The most powerful ally I've ever had is a man who doesn't believe half of what comes out of my mouth.
What makes him such a powerful ally is that even when I think all the odds are stacked against me, he knows the only things in my way are my BS limiting beliefs, and my fear of failing. All of my excuses and sob stories are received with a knowing smile and an invitation to see my challenges from another perspective.
Most people misunderstand life coaches. There are probably a few different reasons for this, the first likely being that when we think of the word "coach", we think of the guy who's yelling at us to do 20 pushups between laps around the field.
The second reason we misunderstand them is that there are plenty of people calling themselves life coaches who aren't actually coaches. These people have answers for our problems. They're experts and they can be very helpful in the areas of business strategy, weight loss, or dating, but they're not coaches. They're consultants.
Life coaching is about identifying how we want to change our lives (or change the world) and then moving all the fear and limiting beliefs that block us from letting out our brilliance. In life, there really are no formulas for how to be our most potentiated and fully realized selves. In fact, anyone who says they're going to give us those kinds of answers is a good salesperson at best and a guru at worst.
I'm not down with gurus. They tend to promise answers to our complex challenges but what they actually do is superimpose their own solutions on to our lives whether they fit us or not. And then what happens is we become dependent on these gurus for answers because we haven't been developing our own intuition and exercising our own courage. It's downright disempowering!
But what is truly empowering is having someone with a highly calibrated BS detector who will tell me when they don't believe the stories I tell myself. There is nothing more helpful than someone with a perspective much larger than my own who, after a one-hour conversation, leaves me wondering how I could have possibly been thinking so small and expecting so little of my life.
Have you ever had the experience of being on a vacation and feeling wild, free and truly alive for the first time in a while? It's that moment when you suddenly realize what's really important in life and wonder how you could have ever been so caught up in all the trivialities of your day to day grind.
That's what it feels like when my coach blows open my perspective. Except I get to experience it every week and regularly put it into practice as I build my life based on my dreams.
Sadly, most people only get to experience it once a year when they take their two-week vacation, and then it's back to "real life," where dreams go to die.
In case my message isn't clear yet, working with a life coach isn't just a nice-to-have. For me, and for just about every highly successful person I know, it's an essential. It keeps us thinking big and moving that vision forward.
The first time I paid money for personal growth, the price tag was 5-digits (yes I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars) and the commitment was ten months. After signing up, I remember silently freaking out wondering if it was worth it.
"Couldn't I just do this on my own? Will I get my money's worth?" I asked myself over and over again.
What I know now is that the price tag is actually one of the main reasons I got all that I got out of that experience. The price seemed out of my range and that was a good thing because it was the first step in starting a new life where everything I did required me to expand my range. That's what they mean when they say the magic happens outside of our comfort zone.
I actually transformed every aspect of my life in those ten months and set out on a path that would bring me much abundance, joy, and fulfillment, and I believe I was able to finally make all those changes primarily because of the size of the financial investment I made.
That investment set the tone for how much time and energy I invested in the journey. It seemed to demand my utter devotion to the process. I often wonder, had I not made a significant financial investment, if maybe I'd have just let myself off the hook when things got difficult in my personal growth journey. I think the answer is probably yes.
I consider myself lucky that I was crazy enough that first time to throw down the cash before I knew if working with coaches would even get me anywhere. And I'm especially lucky that my coach today never lets me use the fact that I pay him a lot of money as an excuse to rely on him to solve my life for me.
I was trained early on to understand that the purpose of a large investment is never to buy a coach's investment in me (because that is already a given). It is to get me deeply, truly invested in myself.
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