S23EP06: JFDI Theory..

Welcome to One Insight. My name is Rich Litvin. I grew up in London and I now live in LA. And this is a podcast for extraordinary top performers and their coaches. You see, I've coached some of the most successful and talented people on the planet. I can see what most people cannot see, and I dare to say what most people wouldn't dare to say.

And what I know about success is that on the other side of it, it can be incredibly lonely. You can feel more of an imposter the more successful you become. And when you're the most interesting person in the room, you're actually in the wrong room. Clients who are more successful, more intelligent, and wealthier than you need your support more than they know and more than you can imagine. I coach around insight. Life looks one way. Something happens and the world looks different.

entire world changes. It can happen in an instant. And this podcast is called One Insight because a single insight can change everything. I'm gonna call this episode JFDI Theory. JFDI Theory. And you've got to listen a little bit further into the episode to find out why. Today you're going to hear me coaching Mahala, who's got a background in the corporate world, been coaching for four and a half years, and Shannon, who's completely new to coaching.

And we deal with really the same issues underneath it all. How do you bring a sense of vision and passion and persistence to this game we called coach coaching? Whether you're at the start in the early days of your career, whether you're four and a half years or 20 years in, the game never stops.

You have to constantly keep reinventing yourself and upping the game. I enjoyed this conversation. Two people in very different places in their coaching career. Have fun as you listen in and let me know what you think of JFDI theory.

Welcome Mahalla. Welcome, Shannon. Let's play. We just spent some time together at an intensive. I love to ask the question when I've worked with anybody in any way. What did you get from it? So Mahalo, we've worked together over the years. What was the biggest takeaway from spending time with me at this last intensive? It was a good reminder.

Uh Both tapping into the vision, what you were trying to achieve, the long-term goal, and refueling my passion from what I'm up to, and also a reminder that you need to do the work. And those two together will get me to the next stage I've I'm going on. I think that they're both like they're that they're both equally useful. Yeah, I mean you said vision and passion and I what you call doing the work is persistence.

It is the secret to success that people don't want to talk about. You see, I I I talked about this at the event. I I I find this thing interesting in coaches. If you go into the corporate world, you know it's gonna take a long time, a lot of hard work to get into the C suite. It's possible, but you know what it's gonna take. If you're an athlete and you wanna have success at any level, you know it's gonna take a lot of hard work and persistence.

And then people come into coaching with this expectation like, oh, I should be successful quickly. They see stuff in their social media feed and they want to be a millionaire overnight. It doesn't work that way in any field. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have success quickly, but my experience is the people who want success quickly, the ones who really get it.

It's the ones who are committed, who have what you say, vision, passion, and commitment to the long haul are the ones who will definitely have success in the long haul and might even have it in the short term too. I love that. Sometimes we need reminders of the basics, right? Yeah.

Shannon, you're much newer to coaching. Mahal has been in the game for a while. This is new to you. So, what was the insight you took away from being with me? Well, definitely built my courage up big time. I I felt like I was really comfortable with push pushing my myself outside the box before.

But this just kind of took it to a new level for me. Also, like what Mahala said, the vision, I I was very jumbled in my mind still about like exactly how to explain and put into words what I want to do for people. And I came out way clearer. And it's interesting because what I initially six months ago had started jotting down on my website and stuff and then second guessing a million times ended up being exactly

what I ended with at the end of the intensive. So I was a lot clearer than I knew. And I was just second guessing myself. So now using my intuition definitely I think also has been something that's come out of the intensive.

Oh nice. That feels solid. I feel that one. Yeah. Courage was a big part of everything I te taught when we were together and more of what I teach to everybody these days. I I my favorite moment in the event in Santa Fe was when I said to everybody, Are you guys familiar with JFDI theory? And there was silence and everyone was going, what's what's that? Oh, JFDI theory? Just fucking do it. I mean, that's really the secret to everything. We all want the clarity first.

the the the confidence first. It doesn't work that way. They're payoffs down the road. You make mistakes and you find out down the road what's gonna whether you're a multi million dollar corporation You're gonna pivot a a million times before you get there or an individual like us building a coaching business, just do it. And and so we're we're in it. So let me ask each of you the same question.

How can I support you right now? Like what's going on? How can I help? Mahala? Yeah, yes please. So yeah, I've been in business four and a bit years. And I have. I've been putting in the work. I've been consistently growing in terms of the level of my clients, in terms of my income, in terms of my impact. And I've been I've enjoyed the whole ride. I've absolutely loved it. I do have a lot of good energy around it, which I think is probably part of the secret. Um

And I've probably had the last I've been busy, busy, busy, busy the last year, maybe nine months. And everything's just been working out for me and kind of falling in my lap. And I've just got to a bit of a quiet phase. off to the intensive, so just when I thought I was on fire. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One, maybe I was focusing

I think the best thing you can do is serve your current clients and they will be your word of mouth and your raving fans. And I do wonder whether I was took too much attention off the client creation other than that. Maybe I didn't haven't been serving my current clients well enough. That's another question for me.

But I have had been kind of keeping myself busy on some lower level work. So I wonder whether the the the pipeline, the client creation has taken a bit of a dip. Secondly, I've decided, I guess, off the back of being on your intensive, like I'm playing too small. should be upping my rights, upping my level of client creation, upping the level of leaders. working on bigger problems, solving bigger challenges. And I think Thank you. Because of that, I have...

turned down some work. I have probably not served some people particularly powerfully because I've been a bit like Not sure I'm the coach for you. And then Hãy subscribe cho kênh La La School Để không bỏ lỡ những video hấp dẫn people that I have been like I'm happy to be on a call with you. You are so you are solving some you're a great leader solving some big problems. Some of them I've got they're excited about as

Have been ghosting me and either I've got, well, mix, I've either not been serving them powerfully enough, or some of them I've maybe have not been ready. I've scared them off and I've not heard from them. So I've been collecting a lot of no's recently for one reason or another. Um Support with that would be great.

Well, I I I think you've got your insights because you were sharing a lot of insights with me there. It wasn't just here's what's happening, it's here's how I see what's happening. So I I think you've got it. Like we could get off this call now without me saying a word and you actually know what to do. Keep going!

I it doesn't mean I can't can't help, but I I I really see that in you. You've got it. You've you've been with me long enough. We've worked together in the past. Look, here's what I hear. Number of things. Number one, there's something called the boom bust cycle. All consultants know it.

Coaches are beginning to learn it. You sign a bunch of clients, you feel really excited. And there comes a moment when they all finish their contracts at the same time. And now you're like, oh my God, I've got no clients. What do I do? And you hustle and hustle and hustle and get some clients. And you go from this to this to this, up, down, up, down, up, down. That's the first thing. So the only way to get out of that is A B C. Always be creating clients.

You can't stop that. I talked about this a decade ago when I wrote The Prosperous Coach, and to this day, my calendar still has two colors on it: blue and red. Anything that's in blue means I'm working with someone who's already paid me money. Anything that's in red means I'm about to spend time with someone who hasn't yet paid me money.

And I'm constantly doing it. If there's not enough red on my calendar, I can guarantee in a few weeks or months or a year, I'm gonna be struggling to have clients. So that's the first thing. You've got to have that balance of serving, serving, serving. Mahala, you can always sell into the future. You can always say, hey, I'd love to work with you. Do you want to start in September or February?

So selling into the future is a great way to do this as you start to because you're you're starting to get close to being oversubscribed at times, you can really uh given space, no rush. How'd you like start down the road? Oh, I I wanna start next week. You know what? I'd love to too, but I don't have space for that. That actually makes you very attractive to people.

If I call a plumber and they can come round immediately, I get really nervous because good plumbers are booked up weeks um if not months in advance. So be like that. Be like uh, you know, someone who's who's in demand. So back to basics, always be creating clients. Always make sure you're doing that. You again, you said this. You know all of this. You said, well, maybe I'm not serving my current clients well enough. You know, sometimes we quietly get bored and we don't notice it.

And so our boredom with what we're doing, I can see the smile on your face that resonates. Our quiet boredom with that means our clients feel it too. They don't articulate it, they don't say it, but they feel it. And so they drift away a little bit too. So you can always use your creativity. Hey client, today we're going to do something different. Hey client, next week I want you to meet me in a graveyard.

Hey client, next next week I want you to go to a beach. I'll be on a beach too because we're in different countries, but we're going to do the coaching from our phones on a beach. I mean you can get super creative in what you do. new tools, new ideas, new ways of showing up that that make it fun for you and challenge them.

You can always go back to past clients. Hey, past client. It's been six months since we worked together. I was thinking of you. When I woke up this morning, I was thinking of you. Like a little text on your phone, a video text. I was thinking of you.

You know what? The summer's coming up, and my experience is that many entrepreneurs in the summer, they've had a great six months and they take a bit of time off and they come back towards the fall and suddenly they're in panic mode of what am I going to do next? Or the first six months of the year weren't quite as good as they thought they would be or hoped they would be. And now they're worried about how am I going to make this next six months catch up with where I wanted to be.

Would you like to jump on a call? We'll spend 30 minutes together, and I'll give you three specific ideas about how to handle either of those issues. Now I got really specific in what I offered then. You might have something different you offer, but that specificity, it's not like, do you want to catch up? Do you want to have a chat? It's like, hey, I've got and and you could even be more specific. I have a space next Thursday at 10 o'clock.

Let me know if you'd like it. They can always go, oh my God, that sounds amazing. I can't do Thursday. I'm in a meeting. And you can go, great. How about a week on Friday or a Thursday in two weeks' time? Give them something really specific they can respond to. I like that. I can already think of somebody, two people.

And then two other things that you said. One is busy work and that is our enemy. The enemy of uh most coaches is not the competition. There's millions of coaches, but they're not your competition. It's you and your attention. And your attention being drawn to

I should be on social media. I should be posting on LinkedIn. I should be doing this, that, the other. They're the things that take us away from the lifeblood of getting clients, which is serving people powerfully, asking for referrals, creating value first. Always come back to those things. Look, if you love social media, if you love doing LinkedIn, whatever, you feel free to do that stuff. But don't lose sight of that. Those are mid-to-long-term plays.

And we forget that and it's so it's much easier to go and write a create a new meme on Facebook because it's so fun and hey, look at this image I created and you get seventy three likes from your friends. than to call one person up and say, hey, haven't spoken to you in a while. You want some help with what you're up to? Yeah. And I know when I'm doing it to procrastinate as opposed to it being the most intelligent thing to do right then. Yeah.

Last one you said, I think this is really key for you, knowing who you are, is you definitely need to work with clients who have bigger problems and bigger challenges. It's gonna be exciting for you, it's gonna be edgy for you, it will take the boredom away. And so you can start to say that. I work with clients who are facing massive challenges right now.

Your people are going to go, oh my God, tell me more. Or, oh, let me tell you about what I'm doing right now. Like really up the level in who you want to work with. Cảm ơn các bạn đã theo dõi và hẹn gặp lại. So look, I said it at the beginning. I said, I think you know all this and you you you said, I do, but talk to me. All I did really is reflect back to you what you already

And sometimes that's the power of coaching, right? We say this stuff and the coach tells us to do what we know we need to do already. So I I get paid a lot of money by people who know what to do and just need me to remind them. And you could be that person for your clients too.

Yeah. I've got no doubt. I've got no doubt. So let me pause there. Let me go and speak to Shannon and I'll see there may be some other insights that pop as as we I come back to you. Hey Shannon, what's up and how can I help? Okay. Well, I was thinking about this before because I've listened to a couple of your other podcasts, and I I felt like so on a high after the intensive, I really overcame some massive blocks.

So I was like, I don't think there's anything, but literally today I was thinking coming into this that I can talk to anybody. I've been a hairdresser for twenty years. That's what I've been told multiple times by a ton of people actually. And but now I'm feeling because I'm putting myself into new situations and when I'm I'm around somebody that I admire or that I look up to or that's inspirational to me, I seem to get very tongue-tied and I don't

It's like I lose all skills of conversation. When I'm out in, I go to a trail with a sign, just basically provoking people to talk to me about anything. And the couple times I've had a couple people watch. Hang on, let me clarify that.

Do you literally go like that that's that Charlie Brown cartoon the the psycho the psychologist is in? You go and sit on a trail with a sign saying, Do you want to talk? Is that what you do? It's hilarious. I I know someone who used to do that in the Bay Area. They would sit, they'd go to the beach.

There was a big branch of a tree that was low down. They'd sit on that branch and it would say, come and talk to me about coaching. And then you literally get clients that were. I mean, I couldn't do that. I have a discovery call today from somebody that I met. So Love it. And I it feels very natural, but as soon as they I had one man tell me he was a psychotherapist and he was so informative and gave me so much advice and I like couldn't speak.

So now I'm like, how do I get over this hump? Cause I do eventually right now I'm I'm kind of helping anybody and working with anybody that wants to work with me. But eventually in order to get clients that I admire that inspire me, I'm gonna have to up that game. And so how do I what's the block I'm dealing with? Right. Like I need So here's I'm gonna make a recommendation to you. Go and buy a book called Unbound by Kasha Urbaniak. The subtitle is A Woman's Guide to Power.

Okay, I think I heard you talk about that before. I talk about it a lot. Oh, watch Kasha's TED Talk. K A S I A is her first name. Watch her TED Talk, Kasia Urbania. And she talks about this. It happens to to all people, but women especially when someone who they perceive as more powerful than them, they there's this I think she calls it the freeze.

Maybe a different word for it, but that that moment when you, you know, afterwards you think of all these clever answers, different things you could have said. What she teaches, and you must watch her tell this more than me, but she teaches to ask a question in that moment. Because it gets you out of it. You have to practice this. You gotta but ask the question. Hey, where'd you get your shoes? Hey, I like that tie. Where's that tie from?

Hey, where did you study? Which university did you go to? It it immediately allows you to step back into a position of power and lets them go into answering instead of them tell you and you feeling a little bit frozen. I recommend you read that book.

And and yeah, that that's the first thing. The second thing is around coaching, I teach this all the time. So you can um Google this, but there's a lot of articles I've written about Why you should be coaching people who are more successful than you, wealthier than you, and more intelligent than you? Because if those three criteria were the path to success, we wouldn't see all these business failures in life from hugely successful people.

Doesn't matter how successful you are, how intelligent you are, you struggle in some area of your life. And that's what you need to know. Everybody you ever speak to is struggling somewhere, somehow. Yeah. Yeah, I feel that. And I mean I

I know that as a hairdresser, I have incredibly successful clients, you know, and for some reason with them I have no problem. But I think it's just because I now in the back of my mind, I'm like, I know what got me to be a successful hairdresser isn't gonna get me to be a successful coach. So now I'm having this crazy mind shift and kind of a new identity. And so it's maybe the lack of

I'm gonna mess with your thinking now. Forget the new identity. There's only one identity it's Shannon. Shannon, who's happy to talk to anybody. And is so good at talking to people that creates so much trust that they open up with her. Nothing has changed. What do you do, Shannon? Well, it's kind of funny to explain, but what I do is I talk to people and really quickly they trust me so much they share secrets they don't share with almost anybody else in their life.

I actually got told that yesterday. Right. Right. That's what you have to own. That's the identity that's the throughput to all of this. And whether you're called a hairdresser, a coach, a coach consultant, a trusted advisor, none of that matters. This is who you are and what you do. What do you do, Shannon? That's how you answer that question. Yeah. It's what I do at home, it's what I do with my friends, it's what I do in every part of my life, regardless of my title or whatever.

So yep. Keep doing that. Keep doing that. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure. You have to play the hundred powerful coaching conversations game. Your your challenge right now is to get a hundred people on your calendar for conversations to build your professional self-esteem. Oh.

I can actually do this on a Zoom call, not sitting in a studio. People do open up to me. Not trying to get them as clients. You don't need a client right now. You're not desperate for money. And if you were, I'd say go and get a job. build that professional self-esteem as a coach. We've all done it, right, Mahala? We've all been in that stage where we come from another career into coaching. Mahala's nodding vigorously, and we don't know how to get clients. So don't try and get clients.

Serve people, build your professional self-esteem, ask, would you like some help with that? Cool. And that's kind of what I've been doing. Like I haven't been in a rush. I'm just like, let's have a deep conversation. If you want the experience, let's do it, you know? Okay. Thank you.

Yeah, I think we're there. Mahala, any other takeaways with some time to reflect? uh just that I get to say to Shannon, it doesn't go away. If you're constantly creating like higher level clients, you like I feel like I'm constantly being intimidated by the people. If I think of them theoretically, I think about

I I where I get scared of is even inviting someone to a call for me. Why would they? Who am I to take up half an hour of this person's time? And yet when we get on a call, they're just another human. They've got the same struggles as I have. And I can help them. But I I chicken out because I I looked at what I provided as the form I filled in before your intensive rich. And it was like, how do I not get so intimidated by high level clients that I want to coach? And the answer is

DIF DI do it fucking do it. Invite them to a call and try and interact human to human. And what I say to my clients is like attention out. Focus on the person in front of you. focus on what you want to achieve, the more we put our attention in, it doesn't serve us and it doesn't serve them. And yet I constantly find myself reminding myself of that. So thank you, Shannon. That was really helpful for me too. Yes, thank you.

Yeah, that's great, Mahalla. That's the distinction I teach. Most people are trying to teach you to get rid of imposter syndrome. And I say don't get rid of imposter syndrome, get good at it. You should constantly be challenging yourself to deal with bigger problems, clients who are playing a bigger game. That's that's the that's gonna keep you excited for the next 20 years of this game. I was just coaching someone whose book has last book has sold a million copies.

Now they wanted coaching because they're surrounded by people whose books have sold ten million copies. The game doesn't end. And never be afraid to coach people more successful, wealthier, or more intelligent than you. And that bombshell, I think we're there. Thank you both. It wasn't cool. was called leadership. And it's what I love to do. learn more about our community and Let's bin dot com