How to improve your life by 10%.
Updated: Jul 30
5 things you should know about taking your life to the next level.
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First things first... Why should you care?
Answer these questions:
Are you committed to self-improvement?
Are you unsure if you're making the right decisions to improve yourself?
Are you unsure if the actions you're taking to improve your life are working?
Are you committed to taking action to improve your life?
If you answered "YES" to any of those questions then this is for you. Over time, we lose our sense of curiosity. We stop asking "why". We stop pushing the boundaries of who we are, and we settle. If you believe you've settled, there are a number of things you can do to reignite your sense of curiosity and take your life to the next level. One of those things is getting a personal or professional coach.
Let's Get To The Point
Here are the key takeaways from this video:
Personal and professional coaches can improve your success by 10%: Here we discuss what a coach is and what a coach isn't. Some of the best coaches are able to coach and provide mentorship where necessary.
Everyone can benefit from a coach, but some people don't know if it's right for them: Coaching helps people realize their maximum potential so they can go beyond self-actualization.
Personal and professional coaches are valuable because they help accelerate the progress of individuals and businesses: Coaching facilitates the experience of your journey in an efficient and safe manner.
Personal and professional coaches are affordable: In many cases, people avoid obtaining a personal or professional coach because they believe you have to be super-rich to afford a coach. However, in many cases, coaches are more affordable than a night out on the town.
You have FREE opportunities right now to start improving your life: Ask your friends and family members who you trust to mentor you! Although mentors are not coaches, they are a great supplement to having a coach. Mentors give you context about what worked well for them. A coach helps you find out what can work for you. So, get a mentor to see if you benefit from that experience. If you do, explore the possibility of getting a coach, and improve your life by 10%.
DETERMINE IF COACHING IS RIGHT FOR YOU
Full Transcript
[The following is the full transcript of this episode of the What They Don't Teach You In School Channel. Please note that this episode, like all episodes, feature speakers that are often unscripted and unedited. Filmed in one take, the What They Don't Teach You In School Channel one of the most authentic and insightful channels that provide real ideas to help you save time, make more money, and improve the overall quality of your life. Don't forget to subscribe to our website for more free content like this.]
Donnie Thomas:
Welcome to What They Don't Teach You In School, where we teach life. My name is Donnie Thomas. And today we'll be talking about how to improve your life by 10%. Yes, how to improve your life by 10%. Here you'll find ideas that help you to save time, make more money, and improve the overall quality of your life. So don't forget to follow us on social media, visit our website, like, share, and comment on this post because it's through your comments that we can begin to grow as a community. Now let's get started.
Donnie Thomas:
So, before I get started, I always like to ask the question, why do you even care about today's topic? Well, I guess I'll start by asking you some questions to really spark that discussion. The first question is, how many of you believe that your lives could be better? And I want you to think about that. Now, how many of you are actually doing what you need to do in order to get there? And lastly, how many of you believe it's actually working? Now, regardless of what your answers are to those questions, whether it's all yeses or all nos, there is still light at the end of the tunnel. Now some of you might be saying, "Look, there better be light at the end of the tunnel, that's the whole reason why I'm here listening to what you have to say." And absolutely, I'm going to get to it so stick in there with me. But before I get there, I do want to address the question of why the questions that I just asked are so important.
Donnie Thomas:
And they're important because, somewhere along the way when we grow up, we lose our sense of curiosity. We lose the urge to ask why and to push ourselves beyond who we are in order to continue to challenge conventional thinking because we got complacent over time. And I remember when I was young, dumb, and full of fun, me, I was full of fun, I don't know what you all were full of, but I was full of fun. But I was also filled with curiosity, a curiosity that was unrivaled with my friends. I would go home and I would read scientific books just to look up experiments to conduct while I was at home. I would read the encyclopedia when we had the hard copy from A to Z, just to learn about topics and animals and all kinds of people across the globe. I had that sense of curiosity, but that curiosity and that energy needed to be honed and needed to be directed. And luckily for me, I was able to find that direction through my parents and through mentors the coaches that I met along the way.
Donnie Thomas:
Now, when I say the word coach, where did your mind go? For many of you, you probably thought of a stadium, thousands of people. You probably thought about your favorite team or sport. You probably thought about an individual, a more mature individual, standing on the sidelines, screaming, flipping over tables, throwing water jugs, whatever they need to do in order to motivate their team and get to the ultimate goal, which is to win the game. But how many of you thought about a personal coach? How many of you thought about a professional coach? I. know at the time when I was younger, I didn't start to think about those kinds of things until I got a lot older.
Donnie Thomas:
Now, when I got older, I remember being in a leadership position at the organization working for, and I was told that I would be getting a coach as part of the leadership program. And I said, "I get a coach? I get coach? I get a coach." That was big. That was fancy. That's what the big wigs got. But I didn't know what the hell a coach was. I didn't understand what a coach was until a lot later on. I knew as I was going through the experience that it was beneficial for me because I saw progress in my life. I saw things happening that did not happen before because I didn't have that accountability partner holding me to the things that I said that I was going to accomplish.
Donnie Thomas:
It wasn't until later on that I read and learned more about coaching. And the International Coaching Federation defines coaching, and I'll paraphrase it here, as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that helps those clients to maximize their personal and professional potential. And I said, "Ah, there's a baseline. There's a baseline. What a coach is not, a coach isn't a mentor, a coach isn't a counselor or a consultant or even a psychiatrist." Although we would love for a coach to embody all of those things, that's not what coaching is. But the one thing I've found through all of the individuals that have coached me is that the best coaches are able to coach while sprinkling in just a little bit of mentorship as needed along the way.
Donnie Thomas:
But the question still remained, why do coaches matter? Now, as I begin to explore the answer to this question, it reminded me of my time as a consultant. I remember when I onboarded to this consulting firm, one of the partners pulls me into his office and he says, "Donnie, look, you have a bright future. You're very smart. But when you get out there, there are going to be people who ask you what it is that you do, your friends, your family members, and you're not going to know what to tell them." And I said, "So what am I supposed to say?" And he looked at me and he said, "Look, the best way to describe what we do and the value that we provide is through a metaphor. And so you're going to tell them that you're a doctor for businesses." And I said, "I've got it. I understand it," because doctors, they identify, they diagnose, and they prescribe all with the ultimate result of healing the patient.
Donnie Thomas:
And so as a consultant, we identify, we diagnose, we prescribe solutions all with the result of healing the problem of that business. And so I said, "Okay, well, let me try to apply this same kind of thinking to coaching. What metaphor would I use?" Now, the obvious one, which wasn't as obvious as it is now, is to go to thinking about an athletic coach. But I started with thinking about a vehicle because when I thought about my experience with coaches, it was like I was jumping in a vehicle that allowed me to navigate to where I wanted to go a lot more efficiently than I could if I had done it on my own. But I also understood that all vehicles are not created equal. And so I said, "Well, let me digress. Let me go back to the example of an athletic coach, because that's where most people's minds go."
Donnie Thomas:
And so I thought about it, and I said, "Well, that makes sense as well because when you look at the definition of a coach, a partnership with clients in a thought-provoking and creative way that helps that client to maximize their personal and their professional potential, I thought about all the examples of coaches that mentor these young men and women and help them to build the legacy that they want to leave behind for their family, for their fans. I thought about those coaches that help the players to analyze the plays while they're out there on the court, out there on the field. And I thought about the process. I said, "Oh, well this is the process they're going through. They are helping them to plan, position, pursue, and pass on their legacy, ultimately what the result of going beyond self-actualization."
Donnie Thomas:
And for many of you who are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there are several different tiers of need in the human experience. And the top two have to do with esteem and self-actualization. Now esteem really involves the ego, the ego, accomplishing things, status, that's those kinds of things. When we talk about self-actualization, self-actualization has to do with realizing your full potential. And I said, "Ah, I got it. That's so powerful." Coaches help people to realize their maximum potential so that they go beyond self-actualization. And there are actually studies that show that Maslow was actually looking beyond self-actualization, at a concept called beyond self-actualization, which really dives into what legacy you're going to leave behind.
Donnie Thomas:
And so that's why coaching and coaches are so important. That's when I had my aha moment. But, like many of you, I'm also a skeptic. So I said, "Show me the money, Donnie." One of my core principles revolves around fact-based solutions. So I don't do or recommend anything if it's not rooted in facts and research. And so I said, "Let me research." And in my research, I found something that was so, so, so interesting. You see, it was through my research that I found that there was a study that was mentioned by the International Coaching Psychology Review. And in that study, there were two structurally identical seven-week coaching programs that were run. And there was obviously a control group. And in this control group, there were individuals that did not receive any kind of coaching whatsoever. And the results were astounding because what the results showed were that the individuals that received coaching performed from two to 10% better than the individuals that did not receive coaching. And if you don't believe me, I have also included the link for that particular study below, because I want you to fact check me, I'm all about facts.
Donnie Thomas:
But again, this video is about how to improve your life by 10%. And there was my proof. And so after I read and I studied, then I arrived and I said, "Why is it that people aren't getting coaches? Why don't more people have coaches?" So I asked the question. I asked the question to the clients that I coach, I asked the question to my friends, my family, my colleagues. I asked them, "Why don't you have a coach? Why didn't you have a coach?" And the answers that I got back were actually really interesting. There were three key things that were mentioned during these discussions. The first was that some of them just did not see the value of a coach.
Donnie Thomas:
Now, we talked a little bit about the value of a coach and I supported it by the study that I talked about a little bit earlier, but let's go back to the example, the metaphor of the vehicle that I talked about earlier as well. Let's say, for example, they've built a walkable bridge from Washington D.C., where I'm from, all the way to Beijing, China. That's about 7,266 miles approximately. Now, the human being walks on average about 3.1 miles per hour. So at that pace, if you decided to walk alone, you'd get to China in about two and a half years, give or take a year, considering the fact that you would not be able to rest, or you would not be able to eat, or do any of the other things that you would do in your normal human experience along the way. So that's the value of coaching. It facilitates the experience of your journey in a much more efficient, effective, and safe manner.
Donnie Thomas:
Why is that not valuable? What makes that not valuable? Why is 10% more time with your family and your friends not valuable? What makes 10% less money going out of your pockets and 10% more money going into your bank account less valuable? What makes 10% more happier days not valuable? Assuming that the human being lives on average 70 years, that's approximately seven years of happier days and times. Why is that not valuable? Why isn't it valuable? And the other thing that they mentioned was the expense. Well, I'll say this, the coaching experience, depending on what kind of vehicle you use, can be less than it costs to go out and have fun on the weekend. But it's about priority. How serious are you about improving your life by 10%, if not more? How serious of a goal is that for you?
Donnie Thomas:
But the last one, which I thought so pivotal, because here's the opportunity for you to increase the value of your life and improve the value of your life with no cost, it's ego. How many of you have friends and family members that you're close to, that you can confide in? How many of you have friends and family members that are good at something that you would love to be good at as well? Perhaps they're amazing in their relationship. Perhaps they are an amazing businesswoman or businessman. How many of you ask them for help? You see, if you haven't reached out for help, now is your opportunity, now is your chance for that mentorship. It's the stepping stone to coaching. It's an integral part, in my opinion, that supplements coaching. And you can get it for free if you would just look to your left and look to your right and ask those around you for help. And this is why I tell my clients, I say, "Don't allow your ego to get in the way of your evolution. Throw your ego in the trash. Set it out on Tuesday or whatever day that is that they come to get your trash, but throw your ego away." Because when you don't throw your ego away, you lose out on your opportunity to improve your life by 10%.
Donnie Thomas:
Now, with that, I'd like to thank you so much for listening today to How to Improve Your Life by 10%. Don't forget to follow us on social media, visit our website, like, share, and comment on this post because it's through your comments that we can begin to grow together as a community.
References:
GREENE, L., & BURKE, G. (2007). BEYOND SELF-ACTUALIZATION. Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, 30(2), 116-128. Retrieved March 21, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/41288077
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