Exiting the Cocoon Continued – The Coach
As someone who has been coaching business owners for a long time it’s very odd that I’ve never really engaged a coach until the past couple of years. I hired a coach to help me through the end of 4-Profit and then, when I was in the middle of my challenging time recently I hired a coach here in San Diego. I met with at least 4 or 5 potential coaches and selected Michael McCafferty, who was the best option for a number of reasons. Michael was introduced to me by my friend Alexis Dixon who spoke very highly of him. I can’t believe how helpful and kind Michael has been. I also appreciated his entrepreneurial background and his positive attitude.
Michael was the original creator of TeleMagic, the first CRM package ever developed. He lives in Del Mar, about 15 minutes from my home, and is in his mid-70’s. He coaches people to help them and make a difference because he definitely doesn’t need the money. His focus is very much aligned with mine, focusing on a positive mental attitude. In the early years of Michael’s business he handed out these 11 x 20 inch posters that had 10 principals to run your business by and a saying by Goethe on the other side. The quote was all about taking action and that nothing happens until you fully commit, and when you do fully commit the world will conspire in ways that you can’t imagine. When we started working together Michael had me focus on keeping a score card on a few key metrics; how much sleep I got each night, my weight each morning, my diet, my meditation practice and my to do list/goals for the day. I so wanted to be out in the marketplace working and interacting with people, but my energy was so low it didn’t make any sense to do that. Michael was right, I needed to get into a positive state of mind before I could pursue my next endeavor.
In our conversations we talked about his life, his experiences and how he had achieved some amazing things. He also shared some personal tragedies in his life that made the successes seem not so important. When we first started together he was so focused on the positive mental attitude (PMA) and I fought it for a couple of weeks. I adopted a positive mental attitude in my late 20’s and had stayed insanely positive until this point. So, if I ended up in this place by adopting this positive attitude maybe that was the issue that caused me to get here. Why were my efforts not achieving the desired result? If I just dropped the PMA and was a lot more humble and subdued maybe I would be better off. In the end I don’t believe the positive mental attitude was the issue, having it is a good thing.
What I’ve realized over the past few months is that it wasn’t the PMA that got in my way, it was the focus on me trying to prove something to everyone around me and trying to tell them how to live their lives. It was really my ego that was getting in my way, not the PMA. If I stopped focusing on what I wanted the world to do and started listening to them about what they want, maybe that would be a good thing. So, that is what I’m doing. I’ve always known that business owners want to make more money, whether they are purposeful or not. What I’ve done best my whole life is to network and build relationships that lead to making more money. I love the art of relationship development and learning new ways to initiate relationships and deepen the ones I already have. I would consider myself an expert in that area, so why not focus my business on that? Why not focus the way that I make a living helping business do what they want to do most, generate more income.
So, that is what’s next for me. My new company is called 5 Dots and we are a business development firm focused on helping business generate more warm leads. I have always said that most people don’t have enough good clients because they don’t have enough prospects. If they don’t have enough prospects then every prospect looks like a client. The way to get more prospects is to learn how to develop deep relationships, understand how to deliver a powerful story, identify your target market to tell that story to, identify the key influencers and strategic alliance partners that will help you meet your target market and finally, you need to manage all of those relationships. So, those are the 5 Dots. I will start to blog twice a week in the coming months, once on my personal site about what’s going on in my life and once a week on 5 Dots around a topic related to business development. I’m super excited about where this is going and will continue to keep you updated along the way.
To connecting the dots ….. one dot at a time!
Larry Kesslin 