Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for coaches. You will have to forgive the melodramatic episode title.
It came from an essay that my own coach Liz shared with me Monday morning during our coaching call The essay is called an invitation to the pain of learning Written by a man named Mortimer Adler who was apparently a philosopher or educational philosopher in the Prominence maybe in the 30s and 40s and beyond until he died in 2000 or something I hadn't heard of Mr. Adler before, but Liz told me about him. I read this essay. I loved it. And now I may need to go read a couple of his books.
I don't think they are easy reading, but that is relevant to today's conversation. So Mortimer Adler writes this essay called An Invitation to the Pain of Learning. And his thesis in the essay is that real learning is difficult. It's painful, and it requires a lot of the learner. That knowledge is not something that we gain just by having more information, but that true education involves the transformation of the person, of their character, of their thinking.
A couple of quotes here from the essay that I think are especially relevant to us in the personal development space, the life coaching space, where he warns us against an educational approach that is too focused on ease. Now, we as coaches, as online trainers, we might not think of ourselves as coaches. Educators, but of course, that's what we're trying to do, especially in training programs, courses, group coaching, mastermind certifications, whatever.
What we're attempting to do is transfer knowledge. I think under the assumption that the knowledge will transform the learner and that the learner will then take the knowledge and and use it to help other people transform as well. It's all very well intended. And I think it does happen. But Mortimer Adler in this essay warns us.
Against what all of us have seen in the ads and on the sales pages and in the sales emails This is him talking about the adult education space and interestingly, this is him talking I believe in 1941 So these are not new ideas. We're talking about 80 plus years ago He says we try to make adult education as exciting as a football game As relaxing as a motion picture and as easy on the mind as a quiz program Otherwise, we will not be able to draw the big crowds.
And the important thing is to draw large numbers of people into this educational game. Even if after we get them, we leave them untransformed. So you're sensing his sarcasm there. He's recognizing, even back in 1940, this guy doesn't have any idea about funnels. He does not have any idea about social media or email sequences. Or sales pages in the way that we understand them today, we're living in the world that he's describing that is multiplied by a factor of a thousand.
So he sarcastically says, if we don't make it easy, if we don't make it relaxing, if we don't make it exciting, then we won't draw the big crowds and drawing the big crowds is the point. Drawing the big crowds cannot be the point. If our goal is to actually aid in transformation, I think Mr. Adler here is right to convict us of drawing big crowds and leaving them untransformed.
10 years ago when I fell into the personal development space and life coaching space, one of the first conferences or seminars, it was really a sales seminar. It wasn't so much a conference. One of the first sales seminars I ever went to the coach who was running it in hopes of filling her mastermind. I didn't know that at the time, but now I know that's exactly what was happening. She referred to it as infotainment. Now do I think that's evil?
No, I don't think it's evil, but I do think it's honest in a somewhat terrifying way. She was acknowledging that the primary function. Of her work was to entertain, but to entertain in a way that made the participant feel smarter, feel better, whether or not they actually transformed. Now, did some of those people transform?
I imagine they did, but in the way that we structure our world, our personal development world, our, our life coaching world, there's no requirement for transformation, there's just a requirement of participation. Through signing up and paying the fee and that incentive structure, the structure where the person doing the teaching knows whether they know consciously or whether it just drives their activity subconsciously.
They know that the job is to make the thing appealing enough that someone will pay for it. That's it. That's the job. Whether it actually does benefit their life is a totally subjective thing, and we could debate it all day and all night. And I don't feel qualified to do that.
What I do feel qualified to say is that if the structure of the program and the culture that the coach creates around him or herself, is such that there's a lot of hype and shine and glamor around the getting started moment. And then if there's a shifting of responsibility, maybe even that sounds like blame if and when the client experiences disappointment in the way the experience was actually delivered. Now we're in weird and risky territory.
And we've talked about this on the show before, but as you consider whether to participate in a thing, a coaching program, whether it's group, whether it's a mastermind, whether it's a membership, all of which can be fantastic. If you notice that the. persuasive elements of it are extremely shiny and bright and persuasive and appealing.
And if you notice that they give you the impression that you'll be able to achieve an extremely unusual result with relatively low effort and with no pain, at best they're pandering. Do you know what pandering means? Here's why I know what pandering means. It's because I was once accused of it and I was guilty. And from that moment, I knew what pandering meant. I talked about my membership site a couple of episodes ago.
When a person joined our membership, they went through our core resources, sort of the doctrine of the program. Here's what you're going to do, and here's what it's going to get you. And I have such a vivid memory of a person who went through the core resources, the core methodology, and then sent me a skating email. And I would say it was 80 percent warranted, which is to say, I don't think I was quite as guilty as his email made me out to be, but I was definitely guilty.
And what was I guilty of? I was guilty of trying to persuade that new member of my membership who was probably in a trial period in my program where I was hoping to persuade them to stay a member for a long time. He had looked at the tone and the content of that introductory material. And he said, you are attempting to make an extremely difficult result appear extremely easy. Telling the person what they want to hear in the face of what you know to be true, that's called pandering.
And he was right. And the proof that he was right was that that program didn't last a lot longer after that moment. One of the reasons that that membership site failed, and I think I talked about this, but one of the reasons it failed was that it did not invite people to a painful, but durable and reliable approach to generating an income. It invited them to sneak through a loophole. And it gave them the impression that it wasn't sneaking and it wasn't a loophole.
I mean, we had good intentions and we helped a lot of people, but 45 year old me looks back at 30 year old me and says, I understand what you were doing and I think I understand why you were doing it, but you were playing a short term game. Um, when you could have had a longterm view and you were guilty of telling people what they wanted to hear instead of telling them what would have benefited them in the longterm.
Now part of the issue is I didn't really know what would benefit them in the longterm. In hindsight, I realized I had a very get rich quick mindset about the thing we were teaching people. I didn't have enough experience yet to understand that we were encouraging people to sneak through a loophole. So there was some naivete, there was some innocence in what we were doing, but it was still pandering and it was still short sighted.
And instead of inviting people to productive pain, I was inviting them to, sneaking through a loophole. I don't want to do that anymore. I don't think it benefits people and I still think the industry is guilty of it So after mr. Adler says We have this desire to draw big crowds and we care about the large numbers, even if the education we give them leaves them untransformed. He says, what lies behind my remark is a distinction between two views of education.
In one view, education is something externally added to a person as his clothing and other accoutrements. We cajole him into standing there willingly while we fit him, and doing this we must be guided by his likes and dislikes, by his own notion of what enhances his appearance. In the other view, education is an interior transformation of a person's mind and character. He is plastic material to be improved, not according to his inclinations, but according to what is good for him.
But because he is a living thing and not dead clay, the transformation can only be affected through his own activity. So where does that leave us as coaches? Where does that leave us, as teachers? My conversation with Liz, with my coach this week happened, to catch me kind of in the middle of creating a website and persuasive material, sales copy, et cetera, around the world. The office hours program that I'm creating. I've talked about this for a while. Am I going to do a membership? Am I not?
Well, it looks like I am, and I feel a lot of enthusiasm for it. Some nerves too, which I talked about in, the membership episode, but this is starting to feel like something I can't not do, even though I know exactly what I'm signing up for, but it feels important and it feels authentic. And don't get me wrong. I'm not a martyr. I'm excited about it. And I have high hopes for it, but now I'm writing sales copy.
And as I write sales copy, even something like a headline for the homepage of this website, which is something I've been doing now for almost 20 years, writing sales copy. I have to ask myself, to what am I inviting this person? Am I inviting them to sneak through a loophole or am I inviting them to fulfilling difficult, even painful transformation? The challenge we face is if all we can do is present pain, I don't think people want to engage with us.
The rare exception to this is if you happen to be running the United States Navy SEALs. The pain is the draw., You know, ultra marathoning is a thing where the person who's drawn to it, find some meditative state in the pain. Great, fantastic for them in an online community, like office hours, hopes to be, uh, where there's education, where there's support or there's some coaching, where there's some practice.
I don't want to lead with all pain, but I do want to invite people to transformation, durable transformation. I want them to experience a change of mind and a change of character, not based on what I think they should do, but what they know to be true for themselves deep inside. I don't want to relieve them of the difficulty that is between them and the realization of their highest and best thoughts about themselves, about their loved ones, about their health, whatever it is.
I want to create a space and make that space appealing so that a person who's invited into that space says, I don't go lightly into this space. And I don't expect to be coddled or pandered to, but I do expect it to be supported as I attempt very difficult personal transformation. Now, we do know as coaches that very difficult personal transformation doesn't have to mean summiting Everest. It doesn't have to mean running 240 miles through the deserts of Utah in an ultra race.
It doesn't have to mean becoming a bodybuilder who diets down to 5 percent body fat for a show. It doesn't have to live in these extremes, intense, difficult, personal transformation makes itself available in the micro moments and cracks of our lives, where, instead of telling ourselves and our loved one, the same old lie we always have. We share a loving, but difficult truth. There's real fear in that for all of us. Most of us, there's pain in that.
When we do that, we're likely to cause ourselves problems. It's likely to get worse before it gets better, but we do it because we hope for something better on the other side. So it's an invitation to pain, but we hope that it's a productive pain. I think that's teaching at its best. I think that's coaching at its best. I think that's friendship at its best and marriage at its best. The truth is in coaching, we are inviting people to difficulty.
I might've told this story on the show before, but when I was about 12 years old, I think my parents asked me what I wanted to do for a living. And I think I said, I wanted to be a psychologist. I don't remember having any idea what a psychologist was at age 12. When I started college, I still had that idea in mind, apparently. And I went to my first entry level psychology class and I dropped the class and I changed my major.
And apparently my mom tells me, I forgot this, but my mom says, Oh yeah, you went out of there and you said, I'm not going to be a therapist. All you do is listen to people's problems all day. That sounds terrible. Well now I'm 45, I'm a life coach. A very high percentage of what I do is listen to people's problems and it is rich and rewarding and difficult and I think important but also painful.
I didn't have a very heavy coaching week this week, maybe eight to ten sessions and Well, I was about to say what happened in some of those sessions, but that's probably not right. So what I'll say instead is, in a high percentage of those sessions and in a couple of emails I received afterwards, there was real pain expressed, but also gratitude and progress. That seems to be the gig. It's the gig we sign up for as coaches.
And it's the experience we invite our clients to when we are at our best. What we do, when it's at its highest and best, it is an invitation to productive pain, coupled with the promise of the growth. And the happiness and the internal alignment and regulation that come with paying the price of those hopefully temporary pains. That's when we're at our best. That's what we're offering to our clients. Anyway, have a good week. We'll talk to you next time.