Years ago I heard about people that had personal coaches, and it seemed like such a foreign idea to me. We have teachers, we have mentors, we have coaches in sports, but the idea of a business coach or a life coach just seemed a little strange to me. In the past two years, I really started changing the way I tried to tackle life. I was struggling to rebuild my “brand” after a change in our real estate businesses and came across some great books. I’ve talked about these books before, and I always use them as the books I give away to friends and colleagues when they hit a wall. The “Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss and “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod, when combined, are life changing. Let me know if you want to learn more.

Back to coaching, I have recently started helping businesses automate their workflows, and try to see how they can become more efficient. It is extremely rewarding to get to share the experience I had and watch new companies take the information and grow with it. Anything that you might be experiencing in your personal or business life, someone else has gone through it. We aren’t as unique as we think we are when it comes to business and life choices.

1. There are major benefits to having a coach, an accountability partner, or a mentor from afar:

   1.) They help take the emotions out of the decisions

   2.) They can help explain the decisions they made in a similar situation, so you can more likely be right

   3.) They can give us a better perspective for our decision making

   4.) We can be completely honest with them

   5.) They can hold you accountable

All of these things are crucial. In life, we tend to share our lives with our friends, but it isn’t always easy to tell a friend what is really going on. Sometimes we hire our friends, and it makes it even tougher to be honest or make the right decision. You don’t want to tell your friends or other parents at school “Hey I lost $1M on this project”, or “I am working on this large partnership that might generate $50K a month, and I’m not sure how to create the contract.” Friendships and business/life decisions tend to be best kept separate. When we share things with our coaches, they can give us quick honest answers because you were honest with them, and they have been there. Two heads are better than one, and if one of the heads already solved the problem, two heads are way better than one.

As I work with guys to automate their real estate acquisition businesses, we are planning to increase their purchases from 1-2 homes per month, to 10-20 per month, without increasing overhead. As we get to see the processes work, using the same principles I followed when I built my acquisition company, it really feels like getting a second,third, and fourth chance to do life and business better/right this time.

I’ll end with this, I recently joined a group that is all about having big goals and short term goals, then holding each other accountable. How is that new years resolution doing? I bet if your friends were asking you about them and pushing you every few days to follow them, they would still be on track. Go find a coach, or a group of guys, or anyone that will hold you accountable.