Welcome to Today's Coach

In this issue, I talk with Drew Rozell, founder of Attractionville.com. Drew has some interesting things to say, including what he believes is the single biggest mistake that people make in building their coaching practices. He also shares the profound impact Thomas Leonard had on his life, and gives a sneak peek at what he'll be presenting at the June CoachVille Annual Conference.

Also in this issue, Bea Fields reviews Awakening the Leader Within by Kevin Cashman and I share a Letter to the Editor I received regarding last week's interview with coach Rhonda Britten. Thanks to all of you who sent in comments and perspectives. As always, send your feedback to letters@coachville.com.

Kim George
Director of Communications and Collaboration
CoachVille/Schools of Coaching
kim@coachville.com

Even as a kid, I always knew that I was really interested in people. Some people are interested in trains and trucks and I was always interested in watching people. I can just sit on a park bench and watch people, observe what they’re doing. To me, that’s always been fascinating and I always knew that that’s what I was good at – relating to people and understanding people. When I got to college, I found myself majoring in engineering for my first 2 years and really not very happy. Then I took my first psychology class. That’s when the light bulb went on. That was fun, easy, and fascinating. I gave up a full scholarship, got the hell out of engineering, and became a psych major.

I found myself in graduate school working on a PhD in social psychology and while there were a lot of aspects I liked, it became clear to me that this wasn’t going to be very satisfying either. There was going to be a limit to what I was going to accomplish, and I felt like other people were going to be controlling my destiny. I knew that something else was out there. Then, I came across the “Careers’ page of Newsweek, and saw Thomas Leonard. I still remember that picture of him on the phone with a mobile home, and that was the one. As soon as I read that, something big clicked and I just followed that.

He’s the reason I’m here, and what he did for me certainly opened up a whole new way of thinking and just exposed me to so much information and wisdom. Thomas made me see my life in a whole new way – he showed me how fast the world was changing and how exciting it was to be on that edge. He always stretched my thinking. And he made me realize that you can influence people through your writing and your observations. I still love to read his stuff.

We wouldn’t be talking right now if it weren’t for him. I was fortunate enough to have expressed my gratitude to him several times.

I can remember a couple of different things he used your website for – I think it was the Full Practice e-course, and I think that was my first introduction to you and your work.

It was a real honor to be acknowledged from that level. That told me I was in the right place for me, but it took me a while to get there.

The most important thing for me in being a coach is being myself. I think people hear that and they go, ‘Oh yeah, of course’ but I don’t think they directly apply that. I know I didn’t. When I was exposed to all this information, while it was great information – around training or how to have a full practice – I found myself trying to model other people, and while there is some value in that, you can only get so far. You’re always going to be doing something that might capture who you are, but not completely who you are. I asked myself ‘What am I delivering for the client? What can I provide for them?’ And to me, that’s the wrong question to ask. That’s a question a lot of us ask, and we’re taught to ask. The question to really ask, I think, is, ‘What does this mean to me? Why do I coach? What do I really want out of it?’

By answering those questions, I realized then that I was in the “very cool life” business because that’s what I want in my own life. Once I figured out what I really wanted and made my life reflect that, then everything became easy.

Whereas many coaches focus on the needs of a client or a target market, you’re saying it was a powerful shift for you to focus on your needs and how to design a powerful life?

I think one thing that draws most coaches to the profession is that it gives them a level of freedom in their life that they don’t experience elsewhere. Yet, once we get in the field and we find ourselves operating as a coach, we do all these things that take away our own freedom. We do things that we think we should do, or things that we think are a “good idea”. I think the “good ideas” tend to be the things that really hold us back.

It’s something outside of who you are The “good idea” is the thing that you think will get you something; it’s strategic, not authentic. It’s not an end in itself; it’s always one step removed. The good idea is usually in the form of, “Well, if I do XXX, then I will get XXX.” For me, I remember thinking, “Well if I go into business or corporate coaching, then I will make a lot of money.” Of course I struggled and it never worked. The truth is that there are some people who are geared for that and there are some people that are not. I mean, the truth of the matter was that I had no interest whatsoever in corporate coaching. It was just a “good idea.” It had nothing to do with who I am. I mean, I’ve never even worked in a corporation! I certainly didn’t have a passion for it.

You’re probably following a “good idea” if you’re approaching something as a means to an end else versus doing something you cannot NOT do!

How do you get to that point where you know you’re centered in yourself? How did it work for you? Were there events that occurred?

When I started coaching, I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I went to networking meetings, I joined the Chamber of Commerce. I was wearing a tie – I taught myself how to tie a tie – because it was all a ’good idea’ and made logical sense. And it worked; I got some clients out of it and they were pretty good clients. None of it was great, and none of it was at the point that it was just flowing and easy, and I got to the point where I was thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ It was supposed to be fun, and it really wasn’t fun. It was a lot of struggling. Then, I asked myself, ‘Why am I in this field?’ I made the decision that I was going to only do what was fun for me, and the reason I got into this was because I was going to have a great life so I did everything to have a great life.

For me, what that meant was that – it was my website. I wasn’t going to do these meetings and these talks that I wasn’t interested in any more. I was interested in learning how to do a website. For me, it was going to be about having fun and learning and a creative outlet for me.

Yeah, it was fun! It was just something I thought about and I was inspired to do it. I didn’t do it because I thought it would get me clients. Once I allowed myself to move in this direction, it all started to show up. By expressing just who I really was, my personal style, I found that I attracted people just like me. Then it became easy. When I started to focus on me and what I wanted to put out there, and living the life that I really wanted to live, the right sorts of folks started knocking on my door. I haven’t looked for a client in at least 5 years. I haven’t given out a business card in years.

There’s a huge difference here between attracting the perfect client and going out in search of the perfect people, like a needle in a haystack.

Right. It’s so completely different. It used to be this panic of ‘Where are they going to come from and how are they possibly going to come to me?’

Let’s talk about how you see attraction. It’s not a new thing; it’s been around for a long time, and everybody has their take on attraction. What’s your philosophy?

In the biggest sense, it comes from that model of like attracting like. We all put intentions out there of what we really desire. But, what we don’t realize a lot of the time is that associated with that positive intention, we’re putting out a conflicting intention, and that’s usually under the radar screen. Coaching from this attraction perspective – it’s my job to point out and eliminate those conflicting intentions that are muting the positive intentions that the client really wants to attract into their life.

Say you’re talking to a coach who desires a full practice but they don’t have a full practice. To get at the conflicting intention, a simple way to do that would be to say, ‘Well why don’t you want a full practice? Can you think of any reasons why you don’t want a full practice?’ Then, an amazing thing will happen. They’ll tell you what their conflicting intentions are. ‘Oh, I don’t know if I could handle that’, or ‘It might be too many people’ or ‘I don’t know if I deserve that’. At that point, what they’re actually putting out there as an intention and where they’re conflicted will be really clear. It’s no big mystery why this isn’t showing up in their lives.

"The physical universe never lies’ – that was one of Thomas’ phrases that, like many things he said, would roll around in my brain for a few years until I really got it.

Well, the biggest shift is that you stop relying so much on what you think or the stories that you tell yourself--everything that comes from that past conditioning. Start to pay attention to what you feel. We’re so good, and have been so good, at using our brain for problem solving and intellectual purposes. It’s gotten us this far, and for lots of us it’s become the default, and we don’t even pay attention to what’s going on below the neck.

It’s kind of amazing when I talk to people and when I ask them, ‘What are you feeling and where are you feeling that?’ They’re disconnected from that, and they need to be reconnected.

To me, that’s the biggest step--to reconnect with how you feel; what’s going on within your body. I think a lot of coaching is going to this place too. Your intellect doesn’t always serve you as efficiently, and certainly not as efficiently as your body. All the truth you need, you’re walking around with and you just have to know how to tap into it.

Now, when you’re looking at people who are struggling, they’re trying to figure out how and they’re trying to use their intellect to solve that problem. If they would just follow what they’re drawn to, they’ll always end up in the perfect place.

Yes. His ideas of attraction were what got me started. You could see attraction in action for him, and having gotten in on Coach U when he was the owner and just being able to watch his life evolve and change, and what he was able to attract, I knew there was something to this. That was the proof. He was a living example.

You’re presenting at the 3^rd annual conference in June. Can you give the readers a taste of what you’re going to be sharing at the conference?

They will learn the biggest secret to having an effortless coaching practice. I just know, having been through the experience, and having to struggle, I know what works and what doesn’t work.

There’s a fundamental shift that needs to take place in the way coaches approach their coaching right now.

They go hand in hand. Think about when you first started coaching. The metaphor that sticks in my mind is that you’re kind of on the edge of your chair. You’re trying so hard to do it right and you’re focused so hard on what you’re going to deliver to this person, what the experience is going to be, and I hoping to God that they hire you for another month.

Yeah, so you’re on the edge of your chair, working. Compare that to lying back on the couch. And that’s actually how I physically do my coaching – lying on a couch. There’s no performance anxiety; there’s just a perfection to it. There’s no agenda either. My clients will often come to the call and say, ‘I had no idea what I was going to talk about today, but I got so much value from the call.’ That’s just a natural part of it. By pumping it up and feeling that we have to be something more than our natural selves and our own intuitive gifts puts so much pressure on us that we become much, much weaker coaches.

No, it’s not fun to sit on the edge of that chair and think, ‘Gee, how did I do? Are they going to hire me next month?’

I’m an environment. I live my life the way I want to live my life, and I learn through that. I travel a lot, I go on vacation, I read a lot of books, I read magazines, I go to movies – I do things that are fun. My life is oriented around things that are fun and freedom and doing whatever it is that I want to do. My job is to rub off on people.

As someone who went through 20 years of schooling and got a PhD, I look at that education as ‘It was valuable, but there was so much I didn’t learn’. In the larger scheme of things, all the stuff I learned was, not that helpful and not that important. It wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go. I don’t see anywhere in our education where people get the kind of information that’s going to lead to them having the life they really, really want. It’s all geared around getting a “secure” job. Forget that!

I was coming into contact with all this information on attraction, and just attracted more and more of it. It just clicked with me that this is what I wanted to master in my life, if one ever masters attraction. I wanted to become an expert in this, just for my own interest. I found in doing that, that you can learn kind of the rules of attraction, but in applying it, it becomes more of a challenge. In coaching there are blocks, things we don’t see so clearly, and dynamics that might be going on. I had my own barriers to actually manifesting what it is that I wanted.

Are these barriers often things we don’t realize? We need somebody else to point them out?

Right, because if you knew it, chances are better that you could eliminate it. We mistake conditioning and experiences as who we are, and walk around with these invisible barriers that keep us from allowing what it is we want to come to us.

So, the idea for me was I wanted to create this school where we could all share information like in a graduate class. Everybody there is at a certain level, has a similar interest, and is going to come and share their experiences about what has and hasn’t worked for them. There’s an educational component, but it also has this community component where we all share resources, where we all share our experiences, we all share our challenges, just like CoachVille. It becomes that much richer when you have like-minded people together, and this just happens to be a more specific topic or focus, this whole idea of the law of attraction. Lots of people are interested in it, and we want more than just a book. We want some sort of connection.

Drew Rozell, Ph.D. is the Grand Pooh-Bah of Attractionville, The School of Attraction (http://www.attractionville.com) and coaches people who are passionate about attracting a very cool life. His coaching site is http://www.evolutioncoaching.com and he thinks it would be worth your while to visit him.

Hot Book Resource
Awakening the Leader Within

Bea Fields/Five Star Leader

Are you leading by the music of your heart? What are you willing to die for? What is something that you KNOW you need to change, but you just don't have the guts to change it?

If any of these questions are now gripping you, I invite you to travel an amazing spiritual journey with author Kevin Cashman and story hero, Benson Quinn in the book Awakening the Leader Within. Written as a novel, this book is not just a book...it is a gripping and compelling story of the realities confronted by a contemporary executive who is torn between bottom line results and his life destiny as a leader. I could not put the book down, and Cashman did not let me off the hook one little bit...I had to confront my own questions as a leader and that nagging question of "Why am I REALLY here on earth?" and "What am I going to do about it now that I know?"

I have read dozens of leadership books, and this one is a classic. The book drew me in and forced me to really explore both the inside and outside of my life and how it is affecting the world. As founder and CEO as Leader Source and an Executive Coach, Cashman uses his skill and finesse to provide the reader with a compelling interactive coaching experience. The "questions for reflection" alone in the book will take your coaching from surface to provocative in the blink of an eye.

This story of transformation is truly a jewel of timeless wisdom which can take anyone to a more inspiring level as a leader. As Ron James, CEO for Ethical Business Cultures says "Don't read this book if you are only concerned with your personal success. Read it if you are ready to begin the journey to a higher calling to really make a difference in the world."

Rating: Five Stars *****

Bea Fields is the president of Five Star Leader.com, an environment dedicated to creating perfect environments in your business and your life to make more money in less time. Bea also conducts the Teleclass Leader Training Series. She can be reached at bea@fivestarleader.com and (910) 692-6118. Her websites are www.fivestarleader.com and www.90daymarketingmarathon.com.

Letters to the Editor

Hi Kim,

Congratulations on a great article/interview with Rhonda. I was left in no doubt that Rhonda has her heart in the right place, and has overcome an amazing personal tragedy to shine brightly in the world. I know that we all have our own version of Rhonda's tragedy - although it may not be so graphic. As the saying goes, it's not what happens to you - it's what you do with what happens to you, and Rhonda seems to live from this premise.

There is one comment that I still reinforce, and it's not coming from a place of negativity, as you suggested in your article Kim. While I will watch a few episodes in coming weeks of the Starting Over show, the little bit I have seen was hard to watch because things were said that just aren't coming from a place of being a professional coach, whether poorly edited or not. If you don't say certain things, then there's nothing to put into the program of a negative nature. I know that this is easier said than done. I worked in the advertising industry for nearly a decade, produced television commercials for a year, and was in front of the camera for a few years in my late teens in television commercials myself.

As for my specialty, I love developing the leadership and communication skills of women leaders, managers and business owners (who have employees) so they experience more freedom, fun and profit. My own version of your "Fearless Living" Rhonda is Intentional Success, which has been something that has helped me develop and continue to grow beyond my limitations. I have written and run programs on Intentional Success, which covers seven steps to creating the fulfillment and life you'd love to live. It's a process for working through the psychological tension that arises when we set an intention to have something we'd truly love to create.

For your interest Rhonda, and in the spirit of being honest and open, given the invitation to email you in the article, I've also included the original email I sent to Kim a week before this article came out.

May your lights continue to shine brightly in the world.

Respectfully
Carly

Carly Anderson, PCC, PMC*
Carly@CarlyAnderson.com
www.CarlyAnderson.com

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