Coaches and Courses – Business Brain 557

Business brain, episode 557 for Wednesday, June 12th. Superman Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we dissect them, we analyze them, we discuss them in order for each of us to be able to tune our business brains every single time we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is LinkedIn.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to post your first job for free. We will Talk more about LinkedIn jobs in a minute here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And on the other side of the country on the west coast, I'm Shannon Jean.

Yeah, man, glad to be here.

What day is it today?

Superman day.

Okay. I had an intro topic that's way boring, so we'll save it the next time we, we. We got to talk about superhero complex. Right.

Okay.

It. I heard it referred to the other day, or I read it referred to as main character syndrome. And I'd never heard about that. Heard it called that before. And you know, that's, that's a, an. I think. Well, I know I, I struggled with it as an, as a young entrepreneur getting started where you're kind of the center of this, the spoke. You're the hub, if you will, of everything going on around you. And that's a tough lesson. There was a tough lesson for me to give up and to not have to have all this kind of stuff flowing through you in this old style, old style kind of command and control mentality. And I just, you know, take it from my experience that you want to give up. Now I get, I want to give up the powers as quickly as I can and get the people. I have a couple of, you know, some new people working for me. Yep. And after a few weeks, I started using phrases like, oh, you tell me, you, you tell me what you want me to do. What resource do I give you to.

To get the job done.

To get the job done. And yes, I, I don't, you know, I'm, I'm, I only care about your output. So let's go and just trying to change my role so where no one is sitting there waiting for information to flow through me. Right.

Oh, you can if you. It. I mean, there's a lot of ways you can create this, but, you know, main character syndrome, lead singer disease, we call it in the music business. It's a little bit.

That's a Van Halen thing, right?

Totally.

Didn't they. Yes.

David Lee Roth is, is like the, the prime you know, the canonical example of lead singer syndrome or lead singer disease. Whereas it's, you know, you want that person, when you're on stage performing, to be the focus of attention. You need that. Like, that's very important for a band.

Yes.

However, as soon as you walk off stage, you don't want that. You don't want to have to deal with that person. That personality you don't want to have to deal with.

Tough. It's. It's part of that is. And I imagine it's very difficult as a performer, but as an entrepreneur, small.

Business owner, we're performers all the time.

So you learning to kind of ramp your ego up and down where. I think that's. That's got to be very important. And over time and. And reading the room. Right. Knowing that, okay, now's the time for me to stand up and, you know, I'm the badass. And I came up with this concept, and everything revolves around me or my partner or both of us. When you're talking to whoever. Yes, somebody. But when you go step back and you're in a different environment, maybe your employees or whatever, you know, I highly encourage you to give that up and to flatten the organization as much as you. Possibly as much as you can.

Yep.

It' just make your life better. I'm going through it with a nonprofit that I volunteer with now, and it. Historically, it's been very top heavy, and there's been like, an executive board that had to be involved in every single decision. And now that I'm on that executive board, as I've swam upstream for the last couple weeks, I'm like, hey, guess what? We're not doing it this way anymore.

Yeah, we're not doing it.

Pushing, giving all the power to the rest of the people. And so far, so good. But you have to be comfortable giving up and not have your. I mean, of course I have my personality wrapped around these businesses. There's no way around it.

Correct, Correct. But that's the same thing. In a band is a business. If you're gonna be making money with it, like it's a business. It's the same kind of thing. You have yourself wrapped up, but, like, there's the people like David Lee Roth who couldn't do it. And then the. The. To me, the best example of somebody who can, who knows how to manage this, it was. Was also a singer in Van Halen, Gary Sharon. That guy.

For a while, right?

Yeah, For. Yeah, for a short bit. Mostly with extreme. Right. Like, that's. That's where we know Gary from. And Gary, I've had the pleasure of being on stage with him. When he walks on stage, he turns into Gary freaking Sharon and it's crazy.

Like alter ego.

Yeah. And, and I mean he is, he's a great performer and, and he pulls the crowd in and all of that, but as soon as he walks off stage, like you're sitting and having a pizza with him, he's just a normal dude. He talks less than you and I do. He's the quietest guy at the table.

Wow. Well, maybe it's that. Remember we did.

It's confidence is part of it, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least.

Communicates confidence. Whether or not that's actually confidence or not, I, I don't know.

But yeah, it maybe, you know, we, we did episode 530 about this alter ego effect.

Yeah.

And, and I was presenting it in a framework like kind of protecting your true self online as you grew a brand or something like that. But also maybe you could apply it towards, to this where, hey, when I'm on stage or I'm giving a presentation, I'm the super business guy or whatever, but when I, you know, step off, I'm just Shannon and let's grab a beer and relax and. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, that's good. That's good.

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Yeah, that's good. And that's why I wanted to ask you this week and talk to you bring up this subject of coaches and courses because, you know, I, I go back and forth because sometimes they get a bad rap. But you know, in my life, most of the time I've, I've benefited, you know, significantly from both those things.

Except when we've had them as guests on this show.

Yeah. Now why is that? Is that, Is it. Okay, so let's, let's, let's back that up. That's an excellent point. So, okay, what makes a good coach? Right? What is it? Is it their ability to ramp their ego up and down? Is it more just like I always think it's what their experience like we hired a coach when we were publishing our first small business guide. Right. I forget her name, but she was terrific.

Yeah. It was through, I forget the name.

Of the self publishing, Self publishing school, something.

And her name was Lise L I S E. But that's right, she doesn't, she doesn't work there anymore.

Do that anymore. Yeah. But what I loved about it is that she focused on her credibility and shared here's all the books I published, you know, and we could instantly see like, okay, she's done this, so we should listen to her. And it wasn't, you know, I see a lot of guy, a lot of 25 year old life coaches on X. Let's just say that. Okay. And we'll use that as the example that's the opposite where I wouldn't necessarily, you know, or I get people in my DM saying, hey, I can get you X number of this and X number of that. And then you go look at their account. You're like, what? How could you know? That's ridiculous.

That's so, yeah, you can do this for yourself first, buddy.

Correct. You haven't. Yeah. So a good coach would be somebody that's done it. Right. Do they have to do the exact thing they're coaching you on?

See, I, I think it depends on what it is.

Yeah.

Right. Like I, I really, I, I, I think this is true because I, it for like the self publishing school that was handy and necessary for the person coaching us to know the subject matter.

Yes.

Right. For that specific type of thing. Yes. But other types of coaches, you know, I consider a therapist a coach in a sense. Yeah. And a coach a therapist and a coach a therapist. Right. Yeah, yeah. They, they, they can serve the same purpose or similar purposes at least. And I've always felt that part of. I don't want to dismiss the therapists. That's not the intention of what I'm about to say. But part of the value of therapy is that you pay for it and therefore you are engaged. Right. And so I think that's also part of the value of coaching. It doesn't mean that, that it works with any coach bad or good, or any therapist bad or good, but I think part of the value is you've got to be engaged. And usually paying for something helps you more engaged, makes you more engaged. There can be other reasons, of course, but, but, you know, with therapy, if you've got a therapist that is good now, they would have had, by nature of them being able to call themselves and work as a therapist, they would have some training. So they would have the experience, maybe not with your specific issues that you need to work through or whatever, same as a coach, but some experience. Like, for example, you've got some people that are, you know, paying you to be their coach with their business. Doesn't mean you've run a business like theirs, but you've run enough businesses that you have the ability to look with your business brain.

Sure.

At things. So.

Yeah, yeah. And that, that, that's a good point because paying for it, but then also like training, you know, is it. As I'm developing this, this coaching and people are asking me to advise them. I don't have any training as a coach.

Right, right.

But is that, you know, I don't know that the person that coached us had any training. I've hired coaches. I hired a, like, just like a mindset coach. And it was more, they guided me through some, you know, curriculum that they had developed.

Yep.

And I found it incredibly useful. And it's almost like you've got, you're reading a book that's very important and offers some different framework, like the E. Myth, and you're paying the author to talk to you in between chapters. Right.

So I, I, I'm, I'm. You're helping me crystallize what I believe is important in a coach.

Okay. That's what I want to do. Great. That's exactly what I want to do.

Here, is to understand, because I think having the knowledge base is not the most important thing.

Okay.

I think having experience with coaching or, and, or a natural demeanor that is sort of geared for, geared towards being a teacher. I, I, I think like there, there are some people that are super knowledgeable and terrible, terrible teachers.

So the ability to teach great communication, right?

Yeah, well. And empathy and the ability to understand what you need next. Like, to me that's what makes a good teacher, is knowing. And it's best if they sort of intuitively know this. But certainly, I suppose it can be trained into you and you can identify things like, oh, okay, I see where this person's going. They're going to need X next. But if the person, you know, almost the lack of an ego. To go back to our intro topic here.

Sure.

Right. Where it's not about the coach, it's about the person being coached. And so what can I do to help you? Not what can I tell you about how great I am? No, you know what I mean? Like, because in the scenario with, with, with Lisa, who coached us through self publishing school, she did a lot, she knew a lot and she was an okay coach, but a lot of times it defaulted to, well, here's what I did in this scenario.

Yeah.

As opposed to, let me apply what I know to your scenario. We never got that kind of thing from, but we did get valuable things because she was, she had valuable knowledge and she was good. She shared at sharing that. Right?

She was.

And so I think that's like step one for being a good coach. But I think it can ratchet up from there the intuitiveness or the awareness of, I know what you need to know next.

Well, and I'll flip that. As a client of a coach, it's imperative for you to tell the coach exactly what your definition of success is going to be. Yes, I'm hiring you because I want to learn maybe this specific thing or I need help with these things.

See, I think, I think as a client going in and saying, I need to learn this specific thing is selling yourself short. You are going to train the coach in the wrong way. Because my question, if I were your coach and I were a good coach, my question, the first thing I would say if you said, all right, I'm hiring you, Dave, because I want you to teach me about WI Fi networks.

Okay.

Okay, Great. My very next question would be, why? What is your end goal here? Is it that you want to know about WI FI networks, or do you want to get a WI Fi network up and running at your house? Or do you want to be someone that goes out and fixes other people's WI Fi Networks. Right.

Different.

Very different things.

Yeah, very different things.

And I have the knowledge and the same, like there's a, there's a core knowledge base there.

Yes.

That would be perfectly applicable to both. I don't know of a way to mind meld that to you. And so it's better for me if I know why you want this knowledge and how you want to apply it. Because I can teach you. Like teaching you how to do it at home is very different than teaching how to convince other people to do it the right way. Right. Because half of that job is. Even if you're not making money on the stuff that they're using, half of that job is convincing them to trust you.

Of course you're selling yourself.

Yes.

Like everything else.

Like everything else. But even your coach, you, your coach is selling themselves too.

Yeah. Because you're, you're trying to connect with them and they got you. You're trying to be credible and offer, you know, and be, and offer value. And I, I think that's, you know, it's crucial and I think it's the same thing on the, the courses side. Who, who's preparing this course? Look, what have they done?

Yes.

Is it, you know, because you can drop stuff in AI and get a course in, in 30 seconds now. Right. So yes.

If, if you're, that's not where the value is.

No, the value is, hey, this is how I did something. These are all the things I learned along the way. If.

Yes.

And if you want to be like, be where I am in your X months or X years behind, this is how I, I can help you get to this point. And I, Yeah. So it's, it's, it's what to look for. And, and I would love, you know, feedback from our listeners. Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. What do you think of coaches? What do you think of courses? What have you used and you know, share your inspiration, your good stories, bad stories with us so we can, you know, help each other.

Yeah, absolutely. What makes a good coach? And if you are a coach, let us know.

Let us know.

We made a rule not to have coaches on the show.

Exactly.

However the rules are meant to be broken. You can convince us to have you on the show. If you're going to come on and talk about coaching and not just talk about your coaching business, we'll let you tell people how to find you.

That's what really got me because we decided there's just, it's not authentic. So how do we do?

It sucked. Yeah, it was awful.

Yeah.

But awesome. But there's somebody out there that's good at this.

Yes.

Yeah. So let us know. FeedbackUsBrain show. We'd love to hear from you. Check out LinkedIn.com BusinessBrain. Of course. And keep living that charmed life. We'll see you on Friday.