How to get the most out of your coach or your mentor. This is Stefan from Project
LifeMastery.com coming to you from Phuket, Thailand, and in this episode of
Ask Stefan, I have a question from someone named Madein. The question is, "Hey Stefan,
I just started a coaching program with a life coach. I have a call with
him for every two weeks for 30 minutes. How do I make the most out of these
coaching sessions? Thank you." Great question, and there's really two
different ways I can answer this, two different perspectives. One as being a
student myself, which I am. I'm always investing in myself. I'm always being
coached. I'm always being mentored. I have coaches and mentors in my life. It's been that
way since I was 18, 19 years old and I started heavily investing in myself.
It paid off ever since. I think everybody should have a mentor or a coach. The best
in the world have mentors and coaches. If you can't afford one, save
your money, invest in it, it's always going to pay off. The other perspective is from
being a coach myself, because since I was 21 years old, I started coaching people
first as a dating, confidence, and relationship coach with a company called
Lifestyle Transformations, eventually getting into life coaching, and
then eventually getting into also coaching people on how to build an online
business. Throughout the years I've coached hundreds of different
people, so I have a lot of experience which can really help answer this question for
you. I think that first and foremost, when you invest in anything, whether that's a
coach, a mentor, a program, online training program, a seminar, you always have
to accept full responsibility of getting maximum value out of whatever you
invest in. You can't just invest in something and expect everything to be
solved after that and not have to do any work. If you invest in a coach or
a mentor, first and foremost you have to make sure that you trust that person. You
have to buy into whatever it is that they're going to be teaching you. That's very
important, because if you have resistance and you're not being coachable, then you're
not going to get anything from that. My bet is that, if you've invested in a
coach or a mentor, you trust that person, you've done some due diligence,
you believe in them, maybe you follow them a little bit online first and
foremost, and they're going to do their part. That's their
profession. They have a lot of experience doing it, they have a lot of testimonials,
clients they've worked with. They've had a lot of
proven track record of success, and so you have to ... That
person's going to do their part. You have to do your part.
The first and most important thing is you have to play full out. Meaning,
whatever it is that you put into something is exactly what you're going to get out of it.
You can't just expect that your coach is going to do everything for you. Your
coach is really there to help guide you, to help support you, to help challenge
you, to help hold you accountable, to help you overcome some barriers, obstacles, blocks
that might be getting in your way that you might not be seeing yourself because
they have an outside perspective on you, to help provide the game plan, the step by
step, and give you feedback on different things and help you make the
right decisions, the right choices. That's what they're there for, but ultimately
it's up to you to do the work,
which is really the hard part of anything. Grinding, hustling,
putting your nose down and just doing the work that is necessary to get the
value out of the coaching program. You could have the best coach in the world, he can
give you all the best advice, the best information, but if you're not doing the
work, if you're not applying yourself and taking action, then that's 100
percent your fault. That's your responsibility. You can reach out
to your coach and have your coach maybe help you to help find out why you're not taking action,
what's stopping you, what are the obstacles, what are the roadblocks getting in the way
that's preventing you from taking action and ultimately getting the results that you want.
Your coach can be there for you for that as well, but again, ultimately it's up to you to
make the changes necessary to get the results that you're after.
You have to make sure, first and foremost, that you play full out, you put
everything in, you're taking massive action, you're being coachable, your coach
says to do something, you do it. You don't question it, you don't argue it, you
don't have resistance, you're just being coachable and you're trusting that
person. If you don't trust them, then they're the wrong coach for you. I always
remind myself of the example from the Karate Kid, where Mr. Miyagi is trying to
teach Daniel's son karate and stuff, and Daniel just wants to learn
the karate moves but Mr. Miyagi has him paint the fence and wax the car
and sand the floor,
and Daniel doesn't understand any of that sort of stuff and he has some
resistance, but ultimately he trusts his mentor and he does it regardless. I
think that's an important thing, because sometimes when you're working with
someone and they're coaching you on something, you might not immediately see
the benefit of it, but again, there's a method to the madness. You have to trust
the person and ultimately believe that this is going to help you to get to
where you want to be. Take action,
listen, and be coachable. Another advice that I have is making sure that you're
prepared. Every coaching session that you have, you should be prepared for that
session. If you have a 30-minute coaching session, you should be spending
maybe 30 minutes
preparing for that session and what that means is having maybe a list of
questions that you can ask your coach, challenges, obstacles, really analyzing
the actions that you took, the results that you might have gotten, and coming
into your sessions prepared to get maximum value from that. If you can
provide information to your coach before each session, then that's going to also help
your coach be able to coach you, because it's going to help save time in that session
and they're going to be caught up to speed and know exactly where you're at and
going to be able to help prepare for the session also. With all the clients that I
work with, I always make sure that they send me what is called a meeting
prep form, which basically allows me to see exactly where they're at, what
actions they took, what challenges they had, what successes they might have had,
what they want to get from this session, maybe certain questions they might
have of me as well. My clients that always get the best results are the ones that are
prepared, that send me all that information beforehand.
Sometimes you work with people that aren't prepared. They show up late,
they're not making progress and everything, and it's
sometimes a challenge to really help that person because they're not able to
focus on the real things that's going to get them the results. Rather, you're more
focusing on playing catch-up with that person and helping them to resolve
some of the mental challenges and the habits that they might have that's stopping them
from actually applying themselves. You can always fast-track it just by
preparing and just taking massive action as much as you can. At the end
of each coaching session, as well, I always recommend to have an
action plan, measurable actions that you can apply for yourself that can help you
make progress, so whatever you discuss with your coach, try to make it into an
actionable plan, some sort of practical way, certain steps or rituals or
habits or actions that you can take to ensure that you're applying what you've
learned. Knowledge on its own is worthless. Knowledge is only
potential power. The real power is the ability to take action, and so action is
where you get the real results. Not just by listening or taking notes, which
is also what you should be doing as well. Taking notes,
writing things down so that you can really remember things as much as
possible. So, listening to your coach, playing full-out, taking notes,
massive action. Very, very important, and I think as long as you're doing that
and you're taking action with things, and every time you show up for a
meeting you're enthusiastic, you're open, you're being coachable, you're listening
to your coach. Coaches love that. Coaches love students that listen to
them and take action. If you do that, your coach is going to be able
to provide the next steps for you and take you to an even further level, and
really fast-track the progress towards where you want to go. If you're not
taking action, if you're not showing up, you're wasting your time. You're wasting
your money. I find sometimes, people will come to me for coaching, and
they'll want help with building an online business, but they're not even capable of
applying some of the basic simple steps that I might give them. Most of
the time that I might spend with that person is helping them to overcome the
obstacles and barriers of their psychology to get themselves free from
those so that they can finally make progress. A lot of people, they have fears, they and a lot of people to have beers they
have doubts, they have uncertainty, they have some confidence challenges, they
have some negative habits of laziness, procrastination, all those sort of things,
and I think a coach can help you overcome those things, and I think ultimately if
you can be free from some of those barriers before hiring a coach, you're
going to get so much more value out of it because they're not going to have to spend as much time
working on those foundational things, those foundational elements. I think
another way of looking at it as well,
one other tip that I have is that, if your coach has online training programs already
available,
always invest in those first. Some people come to me, for example, with Kindle
Publishing and they're brand new and they want to learn how to get started with it, and
oftentimes a lot of what I'll teach you might already be available on my blog or
my YouTube or on one of my online courses, like K Money Mastery.
My favorite people to work with are actually people that have already been
through some of the training that I have. They've already applied it, they're already getting
some form of results, and then people come to me and they want to take things to the next level.
What I find is because they already have a foundation, you can really ramp things up in
that position and help someone double their income or really scale up their
business that much faster. Because they already have a foundation, they already have a
business that's already being operated. A lot of times, if
they already have training programs available, I recommend investing in those
things first. It's going to be a lot more inexpensive for you. Go through it, make
sure you've been through all the training, all the lessons, because again,
otherwise your coach is just going to teach you things that you could've
already gotten at a much cheaper price. That's another piece
of advice that I have, is just really making sure that you've consumed as much as you can
in your position where your coach can really help you the best and really help you maximize
the results that you're after. Hopefully this video has been helpful for you in some way.
I want to thank you guys for watching. Leave a comment below, like this video, and
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I'll talk to you guys soon. Hey, this is Stefan, and thank you so much for watching this video. If you
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I'll talk to you soon.