How To Become A Truly Masterful Coach: An Interview With Toku McCree

I'm so excited to have Toku Makree here. He is the co founder of Samurai Coaching Dojo, which is. I'm going to let him intro it, but my understanding is that it's a really practice based way of achieving coaching mastery. So for those of you who maybe didn't resonate so much with the old school coach trainings, but you want to make sure that you're delivering value to your clients, not just becoming a great marketer. This is where I send a lot of people who ask me coaching skills related questions. And I've been really excited to sit down and chat with Toku to just share with you guys because I really focus on the marketing side. He really focuses on the coaching mastery side with a little bit of sales as well. And so you need both. You can't just be the marketer, you can't just be the great coach who's kind of the undercover coach who no one knows about. So you need both. And I have been really excited to share with you guys. So Toku, I guess welcome and I would love to just have you talk a little bit about what you are doing in the coaching dojo and just correct me where I was wrong in.

Any of those places. Cool. I am happy to do it. Thanks for having me on. Give me a chance to talk to your community. What you built over there is really incredible. So I am just really honored. Thank you. To get on jam with you. I think I'll kind of introduce it by telling a story about actually the first time I hired a marketing coach. Is that okay with you?

Please? Sounds great.

So I like a lot of coaches. When I got started, I transferred over from coaching from being a personal trainer and I said, okay, I'm going to grow my business. And I hired a marketing coach. Paid way, just more money than it ever paid before, ever. And first session she was like, all right, we got to get you your niche, we got to get your ultimate result. And she was like, get your thing. And so I got a niche, I got my ultimate result and I went to work and I did not get any clients. It just was. It was, it was a mess. And she was really confused because she was a good marketing coach, but she was like, this isn't working. And I was doing everything I thought she wanted me to do and it wasn't working. And I remember I was sitting in a Zen temple, actually. I was meditating. I'd gone to the Sunday service and I realized I was like everything I was doing about my business was completely wrong. And I needed to do something completely different. So I fired my marketing coach, I went back to the drawing board and I started to really get to know myself as a coach and get to know who my clients were. I started really focusing on mastery and discovering, like, what is this unique thing that I bring to the coaching world? What are the techniques, what are the tools that I can bring? What are the philosophies that are really my own? What can I learn from the great coaches? And within about 12 months, I had built a six figure coaching business from basically not having any clients for the first six months of doing my coaching. What was interesting was that a lot of the stuff that I had learned from a marketing perspective that she taught me really started to work. But it didn't start to work until I discovered who I was as a coach, what I was there to do, and understood that I was really good at what I was offering. I really developed this sense of confidence. And so I think there's a real natural interplay into what we do in developing really great coaching mastery, helping coaches understand what their voice is and what their mission or philosophy in the world and what you do. Because for me, when I brought that sort of confusion and that doubt into a marketing person and had to try to help them grow my business, I was lost. But as soon as I started from this place of confidence, from ability and a clear understanding who I was as a coach, then all the marketing stuff worked. Not just pretty well, it worked incredibly well. So I think that this conversation we have today is going to be awesome because I think the two parts fit together so naturally and so beautifully.

Yeah, that's brilliant. It makes me think about something that I recently heard. I think I mentioned to you. I went to one of Kyle Cease's events and he had a really great insight, which is instead of thinking about how you want to market something, think about why you want to market something. So if you had like the cure for cancer, obviously there'd be a powerful why and the how would kind of take care of itself because you knew you were confident that it was going to help people. And so if you're asking yourself the question, why do I want to market your coaching? And you can't think of any reasons besides self serving reasons like make more money or building a business, it might be too early to think about how to market it. You may need to get to the point where why you need to market it is so clear because you have that grounded confidence that you were talking about and build from there. So I Think that's a great insight.

Yeah. And I think it's interesting. I think people think a lot about, okay, I'm going to do my coach training and then I'm going to hire a marketer and then I'll make a bunch of money and that's it. And I wander off to the sunset, live happily ever after. And my experience of both coaching mastery and practice and developing yourself as a coach as well as doing sales and marketing for coaching, is it cyclical? Right. It's like you kind of take a guess and then you little marketing, you got a few clients and then you learn a little something. Then you go back to the drawing board, you develop your coaching skills more, you develop your being more, go back to marketing and hone your message like it's these. I think people think it's like one and done. Both coaching mastery and marketing, it's like a one and done process. But my experience is the world's best coaches, they're going through the cyclical process of they're always improving, they're improving themselves, and as they do that, they're improving their messaging, they're improving their marketing, they're improving their skillset, and they're doing this over and over and over again as a practice until they get to a place where they're some of the world's best coaches. And by the way, they have incredible messaging and by the way, they have great marketing and they're great at sales. And because they've committed to this process of deliberate practice, which is, by the way, what science tells us is the most effective way to learn and improve anything you do is by going through a process of deliberate practice.

So tell me a little bit about how you think about applying deliberate practice to becoming a better coach.

Sure. So I think if you look at most of the coach trainings that are out there, they're teaching you a kind of step by step formula, right? So it's the client comes in, you do a life wheel with them, you identify that they're not happy with their marriage and their job. And then you like, great, we're on a seven. We're gonna move this to a ten. Right. And you kind of run them through that process.

Dude, I'm smiling. Cause the damn life wheel, dude, it's like, if you want a way to instantly not stand out as a coach, definitely use the life wheel. Right. Because, you know, 50% of other coaches learn the same thing and they'll do the same thing anyway. I'm sure life wheel's great. And it's fine.

It's a great tool, right?

Just make sure if you're. One of the things that I always say is if you're always the person who's using someone else's tool, you'll always be the student and they'll always be the leader and there'll never be any way to stand out until you create your own mojo. So anyway, I jumped in, but I had to attack that.

I get it, I get it. It's so true. So the way I developed my approach as a coach or my abilities as a coach was very opposite. So I didn't actually have a lot of traditional training. I lived at a Zen monastery for two years. So I had a sort of Zen background. But when I got into coaching, I basically did all this stuff that now we teach in the dojo. Which is the first thing I did is. And this is the first part of deliberate practice, which is you got to study the Masters. So so many people, when they go to coach trainings, they study with the teacher of the coach training school, right? Which is usually somebody who is a coach who wasn't very successful. And that's why they got a job training other coaches, right? They're like, well, I don't need to go build a business. I'll just get a job at CTI at CoActive Coaching, and I'll train other coaches and that'll be great. So you're learning, you're not learning for the Masters, but you're learning from other teachers who don't really know how to build a coaching business. And their coach experience is basically about how to teach you how to build them up to do the model, right? And so that's not what to me deliver practice. If you're going to develop yourself as a coach, go study the best coaches in the world. Watch videos of Rich Litvin, Steve Chandler, Tony Robbins, Byron kd, spend time with really great coaches, really understand from the inside out what they do, and then recreate that for yourself, right? So that's. The first part is study the Masters. Second part is you need to pick a focus and become obsessed with that focus and be a terminator in what you're practicing. So don't just study everything. Study where is it for you? Where are my weak points as a coach? Where are the gaps in my knowledge and how do I focus completely on improving those gaps? Most of the coaches that come in the coaching dojo, I would say 75 or 80% of what they're doing is really good. Same thing when I watch sales conversations you might even notice for marketing as well, like most of what they're doing is really good, but the 10% or 20% that they're doing, that's not very good, that feels kind of awkward. Can just destroy a really great coaching session, right? Because if their lead in isn't good or they're not picking the right topic to coach on, if the client says something kind of a little bit interesting and they miss it, you've missed tons and tons of opportunities. And so it's understanding where your gaps are and getting really, really good at identifying those gaps and working in them. And then the last part of this is really a part of iterating on your models and recreating your mental model. So creating for yourself a really robust model of coaching and then deconstructing it and recreating it yourself. So that when you go out to coach, you may be using the life rule, you may be using the tools that existed, but you're bringing them forward in a way that's completely unique and completely you. So it feels like when they're talking to you as a coach, they're talking to someone who's truly a master of the craft, truly is offering something that's different and. And it feels. The client can feel it. The client can feel that they're working with someone who has really owned what they're doing and offered to the world. And you can only get that by developing and going through this process to live practice.

Amazing. Did you use the word Terminator for step two?

Yeah. So it's actually an anagram. It's. I can't remember what the word for it is, but.

Acronym.

Acronym. Thank you. It actually says spotfire. Study the masters. Pick a focus, get observed, become a terminator, get feedback, iterate on your ideas, recreate your models and experiment. So it spells Spotfire. Basically a breakdown of the book. Couple different books I've read. Masteries. One of the other ones called Peak by Anders Ericsson, that breaks down like, this is the science. If you want to get good at anything, tennis, piano, sales, you use the process deliver practice. Amazingly enough, our medical schools and our public education system is not based on delivered practice, which is why it does not produce great results when it comes to skills. And most coach training is not based on delivered practice, based on a traditional academic model, which is fine if you want to learn When Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue, but is awful if you want to learn a skill. Right? If you actually want to learn a skill. And coaching is primarily not about academic knowledge, primarily a skill It's a series of soft skills that can make you incredibly powerful at changing people's lives, but you have to treat it like a skill, not like an academic study group.

I love that. So one of the things that I found interesting was you mentioned basically working on your weaknesses, because one weakness can really diminish your power in a conversation. How do you square that? Or how do you view that in your mind, working on your weaknesses versus doubling down on your strengths as a coach? And how do you tackle both of those?

I mean, to me, you reveal both of them. Because what I found as working with coaches is that we're totally unaware of the places we're really, really awesome. And we're also very unaware of the places where we're just screwing up. We're usually kind of aware of this stuff on the edges, but we're completely blind to these two. So I did a VAP day with my coach, Hans Phillips. He's incredible guy. He's one of the founders of accomplishment coaching. He doesn't work with them anymore, but he was one of the founders, and I did a weekend with him, and he had me call a bunch of people and do one of these exercises. It's like, tell me what shows up when I walk in a room. This word kept coming up again and again, which is adventure. And I was like, adventure. I'm not the adventure guy. What are they talking about? I'm kind of a homebody. I like watching movies. When I started to think about it, I was like, I've been to every state in the United States. I spent a month traveling in India. I've hiked a bunch of national parks. I've moved across the country three times. The way I got my fiance is I showed up on her doorstep with flowers the night after our first date, which we had in California, and told her I was moving her to New York. I was moving to New York to be with her. I guess I'm kind of adventure, right? Like, that is actually one of my essence words, but I was completely blind to it. I wasn't aware of it. So now when I do my marketing or do my coaching, I talk a lot about adventure, but I had no idea that it was there until I had that insight. And the same thing is true of my weaknesses. So often when I'm coaching, one of my weaknesses is that I'll give answers a little too quickly to clients sometimes or I won't. I'll talk just, like, a little bit too soon. Like, it could even be just a couple seconds. Like, Too soon talk. And I need to leave more space in my coaching conversations. And I didn't realize either of those two until I had someone watch me coach and say, toku, here are the things that you're doing that are really great. We call them brilliance in the dojo. We say in the dojo you want to lead with Bo, brilliance and opportunity. So this is what you're doing really well. This is your brilliance. And here's the opportunity, here's the place that you're missing. And so to me, it's that process of watching your own coaching and have someone else watch your coaching, ideally a master coach and one of your peers. And then ideally a client who can give you good feedback. They can tell you what you're doing really well so that you can do more of it. And they can also tell you where you're struggling so that you can do less of it or change it or transform it in a way. So that thing that's a little bit of a weakness can actually become something powerful that affects your clients.

Yeah, that's amazing. One of the things that I really admire about what you're doing is that you made that point about someone at CTI or whatever it is. And I'm sure there's people who get a lot from that, which is fine. And, but like, I've even had clients from the marketing side say, like, oh, I'm worried to go like to whatever above 500amonth because that's what the coach who was teaching us at the training program was charging and they're teaching us. So like, how could I charge that when they were the ones teaching us? And it goes back right back to the point that you made, which is like, there's a reason that they're teaching you. And not to say that you couldn't have a successful coaching practice and not also want to give back. But as a general rule, if they, if what they wanted to do is coach and they had a full client roster charging the rates that built a sustainable business, they might not be there. So what I like about you is that you've built something that is outside of the traditional kind of the traditional options, but it's not this total like wild west go rogue. Because what some people do is, all right, that didn't. I don't resonate with the traditional option. So I'm just going to be totally self taught. And sometimes what that means is I'm just going to get paid to coach and not really work on the coaching. And the problem you run into there Is in any sport. Like I was a wrestler. There were times we practiced, there were times we competed. If you don't practice, you're just competing the whole time, which makes it really hard to learn because it's hard to learn and mess up when you all start getting. So yeah, I don't know if you have any, any comments, but kind of on that model of having a place where people can learn and mess up and be judged outside of a paid coaching session.

Yeah. We talk about it as a low stakes practice versus high stakes practice. Right. If your only time your coaches are like, I practice, I coach clients all the time. They give me great feedback. Clients do not know how to give you good feedback. They don't know what coaching is. Right. It would be like trying to get tennis feedback from people who like, well, it'd be like trying to be trying to like coach your football team based upon what people say on like college football message boards. Like, oh, I'm going to develop my coaching strategy doing that. That's what it would be like. And it's crazy. It doesn't make any sense to do that. Right. So you need feedback from people who are going to give you really good feedback. And you need a place to do low stakes practice. A place where you can go screw up, make mistakes, take risks and find out which of those risks pay off and which of them don't. I mean, that's part of the problem is that coaches come out of these coaching schools, they go into the coaching world and they're afraid to break the mold. They're afraid to try new things until they go take. You know, that's why coaches are always taking new trainings. I want to take new trainings and learn more stuff. So it's okay for me to go try stuff. But no one's giving them the space to actually experiment and to try what they do. One of the things that we do in the dojo, we have one call that's called the radical experimentation call. And we say we challenge people to completely break the pox on coaching. So we've had people had their client pretend that they were a drag queen and coach them as their drag queen Persona. We've had coaches coach clients using an iTunes playlist. Right. And the idea is to like, learn how do I take a coaching idea, something from my past or my history, apply it to a client and then understand did it work or not and what can I do to make it work going forward? Right. So it's this chance to have that low stakes practice environment. That's really incredible. And the last thing I want to say about this is that, like, we didn't create the dojo as a way to create extra money, right? I mean, you know, we do make some money off of it. But I created the dojo because I realized that I only want to work with. I only work with four clients a year. I make good money doing it, but that's not enough, right? If what I really want in the world is, I want. I think coaching is incredibly powerful technology that can change the lives of our clients and change the lives of leaders everywhere. And if you look around like, we need better leaders in this world, I can't do it for a year, man. If I live to 100, you know, that's like a handful of leaders that I'm changing. I need there to be more incredible coaches in the world to go out and be doing this work. And when I looked around to say, okay, who's doing it? Who's creating incredible coaches? I just didn't find. I didn't find anything that was inspiring to me. I didn't find anything like, great, this is the thing that's going to help. And so I said, screw it. I'm going to create it myself. I'm going to build for myself the program that I wish existed when I was starting out as well.

So let me ask you a question. There was a process before you started the dojo and you mentioned how you started with marketing. You needed to go to the meat and potatoes of it. And then later when you went back to marketing, it was effective, but what were you doing? Because I can hear people saying, okay, the dojo sounds amazing and I kind of want to do that now. But also, is there a way I can get started without the dojo? What were you doing or what can you recommend during that time when you were just developing as a coach on your own without a container to practice?

I mean, basically all the stuff we do in the dojo is the stuff that I was doing ahead of time. We basically designed the dojo after that. So I had a couple of friends that I was really good friends. It was actually Christina, who's my fiance and the co founder of the dojo. Her and I were having conversations. We were trading coaching and talking a lot about what coaching was. So that's one of the things you do is just find a friend and just start trading coaching and talking about it. Talking about it a little bit is better than not talking about it at all, right? And you're going to get some Feedback. So I would just start there, like have a practice session with a coach, just go and start, we call them sparring matches. Go find a sparring partner, start sparring and talking about coaching. What do you like? What's working? Well, you don't get the advantage of having the attention of a master coach to doing that, but it's a great place to start and then start to study and analyze. What coaches are doing are really good. So we developed a tool that I hope eventually every coach in the world will use called the Coaching Canvas. It's actually a simple analytical coaching creation tool that allows you to watch a great coach and break down what they're doing. Right. We break the coaching conversation down into four parts. There's the open, the drop, the shift and the close. You create context and connection. You choose something to coach around, then some sort of shift happens and then you integrate that shift into the world. So you can watch any coach, coach. You can use this four part process to understand what they're doing. So if you want someplace to start, start there. But the hard thing is that, and the reason we created the dojo the way it was was that I basically had to, it became an almost full time job to teach myself how to do coaching better. And so I'm, I'm crazy. Like I had 30 jobs before I was 30 years old. I studied philosophy in college. I've trained at a Zen monastery. So I took all of that stuff and applied it to coaching. I said, great, I got to practice all the time. I have to deconstruct all the coaching philosophy I can get. And I, the reason why I had 30 jobs before I was 30 is I love to learn things, but I hated doing them. So I'd learn a job and I'd be like, great, I learned it, I'm bored now and I'll go do something else. So I basically taught myself rapid learning and deliberate practice. So I just applied that to coaching. And so the hard part is like, you can kind of do it on your own, but you, you need, it's easier if you're someone like me. So if you're someone like me, don't take the dojo. Just be yourself and you'll figure it out. But if you're the kind of person that needs that kind of structure, then really got to find a community of people to help you do it. Otherwise it's just, it's a really difficult process to learn yourself.

The biggest part too is like, I don't know about you, but the coaches who come into My programs don't actually know a lot of coaches. It's one of those weird things where somehow you, like, decide, I want to be a coach one day, which is this weird thing. No one really takes it seriously for a bit. And then you don't know anyone until you start to get into community. So you either take a program like this and you take a marketing program. You go to an event, you know, you meet other coaches. So you might not know who would even be your sparring partner, you know?

Yeah, I joined. I joined. I joined a very expensive, high level mastermind around this process.

That's the most expensive way to do it.

You can do it that way. I mean, I learned a lot from that group other than just this. But that was one of the biggest things I got was I got to spend time with really great coaches and watch them coach. So this is. Joining the dojo is a much cheaper option. But, you know, I got a lot out of paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time doing it. I just. I don't want other coaches to have to do that, because most coaches won't. Right. And that's what we created, what we did.

Could you break down again that coaching canvas, the four steps, and just go a little bit deeper into each? Because we did. I feel like there's a lot of magic there, but we went through it pretty fast.

Sure, sure. So I'll kind of tell you the backstory of how we created it. So we. We wanted a tool to help us watch coaches coach and understand what they were doing. We wanted an analytical tool. And so I actually looked at how do other people who do mastery, how do they study masters and understand what they do? And I actually looked at chess. I was on the chess team in high school, middle school, actually, I was a little cooler in high school. And then when I looked at chess. So there's these kind of three or four components to chess. But one of the things people study a lot are openings and closings. So openings and endgames. It's like a big focus of study in chess. How do you open the game? How do you close it? And Christine and I started talking like, what if we designed something like that for coaching? So we have the opening of the coaching conversation, the close. So what happens in the middle? So we started to talk a lot about what happens in the middle of a coaching conversation, which is this drop and the shift. And so that's how we kind of developed the basic model. And what we realized was that all coaches, really great coaches, they had this really incredible way of opening a coaching conversation. So Rich Lipvin does this really well. He creates this incredible sense of awe. Tony Robbins, like, swears at people and kind of wakes them up. But they create this really powerful opening to the coaching conversation. They're developing this context, this rapport, and they are instantly communicating to the client. This conversation is unlike a normal conversation you're going to have. And so what we noticed was a lot of new coaches didn't spend a lot of time in their opening. So just like they kind of do a little chit chat and they'll get like, great, what do you want to coach on? And they would leave so much material on the table, right? If you actually take some time to connect with someone, create some context for the coaching, create some agreements, have them feel that this conversation is really different, it actually does a ton of the work for you, right? If you skip over this part of the open, which everyone wants, like, I just want to get to the coaching. You skip over that, like, you lose all this magic that can be created in a coaching conversation because they're going to go into the conversation just like, well, this is a regular conversation. And so you have to do a bunch of work in the back end to, like, make up for that. So the opening is really about building rapport, setting context and containers. You're creating the container for this magic of the coaching. The second phase is what we call the drop. And so most coaches, they don't do a drop. They just. They just accept whatever context the client brings. Like, great, what do you want to coach on today? The client will say, I want you to coach me on making better smoothies. And they're like, great, tell me what kind of frozen fruit you have in the fridge. Tell me what kind of blender you have. And then they'll start coaching from there. What does the client actually want? Like, why do they want to make better smoothies? What is it about the smoothies that's problematic? And so really great coaches, when we study them, they spend an incredible amount of time identifying exactly what the coaching is actually about. Right? And what happens is the reason why we call it the drop is, is my experience as a coach is when I find the thing, the thing underneath the thing, the thing hiding behind the thing that they first brought. When you find that thing and ask about it, the client drops it. You just feel this like, ugh, like, yeah, now we're in the coaching conversation now. Now the magic can happen, right? And so it's this really visceral experience. When you find the drop. So the whole second section of a coaching conversation is about finding a drop. And I tell new coaches or even experienced coaches, I would rather spend 55 minutes of a coaching conversation finding something to drop around the real thing we're coaching around, then spend five to 10 minutes kind of picking something wrong, and then spend the rest of time coaching. Because if you don't find the right thing to drop around, you're not getting into the meat of coaching. That's the second part. That's the drop. The third part is the shift. So pure coaches would say that the shift is all about the client having an insight. But if you watch really great coaches, they don't always wait for the client to have an insight, right? Sometimes that might happen. Sometimes we get lucky. But sometimes the coaches is challenging the client. They're drawing something out, they're reflecting something. And the shift is anytime the client sees their own life, their own perspective, the thing they're dropping around from a completely new point of view, whether that's we're showing to them as coach or they see it new on their own. And so instead of treating the shift as sort of like, let's cross our fingers and hope they have an insight. I've really. We've really looked at and studied well. How do great coaches create shifts? When do they let the client have the insight, have it through creating space, through leaving quiet space there. And when does the coach create it? When does it challenge them? How do they change their perspective? Like, what is actually going on right before and around that insight? And the last part is the close. And most coach, the way they close is a great. What's your action item for next week? So we call that like a traditional close. But there's so many amazing ways to close a coaching conversation. You could have them create their action steps. You can let them simmer. Simmering is one of the most powerful things that I've seen. Coaches. Tony Robbins does it really well. Rich Lipman does it really well. Where you actually leave the client in process. You don't wrap it up in a tight, nice bow for them. You let them sit with the question, with the pain, with the struggle. They brought in the coaching session and let them have those insights. Keep going. And if you want to sell coaching and you can learn how to simmer, man clients that you leave on simmer, they will tell all their friends about how amazing their coaching conversations were, how amazing you are as a coach, they'll go home and tell their wife, they'll tell their husband I got to talk. I don't care what this guy charged. I got to pay him. It was the most incredible conversation I ever had. If you wrap it up in a nice little bow every time, they're going to say, great, I know my action item. And they're going to go tell their friends, my coach gave me some homework. Who wants homework? Who wants a coach that gives them homework? Right. We want coaches to give us this incredible feeling of power. And so learning how to do these four things and studying each one in depth because it's not just about the insights. Study how to do incredible openings, how to create the most powerful drops with your clients, how to shift your clients unlike any other coach can. How to close in a way that leaves that feeling of the power of coaching lingering. If you can learn how to do all four of those things and understand the focus and the power in each one man, you can become one of the best coaches in the world.

What I want people to notice who are watching this is just how obsessed Tofu is with the thing that he's built a business around. And I know you have multiple aspects of your business, but that's what you want. Like, if you can find that obsession, it'll take care of itself. And I love. Like, it's so clear to me that you've thought about this, you've tweaked it, you've tried things, you've had to change it, and that's amazing. So we have the open, the drop, shift, the close. Okay, So I really like that framework. So something came up as you were talking, which was one of the reasons I hire coaches. And by the way, like, I think that an alternative or a compliment, ideally a compliment to doing something like the dojo is. Is just make sure you're working with good coaches. Because it's almost like if you played football for almost your whole life out through college, then you went D1, and then you wanted to coach in college, you would probably not have to take a coaching course. You've been coached the whole time by good coaches, so you'll be pretty well set. So I think just making sure that you have a good coach and you're consistently working with coaches, maybe not every week of your entire life, but that you're filling in the gaps with good coaches. And important. The other thing I wanted to ask about is one of the reasons I hire coaches is just because either consciously or subconsciously, there's an energy they have that I want. Like, there's something they have that I want. And sometimes it doesn't even really have to do with their skill set. Like, I might not know if they're any good at coaching, but it could be, for example, like, one of the first coaches I worked with, Christina Berkley, who, you know, and when we interacted, I was at a time where I was really insecure about coaching or, like, having a coaching business, and I didn't know if it was possible I could make it work. And she was. Seemed very grounded and confident. So I was like, all right, I want that confidence. So I don't know if I would have articulated it then, but each coach I hire, I'm trying to get something from them. It could be like a zest for life. It could be a confidence. It could be an opinion about money that. Like a mindset about money that I want to have. So how do you relate that. The kind of just people wanting to be around a certain energy you have and hiring you for that to the way that you orchestrate and become masterful as a coach, if at all? I don't know if you think about that.

No, we think about it a lot. So we. We call it finding your coaching voice. Right. And so it's the way most coach training works is they just want to get you to do the framework. So just do the framework. Focus on the framework. And so they just teach a framework. We don't actually teach a singular framework. Or if you notice the open drop shift close. It's not prescriptive. I didn't say in the open, do this, gotta do this for the drop. I said, great. Here's what to look for. Here's the questions you should ask. Here's the examination. Here's how you could study it. Here's how you can recreate it for yourself. So what I've learned is that the way I bring forward my best energy as a coach is to understand really deeply who I am a coach and what I'm bringing into the world. And the way to do that is to not try to shove myself into some formula. That was the mistake I made with the marketing coach, was I just. She was just trying to shove me into formula. Something I love so much about your work is that you don't try to shove people into formulas. Right. You're drawing out who they are. And so if you try to shove yourself into a coaching formula, you're basically all anyone's ever going to see is the formula. And guess what? Hundreds of other coaches have been trained in that formula. So you're not unique or interesting at all. But if you put the formula aside and instead use a framework to discover who you are as coach, then your being comes out more and more. What's amazing is that coaches come into the JoJo. We talk about it a little bit, but they're like, this is one of the most transformative programs I've ever done in my life. And all we're talking about is coaching the whole time. But what we're doing is we're saying, look, we want you. Right? I don't believe that. My belief is not that there are bad coaches out there who just are like jerks and are trying to sell people on bad coaching. What I think is that insight. Each and every coach in the world is a really incredible master coach, but they've been told a bunch of crap that hides their essence and who they are as coach. And our job is to move away all the crap and draw out that essence by having them really think deeply about the questions they're bringing into the world. Think deeply about what does it mean for me to bring this formula forward? What does it mean for me to be a coach in the world? And that doesn't come through just learning something and just going through steps. That comes through this really careful examination of who I am as coach. And so if you look at the great coaches in the world, most of them have written books about coaching. They've talked a lot about coaching. They basically have taken the models that other people have had and they've recreated them for themselves. So to me, studying mastery and coaching and being able to bring that special something for that being, that coaching voice that's completely yours, that they're exactly the same thing. If it's done right. Right. If it's not done in this academic way, but actually is done. The delivered practice. And you can see this. Other people who do great delivered practice, nobody plays like Tiger woods, Nobody plays like LeBron James, nobody plays like Venus Williams. And that's because they practice so much, they understand their style of greatness in the world. And then you can. It's almost like you could. You could listen to. You can listen to Venus Williams playing and you could tell that it's her because so much of her essence comes through because of all that.

Yeah, what I like too is you mentioned you'll have the master coach and then you'll have your peers. And this is not just like the blind leading the blind. I've even had people come to my programs and they've been like, oh, like, you know, I had. I did take a coach training and Then like, some of us are going to kind of meet each week to talk about marketing. Like, no one has a real business, so it's like, what are they going to tell you that's going to help? And so having both. But peer feedback is really helpful too, in some scenarios. They just don't necessarily have the experience behind it. They can just give you an intuitive sense and an extra perspective. So, yeah, I think that component is really great too.

One thing I want to say about that is that we actually believe in this, in a 360 point of view. It's what we offer in the dojo. So it's. Most people live inside a coaching bubble. They don't get any feedback or feedback from their clients, which is they pay them or don't, and, you know, there's a lot going on there. So in the dojo, when you practice, you get feedback from your client who's a coach. So they're a client who's a coach who can tell you about your coaching. You get feedback from your peers. And then each group is led by two different master coaches. So this isn't like a, you go study with Tony Robbins, you go study with Rich Lippen. You get the opinion of one person on your coaching. You're getting two perspectives on who you are as coach from two different master coaches and feedback from five of their peers and feedback from a client. So you're getting this incredible insight into your coaching, you know, and so to me, it's. It's not enough to get feedback from your peers is great, but you need this full perspective of feedback from your clients from masters and peers to get that, that full view of what's actually happening in coaching conversation.

You know, what I'm curious about is do you guys offer any sort of like, certification or like, is there like a little badge or like anything like that?

We don't, we don't offer any certification or badge. There's some secret things about the program I can't tell you about because there's. There's stuff that happens. You get things, but I can't talk about it. So we like to keep things a little mysterious. We are, we are a ninja group. So we keep things a little mysterious. But I don't believe in certifications. And the reason is actually very simple. When people get a certification, they think they're good enough. And if you read all the books on practice being, thinking you are good enough is death. Basically, as soon as you think you're good enough, you start deteriorating. If you look at doctors, doctors that have been doing medicine for 10 years without any additional training are worse than doctors right out of medical school. And the reason is that they're not practicing, they're just performing. This is true of drivers. Drivers who've been driving for 10 years are worse drivers than drivers about two to three years after they've gotten their license because their bad habits are just getting replicated again and again and again. Half of the program that we have when people come are coaches who have been coaching for more than five years. So this isn't all just like a newbie program. Like, this is for coaches who are experienced as well. And the reason is very, very simple, is that if you're not practicing, if you're not saying, how good can I get? Right. Most coaches ask the question, how am I good enough? Am I good enough? Can I do it? I'm like, that's a horrible question. Never ask that question because the answer is probably no, you probably aren't good enough if that's the question you're answering. So the question you should be asking is, how good can I get over my lifetime as a coach? How good can I get as a coach? How amazing could I become? Could I, in three conversations, completely change a client's life? Can I do it in one conversation? Could I do it in 10 minutes? Could I sit down next to someone on the bus? This is my goal, is I want to be able to sit down next to someone on the bus and have a being, have a presence that's so powerful, that person gets up transformed. That's my shooting for how can I get so good that just being next to someone changes who they are? And so to me, that's the question you gotta ask as a coach is how good can I get? So we don't do certifications. Cause this isn't a one step process. You come do our program, that's it. We give you the tools that you can reapply again and again through your whole life on this pursuit of mastery, A path of mastery which is never ending. Which is exactly why it's like so cool and so exciting to be on.

Yeah, you gotta stay hungry for sure. And one of the reasons I asked is because that's actually, I feel like a reason why a lot of people will do the conventional trainings. Especially if you're young and you're like, all right, I want to do this new career. But like, people don't really take it seriously. So, like, what could I do? So my parents could look up the website online and be like, oh, this is the thing that's official. And what happens is sometimes people will do the program and they'll get the certification. One of two things will happen. Either they will feel like they're good enough and that they're done, or what I found a lot in my work is that they still didn't get the confidence that they thought they were going to get from the certification. So it didn't bring them any further in terms of the confidence to market themselves. Because what you really need to do is have clients and be working with the clients and seeing that they're getting better and better. And so you need the marketing part, you need the coaching part. But there's part of it where, like, attitude follows behavior, right? That self perception theory idea. Like, there's part of it where you have to be practicing. And what's cool is you give them an opportunity to do that before or money's on the line, or if they've been coaching for a while, obviously without money being on the line in that moment, which is really nice.

Which is awesome. Yeah, it's so true. And confidence is this weird thing where it's like you really, really want it. And of course, all the ways that you get confidence is by doing all the things that you think you can't do until you have confidence. And that's what we talk a lot about, how we improve people's confidence in what we do. Because there's just nothing quite like the confidence you get from practicing and getting real world feedback. It's like once you learn how to ride a bike, you're very confident you can ride the bike because you're getting that real world feedback. Right? You're clear. I'm not falling over, I'm not hitting a tree. I can do it, I can ride the bike, I can ride up a hill, I'm fine. But in the world of coaching, in reality, it's like we're riding this bike all the time. We're blindfolded. It's in a void. We have no idea if we're doing a good job or not. And so the only evidence we have is like, signing clients, which, by the way, like, there's so many things that have to happen before you sign a client to get really good at it. That like, we're basically saying, well, I'm an awful coach because I'm not signing any clients and that I have no idea how to get any better. I don't know if it's my marketing, I don't know if it's my sales I have no idea what it is. All I know is that I'm not making any money, man. You've got to break that problem down. Right? And so that's why I love like having conversations with you. Because it's like great. We can look at my marketing. Great. We can look at my coaching mastery and confidence, my voice, understanding what makes me great as a coach. Great. We can look at sales, we look at all these different pieces. But understand that like really great coaches understand that each has their own discipline, their own thing to work on, their own thing to grow.

Yeah, and that's a great point. You don't have to be good at coaching at all in order to get a client. It's just that in order to keep getting clients.

Right.

You'll run through clients and you'll get a terrible reputation. But so much happen. They pay you before you start coaching in general, depending on the enrollment framework that you use and how coaching based it is. But yeah, that's, I always feel like do both at the same time. Like sometimes I'll talk to people and they'll be like, oh, I want to get better at like I want to basically learn how to coach before I learn how to market. And then you also have some people say well I want to learn how to market before I get better at coaching. But you kind of, I'm just like do both at the same time. Like take my program. Because you need to know how to get clients. Because one of the best ways you're going to practice is working with paid clients and, and then also like work your coaching skills. Whether that's a one off training. Like I always recommend, like don't. It's like that one and done attitude that you said. It's like I'm gonna go to CTI or whatever. I'm gonna get the certification, I'm gonna be done. I'm like do like a weekend training by this dude who seems to like do this other thing and then like read a book. Cause you realize you don't, you know, you're not good at this one part. And this is just like the, the elite level, the higher up level of doing that. And you've brought a lot of those resources in for people.

So. Well, it's, it's, it's just practice, man. I mean it's, you know, I, I, people are gonna get so sick of me talking about practice and mastery. It's all I ever friggin talk about practice. You practice again, Toku? I think I like put in a little thing. I Put an asterisk every time I talked about practice and There was like 20 asterisks in the post, so. But it's the same thing with marketing, right? If people have this attitude, it comes from school, right? It's like I need to get the right answer and then I'll get a grade. Doesn't apply. It doesn't work in business, man. You don't do it once and then you get a grade. Like that's not how it works. Right? That's not how it works in marketing. I mean, messaging or marketing is like you try something out, you kind of get some feedback and then you try something new, and then you get some feedback, you try something new again and again and again, right? It's like I built three really bad websites before I built one good website. But every bad website taught me something about my message, my market, how I wanted to write. But people don't want to do that. People want to spend a month building a website that they put out there and they get no response from. And same thing with coaching. I'm going to go take the class and then I'm going to learn the right way to coach and then I will do it the right way forever. And then I will be doing the right way of coaching and getting no clients, not having any results. But I'm doing it the right way because I want to feel safe. And that's not how the world works. It's not how mastery works in marketing or in coaching. If you want to get good at something, you've got to learn what the messaging is and then practice, iterate on your ideas. Same thing with coaching. You don't just learn one method. You, you practice, you develop your ideas over and over in time. So it's this practice attitude in business and in life that actually makes you way successful. And you know, the education system didn't train us to be entrepreneurs, it trained us to be factory workers. And so if you are stepping into this entrepreneurial world, you have to learn how to embrace practice.

Yeah. And one of the things I'm hearing you say too is learning to love the process. Because I think one of the reasons people want the one and done is because they're focused on the outcome. So could I just get the outcome and be done? But the people who are like amazing marketers and this, the person I'm going to describe in some sense isn't even necessarily me, but the people I see who, like, for example, people who love, like Facebook ads, like, I don't love Facebook ads. I Use them at times for a purpose. But like, you look at the people who really love Facebook ads and funnels and they like love that shit. Like, they love the process of it. They don't just love that it makes money. They're like, I want to go in there, I want to compare this ad set to this ad set. I want to tweak it, I want to do it. And if you're not willing to love the process of something, just you shouldn't do that thing. If you're not willing to love the process of becoming a better coach, it's just the wrong thing because you won't be able to stick with it long enough to get the outcome that you want. So if you can't learn to love the process, whether that's learning to love the marketing method you choose so you can be consistent with it, or learning to love the process of getting better as a coach, just give up now, dude, because just find something that you will love the process on. It's going to be an uphill battle.

Yeah, you can. And you can fall in love with the process. I mean, like, when I first did marketing, I was like, a lot of other people, like, I hate this. This is boring. And then our last call that we did, I was like, I'm fascinated. There's tactical marketing and brand marketing. And like, I applied these same ideas about mastery to marketing and I became fascinated with it. Right? You could become fascinated with anything. Right? And so, and what I love, you know what I love about, like, I love watching your stuff. Because I can tell in the same way, like, you're just fascinated by the process of marketing. Like, this is how marketing works and here's how to break it down. And so for me, it's like, if you're going to invest in something, whether it's somebody in marketing, whether it's something in mastery, you want to invest in the person that is. Like, they're kind of weirdly geeky about it. Like, it's like they're a little too excited. Like, no one should be that excited about marketing. No one should be this excited about coaching mastery. Like, it's. I should have a nice website and I should have my 12 step process and I should, you know, say that I've got, I'm, you know, coaching federation certified. I should have all that. But no, I'm this crazy guy screaming about this thing that I made up. Those are the people that I have learned the most from, the people who are obsessed about this thing. That's one of the things I love about your work is like, I can tell you're obsessed about it and so I love to send people to you because I'm like, I know this guy is as obsessed about marketing as I am about coaching.

Yeah, yeah, definitely let like invest in someone who's gonna help you fall in love with the process of the thing that you know, you need to learn to get to get what you want. And one of the things we overlap on is sales. And I'm sure you can relate to this. Like sales for a lot of people feels pushy or awkward and all the things we hear about it. But sales is like the ultimate opportunity for transformation. You could transform more in the sales conversation sometimes than in the entire six month engagement. And that's a good thing. That's great. If you don't view sales as the gateway to the transformation. Not a chore, a means to the end to then now you can work with the client and start doing the work. Now it's like, oh, this is cool. I get to start my job now. The part that I like. So yeah, it's just an example that comes to mind.

No, I think it's so true. I mean, and we apply, we have a thing called the sales dojo and we apply the same formula to the sales dojo, do the coaching dojo. It's a 360 view of watching how you're doing sales. And I think that it's really good to have with marketing and with sales it's good to have a framework, especially for those two coaching. The frameworks are in some ways less important. But with marketing and sales it's good to have a framework because there's a lot of science, there's a lot of study that's been done around what really works. And the part about sales is there's a formula part, there's an understanding how sales works, especially as it relates to marketing because those two connect to each other really essentially. But then there's also a performance aspect to sales, right? Which is like how do you actually bring your being into the sales conversation? And the sales judge is like, that's what we more focus on is actually like we watch you sell and we give you feedback on how you're selling. And so it's that same experiential process. And so just like the marketing thing, it's like, I think it's if you don't have a clear voice of who you are as a coach, you're going to have a hard time going in and doing marketing stuff because you're going to be marketing somebody who you actually aren't. You're marketing something you wish that you were. You can get a clear voice and bring it into marketing. The marketing should become effective. And same thing with sales. If you have a great marketing and sales process and understand how you really can explain value to your clients and customers, and then you can come over and practice it with other people who are really great at sales, your performance is going to be really effective as well.

Yeah. Marketing, sales, delivery. Three activities that you need to be focused on in your coaching business. Everything else doesn't really matter so much. So you got to constantly be leveling up. So what I know you have the new dojo that's filling. So can you talk a little bit about what's going on there and what people can do if they're like, you know what? I'd rather just not dick around by myself and actually get it done the right way. What is their option there that you have coming up?

Well, so you can do what most people do, which is you can say that I'll do it later. I took a course with Greg. I've got a bunch of stuff. I need to kind of spend some more time on my marketing. I, you know, I don't really have the money right now. After I create a few clients, then I'll invest in my training. So you can do that. That's what a lot of people do.

Can I just. Can I just stop you? Does that drive you nuts? I'll do this. Let me get a client or two first. I'm like, dude, this is the thing that's gonna do it. It's the wrong way. It's the wrong order. I'm sorry, I just.

No, it's okay. It's just. It's fear disguised as priority prioritization. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with priority. You know, there's times I choose to invest in things at different times. But yeah, mostly what, you know, what I hear a lot is I wanna. I wanna take the next dojo. And then we come to the next year and say, I wanna take the next dojo. Right? And then there's the other people that say, like, I'm really scared. I don't. I feel something about this really calls to me. It really resonates to me. I have this doubt about myself as a coach. I feel like I'm not totally confident. I feel like I've got other tools, but for some reason it isn't working right. I have all these marketing materials. I'M getting on calls with clients and like, I just. I don't know, like, it just, it doesn't. It feels like something's a bit off. Right? Or I've been doing this for a while, but, like, I used to love coaching, but I kind of fell out of love with it. And I don't really know. I hear that a lot and I say, great, we can fix that. We can fix it way faster than you realize is possible. We can draw out of you the really brilliant coach that you are. And so you just got to ask yourself, like, hey, are you willing to, like, are you ready to put those doubts aside? Are you willing to come out of this program and be really confident? Are you willing to do something that is really effective and really transformative, that is going to push you to your edge? Because we are not some Come read our checkbook. Thought there are no worksheets, there are no checkbooks, there are checkboxes. None of that. Right? We are going to put you into a situation where who you are as a coach is going to be challenged. What comes on the other side is going to be very different. So if you're that kind of coach who loves a challenge, who's tired of waiting, who tired of waiting, looking for the shortcut to never, like, get you shortcutted anywhere, but actually you're willing to go the slow way, that is the fast route to become really successful. You can fill out an application. We can go on our website, fill application. The deadline is pretty soon. Fill an application or samuraicoachingdojo.com pretty simple to remember. I think you could also go to coachingdojo.com and it reverts. So if you have bad memory like me, you can just go there and fill out an application or like, if you just have a question, reach out to me on Facebook, reach out to me on email. Right? Sometimes the questions I'll bring into I think, Greg, you're going to be on a Dear Sensei, we have sometimes answer those questions live on a Facebook live and this thing called Dear sensei or I'll email you back or hey, I'm not sure. Do you think it's appropriate for me. Let's have a conversation. Right? My mission in life is to create a world of really, really incredible master coaches. It can really shift and bend the culture in the world and the culture of coaching away from fly by night, cheap sell something that's not worth any value to this world of coaches that are incredibly masterful, powerful and are as well respected as brain surgeons. I want you to be able to go into a party and say, I'm a life coach. People go, wow, that's so cool. That's what I want for coaches in the world. And so if you're that kind of person, if you know you're in apply, we'll get you in a conversation really fast. But if you're not sure, send me a question. I'll be happy to answer and support you on what your level of going to mastery is next.

Wonderful. Well, the mission in my business is to unleash potential by connecting coaches with clients. And it sounds like your mission in a way. Obviously you didn't word it this way, but you unleash potential too, by helping coaches become more masterful. And as we talked about, you have to have both. What final kind of question or objection that kind of came up for me, for someone who's considering it is maybe someone likes the idea of it. They're okay with it being an investment. They understand that there's a lot of moving parts and there's a lot of value there, so they're okay with that. But they're getting held back by, like, I'll be honest, Like, I'm even thinking for me, like, I would do this. This sounds great. Like, I'm always looking to be better as a coach. And one of the things that comes up for me is it almost is like, there's almost an ego check component because you know that you're going to be in there with other coaches. And I like how you said that. A lot of the coaches are like, have been coaching for five years. So I think that helps with this objection. But what would you say to someone who's like, I. I'm worried about what doing this would say about me, and I'm worried about, like having peers see my coaching and like just being exposed in that way. What would you say to that person?

You, you should be scared. You should be good. You know, it's like somebody looking the junk drawer of your house, it reveals who you really are. And so I get it. It's scary. Like, I get it. But the question is, do you want your clients to be seeing this? The parts of you that you don't want other people to see? Do you want that coming out in places you can't hidden, or do you want to come and reveal those parts in a way in a community that's going to make you feel really safe, that's going to give you support, that's going to surround you with people who believe in you? And they can draw out the brilliance from those hidden parts of what you do. I mean, part of the reason why we call it the Samurai Coaching Dojo instead of just the coaching dojo or the extreme coaching Dojo is we have fun with all of this. We use martial arts cues to start and end our rounds. We've created a really loving community. We expect the best from the coaches that come through our program. We also support them unlike any other program you're going to find out there. And we make the process really fun. I get that you're scared. You should be scared. And that's exactly the reason why you should probably do it.

I love it. That's great, man. That's perfect. I think that's all we have. Samuraicoachingdojo.com if you want to get into this round, you need to apply. Like, just do it now. Just make it easy on yourself and just do it now.

Yeah, you can apply even if you're not sure. We'll have a conversation with you and help you figure it out. So if you have any doubts, go ahead and apply.

That's the biggest. That's the biggest thing is sometimes people like, I don't want to apply because I'm not sure it's right for me. And it's like, that's why you should apply, because you're gonna have a conversation. And I know by just your MO and the way you do sales, like, the goal of that conversation you ultimately have with Toku or his team isn't gonna be to get you into the dojo. It's just gonna assess whether it's the right fit for you now. So can't recommend Toku highly enough. Can't recommend the idea of just getting better at the craft itself highly enough. And what that's going to do for your marketing over time. So go do that now. And Toku, thank you so much for your perspective. I learned a ton. I love that four part framework especially. So I'm going to take that away and use that as a mental model and hope to talk again soon. We will be talking again soon.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll send you a link you can share with the guys. We have a whole book about that process you can share with your audience. Perfect.

I love it. All right, man, Have a great day. We'll talk soon.