CEOs. Almost every CEO in every major corporation, especially the Fortune 5000 even, or Fortune 500 especially, all of them have been coached. They didn’t get there by themselves. They get coaching.

It’s just how you progress in life. You have someone show you the ropes, someone who has either been there and done that, and has practical advice, or someone who can just ask you the questions you need to ask to get you to think very clearly. A lot of times that’s what coaching is really about — clarity.

You might even know the answers, but right now you haven’t articulated them. You have not written them down on paper. A coach will get you to do that. A coach will get you so much clarity about the direction of your life, your goals, your vision, where you want to go, your weaknesses, your strengths, what you need to be working on, what you don’t need to be working on, what you should be thinking, what you shouldn’t be thinking.

All of this can have a profound effect and cut your learning curve substantially. What would take you, a normal person, three years of personal development work to get, with a coaching relationship with myself, I can probably get you that much progress in three months. Think about that.

Would you rather spend the next three years fumbling around, trying to get this stuff done, or get it done in three months? Think about what that is going to do to your wallet. A lot of times people will say “Well, coaching is expensive. I don’t want to pay that kind of money.” Think about it. Coaching is not going to be about a lifelong relationship.

Coaching can last for just a few months. It could last longer than that, but a lot of times the problems are fixed in just a few months, and you get some profound realisations and epiphanies that you take away with you, some tools and strategies that you can apply for the rest of your life.

If your learning curve is cut from three years to three months, that difference, what are you going to do with that time? You can do some powerful things. You can even make up that money many times over. Do not limit yourself with the money problem.

In fact, if you are having objections to coaching, even though you know you need it, but you’re saying it’s too expensive, it’s too frivolous, then that is actually probably one of the biggest limiting beliefs that is holding you back in life right now.

You should get coaching just for hta reason right there. Gather the courage and consider a coach if you see you have something bigger you want to accomplish with your life.

Wrap Up

This is Leo, I’m signing off. Leave me your comments. What do you think about coaching? Have you been coached? Tell me about your experiences. Any questions you may have that I could answer in the future. Please like this, share this.

Go to Actualized.org to subscribe to my free newsletter. We have some amazing exclusive bonuses — a ninety minute video series that you can only find there. Also a chance to win some free coaching. I give away two hours of free coaching every month to my subscribers, so you might want to check that out and get a chance at that.

Then of course, sign up because a lot of the stuff you would get in coaching I actually give away for free in all the articles and videos I’m publishing on a daily and weekly basis. This is actually an awesome opportunity for you to do a little bit of self-coaching, and to see what kind of things are going on. In personal development and coaching, there’s a lot of overlap.