Copyright 2011 by Steve Chandler

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FOR KATHY

Acknowledgments
Kathryn Anne Chandler for everything.
Steve Hardison for the ultimate in coaching.
Deuce Lutui for the internal commitment.
Barbie Gummin for the life coach connection.
Maurice Bassett for the fearless club.
Michael Neill for the academy of super coaches.
Brandon Craig for sales mastery.
Rich Litvin for the confidence salon.
Todd Musselman for words and music.
Dusan Djukich for straight-line leadership.
Fred Knipe for doctoring and cabaret performing.
Sam Beckford for being the small business millionaire.
Terry Hill for the two guys quartet.
Peter and Victoria Sykes for the music school.
Regena Thomashauer for the womanly arts school.
Stephen McGhee for modeling ascendance.
Rob Owen for results now.
Ken Webb for a holly jolly Christmas.
Colin Wilson for the books.
Byron Katie for the work.
George Will for the review.

Table of Contents
1. Don't You Know How to Live?..............................1
2. Your Life Is Gathering Light...................................3
3. Are You Isolated or Connected?............................5
4. What Would People Think of Me?.........................7
5. Your Journey to Inner Space...................................9
6. Your Most Powerful Hidden Tool.......................14
7. Responsibility for My Energy?.............................16
8. If You Start Me Up I'll Never Stop.......................18
9. How to Bankrupt a Fool........................................19
10. You and the Universe Are One............................21
11. Work that Causes Inspiration...............................25
12. Corporations Are Waking Up!.............................27
13. Why Aren't You Connected?................................30
14. Coaching Can Be Challenging..............................33
15. Elvis as a Hero and a Fool.....................................36
16. You Don't Need to Attract ...................................42
17. How to Make a Real Difference...........................47
18. The Awakening Slave............................................50
19. How to Not Ever Grow Up...................................52
20. Coaching Is All About Practice............................54
21. My Inappropriate Limitations..............................57
22. Please Do What You Love.....................................58
23. Creating a Crime of Genius..................................61
24. But That Would Be Impossible.............................63
25. No One Can Bring You Down..............................65
26. Is Your Life Not Working?....................................67
27. The Courage to Change.........................................68
28. Help Means You Are a Pro...................................70
29. Find and Use Your Strength.................................74
30. What Is a Coaching Connection?.........................76
31. Coaches Want Your Word....................................82
32. Juicy and Sometimes a Little Messy....................84

33. Are You Creating Your Life?................................87

34. Do Not Fear Failure................................................97
35. Becoming Violently Original..............................100
36. How to Know Your Tilt Switch..........................102
37. Ready to Get Physical?........................................105
38. How to Be Alive to Life.......................................111
39. Lift Yourself from Nothingness ........................120
40. I Am Seeking Your Disapproval........................131
41. Rescue Your Future Now....................................132
42. We Don't Need No Education............................134
43. What If You Weren't Afraid?..............................136
44. Go Ask the Dog.....................................................139
45. Can You Exchange Your Brain?.........................140
46. Procrastination Is Good!......................................142
47. Lost, Stuck and Miserable...................................144
48. Confidence to Do What You Love.....................146
49. A World Cruelly Disrupted................................150
50. A Coach Should Have a Coach?.........................153
51. Why Not Just Do Things?...................................154

If you dont change your beliefs,

your life will be like this forever.
Is that good news?
~ W. Somerset Maugham

LIFE COACHING 1

Don't you know how to live?

I saw the angel in the marble,
and I carved until I set him free.
~ Michelangelo

Great coaches do work that is similar to a sculptors work.

They see whats possible in their client, and then they help the
client carve the negative beliefs away. Soon the client is feeling
a freedom he has never known. This freedom happened for me
when I turned my lifes dreams over to the hammer and chisel
of my own coach, Steve Hardison.
The term coaching comes from the world of sports and
also from the performing arts. Thats why they call it coaching
instead of consulting or advising or counseling.
I remember a time when there was no coaching for people
like you and me. There was only coaching for athletes and
singers and actors. (Those superstars had strength coaches,
voice coaches, and dialect coaches; they had quarterback
coaches, golf coaches, and hitting coaches. For you and me?
There were no life coaches.)
But soon a personal growth movement began as the
world got more entrepreneurial and creative. Individuals
became more empowered. No longer did most people work
for the same huge company at the same boring job all their

2 STEVE CHANDLER

lives and then get a watch and retire and wear the watch in
the open coffin.
Creative people and innovative small businesses were rising
up. People changed jobs often, and even changed careers, and
soon anyone who really wanted to succeed was considering
hiring a coach.
Why not? Two heads have always been better than one.
If you want something achieved, are you not better with two
people on the project than one?
A lot of people have thought that this explosion of personal
coaching is absurd. Why should the average person be hiring
a coach? A life coach? Are you kidding me? Dont you already
know about life? Dont you know how to live?
People asking those questions were missing the point. This
was not about survival. This was about thriving.
Even today, people wonder if their ordinary life qualifies
for coaching. Its that whole little old me approach to low
self-esteem and false modesty. Thats the very problem that
coaching ends up solving.
Mocking self-help is the ego protecting itself. However,
protecting the ego keeps me isolated and shrunken down to
my most survivable self. So I feel disconnected, not only from
the world, but from my own potential.
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by
a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to
think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted
the flame within us.
~ Dr. Albert Schweitzer

LIFE COACHING 3

Your life is gathering light

The only real purpose of a goal is to inspire you
to fall more deeply in love with life.
~ Michael Neill

Ive been conducting a coaching prosperity school for years

now, so that coaches can learn to build strong practices. Because
of the impact coaching has had on my own life, I am more than
a true believer. I am a witness!
I have noticed that some coaches are so dedicated to helping
their clients that they neglect their own practices. They dont
devote themselves to getting more clients, even though it would
help the world if they did.
Thats one of the things coaches forget to do. They forget to
become masterful at the art of enrollment and sales. But soon
they notice that their life-changing work cant go on without
clients. You cant change the life of a client that you do not have.
I also help coaches believe in the strength of their work.
For this, I sometimes begin with the lamppost distinction.
Michael Neill, the colorful author of Supercoach, sometimes
talks about how good a coach a lamppost would be.
Many people who are just beginning as life coaches and
business coaches worry about whether they have enough
smarts and expertise to be an effective coach.

4 STEVE CHANDLER

Consider a lamppost, Michael advises them. Lets say

your client leaves his office each snowy evening and stops by
a lamppost on his way home and just talks to the lamppost.
Lets say he starts to do that every evening, unburdening the
days problems and vocalizing the possibilities and options for
tomorrow. The lamppost will not talk back; it will just be there
for him.
And by acquiring the habit of talking to his lamppost, this
person finds his life is improving. It is gathering light. He feels
a little less burdened each evening, and by expressing options
and possibilities he even has new ideas he would not have had
if he didnt talk to the lamppost.
So if a lamppost can do all this, imagine what you can do if
you coach someone.
Sometimes coaching someone is as simple as listening. Then
it moves to helping them get started on something they want
to achieve.

LIFE COACHING 5

Are you isolated or connected?

The cave you fear to enter
holds the treasure you seek.
~ Joseph Campbell

To those who have asked me why I have a coach and why

Ive paid people to coach me through the years, I ask them why
should coaching just be for athletes and actors?
They reply that athletes and actors cant afford to be average
or mediocre.They have to be as good as they can be just to keep
their jobs.Greatness, to them, is linked to survival. They have
to be great at what they do or theyre gone.
Well, so do we now. The world has gone global. No more
whining about outsourcing. If someone in China can do it better
than you can, game over.
To have a great life, we have to be great at what we do.
That scares a lot of people, but it excites those of us with coaches.
Why should I not want to be as good as I can be at my own
career? Even if Im not a pro athlete?
But why do you need to pay for that? Why not do it yourself?
Because coaching works and doing it myself never works
the same way. I was okay by myself, but I was never great at

6 STEVE CHANDLER

anything. And even if I was, it wasnt as great as it could have

been. Sometimes the things I was most proud of I later saw as
unrealized potential posing as competence.
Many times people choose not to get coaching because it
would be spending money on themselves! It might look selfish
to their families. It might even look weak. And theyve invested
a lot of energy in looking a certain way. Looking like they have
their act together.
But even that suggests I am an actor. That all the worlds a
stage and each of us play our part. Why not just go with that?
Actors have directors. Actors have coaches. Nobody
questions the wisdom of that.

LIFE COACHING 7

What would people think of me?

Personalities dont love.
They want something.
~ Byron Katie

One of the biggest lessons Ive learned from coaches is that

my personalitys wild attempts at pleasing others and winning
their approval was working against my happiness and success.
In fact, I was losing the respect of others the more I tried to
please them. Not to mention losing all self-respect.
So it was time to turn the spotlight inwardto work on
myself. To take Tolstoy to heart when he said, Everyone thinks
of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.
Today I actually love investing money in my personal
growth to change myself.I get a large return for the investment,
even financially (not to mention improvements in luminosity
ofmind, body, and spirit).
Should I have invested that money in stocks or real estate?
I say no. I wanted to invest in me. I wanted it to go into
coaching.I wanted to be fulfilled. I wanted to find out what Ive
got inside me.
Looking back, I see what being coached has done for me.
Without it, my life would have been a long, dreary compromise.A
dark festival of regrets and missed opportunities.

8 STEVE CHANDLER

No one should to go their grave with their music still

in them.
Thats where I was headed until I met my current coach,
Steve Hardison.He wasnt a therapist or a guru or a priest or a
bishop or a soul mate or a boss. He was just my coach.
And from our first hour together, my life was never
the same.
One quick example of what changed: Prior to working
with him, since I was a little boy, I always admired writers and
authors. I walked through libraries and bookstores as a child
and later as a college student thinking how much I would just
love to be an author.
But soon it was too late for that.Id already wasted fortyeight years compromising and doing whatever I thought would
keep other people happy and the wolves away from my door.
I bowed to others as well as I could.
After meeting Hardison and receiving some very energetic
life coaching I now have written over thirty books, on topics
ranging from baseball to Jane Austen to fund-raising to business
success, and five of them are international bestsellers, and some
others are headed there.
Does coaching really work?People ask me that.
If it didnt work, there wouldnt be coaching.It would not
be growing so fast every year. As the hottest profession in
the world.
And its not just in the USA. I have been meeting lately with
coaches from England and Canada and many other countries.
Its not a fad; its a force.
Why cant we all be athletes and actors and dancers and
artists and singers? Get some coaching and youll find out
that we can.

LIFE COACHING 9

Your journey to inner space

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In
the space is the power to choose our response. In our
response lies our growth and our freedom.
~ Victor Frankl

The space Victor Frankl talks about is inner space. Its not
out there in the world. And even though we love stories about
journeys to outer space, the journey to inner space is even
more rewarding.
And thats where coaching connects.
My coach is the ultimate coach (dot net). He also coaches
TV stars and pro athletes like Deuce Lutui, the best offensive
lineman in the NFL. And those of you who have been following
the Deuce Lutui story will want to see the latest at www.
tbolitnfl.com. Please go there and read the story. Read it and
send it to friends.
People today walk up to me at a seminar and say, The story
of Deuce is the story of you, and the story of you is the story of
me. Well, yes! My old story was also fearful, and my new story
is mine to create fresh each day. No matter how old I am. No
matter what my story of age may be at the moment.
Age itself is a story.

10 STEVE CHANDLER

We all have stories about what it is to be old. For example,

most of us would not think of an elderly octogenarian pumping
iron and getting stronger by the day.
A book called Biomarkers rounded up evidence that
changes the story of age. It turns out that strength training
in people aged eighty-four to ninety-six increases their
strength fifty percent in three months and improves their
health radically!
Ready to haul a box of free weights to your grandfathers
house? How will that go over? It would depend on your
grandfathers story of age.
Where will my own motivation come from at the age of
ninety-six? My coach Steve Hardison is a young man, compared
to me. Maybe hell be there to make sure I get the most out of
my life. Driving a box of weights to my house.
Thats what coaches do, and thats why coaches are
scorned by those who dont have coaches. This whole issue of
changing beliefs and stories while asking for help is a sensitive
one to the ego.
However, if a great athlete like Deuce Lutui can ask for help,
why cant I? The great runner-philosopher George Sheehan
used to say that we are all athletes, all of us. Its just that some
of us are in training and some of us are not.
For me, motivation is an exciting subject. I wrote my first
book about it. It was a huge subject for me because in my life I
had spent so many years absolutely not motivated.
In childhood I usually took the opposite approach to being
motivated. When everyone else around me seemed motivated
and able to get things done fully focused and finishing their
tasks, I was the opposite. Ill never forget that on one of my
report cards the teacher, in the comment section, had written,
in capital letters and dashes, the word L-A-Z-Y.
I tell people that story and they get confused. You? Lazy?
You are creative, productive, and prolific! I get profound email
coaching from you at four in the morning! You write two or

LIFE COACHING 11

three books a year and travel all over to speak and coach. You
run your coaching prosperity school with such energy!!!
People change.
Thats the big secret that the scorners are trying to keep a
secret. People change if they are open and willing.
Picture me staring at that report card and seeing the word
L-A-Z-Y and confirming my worst fears and darkest beliefs
about myself.
I concluded that I was missing something that other people
had. Some kind of inner drive. I thought other people had a
genetically installed sense of purpose about life that I just
didnt have. Therefore I would either have to fake it in order to
survivein order to be accepted in society and civilizationor
just find some way out of life, some form of suicide that didnt
look too cowardly.
Well, for me, the worst thing that happened, that could have
happened, did happen.
As I got into my teenage years and then off to college, I really
did take a kind of way out of life (without really knowing that
I did). I got deeply involved in alcohol addiction and rampant
use of drugs; I was lucky to have come out alive. There was a
time in my life when friends,family,and even medical people
were saying there would be no way I would live past the age of
thirty-five.
Ive gone well past that number now, and I was very
fortunate to be able to recover from that addiction.
People told me that when I finally joined a program for
recovery that I would have to get a sponsor, and little did I
know that a sponsor would be an early life coach for me.
Addiction had been an artificial form of all the things
I thought I was lacking. They call alcohol false courage
because it is. Heavy emphasis on the false part of the
equation. When I thought I was lacking courage, I would
have a few drinks and I could do things I couldnt do when I
wasnt drinking. And then in college we were passing around

12 STEVE CHANDLER

amphetamines to get ready for our exams, and I got into that
as well. It was a vicious circle. I thought I had to take speed to
pass the exams that would allow me to stay in college another
year so that I could drink and party and avoid the real world
and see if I might not just outwit and bypass this thing called
growing up and taking responsibility.
It just sounded awful to me, growing up and taking
responsibility. No fun at all. Just a total grind! I didnt realize
then that true happiness comes from growth. And growth is
fun and exciting. And a person could actually participate in his
own spiritual recovery and evolution.
I learned to embrace spiritual progress, not perfection. I also
began to realize, thanks to my sponsor, that responsibility
meant more power to me. It was not a shame-based concept. It
did not mean I would now have more of an obligation to you.
Speed was a false form of motivation. It stole from the
future to create an artificially jacked-up present moment. But
then you paid back way more than you borrowed if you stayed
alive; and a lot of us didnt. Many of my so-called drinking and
drugging buddies are no longer alive and havent been for a
good long while.
Sometimes you borrow everything, and when they come to
collect they take it all.
Later in the Army I had to stand guard late at night and
so the Army doctors would give me Ritalin to stay awake.
When I was in language school in the military, doctors would
regularly give Ritalin because the study load was so heavy that
we would study late into the night when we were studying our
languages.Then wed get drunk on weekends to unwind.
These artificial forms of motivation, courage, and purpose
(or whatever that is) are destructive and damaging and actually
take you (as everybody who has had any involvement in it
will tell you) in the opposite direction, eventually. Because
once you feel a little bit of a lift or a surge, you then pay for it
five or six times over with detox, hangovers, the long crash

LIFE COACHING 13

and just the worst nightmarish stuff you could ever have to
go through. Its just really horrific. Theres no real reward to
any of that.
So I was fortunate to recover from all that and go through
a program of recovery that started everything all over again.
It allowed me to go back over my life and eliminate the guilt,
eliminate the shame, take away all the things that I had made
up about myself.
That whole belief system about myself that was so negative.
Now I could start all over.
Recalculating!
A coach can help you reset your GPS.

14 STEVE CHANDLER

Your most powerful hidden tool

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words
impossible, never, or too difficult too often,
drop him or her from your social network.
~ Nicholas Nassim Taleb

My coach Steve Hardison showed me that this little thing

that everybody has called creativitythe ability to create
was really, actually, the most powerful tool weve got for
building a happy, productive life.
He showed me that creativity wasnt just for finger paints in
kindergarten. This thing called creating wasnt just about a song
lyric or a new computer graphics program. You can create your
life, and you can create your day (same thing).
Its so funny because children when they are born and
come into life enthusiastically tap into this thing called
creation. They do it so joyfully, and they love it, and they spend
the whole day looking for ways to make up games and make up
plays and act things out. You can turn children loose anywhere.
They can play in a poor part of town among the rubbish and in
an abandoned lot.
I remember when we were kids we loved any abandoned
lot or a house that was under construction. We didnt need

LIFE COACHING 15

Disneyland. We would go play anywhere and make it

Disneyland because we were kids and had not yet disconnected
from our creativity.
Grown-ups project their own lack of creativity on their
young children and take them places like Disneyland or Chuck
E. Cheese constantly to over-stimulate the child. They are
projecting their own emptiness on the soon-to-be spoiled child.
Children dont need all that. Children can (and will) create
anywhere with anything.
Watch them some day. They use everything around them.
They can turn anything into something fun.
How do we lose that?
We lose that by assuming personalities and then defending
those personalities with our lives. No more creativity, just defense.
The creative light and spirit inside of us starts to get dim.
We start to put it away. Soon we are operating not out of
creativity but out of fear.Now Im afraid I wont get a job. Im
afraid my spouse wont approve of me, and Im afraid of my
employer,and Im afraid I wont raise my kids right.
And soon Im out of energy. Because nothing takes more energy
to maintain than a fear. Now I can no longer motivate myself.
People send me emails these days that say, I dont know
how to motivate myself. But if you were a child you would.
Youd never even ask that question.
But now if feels like you have lost it.
Youve lost the connection.
So the exciting thing for me about being a life coach is the
connection that gets restored. Thats why I call it the life coaching
connection. When you re-connect to your core creativity, it can
come back even stronger than it was in childhood.
You can re-connect, and how to do it is not a mystery.
It doesnt have to be something puzzling where you keep
pleading, I dont know how to do it Im all confused about
it I need help with it It can be something that you can
access any time, any moment, and you know you can.

16 STEVE CHANDLER

Responsibility for my energy?

Reliving past experiences through the lens of soporific
sentimentalism, is a time-honored substitute for
choosing to create the rest of your life.
~ Will Keiper

Well, when I really got thiswhen I could really see

itI took it out and field tested it and experimented with
it and found out that it really did prove to be true: That we
ourselves are responsible for our own energy levels and our
own excitement and our own enthusiasm and we can create it.
It doesnt come from outside of ourselves. Thats the really
big awakening. Thats the real big switch that gets thrown.
Thats the massive turnaround that happens in a persons life,
when they finally see that the biological computer (the brain)
really works from the inside-out.
Not from the outside in.
Yet, everybodys confused about it. I get e-mails like,
I want to find something that inspires me. I want to find
something that excites me. I want to find something that calls
to me.
And so they are still confused about where it comes from.
How its generated.

LIFE COACHING 17

Once I started to really see this inner origin, I wrote a book

called 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself, which I wrote after
practicing all the techniques my coach was showing me.
I was also meeting many other people who had ways to (in
adulthood) get connected againto turn the energy switch on
any time they liked. They knew how to get enthusiastic and not
find their purpose, but create their purpose. Develop it.Design
it.Make it up and use it for as long as it was fun and then create
an even better one when the one they were using wasnt as
much fun as it used to be.
This was something that became an obsession with me.
I mean, as far as I could see, everybody had this wrong!
Everybody was looking outside themselves for something
thats already in there! It was like watching somebody in your
household walking around saying, Anyone seen my glasses?
I cant leave the house until I find my glasses and you see
the glasses are on top of his head. And you are laughing and
chuckling and they still walk around saying, I have to find
my glasses. I dont know where I put them. I know theyre out
there somewhere.
The same is true with your calling.
You think it will call from out there.
But its on the inside.
A good coach helps you develop that calling power inside of
you. Other forms of counselors or consultants help you adjust
to life on the outside, but a coach connects you to whats inside.

18 STEVE CHANDLER

If you start me up I'll never stop

The secret to getting ahead
is getting started.
~ Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time. Her

eighty detective novels have sold over four billion copies. Yes
billion, not million. So she knew something about doing great
work and having an impact on the world. And, because her
sales are so far ahead of everybody elses, we can say she knew
something about getting ahead.
And she discovered that the secret to getting ahead was
getting started.
Life coach Rich Litvin is especially good at this principle.
He asks his clients to dream big. He wants to know what they
are not doing in their lives that they always wanted to do. Then,
after long conversations and deep searches into his clients
dreams he asks them to start small.
Take the smallest step imaginable toward that dream.
Picture the smallest step you can picture, and now do
that step.
And now youve started.

LIFE COACHING 19

How to bankrupt a fool

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People make the mistake of stuffing their heads with words

and numbers. They pile in more and more information hoping
that sooner or later theyll have enough information to finally
succeed at something.
But information only goes so far and if you get too
overloaded with it, you can go bankrupt learning to succeed
instead of going out there and succeeding.
Some people spend their whole lives preparing to live.
Which is why the programs life coaches offer always have
a lot of action in them. Transformation works better than
information, and you can only transform through practice.
Author/coach Michael Neill and I recently co-presented
a six-month seminar for twenty-two people from all over the
world. It was called Financially Fearless. During one of the
last sessions, we passed out the above quote from Nassim Taleb
on how to bankrupt a fool.
We wanted to draw a dramatic distinction between
information, a gluttony of which can bankrupt you, and
transformation, which will leave you leaner and stronger. Most

20 STEVE CHANDLER

of the people in the room were coaches by profession. They

were in the business of delivering transformation, so they got
the point faster than most people would.
I work with coaches every day. They have become my
professional coaching focus. I love the work they do in peoples
lives. My role in coaching them is to help them build strong
practices and make a good living so they can go on serving
people in the profound way they do.
Because its hard to be good at coaching people to
succeed if you are not successful yourself. You dont have a
lot of real world experience to draw on. Its mostly theory.
You merely chat.
Most coaches are so busy helping others reach their goals
and live their dreams that they neglect their own financial
strength. They forget to set up a strong system for growing
their practice. Thats where the work I do comes in. Ive done
a number of coaching prosperity schools where I help coaches
gain a mastery level of business prosperity. They learn to
acquire clients easily.
In my school, there is no information.
Why bankrupt these coaches?
Its transformation or nothing.

LIFE COACHING 21

You and the universe are one

Everything is dependent on everything else, everything
is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything
is going in the only way it can go. If people were
different everything would be different. They are what
they are, so everything is as it is.
~ G.I. Gurdjieff

Everything is connected and nothing is separate.

But then why do we feel so disconnected?
It could be all the stories we believe about having and being
separate identities that need to succeed on their own. Good
coaching re-awakens youin your heart and mindto the
connection to the universe that is already there. The connection
you feel when you are feeling joyful and the connection that
seems to go away when fear creeps in.
One good way back to our universal connection is the
internet, which gives us a technological link that mirrors the
connection thats already there. And for all the knocking of
social networks and the games people play on their computers,
this internet is a good thing. This is a good time to be alive.
Weve entered a very exciting age. Peopleeven average
people like you and mecan take their talent directly to the

22 STEVE CHANDLER

whole world right now. We dont have to climb through all the
layers of permission and approval we used to have to climb in
the old hierarchical days.
Thats why life coaching is such a hot thing and growing
like crazy. Because people have more ways to succeed at life
than ever before. Why not get a coach and just make it happen?
If you want to be an author, for example, you dont have to
figure out a way to get some publisher or agent to approve of
your work before you can get it published. You dont have to
battle for shelf space in a bookstore any longer. You just hit a
key on your keyboard and you can be published.
Because these layers of hierarchical approval are
disappearing, anyone can form a garage band, rehearse, write
some songs, put up a website and sell a downloadable album.
People can write eBooks and sell them without anyone ever
approving of anything. No permission necessary.
And because of this expanded opportunity for everyone,
no one really has to settle for a mediocre performance of their
profession. Which is exactly why coaching is flourishing.
One of my clients a few years ago had an okay day job but
really wanted to be a poet. Hed written poetry and other things
on the side, but he wanted to see how good he could really
be. So he hired me to coach him. Id been a writer all my life,
and a full time songwriter for a number of years and even had
published some poems when I was younger. So I was able to
coach his writing as well as his whole life that circled around
the writing. Thats the beauty of life coaching: it coaches the
whole life, not just the special chosen focus.
My client learned to challenge himself more and more as a
writer and it wasnt long before literary magazines all over the
country were eagerly accepting his poems. He was giving readings.
The coaching relationship was very fulfilling for both of us.
At that same time I also had a coaching client who was
president of an aluminum manufacturing company. What
did those two clients have in common? What is the common

LIFE COACHING 23

denominator between aluminum pellets and poetry? It was

this: they both had goals and dreams of higher achievement.
The great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson
said, Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do
what we can.
Notice he said chief want and not one of our many wants.
Its what we want more than anything else. To find somebody
who will make us do what we can! Is there any wonder, then,
that coaching has bloomed and blossomed?
A lot of people laugh at the very idea of my having a life
coach. Why do you need a coach for your life? Dont you already
know how to live?
Apparently not! Because without my coach, I was living
differently than I live right now.
I was underachieving but I didnt know why. Like most
people, I had talents I was afraid of. I had courage and willpower
I had no idea existed. I could go on for many pages about all the
things I found in me through the coaching connection.
But is it really so mysterious? I wrote a book about what
happened to me when I was coached by my coach how it
allowed me to completely reinvent myself. I talked about how
little kids know where to go to get a feeling of pure joy (by
constantly trying to do things they have never done).
The famous cry of, Look Ma, no hands! is a cry of joy,
because the child wasnt satisfied with just riding the bike. The
child tries riding it with hands up in the air, and the thrill is
right there. There is no more joyful cry than when you hear a
child yelling, I did it! I did it!
Its doing things that brings a child joy. As grownups, we
have forgotten that. We somehow think that its feeling things
that will lead to our happiness. Weve lost touch with what we
once knew. Weve disconnected from the spirit.
Coaching was my re-connection. It worked for me.
Is it a big puzzle that if something works for improving the way
you play a game like golf it might also work for the game of life?

24 STEVE CHANDLER

Ive known men who have hired golf coaches to improve

their game and oh my goodness how their games improved!
Sometimes quite dramatically.
They did this because golf had become important to them.
They reached a point in their progress where they felt stuck.
Yet they were passionately curious about how good they could
be if they could somehow take their game to another level.
Thats why they hired their coach.
What if they became as passionately curious about their
lives? What if they made their whole lives as important their
golf game? Because a person can feel stuck there, too. Right?
About life itself? A person can certainly wonder what life might
feel like if it were taken to a whole new level of effectiveness and
self-expression. And not just some hypothetical person either.
May I suggest that it could be every person?
Well maybe not. Maybe not a person who had hardened
into a lot of pride in his existing permanent identity. Not if
he was afraid to let go of his well-rehearsed self. He would
laugh at the idea of a coach. He would have to. To maintain
who he was.
A top business owner called me and said she had read one
of my books and had some questions about this life coaching
stuff I wrote about.
Why would I need that? she asked.
You never need it, I said. You just want it. Or you
dont want it.
Whats the point of it?
I thought about it and finally said to her, What if you had
never painted anything but were hired to paint a mural on
the front wall of a new museum in your community. Would
you take some art lessons? Would you get help? Most people
would. So, if that is so, maybe you can also see your life as a
creative work of art.

LIFE COACHING 25

Work that causes inspiration

Just as appetite comes by eating,
so work brings inspiration,
if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
~ Igor Stravinsky

One of the greatest sports coaches of all time was John

Wooden. He coached basketball for UCLA and won more national
championships than any coach before or since. His motto was,
Make each day your masterpiece. And although Wooden was a
basketball coach by profession, his former players all talk about the
life lessons he taught.
Wooden was a life coach.
He coached the whole life of the player, not just one skill. His
teams won all those championships because of that. Other more
narrowly focused, strictly-basketball coaches lost the games they
played against Woodens teams.
I was sent an LA Times article on basketball coach Nancy
Lieberman by a client and friend.
One of the many wonderful things about being in this work called
life coaching is that people are always sending me things. Whenever
they see something exciting about how a coach has innovatively
changed peoples lives, they send it to me. They know I love this stuff.

26 STEVE CHANDLER

So I am now reading about a basketball coach named Nancy

Lieberman. She talked about going into Harlem as a little white
Jewish girl with flaming red hair. I was dribbling my ball like
I lived there. She went on to become a star basketball player
and now, forty years later, she is the first woman to coach a
team in the NBA Development league, just a step away from
the NBA itself.
Lieberman took the job coaching the Texas Legends. After
a Hall of Fame career as a college, Olympic, and pro star. She
says, Ive never known what my limits are and Im not afraid
to find out.
Can you sense how far away that is from psychotherapy?
Lieberman knew basketball inside and out. But great sports
coaches know that to really develop their players they need to
do more than coach basketball.
They need to coach the whole person.
So Lieberman called Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin
and said, Im a white, fifty-two-year-old woman about to
coach a predominantly African-American team. I need to know
how I can help these guys.
They met together for hours. The topic wasnt basketball. It
was leadership and personal growth.
One of the all-time great UCLA basketball players was
Bill Walton. He played for John Wooden and never forgot the
experience. In his Foreword to Woodens biography They Call
Me Coach Walton writes, Coach Wooden is a humble, private
man who has selflessly devoted his life to make other peoples
lives better. John Wooden, while hired to coach basketball,
never stopped at something so simple. He taught life at
UCLA for twenty-seven years before officially retiring in 1975,
establishing records for success that will never be touched.
The records came because he taught life.

LIFE COACHING 27

Corporations are waking up!

Corporations have hired me to come in and train their
managers on how to coach people. They understand that
coaching is different than managing. They have gotten wind of
this phenomenon called coaching.
Managing is not getting the job done anymore. Its based
on an outdated hierarchical system of military command. It is
most often an attempt to control other people, while coachings
intention is to empower other people.
How does coaching empower other people?
Theres no one way. Coaching is different with every coach.
Its creative. It doesnt follow rules. So theres a kind of fierce
poetry to the art of coaching. The great coaches are all different.
They would have to be, because they are calling on so much
unique intuition and inner creativity to coach. Its not a science.
However. It does seem to work. When you are finished
with your coaching session you have more power than you had
before. Whereas, when you are finished being managed you
have no more power; youve just been managed.
When managers learn to coach instead of control, they bring
out the best in their people. I wrote a book with Duane Black
(The Hands-Off Manager) on how much more productive and
innovative organizations are when the old management style
of military-type bossing is replaced with coaching.

28 STEVE CHANDLER

Which always brings up the worry (and the fear in the

corporate mind) that coaching might be soft. Many people
assume life coaching might be an overly compassionate,
organic, new-agey, woo-woo fad that will soon fade from
the scene.
Its not and it wont. Because coaching is proven to
immediately boost productivity. So it wont go away.
And neither is it soft. (Its about as soft as Vince Lombardi
was soft.)
In fact, a good coach is going to move you quickly into
higher levels of responsibility and accountability. While a
manager just kind of intimidates you and bosses you around
and encourages resentment and sabotage.
Roger Evered and James Selman wrote an enlightening
article for the American Management Association on Coaching
and the Art of Management. In it they talk about managers
who know nothing about how to coach: Managers act out core
managerial beliefs, such as being in charge, controlling others,
implementing owners orders, prescribing behaviors and
events, maintaining order, gaining and exercising command
and control, and discarding the noncompliant.
And I love the cold phrase, discarding the noncompliant.
Sounds like a Hollywood divorce. It lets us know that in
traditional management we are in a rather brutal world, the
world of human control, not too may steps away from bullying.
The coaching world isnt as simple as that world is because
coaching requires a partnership: two people co-creating a
vision and then executing the vision by agreement.
When I train corporate leaders on the difference
between expectation (as a management style) and
agreement (as a leadership practice), they originally
think I am asking them to become soft and weak. They
fear I am participating in the feminization of the culture
(as best illustrated in Adam Carollas hilarious book, In
Fifty Years Well All Be Chicks).

LIFE COACHING 29

In fact, when leaders learn the power of co-creating

agreements instead of harboring expectations, they end up
with a more accountable culture, not less. Managers who lead
by expectation walk around complaining constantly that their
expectations are not being met.
Creating agreements is a more powerful practice than that.
Coaching generates agreements and results. Managing
generates expectations.
I coach you. You go into the world and produce a
wonderful result. I talk to you in our next session about what
you did and how you did it, and you become acknowledged
and appreciated and therefore empowered to internalize and
repeat your result in life, not only next week but also long after
the coaching contract is over.

30 STEVE CHANDLER

Why aren't you connected?

Addressing a wide range of issues, including work,
finances, health, relationships, education, spiritual
development, and recreation, life coaching looks to
close the gap between our dreams and the realities of
our existence.
~ Dr. Nathaniel Branden

The great British novelist E.M. Forster had a very

simple prescription for all artists, writers, and people
in life who wanted to succeed and be effective. He said:
Only connect.
When I taught a public speaking class at a university in
California I told my students that if I had but five seconds to
teach the whole years class I would say this then I walked to
the board and wrote: ONLY CONNECT.
Because public speaking, writing, coaching, and leadership
in anything (including parenting)is all about connecting with
the other person. It is not about being impressive and looking
like Ive got my act together.
We all long to be connected. We often use falling in love
as a way to connect to the joy that created the universe. Its no
accident that its sometimes called hooking up.

LIFE COACHING 31

Some girl I love sent me a quote the other day by Henry

David Thoreau, and it expressed something startling
and beautiful to me. The quote was about a snowflake.
Thoreau said,
How full of the creative genius is the air in
which these are generated! I should hardly admire
more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that
not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Snowflakes, when you look at them closely, show you that
creative genius is in the air. Just waiting for us to breathe it in
and breathe it out and, by so doing, connect.
When John Lennon and Paul McCartney connected, there
was nothing less than the miracle of Beatles music spreading
across the universe (like strawberry fields) forever. When
creative people connect, amazing things happen.
But why should such connections only happen for rock
stars, film crews, and the creative teams at Apple?
You can connect, too.
Putting two people together in a creative setting can have
marvelously explosive results. Fast Company had a recent
article by Danielle Sacks on the history of advertising agencies.
She wrote,
Before 1960, ad making was a solitary practice.
Copywriters toiled away to pitch a product, then
handed them off to an art director who translated
them into an illustration or a photograph. Creative
director Bill Bernbach (the B in DDB) changed all
that when he recognized that pairing wordsmith
and artist could spark genius.

32 STEVE CHANDLER

Life coaching is like pairing wordsmith and artist. The coach

is the wordsmith and the client is the artist. Any individual life
on this planet can be treated and executed like a work of art.
Consider the man who lovingly and carefully sits in his
garage building a birdhouse. All the care and patience of a
creative artist come into play. Why will he not build his whole
life that same way? After all, he knows how!
But once the work on the birdhouse is finished he re-enters
the world of real threatening life. It is, therefore, a world of
nervous reaction. Instead of creating the relationships he wishes
to have with his family and others, he reacts to those people and
makes a scary movie out of his world.
A coach can change all that. A coach can connect with
you and then connect you to the creativity that is the real true
hidden you.
Most adults respond to coaching because most adults have
become disconnected.
Like Picasso said, every child is born an artist, and the real
trick in life is to remain an artist. Because most of us dont.
Because most of us feel the disconnect right around junior
high school.
We disconnect from our original savage grace and creativity
in the name of being accepted and liked and not embarrassing
ourselves with our peers. We sell out for approval. We grow
up and try to get jobs and families. Its hard. We form safe and
insincere personalities. We disconnect from our courage and
our power.
Then a coach comes along.

LIFE COACHING 33

Coaching can be challenging

Some of the biggest breakthroughs with my coaching
clients, and even in my own life, have come from seeing
the benefits of challenge. Ive seen how it benefits me to
challenge myself.
Problems that challenge me benefit me.
When I can see it that way I have a completely different
life. Im not just avoiding things with my day.
Most people new to the coaching process reveal that they
have an avoidance-based life. They wake up in the morning
and mentally picture what they dread. Then they try to figure
out how they are going to avoid what they dread. Its a life of
creative aversion.
They wake up and they say, What do I have to do? What
are my obligations? And what do I hope does not happen?
This is a life that is subconsciously being lived with a
mission to avoid challenges. Because this person doesnt see
the benefit of challenge. They see challenge as an affront and
insult to the comfortable life; and so they try to avoid it and
end up being more challenged than other people, in the long
run, because of all the challenges they avoid.
Lets look at the physical side of this. Studies have shown
(and I refer you to the book, Biomarkers, but you can check
this out for yourself with your own body) that people who

34 STEVE CHANDLER

challenge themselves physically end up feeling betterhaving

a better life, having more energy, having more clarity, having
more spirit. Feeling stronger. Actually being stronger.
They did studies with people in their eighties and nineties
and gently they began bringing weights in. What a horrible
thingpoor old eighty-five year oldsyou are going to make
them lift weights? Are you kidding? Are you sick? What is
thissome kind of death camp experiment? No. These people
got stronger and more energetic. Their heart health got better,
their outlook got better, and their lung capacity improved.
Their metabolism was better, their nervous system was better,
and the circulation in their bodies really got better from lifting
weightsat the age of eightyat the age of ninety.
What a graphic, measurable example of the benefit of
challenge.
Even though, in our society, the very word challenge
makes people sad. Sometimes I meet a new client and ask where
she wants to begin and she hangs her head in sorrow and says,
I have challenges.
Ill have clients come to me frightened by some problem
(and notice that Im putting the word problem in quotes),
and theyre upset that they even have to deal with the problem.
They are not seeing that dealing with this problem is going to
make them happier and stronger and better as a human being.
Its like lifting a weight. The arm strengthens and the weight
feels progressively lighter.
How to get people to see the benefit of challenge?
First of all, the coach sees it right away. One of the wonderful
aspects of coaching is that the coach sees the hidden benefit
immediately.
Even if the client does not.
So what is that first step for the client? Sitting down and
repeating affirmations in the morning? Challenges benefit me
challenges benefit me. Thats not badthat could be a good
start. But he would want to follow it up with experimentation

LIFE COACHING 35

and see if challenges benefit him. Accept the challenges and

take them on. Dance with them until the challenges are too
tired to stand any longer.
Challenging yourself gives you a relationship to challenge
thats beneficial. You begin to see it as something that serves
you and feeds you and gives you energy and gives you
strengths. The more I challenge myself, the less the outside
world throws things at me that look like obstacles and huge
problems that are hard to overcome. These now look like easy
challenges. Ive been challenging myself all weekshow me
what youve got. What do you have? Throw your challenge at
me because I love challenge.
If we could learn through experience to love challenge,
then challenges would no longer be filed in the category in
my brain called Whats wrong with life? Why cant life just
be pure comfort? Why wont things and lovers come along to
make me happy?
Werner Erhard is credited with bringing coaching into
everyday life. Eliezer Sobel, author of The 99th Monkey, said this
about Erhard:
Werner Erhard once bluntly put it to me, staring
right into my eyes, There isnt ANYTHING
that is EVER going to come along that is going
to make you happy. NOTHING. Getting that is
the entr into the system in which the truth lies,
for the truth is always and only found now, in
the circumstances youve got. That was quite
sobering news for a truth-seeker.

36 STEVE CHANDLER

Elvis as a hero and a fool

There is a yearning in all of us for mentors and heroes. It
starts early. But it doesnt have to end. Your coach can be a role
model as well as a mentor. Someone to look up to as well as
someone to learn from.
I remember as a teenager, looking up to Elvis Presley as a
hero. And his early years were very heroic.
When he was young, he would go out in front of hundreds
of people thousands of people in an audience, and he
would challenge himself to express himself from the heart and
not have any fear. He knew he was singing differently, he was
moving differently; he was not like anybody else in the whole
world. But he would just allow that expression that huge
energy, that love of the song, the sense of ownership to simply
express. Let the chips fall where they may.
If you look at some of the early films of his life, you see
some of the concerts and the shows on Ed Sullivan, where you
can observe the expression on his face and hear that music.
Its so infectious even today. Even today with all the better
production values in music, you can hear the raw beauty and
the energy in the music of Elvis in his early years.
This comes from living a life of constant challenge, but
its voluntary challenge. It is absolute joyful challenge. He
challenged himself and he challenged the world. Hey, look at

LIFE COACHING 37

this. Listen to this. Its different than anything youve ever

seen and I dont care what you think of it.
Later in his life, that was completely turned around. His life
became a life of comfort, a life of ease, a life of people around him
pleasing him, the Memphis mafia feeding him drugs and deep
fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and his life went in
the opposite direction. There were no more challenges. I mean,
how challenging was it to make a movie likeClambakeorHaremScarem, Girls, Girls, Girls,orFun in Acapulco? It was the same
movie! There was no challenge in his world; and because there
was no challenge, he lost his strength; and when his strength
went away, he became obese, his voice closed up, he couldnt
sing like he used to, and his life became a nightmare. He was
firing guns at the television set; he was crazy, he was paranoid,
and he died on the bathroom floor at the age of forty-two with
all those drugs in his system.
He was a man who started seeking comfort instead of
seeking challenge.He was becoming the king of comfort.
Lessons for me, all of them.
One of the callers into an Elvis webinar I did asked, What
would have been different in Elvis life if he had had a life coach?
He would have lived the last half of his lifeinstead of
avoiding it. Coaches get you to live.
What happens to us when we think success and money are
all we ought to go for? We find that theres nothing there when
we get there. Theres nothing there. There is no real security
in that kind of security. There is no comfort in that comfort. It
becomes fresh, new paranoia.
Second home, second boat. Third wife. Private jet. More
clothes. More shoes, more shoes! Granite countertop!!! Re-doing
the house, redoing it again. What am I looking for? What am I
trying to achieve? More pleasure, more nice things.
We like nice things.
Emptiness, all around. And if my life does not come back to
me, then they can bring the curtain down.

38 STEVE CHANDLER

We are going out to dinner with a couple. They keep saying

at dinner, We like nice things but theyre just miserable
people. OK, these things are nice, yeah, but you?
Thats what seeking comfort does. It leads to huge
discomfort. In the soul. But what about turning that around?
How about seeing the value of challenge?
I was coaching a very creative person who is a client of mine, and
we were doing a session over Skype one night, and he was beaming.
His life had taken off; he was serving so many people, and he
was a very happy person and he looked into the camera on
Skype, looked at me, and he said, This recession is the best
thing thats ever happened to this country.
I loved that. What joy in that statement! But the reason he could
say that was because of how he valued challenge. How he himself
had used challenge to increase his creativity and productivity.
Valuing challenge is what gets you the life that you saw
when you were younger. When you were a kid and you said,
Hey, lets see if we can jump off this!
Remember that? Challenge. We knew intuitively thats where the
fun was. Thats where the real fun wasin challengesnot in comfort.
Making a child comfortable is the same as making him bored.
I mean what if you walked up to a really energetic child and
said, Well, I know you are playing and youre running and youre
jumping off things and youre crashing your bike and you think
its fun, but it looks really dangerous so I want to give you comfort
instead. Come on in the house; were going to let you lie on the
couch and give you a lot of chocolate and food and put on a DVD,
sweetheart. Were going to give you some comfort.
The child wouldnt buy it. The adult would, but the child would
prefer jumping off the roof of the house onto a discarded mattress.
But parents often project their own misguided need for
comfort on their children and start comforting them in absurdly
unwelcome ways.
The world is now going through a recession, which is a
polite, comfortable word for it. It is going through a challenging

LIFE COACHING 39

time because credit cards and free homes have been taken away
from peopleSorry, no more free money.
People can interpret this as tragedy. They can say its
shocking. I see clips on TV of people rioting, burning cars, and
smashing windows because the retirement age in their country
was going to be raised from sixty to sixty-two. Oh no! What a
horror, what a nightmare; we have to work two more years.
We dont want work or challenge! We want comfort! We
want retirement. We want out.
Or so we think.
I have never heard of a person on his deathbed looking back on
his life and saying, What a great life Ive had and what I most loved
were the long spans of comfort I experienced. Let me recount those
hours of my life where I felt so comfortable I didnt even know I
was there. And that was the real greatness of lifebeing taken care
of like an infant. Im glad Im here attached to all these tubes. Its
like the womb almost. I have gone back to those wonderful days of
yesteryear. Being fed by others, not having to do anything.
No one ever talks that way at the end of his life. People talk about
the challenges they faced. People talk about what they went up against.
I remember my father talking about World War II. War is
hell, but not in his memory.
And as he got older he would talk about the adventurous
things he did when he grew up poor, in Parker, Arizona. The
challenges the family had! How they took in laundry at night
and they all worked on it. His eyes lit up. You could see it in his
face. Those were the great times.
He made a lot of money in business and then retired early
to drink all day and sit in front of the TV set and watch re-runs
of Happy Days. That wasnt the part of his life that he recounted.
He never wanted to talk about that phase.
Isnt that funny? He never wanted to talk about the very
thing he worked so hard all his life for, an early retirement!
Thats what the future will do for you. Thats what living in the
future of comfort produces. Shame.

40 STEVE CHANDLER

He never said, about his retirement, Oh that was so

satisfying. To just be able to get up and make myself a martini,
take a couple of Valium, and then go take a nap. Now that made
my life worth it.
That was the shameful part of his life. That was the part he
didnt want to talk about.
He wanted to talk about the challenges. Because when he
was truly alive, he was amazing at handling challenges.
And if we got real honest, and if we really looked at where
joy comes from, we would start to welcome challenges. We
would start to challenge ourselves more.
I wake up. Look at my calendar. Do I have space in my day to
challenge myself with something? Who am I afraid to call that I
am going to call today? What kind of physical accomplishment
can I do that I wasnt going to do?
Challenge brings joy, but most people devote their adult
lives to avoiding challenges. Because they think a challenge
shouldnt be there. A challenge is a problem. Its an obstacle.
Its something they need to avoid.
Coaching presents a challenge to people.
Good coaching, especially. Which is one of the reasons its
mocked by outsiders.
With my coach listening to me make excuses for why I have
not taken big bold action in pursuit of my mission, there is
nowhere to hide.
My friend Matt Furey coaches people in physical fitness (he
was a national champion wrestler and world champion martial
artist). He also coaches people on how to create successful
internet businesses like he did. We were exchanging emails
the other day about what it meant to be a time warrior (being
violently uncompromising about where you spend your time)
and he said,
One of my friends in college wrestling had the
best response to a friend who told him he should

LIFE COACHING 41

be more sociable so people would like him: Im

not here to make friends, he said. Im here to
win a national title. He did. And people liked
that about him.
I sit across from my coach. I take out my notebook. He is
reading the email I sent him last night about what I wanted
to work on in our coaching session. He says, Im going to
challenge you right now; are you open to that?
I feel my heart skip, and then I realize that this is always
when the good stuff happens.

42 STEVE CHANDLER

You don't need to attract

I speak slowly. I dont get all psyched up and pumped
up. I dont transfer my energy to you. I dont want to get you
psyched up and pumped up. I dont live with passionat least
not in my audio recordings. So, lets get that straight. I do this
deliberately. I speak slowly. I slow everything down.
I want you to be able to hear this at a level that you are
not all pumped up and excited about, but a level that goes in
there (into the subconscious part of your systeminto every
cell in your body) and becomes an operating principle instead
of just information. Something you know. It might become a
place to come from. I want to slow your mind down. I dont
want you racing out ahead of what I am talking about into
your own future.
This future-racing that we do is really the problem as far as
success is concerned. If people would simply slow down and
focus on the beautiful details right here.
Choose a few good moneymaking skills and practice them
slowly. Wonderful things would happen.
But rather than practicing core skills, I find my client, Reed,
pasting photos all over his office photos of hot cars and hot
women and seaside mansions. Michael Buble is singing loudly
from the speakers on Reeds computer:

LIFE COACHING 43

So you want to be a rock star

with blue-eyed bunnies in your bed
well remember when youre rich
that you sold yourself for this
youll be famous cause youre dead
Reed explains to me that he is utilizing the law of attraction.
He says that one cannot have blue-eyed bunnies in ones bed
without first picturing them there.
I sit Reed down for his coaching session, and I say, Lets
take this idea of attraction first. If you really want to succeed,
one of the first things you want to eliminate from your mind
is this thing called attraction.
Reed looks stunned. His whole office is geared up for a
harmonic convergence. He believes he can create a vortex for
abundance in his mind and his very room.
Im trying to develop a passion, he says, for attracting
what I want. Im including passion on that list.
Reed points to the word PASSION! written in deep
purple on his wall.
He says, I want to learn to live with passion.
I look at Reed and he looks exhausted. I can tell hes been
working on his room a long time.
Reed is not unusual. Spoiled as a child, he has been
conditioned to always wonder whose boots he has to lick to
get what he wants. Who will give it to him? The universe?
I need to tell him that there is no universe. Can he handle
that yet?
Reed is not unusual.
Prospective coaching clients often begin their calls with
these words, I want to attract things into my life. I want
to find a way to attract wealth. I want to find a way to
attract a spouse. I want to find a way to attract customers
to my website. I want to find a way to attract clients into
my world.

44 STEVE CHANDLER

I recommend that they drop that. I ask them to look back

through their lives and notice how it does not work. I would
only drop it because it does not work.
Ive worked with people for over twenty years and I have
never seen attraction work. Therefore I would drop it from
my repertoire (my vocabulary), especially from inside that
part of my mind that carries the morbid, toxic beliefs around
with me that keep me from succeeding.
This thing called attractionattracting a partner,
attracting customers, attracting money, attracting wealth,
attracting good contacts and stuffis often associated with
life coaching. Or new age spirituality wherein we harmonize
with the vortex and cuddle up with the universe so that the
universe finally begins to bless us.
Its childhood all over again. What do I think Moms
going to give me for my birthday?? Its exciting! What am I
going to get? Its all about wishing and hoping for things, so
its the opposite of what good coaching brings about.
Coaching empowers people. Coaching does not relate to
what everyone else is calling the universe.
I want to drop attraction as a strategy only because it
doesnt work. Have I repeated that enough times? Because
repetition (annoying as it is) has you get it. So you might
end up not liking me, but getting it. So that would be OK
with me. I mean, that would be perfect for me. Im not
here to attract admirers. Im really here to have these
principles get inside people who are interested in how and
why coaching works.
Once I drop my love affair with the idea of attraction,
what can I replace it with? I mean, I might want a spouse or
a partner. Am I to now be deliberately unattractive? I might
want customers or clients. I might want wealth coming into
my life. So if Im not going to be utilizing the law of attraction,
if Im not going to sit quietly and picture these things coming
into my world, then what can I do instead?

LIFE COACHING 45

What I recommend for people to do is make a difference. To

actually make a difference all day, every day, by using creation.
By substituting creation for where they once had attraction as their
operating system. Rather than attracting a partner, I want to create a
relationship. Now I can become active. I can join clubs; I join church
groups and connect with civilization.
I remember once, many years ago, I joined a group of single
parents with children. I had full custody of my kids, as did the other
single parents in our group, and it was really fun. But I created that
activity, and so I made my life different than it was, which is called
making a difference.
Making a difference has you be creative throughout the day
instead of sitting back wondering how to attract things.
Heres the main problem with attraction as an operating
principle. This is why its dysfunctional. Attraction immediately
assumes that there are things (people, money, whatever) outside
of you, out there somewhere, that need to come into your world
for you to be happy. Thats what attraction is all about. Moving
something from the outside to the inside. Therefore the whole
theme of attraction. the whole principle of attraction is that you
are not enough.
You dont have what it takes.
Thats the starting point. Thats the beginning premise. You are
not enough. You are incomplete. You are missing something major.
You are a damaged self.
And thats a very weak way to start your day.
To believe that you dont have inside of you the resources
to make you happy. You need to have it all come to you from the
outside. You need to have it come in from what you fearfully regard
as the universe. Its the same old punishing God paranoia that the
ancients had, only dressed up in a new age universe language.
To be complete? I need to attract, from the universe, a beautiful
new partner, more clients, more money, a perfect job, more hits on
the website! With attraction as my belief, all these things must come
to me from the outside for me to be happy.

46 STEVE CHANDLER

That has me walking around deficient as a human. And

when my self-concept is deficiency, how bold and confident
can I be in my communications today? Its my communications
that will bring me success, not the universe. But because I
have begun my day focusing on my laundry list of deficiencies
(dressed up as goals and dreams) I am weak and scared.
Because I am not enough.
I am trying to attract what would complete me, and my
whole day is about that.
It leads to low self-esteem. It leads to becoming someone that
other people dont want to be around. We love being around
people who have enough. Who love their lives, who are in love
with life because theyve got everything they would ever need
to be happy. We love being around people like that and we
are (dare I say itI shouldnt even say this) we are attracted to
people like that.
My coach taught me to turn my life around completely,
so that my focus was on strengthening the inside instead of
focusing so much on what was missing from the outside.
My coach Steve Hardison taught me that when I did look
to the outside, it was always to see where I might be able to
make a difference. Rather than to whom I needed to impress or
win over. I was to look for where I could make a difference in
someones life.

LIFE COACHING 47

How to make a real difference

I once worked with a person by the name of Lyndon Duke.
Lyndon lived up in Oregon and was a coach and mentor of
mineand he communicated with me in many ways. He
used to send me cassettescoaching cassetteswhere he
talked directly to me on the cassette! Id never heard of that.
But its part of what is crazy and effective about coaching.
There is no standard conformity for everyone to imitate.
Every coach is different.
And so I would drive around listening to these cassettes
over and over. He was a powerful man, a wonderful gentle
philosopher and his specialty was the linguistics of suicide.
How interesting and strange.
It sounded negative. The linguistics of suicide! It sounded
dark, but it wasnt. It was his way of bringing the light.
Because he had become so good and accomplished
studying suicide notes, finding out what would have a
person be that low on the scale of motivation, inspiration,
spirit, that they would write a suicide note or that they
would even consider that. What he discovered over the years
in his research was that people in that state of mind were not
making any difference. In their opinion.
They felt that their being on this planet made no difference
to anyone else.

48 STEVE CHANDLER

So when Lyndon worked with them, he knew that if he could

get them to the point where they were making a difference
no matter how smalland they knew they were making a
difference, their lives would take on new meaning. Their lives
would actually become meaningful.
If something makes no difference, he would say, it has
no meaning.
Over and over he would repeat that to me, so that I would
never forget the power of difference-making. Meaning is the
difference something makes. If it makes no difference it has
no meaning.
At the same time that Id discovered Lyndon, I was also
being coached by Steve Hardison. I gave Steve one of Lyndons
cassettes to listen to. I was afraid that he might be irritated that
I was learning from someone other than him, but he had the
opposite reaction.
Wow! he said when he heard Lyndons tape. That dude
is amazing! Hes powerful!
Steve thought it was absolutely great that I was learning
from him.
Lyndon convinced me that if you could get a seemingly
hopeless person to start making even a tiny difference, it would
change everything in their lives.
Difference making is also the key to creating wealth; its
the key to creating relationships; its the key to creating clients,
creating customers, and creating the life you want. I want to
look at what differences I can make today in the lives of my
clients by helping them see the differences they can start making.
If a person is contacting me and wanting to talk, I want to
ask myself, How can I contribute to this persons life? What
could I do that would make a difference right now? Instead of,
How am I coming across?
Ive had so many of my clients who tell me theyre going to
communicate with a prospective customer and I dont want
to come across like this_______. I want to re-connect them

LIFE COACHING 49

to the spirit that connects everything by asking, What kind

of a difference can you make in their lives today? Instead
of allowing them to continue to worry about how they are
coming across.
Stop coming across. Start making a difference.
People are so incredibly obsessed throughout the day with
how they are coming across! Im going to send this e-mail.
Look at it, Steve, okay? How do you think this e-mail will go
over? How will I come across sending an email like this?
And thats the whole fallacy of attraction as a goal. Thats
the whole fallacy of trying to manipulate other peoples love
and approval. It never works. It never holds. In fact, it backfires.
The more obsessed I am with how I am coming across, the more
repulsed other people are by my phony attempts to impress
them. The less they want to be with me.
You know this.
Youve been to dinner parties and similar gatherings where
its obvious when a person is trying to make an impression and
win approval. They are trying so hard to come across a certain
way that they become repulsive and you look at your friend
and you kind of smile like, Oh, my gosh. What a jerk! And
your friend says, Yes. He is trying a little too hard isnt he?
And this is why wondering how I am coming across will never
work for me. I want to replace it with different questions: What
difference can I make? How can I contribute? How can I help?
Whenever I value difference-making in my world, my world
literally becomes different. I am soon living a life of creating
relationships, creating money, creating clients and customers,
and creating what I want instead of trying to attract it.
Creating by making a difference.
Trying to attract friends and wealth from outside of me
solidifies my self-concept as deficient, defective, and not
enough. I want to shift that to a whole, complete, and totally
happy me.

50 STEVE CHANDLER

The awakening slave

If you want to live a life and have a professional career
characterized by velocity and power, then you will
allow yourself to see and experience the source of that
power. Its your inner stance. Its you.
~ Dusan Djukich

Susan Motheral is a mentor and consultant to women and

a friend of mine. She specializes in helping women find the
happiness and pleasure that is sometimes lost in the name of
altruistic, saintly self-sacrifice... living for others.
We talked recently about boundaries and saying NO and
the ability to eliminate clutter and complicated confusion
in life. How a happy and renewed love of life most often
involves taking things away, instead of continuously trying
to add things. Like Michelangelo did with his art... he
obtained a huge block of marble from the quarry and then
proceeded to chop and carve away.
Great writers do that with their manuscripts. The editing
and cutting is where the magic emerges.
Susan sent me a postcard after our talk. It was a
Michelangelo stone sculpture called The Awakening Slave...
and the beautiful statue is only partially carved from the

LIFE COACHING 51

stone block. Susan was cleaning her home office when she
coincidentally came upon this card.
She writes, Look at what I found. Isnt the title just the
best for the topic of cleaning...? The Awakening Slave. And
that delicious quotation from the artist, Michelangelo, comes
to mind: I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set
him free.
Coaching, when its great, does that too.

52 STEVE CHANDLER

How to not ever grow up

Ones relationship to a life coach is often a long-term
project, because there need be no end to the process
of learning and growth. This is why many champion
athletes and high performing business executives retain
coaches long after the time they have become successful.
~ Dr. Nathaniel Branden

One of the ways I coach people is via email. Ill often put
other peoples quotes in my emails that have helped people
wake up to the real power inside themselves. They prefer this
power to being hypnotized by the imaginary power of others.
This is such a quote from Dr. Brad Blanton:
Wishing is a way to remove oneself
from what is going on now. Hope is how
most of us avoid growing up.
One of my email clients didnt like that quote, and we went
back and forth debating the relative value of hope. We finally
agreed to the difference between hope that led to action and
hope that did not. It was a great debate, provoked by Blantons
rather harsh quote.

LIFE COACHING 53

And I enjoyed the exchange, because I am all about

provocation. I enjoy provoking people so that they wake up,
stand up, and start speaking for themselves, and even opposing
my ideas. Its all good energy, right? Otherwise we just lie there.
And I like being wrong. One can always learn something
when one is wrong. When youre right, you learn nothing
you just start to inflate. Its not good to be an inflated person.
Its not strong.
Coaching is not about delivering expert advice and
downloading superior wisdom. Its about provocation. There
isnt much value in advice, unless you count advice like this:
Keep away from runaround Sue.
But there is great value in provocation.

54 STEVE CHANDLER

Coaching is all about practice

Coaching is such a powerful concept, especially when
both coach and client commit to creating transformation
and success. Two minds are better than one.
Yet, most people try to go it alone. (Thinking they look
more adult and independent that way.)
I believe one of the telltale signs of a persons commitment
to success is a willingness to ask for help. I know its true in
addiction recovery. Reaching out and asking for help means
you are finally ready to recover. Surrender is strength.
In most of adult life we associate it with weakness. Why
do I need help? Why do I need a coach?
No one really, ultimately, needs a coach. But people
who are in a good hurrypeople who dont want to
postpone their career success any longer want a coach.
Its really a wantnot a need.
Coaching is not therapy. When someone thinks they
need a coach, they probably actually need therapy.
Coaching is not designed to heal psychological wounds
(although it can, in indirect ways). Coaching is for
success. It is proactive and project-oriented. It brings out
the best in people.
I love the prosperity school for coaches I conduct
because it gives coaches a way to build strong practices.

LIFE COACHING 55

It takes practice to build a practice. Coaches can learn,

with practice, to become prosperous in their professions.
And that actually helps their clientswho would you
want coaching you? Someone who has a strong, proud,
prosperous coaching practice, or some needy person who is
struggling to pay bills?
As the 2009 baseball season progressed I watched
players more closely than I usually do because of the
book I was writing that year about baseball (Two Guys
Read the Box Scores). I also read more about this thing
called talent.
Because Ive always had my suspicions about talent.
Ive even written about athletes and musicians who people
assumed were talented but who actually practiced more
than their counterparts.
Ive also experienced myself being called talented in
areas that I knew for a fact were just the result of committed
practice that my coach helped me be continuously
accountable for (and enthusiastic about). Yet, on the outside
it looked like talent.
Leading me to laugh inside about how good coaching
can make you look talented.
Now the research is pouring out to verify what I suspected
all along. Talent is overrated. In fact I just finished reading
a wonderful book called Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.
I thought that was the most impressive book Id ever
read on the subject until this week when a mentor of mine
urged me to read The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. Wow.
That book blew me away.
Why dont we teach our children this stuff? Its so
amazing how talented the average person can become if
he or she wants to.
The Talent Code reveals the kinds of dedicated, deep
practice that leads to excellence and mastery. It is so
inspiring to know how much potential we all have in us.

56 STEVE CHANDLER

Yet when we see a Tiger Woods or a Pablo Picasso or a

Meryl Streep, we shake our heads and admire their natural,
inborn gifts not realizing that we also have gifts. We just
dont practice them.
Coaching comes from the world of sports. Coaching and
practice go together.

LIFE COACHING 57

My inappropriate limitations
My two-hour coaching session was today with Steve
Hardison. I enjoy being coached because I always move beyond
my comfort zone. I go farther than I would have gone on my
own because its easy to fool myself about my limitations, but
its hard to fool both him and me.
That takes some twisted skill. Its not that I dont often try.
Somewhere in his home Hardison has a framed quotation
from Nathaniel Branden that pretty much sums up how he
approaches coaching and life:
I am convinced that one of the most helpful things
we can do for people is to refuse to buy into their
inappropriately restricted views of their limitations.
~ Nathaniel Branden

58 STEVE CHANDLER

Please do what you love

Stephen McGhee flew into Phoenix to meet with me for
four hours on the subject of conducting a coaching school. He
brought his own client Mark Musselman with him. We had a
small conference room at the Airport Hilton and went deep
into the content of the coaching prosperity schools Ive taught,
one of which Stephen McGhee attended.
McGhee is one of the most dedicated and gifted coaches I
have ever known. His book, Learning to Believe the Unbelievable
can be found on Amazon and is highly recommended. After
the three of us met, he went home and wrote this in his blog:
Recently, I was in a meeting with Steve
Chandler, a well-known author and leadership
coach. He said, The faster a person gets in
touch with reality, the faster he will succeed
(www.imindshift.com). These words were
energized with Spirit. It was a statement that
clearly sang out with truth and wisdom.
One of my coaching clients has been holding
onto a job he has essentially disliked for years.
Sure it provided income. He was comfortable. And
each night he went home feeling empty inside. Is

LIFE COACHING 59

this how you want to live life? I can tell you, I have
done this many times in life. It is not fun. Once
he made the decision to move his energy into a
career he loves his life has transformed. He has
dropped over twenty pounds in two months. His
relationship with his wife is more intimate and
loving. He looks different. He walks different. He
is inspiring other people in his life as an example
of leadership. Getting real in one major area has
transformed every arena of his life.
I invite you into the miracle of reality. My
former coach and mentor Steve Hardison says
Why would you ever do anything in your life
that you dont love doing? At the time that
concept struck me as incredibly insightful.
Why would I do that to myself? I thought I
was being responsible by being tough. Then,
I began to wonderresponsible to whom? To
those around me that just want me to be happy?
I no longer see it that way. It was my silly idea,
not my familys.
Someone on a recent flight to DC asked me
about my job? I said I dont have a job. I have not
had a job for twelve years and yet I do something
that enlivens me every day of every week. Its
lucrative and enjoyable. Some of us feel those
two elements are mutually exclusive. Thats not
true. The story some people have is that work
should be hard. You show me someone that
is in touch with reality and I will show you a
person that succeeds. I will show you inspiration
in action. There will be poetry in that persons
motion, because there is no gap in reality. It is
clean and crisp.

60 STEVE CHANDLER

One of the reasons people dont hire a coach and get good
coaching is because they would rather look outside themselves
(to circumstances) for help than inside. A coach will have them
look inside. But most people prefer outside help, sometimes in
the form of loans or investments.
As if money were the answer to their lack of success.
They are the classic incompetents made more incompetent
with a handout, not less. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
Teach a man to fish (a good coaching session is really a fishing
lesson) and he eats for a lifetime.
I just remembered a few variations on the teach a man to
fish concept that Ive always liked:
Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach
a man to fish; and you will not have to listen to his
incessant whining about how hungry he is.
***
Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a
man to use the Net and he wont bother you for weeks.
***
Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a
man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. Teach
a man to sell fish and he eats steak.

LIFE COACHING 61

Creating a crime of genius

If a person suffers from acute anxiety, severe
depression, or low self-esteem, he or she needs
psychotherapy, not life coaching. However, if a
person is basically healthy but is seeking greater
fulfillment in one or another aspect of life, life
coaching can be invaluable.
~ Dr. Nathaniel Branden

Today I attended a seminar on law enforcement put on

by a friend and advisor who is also a detective who heads
up the criminal investigations unit of the Gilbert Police
Department and runs a national program that trains cops
on how to catch killers.
His techniques of cutting-edge cell-phone tower tracking
and other high-tech secrets of pursuit were fascinating to learn.
I took many pages of notes for a book I am writing called A
Crime of Genius. That book is the second in a series of mysteries
that begins with The Woman Who Attracted Money.
As I sat in the seminar among all those law enforcement
people with weapons on their hips taking notes, I really felt
their dedication. These people put their lives on the line every
day to keep the rest of us safe. We take them for granted. But

62 STEVE CHANDLER

they work so hard. You should have seen them taking notes and
asking questions. That killer who might be on the loose is now
at a real disadvantage up against these brave, smart people.
And thats the kind of thing thats fun for me to write about.
My other big motive in writing my first mystery was to
introduce people to coaching. In the book my life coach Robert
Chance has some coaching sessions with Madison Kerr. The
reader gets to see how a coach thinks and works, and how a
clients world opens like a butterfly.
In a wild kind of way I wanted to get the idea of coaching
to a wider audience. I always wanted to write mysteries, so I
made my hero a coach who used to be a cop. And a lot of friends
and readers have told me that they never knew anything about
coaching or what coaching could do until they were lured into
this murder mystery.
I love writing fiction. Its just huge fun, and very, very
difficult work. And I enjoy difficult work.
I didnt enjoy work before. Not before I got a coach. Before
I got a coach, work was something I hated. He transformed it
into something I absolutely love.
In my past life as a total victim (and I really was one!) I
avoided work.
Then, through my coaching sessions, I got it. Work, when
really engaged, is the most fun anyone could ever have. When
it is done in a thoroughly disciplined way, it is a total joy.
Coaching has given me a life-changing message: Only the
disciplined are free.

LIFE COACHING 63

But that would be impossible

I ran a writers workshop that hosted more than twenty-five
writers gathering to explore the depths of creativity, discipline
and book publishing.
The workshop opened with this quote:
Every noble work is, at first, impossible.
~ Thomas Carlyle

But what do we mean by impossible? One of the exercises I

often have my coaching clients do is to sit down and create an
impossible future.
Is this practical? Does it not just get their hopes up and
indulge their fantasies?
Not quite.
Because we have misused the concept called impossible.
We automatically put way too many things into that category.
And because we do that, we condemn ourselves to Groundhog
Day. We live repetitive default days, always thinking the same
thoughts and indulging the same fears. We do this day in, day
out, only getting about three percent to nine percent better
at what we do each year because we are not trying anything

64 STEVE CHANDLER

new or daringly experimental. There is no stretch. We are not

thinking in new ways.
Why arent we?
Those great ideas we get are impossible. Or so we think.
And so we say.
Therefore a really effective jump-start to quantum growth
in performance and achievement is to list all the impossible
things you would like to do. And the only rule to the exercise is
that they have to be, in your own mind, currently, impossible.
This is a great coaching exercise because in the past my mind
would not even go there. Once I say to myself that something is
impossible, I produce a total blackout. Its a shutdown category
where the mind can never travel.
Id like to. oh, but thats impossible.
In this coaching exercise we dont care that its impossible
because thats the rule of the game it HAS TO BE impossible.
Strange things then happen. The impossible concept, once
two people get really creative with it, and brainstorm it and
work on it and look at it from every imaginable angle no
longer. looks impossible.

LIFE COACHING 65

No one can bring you down

One day I gave a talk at a womens group of realtors. I talked
about how I coach my clients how I ask them whether they
want to cede and concede and surrender all power to external
circumstances like the economy, the housing market, and the
temperature of the sun.
Or, if instead, they were willing to turn inward and strengthen
themselves from within so that they entered the market with
courage, creativity, enthusiasm, and totally inventive spunk.
I love giving these talks and the great exchanges with the
audience members who ask the best questions in the world.
Here was one question: How do I handle it when I am
optimistic and opportunistic but people around me, especially
family, are cynics and pessimists?
I have no solution for that situation because there is no
problem. The only problem is a perceived problem in the
bio-computer of the person perceiving the problem. If your
biological computer has been tuned recently, it cant see a
problem in pessimistic family members for the same reason
that it cant see a problem with autumn leaves.
I grew up in Michigan, and in the autumn the leaves on the
trees would change color and then fall by my window. The
autumn leaves of red and gold. Was there a problem with that?
No. Its what trees do.

66 STEVE CHANDLER

Same thing with people. They get emotional. They get

cynical and pessimistic. Is there a problem with that? Not unless
my own bio-computer is out of order.
But there IS a problem! said the woman realtor, because
they bring me down! They make me feel awful by the time I
leave their house!
But this is once again a misunderstanding. A faulty use of
the bio-computer. Like trying to type on your keyboard when
its upside down.
Because no one can bring you down.
The brain wasnt set up to work that way. (Thank goodness.
Otherwise Id be down all the time! Id just turn on the evening
news and Id be down in two minutes! Not because of reality,
which is just fine, but because of how its being sold to us.)
The brain was set up to only produce an emotion in
response to an internal thought. Never to anything external.
Not even relatives.

LIFE COACHING 67

Is your life not working?

Either you will make your life work,
or your life will not work.
~ Nathaniel Branden

I get contacted by a lot of people whose lives are not working.

Their businesses are not working. They want coaching.
They want their lives to work again.
But they dont see the problem.
When I ask them to describe what they think is wrong, all I
hear about is other people. Other people disappoint them. Or
scare them. Then I hear about circumstance. The competition.
The economy. Their location.
I know right away why their lives are not working. A life of
expectation is a life of disappointment. A life of trying to win
the approval of others is a life of fear.
My job as a coach is to restore the creative life. Because a
creative life is a life of action and huge energy for achieving
large and small goals; its a life of happy flow. Its never your
life thats not working. Its always just you. But thats the best
news there could ever be.

68 STEVE CHANDLER

The courage to change

The first really powerful coaching in my life came from my
sponsor. I was in a recovery program for alcohol in the 1980s
and when you get serious about taking a spiritual path to
recovery you get a sponsor.
I met with my sponsor at least once a week, and he coached
me compassionately but in a very uncompromising way. I was
held accountable for my recovery steps.
Recently I went to a twelve-step meeting with a dear friend
who was celebrating her first ninety days of sobriety. Even
though I have almost thirty years now of recovery from this
horrific and demeaning addiction, I always learn something
fortifying and illuminating at these meetings.
Why do I include this meeting in a book about coaching?
Because none of my books would have been written had I not
experienced this program of change.
Everything comes from having become clear.
There are forms of coaching everywhere. Why not make it
conscious and deliberate?
At the beginning of the twelve-step meeting one recovering
person read these words, words she called the promises:
If we are painstaking about this phase of our
development, we will be amazed before we are

LIFE COACHING 69

halfway through. We are going to know a new

freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret
the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will
comprehend the word serenity and we will know
peace. No matter how far down the scale we
have gone, we will see how our experience can
benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and
self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in
selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude
and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people
and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will
intuitively know how to handle situations that
used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that
God is doing for us what we could not do for
ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We
think not. They are being fulfilled among us
sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will
always materialize if we work for them.
Those promises have been kept in my life.
Yet I still run into people who say that people never change.
But they are so wrong. People never change? Look at all the
Before and After pictures I see every day. Look at the person
who once was a daily drunk and now has a good job, a family,
and is contributing to society. How big a change do you want?
My coach coached a guy who was in so much debt his
life looked hopeless and his business looked doomed. After a
year and a half with my coach he was debt-free and one of the
wealthiest people in town. And thats just money. I only use
breakthroughs in money as examples because they are so easy
to measure. The real coaching breakthroughs occur in even
better ways than that.

70 STEVE CHANDLER

Help means you are a pro

We are, each of us, angels with only one wing;
and we can only fly embracing each other.
~ Luciano de Crescenzo

Steven Pressfield has written a true masterpiece on the

subject of creativity (a subject that concerns us all whether we
realize it or not) called The War of Art.
He has a short chapter in the book called A PROFESSIONAL
DOES NOT HESITATE TO ASK FOR HELP. He writes,
Tiger
Woods
is
the
consummate
professional. It would never occur to him,
as it would to an amateur, that he knows
everything, or can figure out everything on
his own. On the contrary, he seeks out the
most knowledgeable teacher and listens with
both ears. The student of the game knows that
the levels of revelation that can unfold in golf,
as in any art, are inexhaustible.
When I was younger I would experiment by reading
Emerson and allowing his philosophy and poetry to influence

LIFE COACHING 71

my mind. After I got out of recovery for alcohol I realized that

living without a philosophy was not serving me.
Without my own philosophy of life to guide me I was simply
attaching to the next person or thing that caught my fancy. I ran
out of money and luck living this way.
Then I began experimenting with religion, psychotherapy
and hypnosis. They all helped, in their own way. Now I
was getting somewhere, because I was gathering a storm of
momentum. Philosophical momentum.
I experimented, then, with a coach. For the first time! I hired
Tom Rompel in Tucson to coach me and my business (I owned
an advertising agency and PR firm). Rompel had been a student
and business associate of Werner Erhard.
Was I sure I wanted to experiment with that? Wasnt
Erhard made fun of by TV and movies for leading that
extreme EST program?
Well, yes. But as Ive later come to understand, television
media is not devoted to accuracy. Its devoted to its own
politically self-righteous superstitions and selling us the dark
link between greed and fear. Accuracy is WAY down the list
of their philosophical guidelines. So they were wrong about
Werner Erhard, but they didnt mind in the least.
Tom Rompel, who would be my first coach, would be right
about Werner Erhard. He had worked at his side. He knew him
well. He learned so much from him. I benefitted immediately.
Erhard was dedicated to raising the consciousness of the
community and increasing the effectiveness of the individual.
He was moved by this purpose, just as Gandhi was moved by
his purpose. Both were about strengthening the mind. Gandhi
once said,
I over-eat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor,
he gives me medicine, I am cured, I over-eat again
and take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills
in the first instance, I would have suffered the

72 STEVE CHANDLER

punishment deserved by me, and I would not

have over-eaten again. The doctor intervened and
helped me to indulge myself. My body certainly
felt more at ease, but my mind became weakened.
Gandhi was describing a societal magnetism toward
comfort at the expense of personal, mental strength. He himself
countered it with all kinds of austerities and fasting.
I was to begin my own counter of societys pull by using a
coach. A coach, Tom Rompel, who later said he had to use a
two-by-four in our sessions to get my attention.
But he got my attention.
And I learned what it was like to live on purpose.
There is a famous quote by George Bernard Shaw on the
subject, and although I have read it hundreds of times (and,
perhaps, so have you) it is worth repeating. When you read
this quote, compare it to being lost. Because the longer I live the
more I realize that life is a choice between this quote by Shaw
and being lost.
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a
purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one;
the being a force of nature instead of a feverish,
selfish little clod of ailments and grievances
complaining that the world will not devote itself
to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the
whole community, and as long as I live it is my
privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for
the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for
its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is a
sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the
moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as
possible before handing it on to future generations.

LIFE COACHING 73

One of the first things Rompel did was take me into an

office to show me a video of an event facilitated by his parent
coaching company, Transformational Technologies.
It was called the Manager as Coach and was a business
seminar that was shown on satellite in 1987 on TV to over ten
thousand people across the U.S. They say it was the largest
teleseminar ever done up to that time.
The participants were John Wooden, George Allen (Redskins
coach), Red Auerbach (Celtics coach), Tim Galway (Tennis
coach and the author of The Inner Game of Tennis), and Werner
Erhard (founder of Transformational Technologies and, later,
Landmark Education).
That was the first time Id ever thought of coaching as
something that could apply to someone outside of athletics.

74 STEVE CHANDLER

Find and use your strength

Dr. Martin Seligman is someone whose work on the
psychology of optimism Ive praised and used and admired for
years. His deep, respected research has uncovered a simple key
to happiness: Use your strengths often.
But many times we forget our strengths or dont even see
what they are.
I was coaching a very bright fellow who had been an
accountant all his life and was just now getting into business
consulting and coaching. He would attend my coaching schools
and introduce himself to the other coaches as a recovering
accountant. He wanted to leave that boring life behind and
enter the exciting, multi-faceted world of coaching!
But when he ventured forth to get clients he wasnt having
much luck. He was not using his strength, because to him it was
a weakness. So he wasnt very happy.
One of his strengths was that he was an accountant,
good with numbers. He could look at a balance sheet, a
business prospectus or a P&L sheet and understand it
immediately. He was exactly what many business owners
needed. Someone who was not afraid to look at, work with,
and strengthen the numbers.
Once he saw that strength, he began to use it everywhere.
He started a mastermind group that focused on Measurable

LIFE COACHING 75

Results. It was a powerful appeal. I attended one of his

mastermind sessions, which he ran with quiet strength and
precision. The people in the group benefited greatly from his
work. He was using his strength.
This is one of many examples of a coach seeing a clients
so-called weakness for what it really so often is: the hidden
strength. The client himself cant see it. But the coach can.

76 STEVE CHANDLER

What is a coaching connection?

A coach begins by connecting you to your own purpose.
That, more than anything else, is the life coaching connection.
When I coach people, my first assignment is to connect my
clients to their hidden momentum. My job is also to disconnect
my clients from their damaged personalities. At least,
temporarily.
My own life coach reconnects me to my purpose in each
sessioneven when my purpose shifts and changes. He doesnt
care. Once we choose it we connect to it.
Otherwise my time spent between coaching sessions is
wasted away dealing with the politics of human emotions.
Soon I lose all energy for a joyful life.
Does coaching really work? I cant even describe it.
But let me try.
What do people want? People I talk to are always looking
for more energy. They have this long list of things they think
they need to get done and they say, Boy, I wish I had more
energy. What can I do for more energy? What foods can I eat
that give energy? What exercise can I do? And they look
in all these different places for energy because they have so
much to do.
Now one of the things thats beautiful about the concept of
purpose is that purpose actually produces energy.

LIFE COACHING 77

When I was a little boy I used to go swimming with

friends, and I remember a couple of times while playing
around in the pool, one of my friends would hold me under
water. Just kind of playing around, he would hold me down
there under water for a while just to scare me, just to have
some fun and to make my heart race.
I never had so much energy as when that happened!
I mean, I wasnt distracted by anything. My mind didnt
wander. I didnt wrestle with my options. I didnt worry about
whether I would make the right decision. I had one purpose:
to fight to get up above water and breathe once again.
Therefore, my energy was focused and my strength
powerful and the innovation of my body movements almost
magical as I threw my oppressor off and gained fresh air.
What an illustration of the power of single-minded,
uninterrupted purpose! It is energy itself!
Ive read a lot of accounts and Ive seen some
documentaries and true story movies made about people
who break out of prisoneven if its an impossible prison
to break out of. Even though the prisoners have heard about
the impossibility, they plan their escape day and night.
Amazing things happen when people wake up with
their purposea singular purpose. Throughout the day that
purpose is with them and so they see things from that purpose.
Theyre able to ask, of every circumstance, good or bad,
How could I use this? Whats useful here based on what
Im up to?
We can do that, too; we just forget it. In the face of all
the other purposes calling to us from all the people we
need to please, we forget about the power of purpose,
so we dont have any. We just try to survive. We call our
survival mechanism a personality and soon that personality
(a collection of worries, hopes and resentments) drives our
lives the choices we make for action or non-action.
But we can, just as easily, have purpose driving our lives.

78 STEVE CHANDLER

When you have purpose driving your life, you now have a
way of converting bad news into useful news. (Im putting
bad news in quotes here because we dont really know if its
bad until years later when we can see that it was not.)
Purposeless people (personalities) who get bad news
allow themselves to slide down the ladder and be in a bad
mood. Now theyre disheartened and discouraged. Theyre
not feeling so great. Thats what bad news does to them!
But, if you are up to something, and you are in the middle
of creating actions toward a project, and some news comes
in, you are able to ask, Given what I am up to in life, how
can I use this? That very question is a beautiful use of this
thing called purpose. I cant tell you how many times my
coach has asked me that very question. Given what you are
up to, how can you use this situation?
Often I am a prisoner and my coach just sets me free. With
that one question. Like the prisoners in the movie.
When those prisoners wake up in the morning and they
look around, everything they see and everyone they talk to
gets filtered in through How do I break out of this place?
and How does that help me with the plan Ive got going
on to break out? Because thats all theyre thinking about
breaking free.
Being up to something in life gives us energy and makes
us enjoy life. It is no coincidence or accident that a life coach
will ask a prospective client that very question in their first
conversation: So, what are you up to these days?
I want the clients I coach to really know the difference
between how it feels to be living from purpose versus living
from personality.
Personality can only be wounded and disrespected in
its everlasting fight to win appreciation from others. Thats
what living from personality does, but living from purpose
makes what other people say become unimportant. Unless I
can use it to fulfill my purpose.

LIFE COACHING 79

When you are up to something, energy flows into you.

But when you are focused on who you think you are (your
personality) energy flows away from you.
Maintaining a consistent affect (personality) leaves you
weakened and everything else looks powerful in the face of
your struggle to maintain yourself. Other people look like
they have all the money and all the power, institutions look
overwhelmingly powerful, health problems look like they
could take you downeverything looks frightening when Im
living from my personality.
One of the most disempowering elements of ones
personality is age how old you are.
When I dont care about who I am and Im in action creating
and serving, my age means nothing. Some people become more
and more successful, creative, and accomplished as their life
moves forwardno matter what age they are. People like Clint
Eastwood or Frank Lloyd Wright, who really started to blossom
in their seventies and eighties because theyve been on a curve
of purpose that keeps eliminating whats not important.
The great ballet director George Ballentine said, Ive got
more energy now than when I was younger because I know
exactly what I want to do. He has more energy now! Now that
he is older! Why? Because he knows exactly what he wants to
do.
When he was younger he was probably like so many of us.
He probably had so many things he was half-trying to do
or just thinking he should do. and trying to decide what to
do that the energy was robbed by all the indecision. A life full
of distractions and being scattered. Thats why I love the old
saying, Winners focus; losers spray.
This is a power inside of life coaching that a lot of people
dont think about. Its a simple question your coach will ask
you. What do you want to create? Or, What is the result you
would like me to help you produce? The coaching becomes
a compass.

80 STEVE CHANDLER

It was amazing to watch the career of Larry Bird because

he didnt have anything that you would call athleticism or any
kind of natural gifts that we say other basketball players have.
He was rather slow. He wasnt overly strong. There was just
nothing about him that would have you say, He would be a
great basketball player!
But he had a purpose.
So he was willing to do various unusual and extreme forms
of practice. His purpose was so simple and so friendly to him
and he would wake up with it.
So when he found that other people could guard him because
he was right handed, he would practice dribbling with his left
hand. So now people guarding Larry Bird didnt know which
way he was going to go. It was almost as if he made himself
ambidextrous! And why did he do that? He had a purpose he
woke up with.
Watching a pro football game on TV I noticed that one of the
players was screaming at his coach. I mean he was just losing
it. He was yelling at his coach and the coach was telling him to
knock it off, and the player was yelling back at the offensive
co-coordinator, and throwing a tantrum.
A tantrum is a result of over-focusing on ones personality.
Im being disrespected, you hurt my feelings when
you dont put me in and let me run a play and you
put someone else in. Im being disrespected. How do
I look on national television when I sit out two plays
that are important to the team? How am I coming
across? How am I looking? I am being disrespected.
Stop dissing me!
Thats an over-focus on personality and ones
contracted identity system. Thats living from personality
instead of purpose.

LIFE COACHING 81

There was another player on the same team who for almost
the whole season wasnt put in the games. But he used that
situation for his higher purpose. I will rest, I will save my
strength, I will learn, I will train, I will work out, I will be so
ready when they finally do put me in that my purpose will be
fulfilled and that is to make a real difference on the field.
They did put him in during the playoffs, when another
player was injured, and he was so fresh and strong and prepared
for his moment that he made all the highlight reels on ESPN after
the game.

82 STEVE CHANDLER

Coaches want your WORD

You cant change anything by fighting or resisting
it. You change something by making it obsolete
through superior methods.
~ Buckminster Fuller

Making the bad thing go away is a double negative: bad

thing and go away are both negative. And to change my life I
want positive energy.
What the genius Buckminster Fuller is saying is an important
part of why coaching works. My coach does not have me fight
off bad habits. My coach has me execute superior methods of
living that make the bad things a mere memory.
Often I do this with my own coaching clients. I listen as
they talk to me about their problems, and I listen carefully for
language that is permanent and pervasive. Whenever I find
permanent and pervasive phrases in my clients talk, I stop the
conversation and explore.
My client, Odessa (and that is not her real name) would
always talk about herself in permanent, pervasive ways. Such as,
I always. I never. Or I have a tendency to. Notice
that these phrases describe permanent, ongoing patterns. They
hint at perpetual motion machinery in the woman that drives her

LIFE COACHING 83

behavior. She obviously believes in personal patterns that explain

her actions. She even tells me often, I have a pattern of always.
I want to break her of this mental mistake. So I tell her
a story. I ask her to follow the story and see if it makes any
sense to her.
One night it snowed heavily as my wife and I were watching
late night TV. My wife asked me if I would shovel the walk in
the morning, and I said I would do that.
The next day when she came home from work at lunchtime
to have a sandwich with me, she noticed that the walk was not
shoveled. She almost slipped and fell on the packed snow and
ice on the walk leading up to our door.
I thought you said you would shovel the walk, she said
when she got inside.
I have a tendency not to shovel walks, I said.
But you said youd do it, and if I had known you werent
serious I would have shoveled it myself this morning, she said.
My pattern has been not to shovel, I said. Looking
back on my life, I tend not to shovel walks. Its a bad habit, I
know, but it kind of runs my life and leaves me in situations
like this a lot.
I dont care about patterns or habits or tendencies,
she says. I just wanted the walk shoveled. You said you
would do it.
Was my wife being unreasonable to dismiss and discount
my patterns and tendencies?
Odessa said that I, myself, was being ridiculous to even float
them as excuses for not doing the walk.
But thats what you are doing, Odessa, I told her. You are
not doing things and then going back into your past to find the
patterns and tendencies that explain it. You refuse to see that
the past is over. It counts for nothing. Your word counts for
everything. Your word you give yourself on whether you are
going to do something.

84 STEVE CHANDLER

Juicy and sometimes a little messy

Ive been trying to stress, as a positive, exciting thing, that the
best life coaches are the ones least likely to conform to anything.
They are the least likely to have practices that resemble Gabriel
Byrnes laid-back psychologist on the In Treatment TV show.
Lets take, for example, Dr. Alison Arnold, whose website is
called Scream and Run Naked.
Can you see the provocative difference? Alison also has a
book out by the same title. Her clients refer to life coach Ali as
an Awakener, Fear liberator, and Sparkplug. Shes also
an athletic coach who works with the United States Olympic
gymnastics team. Shes also a reality TV star who coached Scott
Baio in front of the cameras for a long, hard season.
Shes known as Doc Ali to her clients, and a rather
resistant Baio, who feared her direct, confrontational toughlove coaching started calling her Dark Alley on the show. She
was a place he didnt want to go. Transformation often looks
frightening before you go there.
Alis success is extraordinary, and like all the best coaches I
know, she also enjoys being coached. Shes been coached by the
best and recalled,
Just sitting in the room with Steve Hardison
changed my perception of myself and the world.

LIFE COACHING 85

My head spun asI argued with my own limitations

while sitting before me was a man who completely
mirrored my amazing greatness and beauty.
And the way he did it blew me away. My whole
being was being flooded with his intensity, and
passion, about all I am, have always been, and
ways I could give my gift to the world. I have
been changed with every meetingI have had with
Steve. Not only by the insights about my life, but
more importantly through the inspiration of the
way he lives his. He lives it fearlessly, lovingly,
and without apology. What a model!
Ali brings up something very important herethat factor
called modeling. The best life coaches work on themselves as
aggressively as they work on their clients. They want to model
how its done. Unlike a consultant or therapist who only talks,
a great coach will be willing to live it for you.
Dr. Alison Arnold is very open about sharing what she has lived
and remembers thinking at one time:
I am going to Nepal to learn how to die. That
cheerful thought abruptly popped me out of my
morning meditation. Lovely. I was already a little
nervous about this trip. Never one to give up, I
took several deep, calming breaths, closed my
eyes again, and immediately became aware of
another question moving among the rising and
falling thoughts of my chattering mind: Have I
learned yet how to live?
Ali asked me to introduce her at a bookstore event she was
speaking at when Scream and Run Naked first came out. I was glad
to do it. Her book is one I highly recommend. In it she writes,

86 STEVE CHANDLER

As we flounder along in our never-ending

pursuit of happiness, we are sometimes seized
by what the poet David Whyte calls unnamed
longings. We have a feeling in our gut that there
is something more to life that we are missing. We
long for fire and passion to fill our lives. We ache
to grasp and fulfill our hearts desires. We crave a
destiny of our own. In short, we want to be alive.
From coaching athletes to average people who just want to live
more than they are living, Ali sees it all as the same evolutionary leap.
Do you ever feel like you are asleep at the wheel of your own
life? she asks. What do you feel you are missing in your life
and how are you going to find it? Do you want to die before
learning what it means to be truly alive? To feel passion and
wonder and excitement once again?
Feeling her own life had been flat-lined and with more
questions than answers, Alison traveled to Nepal and Thailand
to learn from Buddhist monks. Buddhism, particularly as it is
practiced in the West, is more of a non-sectarian philosophy than
a religion. Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, or atheists can
incorporate Buddhist practices into their lives while remaining
completely true to their own beliefs.
At the core of Buddhas teachings is that we must wake
up from our sleepwalking lives if we ever want to realize our
true Self, and be able to see the true Self in others. The term
Buddha actually means one who is awake.
Waking up to your own life may be easy and it may be
difficult, Alison tells her clients. It may happen in one glorious
instant of enlightenment, or it may unfold over a lifetime. Life
can be like devouring a fully ripe mango juicy, fresh, luscious,
and sometimes a little messy. Are you ready to begin?

LIFE COACHING 87

Are you creating your life?

My session with my coach today focused on his own lifes
evolution from the many pains of a painful childhood to the
discoveries, inside a seminar called The Forum (an extension
of Werner Erhards earlier work), that there were people living
and teaching what he himself had learned to do on his own.
To put it simply, my coach had discovered the power of
keeping his word. You can call it integrity and you can call it
commitment, but its having your whole life be as clean and
clear as any single promise kept.
If my word is that I will meet you at nine, then my appearing
at your house at nine has my word and my action be the same
thing. So I am now creating my life by what I speak. My
language is generative, not merely descriptive. And this is the
ultimate in creativity, and this is what my coach coaches me in.
I think I discovered maybe twenty years ago the difference
between creativity in the narrow field of art and music and
creativity in ones entire life. Once I really got that, I could then
see that everybody is potentially creative. So I always look for
the hidden creative powers in my clients lives when I sit down
to coach them or when I pick up the phone to coach them.
Children are creative when they are bornPicasso said,
Every child is born an artist and the trick of life is to remain
an artist. But most of us really dont remain artists. At least I

88 STEVE CHANDLER

didnt. I allowed myself to get talked out of it by worries and

fears and a desire to make a living and not embarrass myself in
the world of grown-ups.
That was my driving forcefear of embarrassment. If I was
flying on a plane and a burst of turbulence had the plane drop, I
didnt fear a crash as much as I feared what the people on the plane
would think if I was a coward during the plunge to the ground.
So there isnt really a lot of room for creativity if thats your
life. If you are just trying to survive embarrassment, or not have
various people mad at you. Your life and mine soon become
lives of avoidance and aversion. If the goal of life is to not have
your spouse mad at you, you do things that please her and
make you hate yourself. It ends up being a humiliating life.
And we dont have to live that way. What I discovered,
through the value of having my own coach and putting myself
through various seminars and workshops that put me back
on track to having a good life, was that our lives can be the
subject matter of creativity. We can each make our own life a
masterpiece. Like coach John Wooden would say: make each
day your masterpiece.
Instead of having some little narrow field of creativity in my
lifelike I might do a little watercolor here, or build a birdhouse
there, or write a song every other yearhave the entire life be
a written song.
We can allow ourselves to apply the creativity that all
children haveintuitively, innatelyand open it back up and
have our financial life creatively invented (constructed) and
have our physical life be that way too.
Creativity with physical exercise, creativity with finance,
creativity even with how you raise children! Its all possible.
You can even be creative with how you create relationships in
life versus the opposite of thata life of fear. Without creating
my relationships Im just afraid I wont have enough love and
approval. So Ill be making all my moves based on my own
fears instead of what I want to create.

LIFE COACHING 89

I can wake up in the morning and ask myself (given the day
I have ahead), What do I want to create with this day? Because
my day is pure opportunity.
Or I can do whats most common and that is wake up and
ask myself, What do I fear? What do I dread? What do I hope
doesnt happen? What can I avoid? What steps can I take to
avoid what I dread the most?
And sadly thats how most people livea full day of
avoidance, trying to get around things, trying to avoid
something happeningI hope this audit doesnt happen, I
hope she doesnt find out that Im doing this, and I hope my
daughter doesnt think that if I dont send her this money
and everything is hoping that something doesnt happen;
because we are using our creative imagination in the most
negative, perverse way because we are using it to worry about
the imaginary negative future.
The antidote to thatin my experience and in the experience
of my clients is to reconnect human beings to their innate,
natural birthright of pure creativity.
If you look at kids, they are running around making up
names and making up games all day. They have no identity
system to maintain. Therefore they are very creative.
But then you look at adults and they just sit there.
Does anyone on the planet sit down as much as an adult?
Was this body designed for sitting? And you look in their eyes.
And their eyes are kind of bloodshot and nervous and darting
aroundWho is a threat to me? Who might embarrass me?
Who will unmask me and make me look like a fraud?
Even when that bloodshot adult is thinking positively
they are thinking, Who do I connect to? Who do I need to
impress and win the approval of?
One of the best people on the planet that I know of on the
subject of creativity is my friend Peleg Top. He coaches people
in the world of design, and he also coaches them on how to
bring the creativity of their art into their whole lives.

90 STEVE CHANDLER

He teaches his clients how to createnot only projects for their

clients, but how to create their own businesses in profitable ways
from their creativity, not from their fear of going out of business.
And, then, while he was in Israel recently, he literally by
accident (I deliberately put the word accident in quotes)
stumbled upon a new mentor that taught him a system for
bringing out creativity through intuitive painting and drawing.
So he fearlessly began to integrate that into his coaching practice
and seminar work.
Pelegs life as a coach dramatizes for me the strength of
intuition and pure productivity thats in all of us. (If we would
just bring it back out, it would improve our whole lives.)
Whenever people are fearlessly creative in the world of
businesslike at Apple or Google everyone stands up and
cheers. Oh my gosh what a great business they are! Facebook!
OMG! Lets all go to the movie and watch how creative that
young man was connecting everybody the way he did!! And
we cheer for it and then we go back home and dont live it. And
yet its open for anyone. Peleg says, I remember walking into
museums and looking at the art that hung on the walls and
finding an incredible source of inspiration, thinking to myself,
I just cant wait to start doing something like this for myself as
well; but at the same time I was struggling with the resistance
that would come up and that voice of my inner critic that says,
Ah, you cant do this. You are not good enough. Dont even
bother. Just keep designing for your clients.
Stumbling on intuitive painting and the whole intuitive art
world called me and helped me connect to that part of myself
that always had been hidden there and that was waiting to
emerge and which I believe is in every single human being.
Now that doesnt necessarily mean that painting is the outlet
for everybody; but that basic human instinct to create is there.
It is there for all of us.
Peleg got me thinking and remembering. I remember
growing up and being in classrooms and it was time to paint or

LIFE COACHING 91

time to draw and we would look around at other classmates and

notice that there were one or two maybe out of twenty-five kids
who could really draw well; and then the rest of us compared
ourselves to them and we began to think Im not good. I dont
draw as well as Monica does and so therefore Im not good at
drawing and I remember getting these ideas in my mind when
I was youngI cant draw, I cant paint, Im not good at this,
Im not good at that. Peleg says, Its a belief. And I think youre
right. It starts when we are children. It starts at that age; the
same experience that you had. That self-critic is what we starting
hearing as children in those classroomssometimes we even
had teachers that said, Peleg, only draw inside the lines. We
grew up with a sense of what art is supposed to look like and
never really had the encouragement to create. If you look at all
the artists that are well known to us todayfrom Kandinsky
to Picassothe thing that made them most unique was their
willingness to break the rules. They expressed themselves in a
way that nobody else did. Sometimes creativity and bringing
that instinct out to the world shocks people. And thats a good
thing; but most of us are afraid to do that because, most of the
time, were in people-pleasing mode and we only want to create
for the sake of getting good feedback from somebody. Look how
good I am! Look how good my painting is! And only if you tell
me Yes, this is good! Only then will I feel good about myself.
Peleg takes painting into life itself. He coaches people on
how to make their entire lives like that painting they are afraid
to cut loose and get wild with.
His coaching confronts the inner life critic.
The inner voice of criticism is unforgettable because it was
so piercing and hurtful when we first heard criticism when we
were young. Its unforgettable (also unforgivable if you really
look at it closely).
I notice in my own coaching clients that people actually respect
and obey that voice! Its as if it were the voice of reason or their own
conscience speaking instead of the ghost of a hurtful past.

92 STEVE CHANDLER

I asked Peleg Top what he does when he coaches people like

this. How does he get them to see that they are not applying
their creativity to their lives?
Creativity takes courage, he says. A lot of people are
afraid to take risks. Creativity involves a risk. So a lot of the
work I do is to help clients get to the place where they are not
afraid to take risks with their business because theres really no
reward without risk.
I love the word encourage. The kind of coaching Peleg
is talking about encourages clients. Theres courage in the
world encourage. And it takes a lot of courage to do something
that doesnt look like what the whole rest of the world is doing
right now, which is what creativity is.
Colin Wilson wrote a great book called The Strength to Dream,
and I was startled by the titlethe strength to dream? I had
previously associated dreaming with being passive and lazy
an irresponsible, weak, flighty use of the brain. When I read The
Strength to Dream, even just seeing that title allowed me to see the
other side of it. It does take strength and it does take creativity to
actively dream. It was no accident that many years later Wilson
called his autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose.
There was a period in my coaching life when I worked almost
exclusively with sales people. One of my practices to help people
get over this thing called rejection (I put it in quotes because
there is no real rejectionyou either feel rejected or you dont
with the information you have just received) was to ask a sales
person to stop every time someone says no and internally
translate that no into Cant you be more creative than that?
When he did that, it touched off new ideas: I might propose
something new, or change my approach, or ask more questions,
or customize something He got into that creative mode that
he never would have found otherwise. The courage to create. It
can be encouraged.
Years ago a company hired me to talk to people who had
lost their jobs. They were laid off and now were facing looking

LIFE COACHING 93

for another job. Soon they understood that the more creative
they were willing to get, the faster they would get a new job.
I said, Pick any company you would want to work for and
you can work there if you are willing to be creative enough in
how you apply. Many people didnt even want to hear that.
They kept coming back to me and saying, What am I supposed
to do? When do I send a thank you note? Do I send it after
the interview? And I would say, Listen to yourself. You are
trying to find out exactly what everyone else does. If people
are going to hire someone who they think is going to do a better
job for them than all the other people applying, why try to be
like everybody else?
I often use the approach of Jerry Garcia, who was a very
creative artist with The Grateful Dead. He said the trick was
not to be the best at what you do; the trick is to be the only
one doing what you are doing. Thats a different mindset than
trying to anticipate what someone wants from you. It always
produces a different mindset when I ask, How creative can I
be with it? Or, What can I do that no one else does?
Peleg recently visited a Pablo Picasso collection at a
Seattle museum.
It was worth the trip to Seattle to just go look at this
exhibit but what I remember most was the big letters on the
wall where his quote was written, One never knows what
one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes
something quite different.
This is the Picasso effectthat element of unpredictability
in all creativity. Which is why good coaches wont even want
to give you the answer to your problem. They will want to keep
asking you questions until you empower yourself. Peleg says,
I think thats a really important distinction that a lot of people
dont realize when it comes to hiring a coach. Many people
think Ill hire a coach and hell show me what to do. And I
have to say I was in that place myself. I initially hired a person,
professionally, who I thought would coach me into what to do,

94 STEVE CHANDLER

but he really didnt help me connect to what I had inside myself

to go to the next place. So now when I have clients who ask
me that question (what should I do? which by now there is a
ruleyou are not allowed to ask me that question any more),
they dont get an answer. The answers are inside of you. I dont
want people to run their business like I think it should run.
They did not live my life. They did not have my path and my
journey. They have their own.
Experimentation is what Pelegs whole intuitive painting
lesson is designed to encourage in people. Keep looking for
different ways to do things. How can you be more creative with
these so-called problems youve got?
Why dont you try opening yourself up and seeing what else
you might see? What can you play around with here? Creative
problem solving is a beautiful process. Most people never test
it. They never find that out. Because when their problem shows
up they just shut down. They get upset and pout like little kids.
Im really upset that I have a problem!
They stage a quiet tantrum instead of going the other
direction that asks, How can I get creative about this? How
can I open my mind? What else is possible? What are some
funny, out-of-the-box things that Im going to try just to play
with peoples minds, just to mess with people?
I try to use every phrase in the book to open people up
especially sales people who are so terrified that they are
going to bother somebody! Theyre going to make people
uncomfortable by trying to sell them something.
Its sad to me. Fear is what governs so many professional
lives. But business was meant for play, not fear. Numbers are
indicative of a game being played.
But its encouraging to me that the antidote to all that fear
is not some kind of huge, bold, macho courageits really kind
of aggressive playfulness. Giving yourself permission to play.
Dont listen to the imaginary voice that keeps coming up
denying permission: PERMISSION TO CREATE DENIED!

LIFE COACHING 95

like its coming up on the computer screen of the mind.

One client blurted out, Creative experimentation sounds
great, but I dont want to do anything Ill regret!
You dont have to regret anythingthats optional.
Regret is absolutely optional in this world. You can go find
a painful memory and regret it and attach a story to it any
time you like. You can regret everything if you want. You
can say that any choice was the wrong choice, and then you
can wonder about what the right choice would have been.
But in the world of creativity and living an honorable life,
these activities dont help. They do not make a good guide to
what the next experiment should be. I would drop all of that
and free yourself from all that judgment of yourself and fear
about making the wrong choice and just jump in. Trust
your inner compass.
I remember years ago going to see Woody Allen in Las
Vegas when he was a stand-up comic. He was a very creative,
funny guy. He started his life writing for TV shows, and then
he did a standup act and that wasnt quite right for him, so
he started to write little short stories for the New Yorker, and
then he started to write plays for Broadway. Then he started to
write movie scripts, and then he started to direct and act in the
movies. Were any of these the right decision? Not really; he
just kept jumping in and things got better and better.
So I say just jump in.
Forget about making the right choice, and forget about being
afraid of your intuition leading you wrong, and forget about
attaching a story of regret to a time in your life when you were
doing the best you could and then now looking back you are
going to attach a story of regret to ittheres no value in that.
You cant be creative when youre taking things personally.
If you take your parents comments personally, or your spouses
comments personally, you cant create.
Peleg says, Its about putting ourselves in a place of more
self appreciationnot waiting for that approvalnot trying

96 STEVE CHANDLER

to please somebody else. Im going to increase the way that I

love myself and respect myself and put myself and my life in a
constant state of self- love and appreciation. I know thats going
to help me make my dreams come true.
Pelegs words are not to be confused with narcissistic selfreference. Hes describing a more effective way to live. Hes
describing what he does to help his coaching clients turn their
dreams and projects into reality.
A listener to a webinar Peleg and I were co-hosting on
creativity asked a very colorful question: How do you deal with
getting swatted down with your creative idea and you just feel
like a snowman who has melted into a puddle and cant get up.
Heres what I said to the melted snowman: Great ideas are
going to confuse other people. But I dont need other peoples
approval to move forward; I just move forward. Or if I do need
their approval (if Im in a company and I have a great idea and
somebody doesnt agree, they are confused about it or cant see
the value in it), then I make my choices based on whats going
to keep my mood elevated so I can continue to have a creative
life. But I dont want my happiness to be dependent upon what
other people think of my ideas. I dont want to have it set up
that way.

LIFE COACHING 97

Do not fear failure

Failure is the foundation of success
and the means by which it is achieved.
~ Lao-tzu

Most people want to succeed by succeeding, which makes

sense. But when failure happens, it can be the best teacher ever.
We realize that were free to experiment more. And as Dale Dauten
says in his classic little business book, Experiments never fail.
Dont be too timid and squeamish about your actions,
said Ralph Waldo Emerson. All life is an experiment. The
more experiments you make the better.
One of the most common complaints of the people I coach
today is this: The people that I supervise just hate to make
changes though they are constantly being required to in our
highly competitive business environment. I just tear out my hair
sometimes trying to get the needed changes accomplished!
The way I respond is, Yes, it may feel difficult to encourage
people to change, but try this possibility: People may prefer
not to change, but people love to experiment.
Its precisely because coaching is not therapy and doesnt
have to follow any mental health standards that methods can
be unorthodox, creative, provocative, and unforgettable.

98 STEVE CHANDLER

Michael Neill was coaching a friend of mine by phone when

my friend confessed that he had been procrastinating, out of fear
and anxiety, about writing a short article for a well-known business
magazine. Michael said, Really? Are you near your computer?
My friend said, Yes, its right here.
Good. I want you to put the phone downdont hang it up;
just place it down by the keyboard so I can hear you typing
and I want you to write the piece right now, the entire piece,
start to finish, and when you are complete pick up the phone
and tell me.
My friend was startled by the request, but he did it. He
wrote the piece and thirty minutes later picked up the phone
and said, Are you there?
Michael said that indeed he was.
And my friend had written a rather brilliant article.
Thats not a technique; its an impulse based on a commitment
to have your clients life get better with each coaching session,
whatever that takes at the moment. Its a continuous call to
action versus a call to plumbing the depths of ones emotions
as psychologists do.
And this is not to demean or diminish the role of
psychotherapy. It has its important place. In fact, some
people who think they need coaching are better suited for
psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is about healing the past.
Coaching is about creating the future.
I have a friend who is a wonderful, compassionate coach.
But she has a strict no crazies rule for her practice. (Notice
how politically incorrect phrases are the best. They are so
functional in a world gone mad with enforced sentimentality.)
I was politically incorrect when I ran a blog entitled, You
Had Me at RETARDED. But when people read the whole
piece and linked to the wonderful Christopher Dorris video of
the same name it made perfect sense.
Can you get coaching from a movie or the internet? I believe
so. I receive a lot of inspiration from the internet blogs and

LIFE COACHING 99

email messages of Matt Furey who coaches people in fitness

and internet business expertise.
In a recent message Matt recalls watching a clip from
the movie Miracle the movie about the USAs improbable
(impossible?) Olympic ice hockey victory over the Russians in
1980. A victory of amateurs over professionals. Matt enjoyed
the clip so much that he purchased the DVD and had it sent to
him by overnight mail. Then he watched the movie with his son
and watched it again the next day.
In the movie there is one moment when coach Herb Brooks
has his team repeat their conditioning sprints over and over,
shouting, The legs feed the wolf! Matt stopped the movie and
wrote that down. The legs feed the wolf! It was a powerful,
poetic expression of something Matt had been taught by his
own great coaches over the years, Dan Gable and Karl Gotch:
conditioning is the ultimate move. If youre wondering what
a good move to learn would bein hockey, in wrestling
(Matts sport) or anything in lifeconditioning is it. The wellconditioned legs feed the wolf.
In the very same morning I read Matts inspirational piece, I
couldnt wait to go out and do some sprints myself.

100 STEVE CHANDLER

Becoming violently original

Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois,
so that you may be violent and original in your work.
~ Flaubert

When I coach people who are stuck and not doing things
they wish they were doing I often see that they are overidentified with their personal traits and qualities.
They have been hypnotized by the appearance of consistency
in their habits and have started to believe in the permanence of
their characteristics. This habit can be absolutely spellbinding,
like watching Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho.
So my work as a coach is to break the spell. To hear that
screeching music that comes up while a person is telling
me what they are like and always do given their permanent
characteristics.
A client talked to me recently about how trapped he felt in
the limbo he was in between his old life habits of boredom and
disappointment and the new exciting person he wanted to be.
He so wanted to change his life and live his full potential that
he could almost taste it. Why was he stuck? Why couldnt he
develop the willingness to live differently? What were all these
frustrating feelings about and where were they coming from?

LIFE COACHING 101

Because Im a coach and not a compassionate therapist I

didnt care. I didnt need to empathize or have a long drawnout examination of the origins of his feelings.
So I told him his pyramid was upside down.
Remember those food pyramids we used to have on the wall
in grade school classrooms? It turns out they were all wrong!
Hello, obesity epidemic!
My client had his own pyramid wrong, too, because he
had thoughts and feelings at the very top. Those were the
things he thought he needed to study and figure out and
understand before he could transform himself into a man of
pure, adventurous action.
He should have had action on top and thoughts and feelings
on the very bottom. You become a man of adventure by taking
action, not by figuring out why you dont feel like doing it yet.
Once you are able to see that beliefs, thoughts, and the
feelings they produce are just inconsequential clouds passing
in the sky, you are free.
Or like that transcendent coach Byron Katie says, when the
beliefs are seen to be the nebulous hallucinations that they are,
That leaves a lot of energy freed up to make amazing changes
in the moment, because its so clear, none of the options are
hidden. Its a fearless state of being. The mind notices that the
kind way is the brilliant way. Theres no limit to it.

102 STEVE CHANDLER

How to know your tilt switch

Pinball is a type of arcade game, usually coinoperated, where a player attempts to score points by
manipulating one or more metal balls on a playfield
inside a glass-covered case called a pinball machine.
~ Wikipedia

No matter what technology I write about, it will be outdated

by the time this book is in your hands (or on your iPad or
whatever has replaced the iPad as the next coolest thing).
So I am okay with being outdated. In fact I dont even mind
going way, way back.
Do you remember pinball machines? Do you remember
the rock opera Tommy by The Who about a pinball wizard?
Remember that deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure played
a mean pinball?
My own life coach and I go back as far as pinball. We
have been working with each other for over fifteen years.
He often coaches me with vivid parables and metaphors. He
illustrates what I cant yet see with a fresh, dramatic example
that allows me to finally see. He doesnt want me to simply
understand it or get it. He doesnt even want me to grok
it. He wants me to actually see it. Thats why he creates these

LIFE COACHING 103

vivid visuals (he calls them distinctions) for me to go home

with and never forget.
So one day he asked me to picture a pinball machine. Not
too hard for me to do given my wasted days and wasted nights
spent in many a bar in my early life.
He asked me if I remembered people trying to shake the
game and bang the side of the case to help guide the ball to
hit more markers and ring up more points, and if you tipped
the board too much the sign would say TILT! and that game
would be over and youd lose points that way. So trick was
to learn just how much you could move and bang the board
around without getting a TILT.
Yes, I remembered all that.
Do you know how the game knows youve gone to far?
Steve Hardison asked me.
Not really.
Theres a tilt switch in the game. Built in. And it looks
like this.
At which time Hardison made a circle with his fingers on
one hand and then put one finger inside the circle to illustrate
the switch.
When the switch moves too far over, it hits the inner edge
of the circle and registers TILT, he said. Then he showed me
with his hands.
I see, I said.
So what you now want in your life is to widen that circle.
To keep widening that circle so that when the tilt switch tips it
still doesnt register TILT and you can keep playing and keep
scoring points.
How do I widen the circle? I said.
By doing things you are not used to doing. Challenging
yourself. Going a little too far. Going beyond what is comfortable.
Each time you do that the circle widens.
And he made the circle with his hands again, and then made
it wider and wider, and then he put his finger in it and made

104 STEVE CHANDLER

me see that the finger could tip and move over and still not hit
the edge of the circle.
Hardison was trying to show me that there wasnt anything
special about himself. Even though people were always telling
him how bold he was and how amazing he was in his ability to
approach anyone and ask him or her anything, he said, You
can do that, too. I wasnt that way always. I started with. (and
then he showed me a very small circle around the tilt switch of
his finger) this circle and I just did it and did it and it got
wider and wider. Anyone can do what I do. Anyone.
From that day on I couldnt get the tilt switch out of my
mind. It was an indelible visual metaphor for being bold and
challenging myself to always go a little further. To push the
envelope. To step up. To stretch myself whenever I could.
Of course my coach would make sure I didnt forget to do
this. One time I sent him a training proposal I had written to a
company who wanted me to train their sales people. I called
Steve to ask him what he thought of the proposal.
It was great, he said. Although I caught a typo.
Oh really? Where is it? Ill fix it. I want it to look clean and
professional.
The fee you proposed was missing a zero at the end.
Hed wanted my $8,000 fee to be $80,000 dollars. You can
begin to see now, maybe, why his huge fee is something I
always earn back rather quickly from being coached by him.

LIFE COACHING 105

Ready to get physical?

Great ideas originate in the muscles.
~ Thomas Edison

In The 4-Hour Body, a book that coaches you hard on

losing fat and gaining strength, Timothy Ferriss recounts a
time when he was on an island with billionaire entrepreneur
Richard Branson.
Twenty people sat around listening to Bransons wisdom
about innovation and wealth. Someone asked the final question,
the question most everyone wanted the answer to, How do
you become more productive?
Branson sat a moment... and then spoke his answer:
Work out.
What? I thought we were talking about the mind? The brain!
Strategy! Innovation! What do you mean, Work out?
It has taken me years to see the wisdom in what Branson
said. And it came not from believing it but rather from
testing it. Trying it.
A good coach isnt afraid to move your body. He wont just
fix his mind on your mind.
Stephen McGhee is one of my favorite coaches of all time.
Every time I refer people to him for coaching, I get nothing but

106 STEVE CHANDLER

the best feedback on what it has done for their lives. Stephen
is a life coach with a specialty in re-introducing his clients to
their bodies.
He goes out into the world with people and puts their bodies
into the whole mind/body/spirit equation. And Ive found over
the years in my own life and in the lives of clients Ive coached,
that when the body gets left out of that equation, its not a good
outcome. You cant get an optimal result. Body-neglect brings
the other two things (mind and spirit) way down.
But when you lead with the body, the other two always
follow. Of the three elements, mind, body, and spirit, the body
is the only one that can get the other two to automatically rise
up with it!
If you can get up and walk and move your body, the mind
and the spirit will follow!
Most people try to do it the other way around.
They wait until they feel like moving the body. They think
theyve got to get their mind right before they exercise. Or they
have to be in the right kind of mood or spirit and then they will
dance, or then they will swim, or then theyll run or lift weights
or play basketball. And thats why people are so out of shape.
Thats exactly whybecause their bodies wait for inspiration
instead of just diving in.
Everybody talks about the mind-body connection. I hear
people say, Im a coach of mind/body/spiritbut theyve
got it in the wrong orderthey are misleading everybodyat
least in my experience.
If you were to lead with the body, amazing things would
happen. And you dont have to wait to be in a particular mood.
You dont have to figure out if your psychology is precisely
right or if the stars are aligning or if your DNA is perfectyou
dont have to wait for anything. The action itself is what lifts
you to act.
Stephen McGhee is in great shape. He climbs mountains, he
runs, and he does yoga.

LIFE COACHING 107

Once I begin to really move my body, says McGhee, there

is an enlightening element that occurs in my entire life. Its like
the body starts moving, the heart starts pounding, the blood
flows, and the thinking gets clearer. So the progression is body,
mind, and then spirit. So suddenly then there is this enlivened
spirit that comes from moving my body.
As a life and leadership coach McGhee noticed that there
were a number of his clients he could see were struggling with
their bodies.
They were overweight, he says, and yet they were
wanting to create something magnificent in the world, in their
business, in their life, but they were being stopped by their
body. They couldnt see it.
Seeing this gave McGhee an idea. He wanted to do something
big so he decided to bring a group of men with him on a ninemonth coaching program. He decided to start with the physical
and then flow into the emotional, mental, and spiritual ways of
being that supported people in growing and getting stronger in
their lives and in their businesses.
I wanted it to culminate with a huge goal, he said. I didnt
want this to be something based in theory in a seminar room
where we only talked about moving our bodies. So I created a
program called The Aconcagua Man Project which culminates
in our climbing a huge mountain summit after nine months of
exercising together.
He took his clients through nine months of mental
strengthening and emotional stability, to summit out a very big
mountain in Argentina called Aconcagua, which happens to be
22,834 feet to the top.
His core message to his clients: Put your ass on the line and
get everything off the couch.
Aconcagua is the tallest mountain in the world outside
of Asia. And this very sense of adventure is one thing that
sets life coaching apart from business consulting and from
psychotherapy.

108 STEVE CHANDLER

Im reminded of the old sports coaches saying (and its

been attributed to so many coaches now I have no idea where
it began), Its not the will to win thats important; its the will
to prepare to win.
McGhee agrees, That mountain is not something that you
want to be unprepared for. The statistics on the mountain are
about thirty percent of all people that attempt the summit
actually make it and, of course, our intention as a team is that
we all make the summit.
Thats the physical side of the coaching project, but theres
another side, too. McGhee and his group of clients call it the
inward summit.
Its a realization that each of us physically has a place
where we think can go to, McGhee says. Then I have them go
a step beyond that.
Going beyond where you think you can go is exactly what
coaching is for. I realize with my own coaching that I never
would have dared to do what I did with my professional life
had I not had a coach.
McGhee says that the human body is an example of our
holding back. The body can do more than we think it can,
he says. And we as a society have gotten so lazy with our
bodies that we want to do it in twelve minutes a day. We want
turtleback abs in twelve minutes a day. It just doesnt work.
Ive tried to get McGhee, who is forty-eight, to admit that
he has down periods when he forgets or simply doesnt feel
like exercising. I asked him to tell me about when those periods
happen for him. This was his response: It is not worth it to me
to not exercise. I had one of the greatest compliments recently
from a person who said, You are the most vital person I have
ever met. When I heard that I immediately thought, It has a lot
to do with taking care of the body. I mean, theres meditation,
theres affirmationstheres all that stuffbut until the space
is cleared through my body, I can just forget about it. Because
if I dont exercise, my mood changes, the world looks different,

LIFE COACHING 109

Im more cynical about the world and the world situation. All I
need to know is that I feel better after exercise. So its not in my
world that I would consider not exercising.
The vitality McGhee radiates is part of the reason his
coaching practice is so successful. People love his energy.
They love being in his presence. When he coaches business
leaders, they open up to more exciting ranges of possibilities
for their future.
Like so many people who have become enlightened to the
power of living a committed life, McGhee can trace his inspiration
back to a negative experience. This once again illustrates the
value of bad experiences in life. Its a paradoxical factor that
Napoleon Hill called inspirational dissatisfaction. Ill often
use it with new coaching clients. Lets find where you are most
dissatisfied in life, and lets use that as inspiration for creating
a new future.
McGhee was twelve when he contracted Osgood-Schlatter
disease. It severely limited the movement of his knees. When
all his friends were out playing football or baseball he couldnt.
For ten months he had to stay sitting at home while the world
outside played.
McGhee remembers that painful period: When that finally
healed up, I can remember making a decisiona choicethat
I would always exercise, because I got to feel what it was like
not to.
Some of the men who joined him for the mountain climbing
project were out of shape. McGhee brought in a professional
trainer to work with them, and said, But it really started, and
this is important for everybody who is out of shape, with the
important foundation-setting time. So anyone thinking, Its time
for me to start to move my body again, its important to start
slowly. So we took two months of building foundation for these
guys that were not in particularly great shape. So we werent
carrying heavy packs; we werent running up mountains. We
were doing core abdominal work at the beginning. And think

110 STEVE CHANDLER

about it. A lot of our strength comes from our core and our legs.
People think its big bicepslike Popeye. Remember Popeye?
He ate a lot of spinach and he had big arms, but I dont know
how strong his core was. The core is your abdominal area, so
thats strengthening it through sit-ups; or there are other ways
to do it, but that is very important when one begins a physical
regime, because everything comes from there. You have a lot
better chance of staying healthy without low-back problems or
any other complications from heavy exercise.
McGhees group took two months to build the core. All the
while he was also coaching them in the core stability of their
business and financial world, as well as family relations.
Theres a core there too.
Theres a principled, committed life versus a life of pleasure,
pain and egothe life of seeking love and approval from others.
A life lived in vain. Coaching addresses the whole life of the
client. Not just his abdominal muscles.
After the two months of core work, McGhees guys knew
that in six months they would be climbing Aconcaguaone of
the toughest mountains in the world.
It really shows how quickly and how powerfully a person
can get in top condition, said McGhee.
During the training McGhee saw that there was an even
greater connection between the body and the spirit than he had
previously appreciated. (Coaches often become inspired by
their clients.) He saw his clients grow strong.
When one starts to get his or her body in shape, all kinds
of possibilities start to emerge, he said. No longer is a person
distracted by twenty pounds of overweight excess fat. Suddenly
they are moving their body better, so they are thinking more
clearly, and all of a sudden they are saying, Lets talk about my
having an extraordinary relationship with my wife.

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How to be alive to life

Self concept is destiny.
~ Nathaniel Branden

Dr. Nathaniel Branden always says that self-esteem is the

greatest predictor of success in life. And self-esteem begins at
the physical level. Whether you feel vibrant or in shape affects
your whole self-concept. Even in a business meeting.
In his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost
writes about best-selling author James Michener and how he
would actually go into training like a boxer before he began
a book, so the least you can do is take a few deep breaths, put
your pulse rate into second gear, and deliver a supply of oxygen
to the brain.
We all get glued to the TV during the Olympics, and we are
so excited that health club memberships go up during those
weeks. It would be great if we could just have that be a daily
thing for us too. To have our lives lived inside our own Olympic
Village of the mind.
Or we could just sit around and get more depressed.
Dr. John Ratey is an MD who has devoted his lifes research
to studying the effect of exercise on the brain. His book Spark is
highly recommended. Many of the psychiatrists he meets with

112 STEVE CHANDLER

have no clue about exercise and how it relates to depression.

They just want to work with the pharmaceutical companies to
come up with more and more prescriptions. And many of those
drugs list suicide as a possible side effect of taking the drug.
Suicide would also certainly eliminate the depression, but there
has to be a better way.
Dr. Ratey says that most psychiatrists just dont know this:
Toxic levels of stress erode the connections
between the billions of nerve cells in the brain or
that chronic depression shrinks certain areas of
the brain. And they dont know that, conversely,
exercise unleashes a cascade of neurochemicals
and growth factors that can reverse this process,
physically bolstering the brains infrastructure.
Stephen McGhee gets calls from his team during the business
week thanking him for the difficult training they did over the
weekend on snowy mountains in Colorado. They tell him they
feel more alive than they ever have before. McGhee reflects on
how glad he is, as a coach, to be so focused on the physical, and
to have being alive and vibrant the central characteristic of his
own being.
People want to hire coaches who are alive to life, he says.
That reminded me of something. Michael Neill was doing his
Super Coach Academy in New York and invited some people
over from a coaching association to sample it and sit in and
see what he was delivering. When they found out that he was
charging $10,000 per coach to attend, they became infuriated
and refused to have anything to do with him. They pointed out
that most of the coaches (notice I use quotes there) in their
associations were making less than $20,000 a year as coaches,
and they thought it was criminal that he was charging so much.
No wonder, with that victim mentality at the top, that those
so-called coaches were making so little. And it was also

LIFE COACHING 113

funny. How can you sell yourself as a success coach when you
yourself are not successful? What do they say to prospective
clients? Hire me! Ill help you get anything you wantIll help
you dream big and reach that dream please hire me. Which
Starbucks do you want to meet me at? It has to be a Starbucks
because I have no office. And it has to be in my bus line because
I have no car. But I can help you reach any goal you set.
So I think maybe it was an association of homeless
coachesthats what I said to Michael. Maybe it wasnt an
association of professional coaches. Maybe he got it wrong.
He could have had them all over to the Academy and formed
a soup line for them.
McGhee is right. If a coach cannot first take care of himself
and succeed and be vibrant and strong, imagine now going
to someone and saying What do you want to achieve? You
name it and Ill help you get there! And then you look at the
guy and hes out of shape and out of money. This is one of the
most hilarious parts of our profession. There are many amusing
things about the work we do and this is just one of them.
The coaching profession has gotten so hot and popular that
everyone now wants not only to have a coach but to be one.
I had a cab driver in L.A. tell me he was a coach on the side
and he gave me his card. I gave him a book of mine as I left the
cab and he said, Oh I know who you are! Ive read this book!
Someday he and I will coach each other.
Most people think, If I were to take up exercise, I would
have to give up something else. The other parts of my life would
get worse and they would suffer and they would go downhill.
Business people especially tell me that. If I took the time to get
into shape, then I wouldnt be able to call Tokyo in the morning
and do my deals!
And this fear reveals a key element of physical training.
Even more important than the training itself: commitment.
Keeping ones commitment to it is even more strengthening
than the workout itself.

114 STEVE CHANDLER

McGhee says, There have been days, thousands of them,

where I did not feel like doing a damn thing in terms of exercise.
So I might go down to the gym for twenty-five minutes, because
my integrity is at stake, because Ive promised myself I am
going to do daily exercise. I mean, you and I have both worked
with Steve Hardison, so I mean, Hello, the guy has cleaned my
clock on this in a positive way so many times about doing what
I say I am going to do. I honor the fortification of that in my life
and the velocity of my word.
So McGhee uses exercise regimens for his clients, not just
to get their bodies in shape, but to achieve one of the most
powerful potentials that life coaching offers: the fortification of
ones word.
He says, We become more powerful with ourselves by
just simply doing what we say, even if its twenty minutes a
day of stretching. So Im not saying to everybody Go climb
the highest peak in South America. Im saying, get out of bed,
drink some water and some juice, throw a protein shake down,
and do something that takes care of that temple of yours called
your body, because without it nothing else happens.
Years ago McGhee was a deeply stressed-out banker
who got a blood clot that nearly cost him his life. He recalls,
I was doing a job that I did not like. I was still living in a
world of have to (you know, I have to do this work, I have
to pay my mortgage) and I was being a total victim. The
internal stress that I experienced by not being who I am had
me create a problem in my body; and it was a blood clot
and it got very serious and I, of course, ignored it like a lot
of people do when they have health issueswe think they
are just going to go away and oftentimes they dont. So I
went into an emergency room on a Thursday evening, and
the nurse looked at my arm and her eyes got big like a fish
bowl (like this is really not good), and I ended up being in
intensive care for almost eight days while they cleared the
blood clot. I had a very severe reaction to the medication,

LIFE COACHING 115

which had me going into (what I refer to as) my near death

experience because I literally left my body; my heart stopped
for a minute and sixteen seconds according to the medical
people on staff. When I finally came back into my body and
then later coming out of the hospital I was thinking about
how important keeping my body in shape was to fulfilling
my purpose in life. I just cant fulfill my purpose if my body
doesnt work!
And his revelation after leaving his body wasnt just to
stay in shape from now on, but it was also to shift his focus
to what he could do as a leader of leaders and a life coach
to individuals who were having their own slower, but just as
real near-death lives.
I went into coaching because I wanted to be someone
who was making a bigger difference than I was making in
the past. I could have looked at the challenge in my life
especially my medical challenge in 1990and I could say,
that was just unfair and wrong that wasnt right why
me? But what I did instead was I said Im just so lucky to
be alive. What a blessing! What do I want to do with this
blessing? Well, I quit the bank. That was the first step and
I said, If not now, then when? So that medical catalyst was
a great catalyst for me. I was slower than most people. I
needed a cosmic two-by-four to smack me in the head and
say Wake up, Dude; its time to go live your life, and thats
what I did.
To McGhee coaching and exercise are both about developing
the power to make and keep commitments, which becomes
core integrity.
A lot of people think integrity means not lying as much
as you used to, or agreeing to now put most of your income
on your IRS form. But integrity, the way McGhee lives it and
coaches it, has to do with keeping your promise to yourself. In
other words, having an integrated life. Word and action become
integrated in integrity.

116 STEVE CHANDLER

A lot of people think integrity is most useful as a word

with which to shame others. I have a guy in my life with whom
I had kind of a stormy relationship, and any time he wanted
something from me that he didnt think he was getting, he
would drag out integrity and try to beat me with the word
like it was a big religious book. He used that word because he
thought it was a good shaming wordthat you can embarrass
people with it.
But coaches like McGhee see it more as truth-equals-beautyequals-integrity-equals-keeping your promise to yourself.
What about people who havent exercised in years? How do
they start?
McGhee has leadership clients who are like that. Joking
about their big appetites and sloppy appearance.
Commitment to yourself, says McGhee, involves
accepting that small things done consistently over time can
make a major impact. If I were coaching someone who hadnt
exercised in years, I would say, Tomorrow morning are
you willing to get up early (What time do you start your
daysay 8 oclock) are you willing to get up at six, throw
some protein down your body, drink some water and go for a
twenty-five minute walk around the neighborhood? Are you
willing to do that?
Yes, I am willing to do that.
Are you clear that you are not promising me that, but are
you really clear you are promising yourself that?
Yes, Im clear on promising myself that.
So we are in agreement that you are promising yourself
that you are going to get up tomorrow morning and do that. Is
that accurate?
Yes, thats accurate.
McGhee knows they are committed now to do that
themselves.
Then I would call that person by noon that day and I would
say, Sarah, did you get up in the morning, drink some protein,

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drink some water, and go walk round the neighborhood?

Yes, I did.
What had you motivated to do that?
I promised myself I would.
Great. Beautiful. How did you feel?
Oh, my God, I feel better. My whole days been better. Its
not even noon yet and Ive got more done and Im thinking more
clearly than I ever have in my whole lifeor in four years.
Beautiful, are you willing to do it tomorrow?
Yes.
Would you be willing to do five minutes longer?
Yes.
Many people ask, How do I motivate myself to keep
doing that?
Ill answer that question myself because McGhee already
talked about how this is something he has done ever since he
was a boy and he just does it. But for those who havent just
done it, this is one of the great questions of all time. How do I
motivate myself? The question keeps coming up over and over
in so many different formats with so many clients of mine, and
it came up in my own life so often.
My clients say to me, What do I do when my motivation
fades and my desire wanes?
I want to set aside whatever can wane. In other words,
anything that can fade or wanelike motivation, inspiration,
and feeling like itI want to factor that out.
If its going to be 5:30 in the morning that I walk for
twenty-five minutes around the neighborhood, I want
to just walk; and I dont want to wonder why I dont feel
so motivated, or wonder how to keep my motivation up
because thats putting the cart before the horse. What needs
to occur is the walkingnot the motivation to walk; and
people in our society get this backwards.
They think that in order to do something, they need to
be motivated.

118 STEVE CHANDLER

They are wrong.

McGhee says we have become lazy, but its worse than
thatmuch worse than lazy. We have become spoiled. We now
believe that to do something, we need to really like it. It needs
to be on our Facebook page as one of our favorite things to do
before we even consider doing it.
We say to our children, Do you want to eat this? Do you
want to eat that? Would you like to go to Disneyland? We
are giving children all these choices and everybodys being
pampered and catered to. People walk around taking their
emotional temperature all day trying to figure out what they
feel like doing.
And they come to me and ask, How do I get myself to feel
like exercising? And my answer is thats not the problem. Its
the fact that you are not exercising. Thats the problem. Its not
that you dont feel like it. The fact that you would even ask that
question is the problem because you think you have to feel like
doing something before you do it.
So it would be like saying, If my house burns down, how
do I get myself to feel like running outside?
No one would have to get themselves to feel like it. They
would run outside first and then check in with their feelings
later. The same is true, I found in my world, with exercise. It
wasnt about getting myself to feel like doing it. It was about
doing or not doing. Im going to do it or not do it. And thats
the only question.
So all the people who wrestle with and torment themselves
over trying to find the motivation to do something are really
missing out on a life out there that would be there for them if
they would just do these things.
McGhee says, It is not supposed to be easy. We want it to be
easy. Why would we want exercise to be easy? The whole point
is that we get to experience something thats uncomfortable.
Thats why we push ourselves. Thats why we watch great
athletes stand on a podium with the National Anthem playing

LIFE COACHING 119

in the background and we all tear up. Because we know they

pushed beyond what was easy. And we are all Gold Medalists
if we would just move our bodies and move our minds and our
spirit in the direction of this is good for me and sometimes
whats good for me isnt easy.

120 STEVE CHANDLER

Lift yourself from nothingness

Then, suddenly, I knew not how or where or when,
my brain felt the impact of another mind, and I
awoke to language, to knowledge of love, to the usual
concepts of nature, of good and evil! I was actually
lifted from nothingness to human life.
~ Helen Keller

Anne Sullivan was Helen Kellers teacher and dare we say

life coach, although the phrase was not around then.
Helen Keller was lost and confused and asleep while awake.
Then she got it when language flowed in. The little girl felt such joy.
If we are to create anything, it begins in language.
Coaching has your brain feel the impact of another mind.
And one of the areas my brain most needed coaching in was
selling. Once the coaching had its impact, I was able to write
about the true nature of selling, which is joy. Joy is as powerful
word as you can find on our language.
So I wrote a book called The Joy of Selling. The title was a
deliberate choice, even though it was jarring and hard to
swallow to those who thought that selling was difficult.
My whole point in that title and in that book was that once I
learned to really enjoy the selling process and not fight it, I got

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successful. Once I stopped being confused about whether somebody

saying no meant rejection, then selling actually became a thrill
for me. It became something that I got good at and it was fun to
do. It took many years to see the light. But once I saw the light, it
happened almost overnight. Thanks Coach.
I was struggling with it for a long time. I had deep negative
thoughts about it, and it took me a long time to unravel those and
take a fresh approach and start over again and start selling with the
idea of fun being the main objective. Money and fun. Who knew
that the two went together? I had thought it was the opposite.
Money and pain. That was my old belief system.
I remember so well the line from the Warren Beatty, Julie Christie
movie McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Theres a poignant moment in the
movie when Beatty as McCabe says, All youve cost me so far is
money and pain.
I saw that movie many times in my youth and would often
repeat that line from the movie with my friend Fred. Wed mention
an ex-girlfriend and we would both imitate Beattys voice saying,
Money and pain.
So it meant a lot to me to see (the light!) that there could be such
a thing as joy in selling.
After I really got the hang of selling myself, I started training
sales people and sales teams and they began to have successes, too.
Moving over from pain (victim) to joy (owner). I was in over twenty
Fortune 500 companies at the level of sales staff and leadership
teams doing my owner-victim sales training. Because there is a way
to train this and to work with people and teach them how to enjoy
it; and the more enjoyment people created for themselves, the more
successful they were at selling. It wasnt the other way around.
Most people think it happens the other way around: Once I start
selling Ill enjoy life more.
A lot of times when I would get into a group or a company,
the book would get passed out to them; and they would look at
the title The Joy of Selling and just laugh bitterly. Oh, my gosh,
its the most dreadful profession in the world. Its the hardest

122 STEVE CHANDLER

thing to do. And he thinks its some frivolous thing like the joy
of cooking?
And I noticed, too, when I started coaching coaches and
putting them in my coaching school, that the part of coaching
that they had the biggest struggle with was how to sell coaching.
It really isnt a big mystery as to why selling and sales is
difficult for so many people. Its in the culture, its in the movies,
its in the novels, its on TV, its in the media, and its even in
our educational system. The demonization of the profit motive
is everywhere!
I noticed when my children were going to school, there was
never an hournot even one hour in the hundreds of thousands
of educational hoursspent talking about commerce, or about
the global marketplace and how to sell something and enjoy
doing it. Selling was the necessary evil that greedy profiteers
knew how to do. Good people dont do that kind of thing. Good
people spend their time taking care of others.
Selling was always referred to as being greed-based, or as
something you had to do as a last resort. Soon in our minds we
knew that the most difficult part of all of life would be to sell
somebody something!
No wonder its hard to learn. Look how weve been programmed.
Well. It gives a lot of business to coaches who can teach
clients to get good at selling. Coaches who specialize in that
like Brandon Craig, but Ill get to him in a minute.
Back to my sociological analysis: Movies would come out
like Wall Street wherein the villains would always be anybody
who had a company or who was involved in any kind of
corporation. Its still true today in movies. So kids growing up
in our country have no real positive way to relate to sales as a
joyful activity. They dont see it as an exchange of value, where
both sides can win, where the economy can move forward and
people can advance their lives.
Its thought of as a last resort. If you cant catch on with
some honorable altruistic organization, then you might have to

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go sell for a living as a very last ditch desperation move if you

can do nothing else.
Now every once in a while someone comes along who is just
a natural at sellingeven though there might have been a lot of
work behind the naturalnesslike being a missionary, and selling
things at a young age. Brandon Craig is one of those people.
I met Brandon many years ago when we both worked at
a corporate training company and I was giving seminars. But
I was only giving seminars because Brandon was selling the
seminars. He was out in the world, a young guy, going into
companies and corporations and picking up large checks. He
sold my goal achievement training and he led the team in
sales! Everywhere he went to work after that, in telemarketing
salesany kind of saleshe would always rise to the top, even
nationally. He was what I call a naturallike Redford in the
baseball movie. He just loves it. He loves talking to people.
He loves the whole concept of selling and has really strong
principles and skills with sales.
Brandon agreed to come to one of my coaching schools to sit
in and watch how that works and to help the other coaches in
the school. He coached a number of those people in the school
on how to sell their coaching services. And since that time
Brandon has now become a powerful business coach. Whenever
I have a client who is just totally stuck and I cant move them
in the area of sales, I bring in Brandon and Brandon works with
them for a while and then I get reports that they have had great
breakthroughs and they are selling now like never before.
Brandon is a master. Not just at selling. He owned his own
company that built beautiful wrought-iron gates, and he would
sell and train his people to sell all day and has responded
beautifully to the recession. He was in the construction-related
industry with housing in Arizonajust the worst thing (or
maybe the best thing) you could ever be in if you were going to
be a victim of circumstance and he sold through this whole
thing and was successful in the face of dire warnings and worries.

124 STEVE CHANDLER

Brandon sees sales as profoundly beautiful and a deeper

and more pervasive practice than we realize.
We are all salespeople in our own way and we are selling
ourselves to our friends and our family, he says. Were selling
ourselves to our employer, to our employees, because we are
constantly communicating. I would even introduce to you the
idea that we also sell ourselves to ourselves. We have to buy
into something all the time.
That would be a great thing to master. But so many people
think selling is pushy. They are afraid that to try to sell
something is bothersome. Theyll end up being disliked. A
friend wondered about how to better sell his music and dance
lessons without being pushy about it, and I put him in touch
with Brandon, who told him: Being pushy is what you might
feel if you are not really communicating the value. If you have a
music school that provides a valuable service to someone, and if
your existing students love it and appreciate having it so much
that they are willing to write a check for it on a continual basis,
then thats exciting to communicate to others. Youd want to
tell everybody! Youd want to take that chance the chance
to explain what occurs in the school for people. Lets not overcomplicate the process. Its really a very, very simple process.
Sales is about being able to communicate with your potential
customer what it is that your service or product does for them
in such a way that they can see it. Because if they can see it the
same way you can see it, theyll buy it.
I agreed with Brandon. I thought back to fifteen years ago
when I was struggling with selling my seminars to corporations.
That fear of looking pushy really meant that I was focused on
me and what I was going to get out of the sale. I wasnt focused
on what value the other person might receive if they knew
about itif they could see it.
Therefore, today, the fears of being pushy are a signal to me
that I am still just focused on me. Im worried that Im the only one
who wins in this conversation. Im believing that money is more

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important than anythingeven more important than music,

even more important than a life-changing seminar! I always
want to turn that around and say the experience is the exciting
thing here not the money. If I stay focused on what happens
for peopleand if I take the focus off meI dont feel pushy at
all. I feel excited to keep talking and keep asking questions.
When Brandon coaches people on how to sell their services
he emphasizes the direct approach. He recognizes truth as
beautyand truth as an effective approach to selling.
Were so afraid to state our true intention, he says. So
we feel like we have to dance around the real thing, but to the
person we are talking to its not clear what we are up to.
Having your own intention be clear is everything. People dont
like being manipulated. They dont like bait and switch, or the
indirect approach. They want to know what we want and why.
I believe in just being really direct and honest, Brandon
says. You might ask, What do you see? or What is it that Ive
showed you that you have interest in? or What do you not
have any interest in? or What is it that you hesitate about?
What is it that we need to spend more time together on? What
do you see value in? Those are the kinds of things that have the
other person become part of the process so you always know
where they are.
Coaching, at its best, always seems to improve the clients
relationship with reality. Like Brandon does when he coaches
people on how to sell. The more I know about what my prospect
is really thinking at every moment, the better I will do when I
am selling him or her something.
Dysfunction occurs when we dont want to know. When
we fog things over with pleasantries and go unconscious. Its
as if we cant handle the truth. But coaching shows us, almost
always, that the truth we dont think we can handle will actually
be what wins the trust of another person.
A final point Brandon stresses in his coaching is belief itself.
Having a strong belief in your product or service when you

126 STEVE CHANDLER

go out to sell it. Because Emerson was right when he said,

Nothing great was ever created without enthusiasm. Thats
especially true of a great sales relationship. Enthusiasm, more
than anything else, sells.
A guest in a seminar I was delivering on sales had an
interesting question. He said, Ive never gone out into the field
to sell something and its something Id like to try. What should
I do first? Is it better to first acquire good sales skills or better to
know my product deeply enough?
I told him I would know the product, love the product,
be crazy about it, be enthusiastic about it, be an encyclopedia
of information about the product, be obsessed with it; and if
I wanted to succeed at sales, I also want to get curious about
how other great sales people do it. Get those books and audio
programs. Even consider getting a coach like Brandon.
I had a young man call me the other day who was just
starting his career in real-estate sales in California. He was a
young man with a good company, and they offered a lot of
ongoing training to him in how to sell real estate. Why was he
calling me?
I want to get the main part right, he said. I read a book of
yours and realized that I didnt want to wait all the years you
waited to learn what you learned from Steve Hardison. I want
that now. I want to master self-motivation and commitment. I
dont want it to have to come from my company or my family
or society. I know that all of that is fear-based.
The first commitment would be to be great at what you do.
Not good, but great, and to be great for the fun of it, not to
please anyone else or make an impression. If Im going to sell
and enjoy it, then I want to be really great at it. Thats the big
problem with seeing sales as the necessary evil of our system
as the hard thingthe one thing thats difficult to do. If I
approach it that way, it will always be hard for me.
Brandon Craig stresses this belief factor too. If somebody
said they want to become a salesman, I would say find

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something you really believe in. Because we have far too many
people out there representing products and services they really
dont believe in. They are wasting a lot of time. It doesnt serve
you and it doesnt serve the company you are working for
and it certainly doesnt serve the customer. So once you find
something you believe in and you understand what it is, next
youve just got to be able to communicate that and communicate
it at a level where you are willing to be completely honest and
have integrity in every conversation.
Brandon also coaches people on the power of measurable,
doable daily process goals versus huge heartbreaking
soul-destroying deflationary outcome goals. Stressing the
simplicity of a successful sales day, he tells his coaching
clients: Make an agreement with yourself on what you plan
to do when you sell. A lot of people go backwards. They
say, Im going to sell twenty-four units this week. But
thats backwards and ineffective. Because they dont really
understand how to get to the number twenty-four. They
think that number, all by itself, is going to drive them. And
although I recognize the value of having a goal, theres more
value in making an agreement with yourself on what you
are going to do about it. Right now, in this present day, so
that its actionable. So you are better off saying, Today Im
going to make seventeen sales calls, and tomorrow Ill make
seventeen sales calls, and then actually honor the agreement
you have made with yourself so you can get some power in
your performance.
But what if Im reluctant to make those seventeen calls?
What if I have what the sales training industry politely calls
call reluctance? Brandon says, Handle your fear ahead of
time. Be prepared. Do that by recognizing that whoever it is
that you are calling could potentially benefit from your call. But
you cant do that from a position of fear.
Many sales training companies have made tons of money
training sales teams to overcome call reluctance. Its a huge

128 STEVE CHANDLER

problem in the world of selling. I had that problem myself in

very profound degrees! It wasnt until I brought in my own
coach that the problem went away. And I didnt overcome call
reluctance; I overwhelmed it. I crushed it. My coach explained
that it would either have to be that, or not work with him. No
middle ground.
Call reluctance! It sounds rather innocent doesnt it?
The worst part about this seemingly mild problem of call
reluctance is that it becomes life reluctance, getting-out-ofbed reluctance, joining-society reluctance, being-a-part-ofcivilization reluctance. Its a slippery slope.
Its an unwillingness to join the world and play in the
global games.
And it is so much fun to really stare it down and look at why
I am resistantwhat it is about? What I am going to say when
I call people? Why am I reluctant to say it?
I want to change what that is until I am excited to say it
so I cant wait to say it. Because if I dont have what I am
saying be something Im so happy to be able to offer, then
none of this will work! I want to have my call be something
that gives you an opportunity! I want to realize and make real
to myself (as if reality were on my side) the fact that if I hadnt
called you, you would have no way of knowing about this
opportunity for this service.
If I dont get myself into that internal position to come from,
then of course Ill have call reluctance. Ill always have it. And
like Brandon Craig says, Do I believe in it? Do I believe this
call would serve the recipient of the call? Because if I believe
that, why would I resist it? I am helping you. Im not reluctant
to help you or offer you something really nice.
If I am a waiter and Im offering you dessert or coffee after
your meal, I dont have resistance to that. I walk up and offer it
because you might like that. And so, its pure service that I offer
it. So why do I not see my sales call as a service to someone? I
can if I make the internal adjustment.

LIFE COACHING 129

There are two ways to fix fear. One is internal and one is
external. I can fix it by doing the thing I am afraid of over and
over and over enough times so that its just easy and almost
boring for me. Thats one proven way. Or I can do it by cleaning
myself up internally and altering my beliefs so that my belief is
different when I make the call.
Its best to do both.
The external way would bewhether Im reluctant or not
Im going to make the seventeen calls. Im going to put a big
white sheet on my door with seventeen boxes in it; and at every
call, Im going to put an x in one box. I will not leave this office
until the seventeen are made. Now there is no longer a matter
of reluctance; its just something I am doing and there can be
fear or no fear or nervousness, but I am doing it anyway. If I
do that again tomorrow and the next day, Ill notice the fear
diminishes. Thats the external way to break this thing.
The internal way is to sit with my coach and allow him to
challenge my belief. He then helps me develop a stronger more
useful belief, and together we keep strengthening my belief in
what I am doing and dropping the negative aspect of what I
believe I am doing, and the fear tends to go away that way too.
As Brandon says, Why would someone buy anything from
you if you cant muster up the courage to sell it? So you might
want to get that handled before you move to the calling part.
Whywould I use my blog (www.imindshift.com) to SELL
my upcoming seminars and coaching schools? Why would I
openly sell on a blog that people innocently read? Why would
anybody ever sell anything? Why exchange value? Why not
SEIZE the wealth of others and redistribute it to those with the
most depressing grievances?
I got an email the other day that criticized my blogs saying,
Seth Godin would never do that. Seth expresses gratitude
in his blogs. Seth never markets without permission. Seth is
careful not to sell because his reputation is important to him.
My reputation is not important to me. If I can help people,

130 STEVE CHANDLER

I will. I will not equate selling with harming. And that upsets a
lot of peoples paradigms. But if NO ONE is EVER at all UPSET
with my work and communications, then I know that I am
simply playing it safe and making caution my only mission.

LIFE COACHING 131

I am seeking your disapproval

Perhaps the most powerful coach of all time is Byron Katie.
In a coaching school I was conducting, a woman raised her
hand once and asked me why there were so few women in the
coaching world. I begged to differ. There are as many good
women as there are men.
Byron Katie says, Personalities cannot love. They want
something. I rejoice that someone has finally pointed that out.
She is fearless.
Many people have subscribed to receive email messages from
me. I will often try to drive people away from the membership
with messages that stretch their belief systems to the breaking
point. Why do I do this? Am I crazy?
No. I was doing Katies meditative work on the belief I
need approval and one of the turnarounds (possible beliefs
that are as true or truer than the dysfunctional belief thats
sabotaging my life and happiness) was I need disapproval.
And I could really see it. I need disapproval to let me know that
Im not playing things safe and that Im out there, giving it my
allwhether in a book, a talk or a coaching session.
Not disapproval for its own sake but a willingness to push
the envelope and really stretch whats expected. I will never
know if I am doing that unless I get some push back.

132 STEVE CHANDLER

Rescue your future now

A great coaching conversation pulls the future out of the
future. Why leave your future stranded in the future? Many years
ago I returned from a great Landmark Education seminar with
a five-year plan for myself. I couldnt wait to take it to my coach
Steve Hardison and show him. I was going to be a public speaker!
I had a five-year plan. I was proud of myself, because prior
to the seminar it was just a pipe dream, and now it was a reality.
It was on a piece of paper in my hands. You cant get much
more real than that.
Oh, yes you can, said Steve Hardison.
What do you mean? I said.
Why do you want to wait five years for this? he asked.
Ive heard you speak to a room full of people.
Oh, that was just fooling around. dont you think it takes
time? To ramp it up? Start small and build. Build a reputation
over time?
It will take five years only because you believe it will take
five years.
Oh.
Why not do it now?
Now?
Why not compress it and have all the things you want to
do in the future take place right now?

LIFE COACHING 133

I got very excited. I didnt know you could do that. I didnt

know you could put the future into the present moment. My
five-year plan happened in five months. Five months after
the plan I was getting five-figure fees for my speaking and
my calendar was filling fast. So does coaching work? People
always ask me, does it really work? Or is it just some kind of
feel-good thing?

134 STEVE CHANDLER

We don't need no education

Coaching was created for those who never sing.
I moved into coaching reluctantly. I would give talks and
the clients would ask me to stay an extra day after the talk and
coach various individuals.
If I hadnt been coached myself by the ultimate coach, I
would be totally blind to what coaching could do. Now I was
just partially blind.
I knew one thing about coaching. It would be two people
talking. Two people instead of one. It would break the
isolation. That sense of isolation that makes a person feels
trapped in his own ego. People say we got it made, sang
John Lennon. Dont they know were so afraid? That song
was called Isolation.
Coaching replaces isolation with connection.
Lennons lyrics were often bold and brutal. Especially after
he left McCartney and did his primal scream therapy emerging
with this musical vow that I myself vow as well, No shorthaired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dick is gonna mother
hubbard soft-soap me with just a pocketful of hope. I wake
up in the morning and take that vow.
Alas for those that never sing! Thats what Oliver Wendell
Holmes said.Alas for those that never sing, but die with their
music still in them.

LIFE COACHING 135

When a guy like me dies with his music still in him, its a
shock to the pathologist when he opens the body up and the
music is released. All the attendants in the autopsy room back
away from the body they have now dubbed Pink Floyd.

136 STEVE CHANDLER

What if you weren't afraid?

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death
that brings total obliteration.
~ Frank Herbert

Super coach Michael Neill wrote this recently: Whatever

it is youre trying to achieve, ask yourself what you would do
if you werent afraid. Dont worry about whether or not you
actually are or arent afraidjust notice your answers, and
notice which ones you want to act on.
As I have written elsewhere, there is a tremendous
difference between feeling the fear and doing it anyway
and the freedom which comes from finding that space in
yourself which is beyond fear. And the more time you
spend living beyond fear, the sooner the answer to What
would I do if I wasnt afraid? will become Exactly what
Im doing now.
Michael and I had twenty-two wonderful, courageous
people sign on to the Financially Fearless Money Mastermind
for six months of abundance-muscle-building and wealthcreator lessons for those who wanted to earn the money
theyve always wanted to earn but were afraid to.

LIFE COACHING 137

Life usually has three acts, (1) childhood, (2) adult

victimhood, and (3) transformation.
Most people never take the stage for act three.
How does one become rich? How does one not become rich?
Lets start there. Because there are a hundred ways to become
rich. But only one way not to. So if we took that one way not to
away, what a start that would be.
So if we took the fear (one way not to) away, what a start
that would be. And how would we finish after that? The other
hundred ways would come to you.
Some people find it offensive to talk about money this
openly. Especially when politicians have promised us that
money will never be a problem for us. That we will all get what
we are entitled to.
But its not entitlement. An entitlement is what
people on welfare get, and how free are they? Its not
an endlessly expanding list of rightsthe right to
education, the right to food and housing. Thats not
freedom; thats dependency. Those arent rights; those
are the rations of slaveryhay and a barn for human
cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to
do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only
basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
~ P.J. ORourke
Then theres the secret law of attraction. Another way to
not work... not use your hands or your resourcefulness or your
creative desire to serve. Soon you are demeaned into wanting
things. Its demeaning, isnt it? Its ultimately degrading to
make lists of all the material things you are wanting.
Never noticing the power you already have.
You erroneously think those things will give you power. Money,
cars, homes, lovers. You think that comes first, then the power.

138 STEVE CHANDLER

When you had the power all along. You just werent using it.
I would have gladly paid $100,000 to learn what our moneycoaching program delivered. In fact, I did pay that, a few times
over, to learn what the program delivered. I learned the hard
way. I learned that of all the powerful things you can do with
money, spending it is the least powerful.
People fear money and death for the same reasonsbecause
of the same deep primitive misunderstanding.
A child will believe a superstition if enough adults verify
it and confirm it. A child will even believe in Santa Claus if
enough adults confirm that he is real. Its the same process with
any accepted belief. Each belief changes that childs whole life.
Like money makes you secure.
Until its deleted. Until we are willing to start over.
And thats where coaching comes in. It is one sure way of
starting over.

LIFE COACHING 139

Go ask the dog

One day Michael Neill just totally changed my life.
I had a phobiaI only had it for about fifty years, but it was
still terrible. It was around dogs and animals. Michael invited
me over to his home office and worked with me all afternoon
doing a powerful mix of coaching, NLP, and hypnotherapy;
and afterwards it was just amazing. The healing (re-framing, reprogramming) work that he did actually worked. He brought
his dogs into the room with us, and I couldnt wait to pet them
and rub their bellies and get to know them.
Who was I?
Ive got my own dog now. Jimmy. He has changed our lives
at home. Hes just such an amazing addition to my life. It never
would have happened if it hadnt been for my friend, the author
of the great book Supercoach, his modestly-named book about
how he coaches people.
Some people out there in the world are as popular as
Michaelwriting, selling books, and doing radio and TV
showsbut do they change lives like he does? I doubt it.
Everything he writes about and talks about on his radio show
he actually does for people.
Does coaching really work?
Ask Jimmy.

140 STEVE CHANDLER

Can you exchange your brain?

I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal by Sharon
Begley called How Thinking Can Change the Brain which I
found so very interesting given that coaching is all about that.
Begley talks about research done at the University of
Toronto using brain imaging to measure activity in the brains
of depressed adults. Half of the volunteers received the
antidepressant Paxil, and the other half received twenty sessions
of cognitive-behavior therapy, learning not to catastrophize.
That is, they were taught to break their habit of interpreting
every little setback as a calamity, as when they conclude from a
lousy date that no one will ever love them.
The depression lifted in both test groups.
Linda Ronstadt (catch Linda singing this on YouTube),
the Everly Brothers, Vince Gill and so many more have sung
the song:
Ive been cheated
been mistreated
when will I be loved?
It wouldnt have been as great a song had it gone this way:
Ive been cheated

LIFE COACHING 141

Been mistreated
When will I learn not to catastrophize?
But I love all this research because it has helped me reveal
another thing that happens when people get good coaching
they learn not to catastrophize.
Catastrophizing can become contagious. People get on
the phone and catastrophize with each other. People become
addicted to their own catastrophes as well as other peoples. It
becomes quite compelling.
The coach who sees it and calls you on it can seem heartless
at first, but stay with it. Because once the story of catastrophe
disappears, the story of opportunity replaces it.

142 STEVE CHANDLER

Procrastination is good!
Procrastination is the soul
rebelling against entrapment.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When I didnt have a coach and I procrastinated, I

would simply tell myself that I had this terrible flaw called
procrastination. It was one of my many bad habits.
But a great coach wont let you get away with that.
Negative labeling that reduces self-esteem? Not allowed!
With most people this labeling is automatic. And it has no
relationship to the truth.
Procrastination is a beautiful form of rebellion. Its a rebellion
against other peoples imaginary judgment. Its a rebellion
against living other peoples lives for them and reaching their
goals instead of yours. Even if its a task you were going to do
just for you, if its something you think you should do versus
what you are truly choosing to do, you will rebel. It is your soul.
The only problem occurs when you notice that all around
you is unfinished business! Chaos. Broken promises.
So how to convert the rebellion against entrapment into
something better than unfinished business?

LIFE COACHING 143

Awareness. Then practice.

My to-do list is something that looks like its telling me
what to do. And it is, isnt it? Isnt my to-do list trying to tell
me what to do?
In a book called Time Warrior I have recommended the
elimination of to-do lists and the return to the joyful single act.
As with all my previous books, the content came from coaching
sessions that changed me.

144 STEVE CHANDLER

Lost, stuck and miserable

My coaching clients often know what they should
be doing. They know their business. They know
themselves. They know a lot. Many are already quite
well known and successful. And my first objective is
to separate that separate what they know from
what they live. Two different categories.
~ Dusan Djukich

Todd Musselman is a coach and speaker who has created

his own powerful versions of the Owner-Victim distinctions I
first introduced in Reinventing Yourself.
Todd says, My first victim phase is that I would rather be
lost, stuck, or miserable than ask for assistance.I would rather
be fired, or divorced or dead than ask for assistance.
But then he points out that when the victim reaches out
and gets help, the power of owning his own spirit starts to
materialize.
Coaching is great, he says, because it provides a powerful
space for you to fully express yourself in a way that you
feel gotten. Its great because it provides a space in which
creating what you want in yourlifeis the only focus.

LIFE COACHING 145

Everyone else you talk to has his or her own focus. They
all want something. They may even love you, but they want
something. They have an agenda.
Your coach is the only person in your life who has no
agenda. Everyone else you talk to has an agenda of some sort.
Your coach only wants you to succeed.
And thats the key to the effectiveness of coaching.

146 STEVE CHANDLER

Confidence to do what you love

Rich Litvin is an expert in deep, inner, natural confidence. He
has worked with best-selling authors, physicians, Fortune-500
consultants, and coaches to help them achieve inspirational
results, create passionate relationships and build wealth doing
what they love.
He recently worked with an Olympic athlete who was
struggling to fund her Olympic bid by selling calendars. She
had one coaching session with Rich and the next day called to
say she had raised $40,000 of corporate sponsorship.
But for much of Richs life, although people thought he
seemed really confident, it never really felt like that for him.
It looked like he was successful, but inside he felt nervous
and insecure and so he felt like a fraud. He was terrified that
you would find this out, so he learned all the tricks he could to
appear more and more confident.
But none of those tricks worked.
He ended up feeling less and less confident. So Rich has
spent the last decade learning as much as he can about how
to build deep natural confidence. He has traveled the world
interviewing the worlds most confident people.
Rich also coaches. Most of his clients have already achieved
a great deal in life, but they have one thing in commonthey

LIFE COACHING 147

all feel like they are facing an impossible goal. And they lack
the confidence to achieve it.
I have co-facilitated seminars with Rich and interviewed him
on one of my webinars recently. I asked him about being nervous
and whether he had butterflies even before this interview.
Thats the funny thing, he said. Every time I talk about
confidence on a radio interview, the irony doesnt escape me
that I get nervous as Im getting ready for that conversation.
I love it that he calls himself out on that. A lot of people
think that coaches who teach things have to be amazing perfect
experts in that category. And the truth is the best coaches are
people who really had to work hardharder than mostto
achieve things and to learn how to do things. Its always true
in sports. You look at all the best managers and coaches and
you never remember where they played the game because they
didnt distinguish themselves as players at allthey had to
learn the hard wayand thats why they can teach it so well.
So its great that Rich talks about his nervousness because
it allows his clients and everybody listening to my webinar to
listen better. Because when its hard for you to do, I really want
to hear about it. But when it comes naturally for you I tune out,
and I think, Ok, great, lucky you; I cant identify with you.
Rich says, Ive noticed, the more authentic Im willing to
bethe more willing I am to speak up when I feel nervous or
insecurethe more I relax on the inside and those fears seem to
disappear anyway.
Rich works with some clients who want confidence for
themselves and also want their partners to be confident. Its a
common misfire I also see in my own clients: the desire to have
my family members change. Or, even more common, the desire
to have my spouse or partner change for the better.
Its a total distraction to want other people to change. Its
misdirected energy, and it only leads to misery. A good coach
like Rich wont go there with you.
When you desire something from someone else in a

148 STEVE CHANDLER

relationship (especially in an intimate relationship), that begins

to be the downfall of the relationship, he says. Whatever you
want more of you need to look at how you can increase that in
your life.
So a man is projecting his own insecurities on his wife, and
soon hes longing for the romance of the early dating days to
return. Rich said, There is nothing more exciting for a woman
in a relationship with a man, than to have a man who is in touch
with his purpose in life. A man who knows what he wants in
lifea man who is clear about what he is doing is a man who
feels confident, grounded, and solid and there is nothing
more attractive. So for the man who wants to inspire his wife
(instead of fixing her), he can just go to that place of purpose.
Just tap into that.
Does he mean that women dont love needy, confused
victims who come home from work and blame everyone at
work for how bad they feel? Thats not an aphrodisiac? Wow.
Who knew?
Actually hes so right. Ive never had any of the women in my
seminars come up to me and say, You know what I love about
my husband? The complaining he does about people at work
when he gets home. That just lights me up. I am so connected
to him when he does that. It turns me on. I light candles, I put
on soft music and I just cant wait for him to come home and
complain about life.
Ive never heard anyone say that. Its always the opposite.
People are attracted to people who own their lives. People are
not attracted to victims.
And I enjoy Rich Litvins willingness to share his own
stories about when he lacked confidence, or when he failed
at things.
I started my career in public speaking trying to be somebody
I was not. I was going to try to hide all my failures and pretend
I was Tony Robbins, or pretend I was born with a Boy Scout
uniform on and I just catapulted out of the womb full of energy

LIFE COACHING 149

and I was like Tony doing karate kicks and having passion
and it just wasnt me.
My own coach Steve Hardison took me aside and said,
Why dont you just be you? Why dont you share the
stories of your life and where youve come from and all
youve been through?
And I said, Well, I dont want the audience being depressed
or suicidal at the end of my talk.
And he said, No, that wont happen. They will identify
with you. Youll feel the connection right away. Just be real.
Just be you. Forget about trying to be somebody successful. No
one will buy that.
How true.
But soon it was amazing because I just dropped all that
bad act about how great and successful I was and I just told the
truth about my kids and me and my life and alcohol addiction,
bankruptcyI mean the whole thing. Jerry Springers show! It
almost turned out to be that, but it was powerful and surprising
to me because people were able to identify with my stories, and
soon I started putting more of that in my books and people
started buying the books at a greater rate. People started asking
me to come speak.
The coach will get you to the truth. And the truth will
set you free.

150 STEVE CHANDLER

A world cruelly disrupted

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Dont stand in the doorway
Dont block up the hall
~ Bob Dylan

My friend Will Keiper coaches international corporations

and the people who run them. He has special insights that
allow him to immediately transform businesses in distress into
businesses that can be vital and successful again.
He works with boards and CEOs to give them harsh new life
after years of passivity and neglect. When he steps back from
his work, he sees that a lot of our problems are generational.
Will points out that his Boomer generation has ...looked ahead
to retirement and grandchildren, and easing into our seventies
and eighties; but on the other hand, as pointed out by Tom
Friedman, we also have been the grasshopper generation,
eating through just about everything like hungry locusts
We have been voracious consumers of credit to buy
homes, second homes, swimming pools, cars, planes, vacations,
electronics and whatever our kids wanted or demanded. Just as
we are approaching the good life of retirement, our more-or-less

LIFE COACHING 151

stable world has been irrevocably and cruelly disrupted. An

aging generation has met a financial crisis that compares with or
exceeds that of the Great Depression of our parents generation.
Our fellow boomers and their children and grandchildren have
been loaded with a staggering amount of national debt. The
debt is so large that it threatens the very financial stability of
our country, and has already diminished the US role in the
hierarchy of world power. As a collective generation, our future
absolutely will not unfold as we had hoped.
This fact terrifies most people in Will Keipers generation,
but not Will. His specialty is confronting distress and converting
it into creative, vibrant health.
He enjoys waking people up.
He recommends that older people take another look at their
lives; and instead of asking when they can retire, ask, instead,
How can I get busy and contribute?Ongoing productive
contributions must now replace golf and bridge, says Will.
We cannot live in the segregated retirement community
reservations where older people have in the past gone to bide
their time and wait for whats next. We must rapidly access
and gear up the personal power and energy that is normally
downshifted about now. This is the new normal.
Ive been urging Will to write a book about this for a long
time. To take his powerful coaching and consulting that turns
companies around so quickly, and apply it to our whole nation.
Turn us around too! With more of your wisdom: Although we
have been severely impacted by events beyond our control,
we can choose to make the days ahead the most vibrant and
powerful period of our lives. We can turn legitimate fear of
this new unknown into an unprecedented recommitment to
American innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation. We
can leverage the experience, education, and wisdom we have
at our disposal as a consequence of living longer and better
than any prior generation. A pragmatic wartime remark by

152 STEVE CHANDLER

Winston Churchill sums up what now must become our

generational mantra: It is no use saying, We are doing our
best. You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
The good news is that there is a ready answer for Now what
do I do? It is already in you.
A few more coaches like Will Keiper in the world, and we
will be fine.

LIFE COACHING 153

A coach should have a coach?

My friend and coaching school colleague, Ron Wilder,
is an amazing coach and an amazing person. A high-level
martial artist and classical pianist, Ron lives life to the fullest.
His coaching specialty is working with CEOs to re-align their
businesses so that they run at the highest productivity possible.
Ron also coaches business consultants and other coaches.
Every coach should have a coach, he says. Having a
coach makes you a better coach because you are experiencing
the very process of growth and development that you are
asking your clients to engage in.
Wilder notes that being coached takes huge courage, which
is one of the reasons why it is so effective at changing lives.
Where else in life do we regularly schedule acts of courage?
No wonder Im so tired after my coaching sessions,
Wilder said. When I am being coached, I really work. Now
as the coach, Im going to ask my clients to do the same thing.
In order for them to advance towards their success, they will
voluntarily submit to the coaching process. If they do it fully,
going all-in, they get the biggest benefit. Yet this is risky. And it
is exactly what I want my clients to do. Take the risk and grow.

154 STEVE CHANDLER

Why not just do things?

Because most people never define the necessary
required actions to get a result, they will always simply
do whatever actions are comfortable at the time. They
are always going with the feeling of activity instead of
insisting on doing the necessary required action.
~ Dusan Djukich

People have dreams but they dont live those dreams. They
talk about their dreams sometimes after a glass of wine or two,
but when will the dream come true?
The first thing a good coach will do is find the dream
even if its lodged inside a complaint about life. Then the next
thing the coach will do is help transform the dream into a
doable project. Vladimir Nabokov says this in Speak Memory:
It is certainly not thennot in dreamsbut
when one is wide awake, at moments of robust
joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of
consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer
beyond its own limits.

LIFE COACHING 155

Pyschotherapy is all about feelings. But coaching is all about

achievement robust joy and achievement. Your coach doesnt
just want you to feel better about yourself. Your coach wants
you to feel what it feels like to achieve something remarkable.

The Coaches
Steve Hardison, www.theultimatecoach.net
Byron Katie, www.thework.com
Michael Neill, www.supercoach.com
Rich Litvin, www.thatconfidenceguy.com
Ron Wilder, www.alignedaction.com
Tom Rompel, www.growthstrategiesllc.com
Stephen McGhee, www.thegetrealblog.com
Brandon Craig, www.tlc5.com
Peleg Top, www.pelegtop.com
Will Keiper, www.firstglobalpartners.com
Alison Arnold, www.docaliarnold.com
Matt Furey, www.mattfurey.com
Dusan Djukich, www.straightlinecoach.com
PLEASE GO TO:
THE LIFE COACHING CONNECTION
www.tlc5.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Chandler is the author of dozens of books and audio
programs, including the bestsellers: Fearless, Reinventing
Yourself, Shift Your Mind, Time Warrior, and 100 Ways to
Motivate Yourself.
He is the leader of the Steve Chandler Coaching Prosperity
School (www.stevechandler.com) and writes a popular blog
called iMindShift (www.imindshift.com).
Chandler is also one of the featured coaches at TLC5.com:
The Life Coaching Connection (www.tlc5.com).

Also by Steve Chandler

Time Warrior
Fearless
The Woman Who Attracted Money
Shift Your Mind: Shift the World
A Crime of Genius (coming soon)
9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back
(with Sam Beckford)
The Small Business Millionaire (with Sam Beckford)
Business Coaching (with Sam Beckford)
100 Ways to Create Wealth (with Sam Beckford)
100 Ways to Motivate Yourself
Ten Commitments to Your Success
Reinventing Yourself
RelationShift: Revolutionary Fundraising
(with Mike Bassoff)
The Joy of Selling
The Story of You
100 Ways to Motivate Others (with Scott Richardson)
The Hands-Off Manager (with Duane Black)
50 Ways to Create Great Relationships
Two Guys Read Moby-Dick (with Terrence Hill)
Two Guys Read the Obituaries (with Terrence Hill)
Two Guys Read Jane Austen (with Terrence Hill)
Two Guys Read the Box Scores (with Terrence Hill)
Two Guys on the Road (coming soon)

Robert D. Reed Publishers Order Form

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The Life-Coaching Connection: How Coaching Changes Lives..................$14.95_______
The Woman Who Attracted Money................................................................$14.95_______
Shift Your Mind, Shift Your World...............................................................$14.95_______
Fearless..............................................................................................................$12.95_______
The Joy of Selling...........................................................................................$11.95_______
100 Ways to Create Wealth (with Sam Beckford).........................................$24.95_______
Small Business Millionaire (with Sam Beckford).........................................$11.95_______
Ten Commitments to Your Success.................................................................$11.95_______
RelationShift: Revolutionary Fundraising (with Michael Bassoff)..........$14.95_______
Two Guys Read Moby-Dick (with Terrence N. Hill).................................... $9.95_______
Two Guys Read the Obituaries (with Terrence N. Hill).............................$11.95_______
Two Guys Read Jane Austen (with Terrence N. Hill).................................$11.95_______
Two Guys Read the Box Scores (with Terrence N. Hill).............................$14.95_______

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