How To Get The Most Out Of Your Life Coach Or Mentor

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If you're paying anyone or anything for its products or services, then you ALWAYS want to make sure that you're maximizing the value that you're getting from the experience.

If you hire a coach, mentor or invest in a training program, there is a RESPONSIBILITY on your end to ensure that you're getting value.  The coach, mentor, and training program has a responsibility to deliver, as promised, and provide value, however, it's up to YOU to receive that and get the most out of it.

Being lazy, not showing up on time, not taking notes, not asking questions, not taking action – these are all things that are within YOUR control that will determine the results you get.

In this video blog, I share how you can get the most out of your life coach or mentor.

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

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Video transcript

How to get the most out of your coach or your mentor. This is Stefan from ProjectLifeMastery.com coming to you from Phuket, Thailand, and in this episode of #AskStefan, I have a question from someone named Madein. The question is, “Hey Stefan, I just started a coaching program with a life coach. I have a call with him for every two weeks for 30 minutes. How do I make the most out of these coaching sessions? Thank you.”

Two different perspectives

Great question, and there's really two different ways I can answer this, two different perspectives. One as being a student myself, which I am. I'm always investing in myself. I'm always being coached. I'm always being mentored. I have coaches and mentors in my life. It's been that way since I was 18, 19 years old and I started heavily investing in myself. It paid off ever since. I think everybody should have a mentor or a coach. The best in the world have mentors and coaches. If you can't afford one, save your money, invest in it, it's always going to pay off.

The other perspective is from being a coach myself, because since I was 21 years old, I started coaching people first as a dating, confidence, and relationship coach with a company called Lifestyle Transformations, eventually getting into life coaching, and then eventually getting into also coaching people on how to build an online business. Throughout the years, I've coached hundreds of different people, so I have a lot of experience which can really help answer this question for you.

I think that, first and foremost, when you invest in anything, whether that's a coach, a mentor, a program, online training program, a seminar, you always have to accept full responsibility for getting maximum value out of whatever you invest in. You can't just invest in something and expect everything to be solved after that and not have to do any work.

If you invest in a coach or a mentor, first and foremost you have to make sure that you trust that person. You have to buy into whatever it is that they're going to be teaching you. That's very important, because if you have resistance and you're not being coachable, then you're not going to get anything from that.

My bet is that, if you've invested in a coach or a mentor, you trust that person, you've done some due diligence, you believe in them, maybe you follow them a little bit online first and foremost, and they're going to do their part. That's their profession. They have a lot of experience doing it, they have a lot of testimonials, clients they've worked with. They've had a lot of proven track record of success, and so you have to … That person's going to do their part. You have to do your part.

You have to play full out

The first and most important thing is you have to play full out. Meaning, whatever it is that you put into something is exactly what you're going to get out of it. You can't just expect that your coach is going to do everything for you.

Your coach is really there to help guide you, to help support you, to help challenge you, to help hold you accountable, to help you overcome some barriers, obstacles, blocks that might be getting in your way that you might not be seeing yourself because they have an outside perspective on you, to help provide the game plan, the step by step, and give you feedback on different things and help you make the right decisions, the right choices.

That's what they're there for, but ultimately it's up to you to do the work, which is really the hard part of anything. Grinding, hustling, putting your nose down and just doing the work that is necessary to get the value out of the coaching program. You could have the best coach in the world, he can give you all the best advice, the best information, but if you're not doing the work, if you're not applying yourself and taking action, then that's 100 percent your fault. That's your responsibility.

You can reach out to your coach and have your coach maybe help you to help find out why you're not taking action, what's stopping you, what are the obstacles, what are the roadblocks getting in the way that's preventing you from taking action and ultimately getting the results that you want. Your coach can be there for you for that as well, but again, ultimately it's up to you to make the changes necessary to get the results that you're after.

You have to make sure, first and foremost, that you play full out, you put everything in, you're taking massive action, you're being coachable, your coach says to do something, you do it. You don't question it, you don't argue it, you don't have resistance, you're just being coachable and you're trusting that person. If you don't trust them, then they're the wrong coach for you.

Trust and the method to the madness

I always remind myself of the example from the Karate Kid, where Mr. Miyagi is trying to teach Daniel's son karate and stuff, and Daniel just wants to learn the karate moves but Mr. Miyagi has him paint the fence and wax the car and sand the floor, and Daniel doesn't understand any of that sort of stuff and he has some resistance, but ultimately he trusts his mentor and he does it regardless.

I think that's an important thing, because sometimes when you're working with someone and they're coaching you on something, you might not immediately see the benefit of it, but again, there's a method to the madness. You have to trust the person and ultimately believe that this is going to help you to get to where you want to be.

Take action, listen, and be coachable. Another advice that I have is making sure that you're prepared. Every coaching session that you have, you should be prepared for that session. If you have a 30-minute coaching session, you should be spending maybe 30 minutes preparing for that session and what that means is having maybe a list of questions that you can ask your coach, challenges, obstacles, really analyzing the actions that you took, the results that you might have gotten, and coming into your sessions prepared to get maximum value from that.

If you can provide information to your coach before each session, then that's going to also help your coach be able to coach you, because it's going to help save time in that session and they're going to be caught up to speed and know exactly where you're at and going to be able to help prepare for the session also.

With all the clients that I work with, I always make sure that they send me what is called a meeting prep form, which basically allows me to see exactly where they're at, what actions they took, what challenges they had, what successes they might have had, what they want to get from this session, maybe certain questions they might have of me as well.

My clients that always get the best results are the ones that are prepared, that send me all that information beforehand. Sometimes you work with people that aren't prepared. They show up late, they're not making progress and everything, and it's sometimes a challenge to really help that person because they're not able to focus on the real things that are going to get them the results.

Rather, you're more focusing on playing catch-up with that person and helping them to resolve some of the mental challenges and the habits that they might have that's stopping them from actually applying themselves. You can always fast-track it just by preparing and just taking massive action as much as you can.

At the end of each coaching session, as well, I always recommend to have an action plan, measurable actions that you can apply for yourself that can help you make progress, so whatever you discuss with your coach, try to make it into an actionable plan, some sort of practical way, certain steps or rituals or habits or actions that you can take to ensure that you're applying what you've learned.

Action is where you get the real results

Knowledge on its own is worthless. Knowledge is only potential power. The real power is the ability to take action, and so the action is where you get the real results. Not just by listening or taking notes, which is also what you should be doing as well.

Taking notes, writing things down so that you can really remember things as much as possible. So, listening to your coach, playing full-out, taking notes, massive action. Very, very important, and I think as long as you're doing that and you're taking action with things, and every time you show up for a meeting you're enthusiastic, you're open, you're being coachable, you're listening to your coach.

Coaches love that. Coaches love students that listen to them and take action. If you do that, your coach is going to be able to provide the next steps for you and take you to an even further level, and really fast-track the progress towards where you want to go.

If you're not taking action, if you're not showing up, you're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. I find sometimes, people will come to me for coaching, and they'll want help with building an online business, but they're not even capable of applying some of the basic simple steps that I might give them.

Most of the time that I might spend with that person is helping them to overcome the obstacles and barriers of their psychology to get themselves free from those so that they can finally make progress.

A lot of people, they have fears, they have doubts, they have uncertainty, they have some confidence challenges, they have some negative habits of laziness, procrastination, all those sorts of things, and I think a coach can help you overcome those things, and I think ultimately if you can be free from some of those barriers before hiring a coach, you're going to get so much more value out of it because they're not going to have to spend as much time working on those foundational things, those foundational elements.

Invest in the training program first

I think another way of looking at it as well, one other tip that I have is that, if your coach has online training programs already available, always invest in those first. Some people come to me, for example, with Kindle Publishing and they're brand new and they want to learn how to get started with it, and oftentimes a lot of what I'll teach you might already be available on my blog or my YouTube or on one of my online courses, like Mastering Book Publishing.

My favorite people to work with are actually people that have already been through some of the training that I have. They've already applied it, they're already getting some form of results, and then people come to me and they want to take things to the next level.

What I find is because they already have a foundation, you can really ramp things up in that position and help someone double their income or really scale up their business that much faster. Because they already have a foundation, they already have a business that's already being operated.

A lot of times, if they already have training programs available, I recommend investing in those things first. It's going to be a lot more inexpensive for you. Go through it, make sure you've been through all the training, all the lessons, because again, otherwise your coach is just going to teach you things that you could've already gotten at a much cheaper price.

That's another piece of advice that I have, is just really making sure that you've consumed as much as you can in your position where your coach can really help you the best and really help you maximize the results that you're after. 

Hopefully, this video has been helpful for you in some way. I want to thank you guys for watching. Leave a comment below, like this video, and subscribe for more videos like this. I'll talk to you guys soon.