Catching The Alignment Wave
My business partner and I met in a bistro in the beautiful Kitsilano neighbourhood in Vancouver BC, Canada. We met in mid December of 2019. As of the writing of this article, we have been in business together for six months and undergone an incredible amount of transformation, growth and education. The whole crazy amazing journey that we have been on together started from one simple place. I was compelled to change the world. Both he and I have been on the path of deep personal growth and transformation for many years. My own personal journey started at the age of fifteen, and has spanned just over two and a half decades. My story is a story for another time, because today I am telling our story. However, it is relevant to note that before we met, I designed a one year coaching program that distilled a 25 year journey of personal growth and transformation into a powerful, accelerated blueprint of personal growth and vision creation.
We met because I was in one of those magical life phases where I made a decision that changed my life for ever. What was happening in my life is that I had been putting off working with clients after completing the program design. When we met it was because I had cut through the fear and excuses that held me back. I had already begun the process of testing the systems and processes that went into the program I spent so much time and energy creating. I was testing the program by working with clients.
Let’s cut back to when Tom and I met. The setting or backdrop for this story is hands down a West-coast cliche. I had just finished my 7am yoga class and headed out to the juice bar for some breakfast. One of the things that I love about TurF is the energy of the place. It pleases my ADHD, extroverted Aries Sun, Leo moon hyperactive personality. It is a juice bar,a fitness studio, and retail outlet (ie yoga based retail therapy). It is a also a grocery store with a limited selection of meals to go and super food ingredients for home smoothie projects. There are also huge crystals the size of a persons head sitting on the two long community tables. As an entrepreneur with a vision of changing the world, it just doesn’t get more Vancouver than that. If I am ever having a bad day, the TurF Energy Green Smoothie and a couple of hours in that high energy environment can shift my mood exponentially.
So here I am sitting in TurF, minding my own business with just the right amount of energy buzzing around me that I can focus and lean into the project when a book on the corner of a table caught my eye. It was called “Emotional Design” by Don Norman. I walked over to the owner of the book and asked if I could borrow it. As I paged through it, something about the content of the book made me think a conversation with the lender may turn out to be interesting.
Over the next few months we became friends and began to collaborate. Each of us had a project that we were working on launching and both of us were stuck on the best way to get it out to the public. I had just purchased an advertising course called the Knowledge Business Blueprint by Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi.
The course started with 21 high level executive coaching tools to help the course participants get a clear understanding of why they were doing the thing that they wanted to do and what the best plan of action was to do the thing. Considering that we had basically just met, these coaching tools were a powerful way to get to know one another. Coaching also became the foundation of our business relationship. Starting any new venture can bring up a lot of internal challenges and conflicts, but when we decided to go into business together and monetize the sales and marketing knowledge that we were learning, the inner challenges that we faced increased dramatically.
At least once a week, one of us would run into a major block and productivity would grind to a halt. Or tension would build over a period of days and we would start fighting about minutiae. In either case, one or the other of us would press pause on what we were doing and investigate further into what the source of the conflict was. We talked about relationships, childhood, our dreams & desires, depression, loneliness, anxiety and anything else under the sun that kept us from playing at the top of our game. Through this process, we learned so much about each other. We learned that we shared many things in common.
We were both adrenaline junkies, had disengaged from society in order to figure out who we were and what we wanted out of life. We both were studying similar teachings about how to become the deliberate creators of our reality. Both of us had an ongoing relationship with depression and both of us had a strong desire to create an enterprise that would enrich humanity. The more we discovered our alignment, the more our growth as entrepreneurs accelerated. We quickly decided to monetize the the sales and marketing skills we were developing and started a business partnership that would end up seeing our individual projects rolled into one business.
Dean Graziosi said one thing over and over again “sell them what they want so that you can give them what they need”. The story that he told that demonstrated that was a real estate course that he created. The hook that got people into the course was how to be profitable in real estate, even when the market was crashing. The course was hugely successful, but what he really did was deliver a personal growth intensive. People loved it, but they may not have signed up for a personal growth intensive if that was the initial offering. What the people in Dean’s course wanted was real estate knowledge, and of course, they got what they paid for, but they also got clear on who they were and what was driving their desire to engage the real estate markets. Ultimately, each person wanted to engage the real estate markets because they thought it would give them some other benefit that they may or may not know about. We based our sales and marketing on this model and quickly discovered that entrepreneurs that have an issue with sales and marketing usually had a bigger and more nuanced internal conflict around their business. We also realized that most sales and marketing companies are based on templates. Give us your information, we will build your ads and you will get clients. And this approach works.
The problem was that the clients who found us were not getting the clients that they wanted. We used the tools that we ourselves had experienced so much clarity and transformation from to help our clients get clear about who they were and what they wanted. It was an amazing journey to help a client realign with why they started their business in the first place. By getting clear about who they were, and identifying the personal stories that best communicated their reason for starting their business, we had laid the foundations for our clients to create a tribe that they could powerfully serve. In essence, we had sold our clients sales and marketing and delivered high level coaching. There was only one major issue, and it almost ripped our business relationship apart.
Neither of us really wanted to do sales and marketing. It was something that we both felt was a necessary evil in order to create an impact. We bought into the hype about the current formula for building a powerful business being based on pushy and manipulative sales and marketing tactics. The trouble is, it just didn’t feel right to either of us, and we both began to resent the work we were doing and the person we were doing it with. One day, it came to a head and we had to change something in the business. It took a full week of deep, introspective and powerful conversations, but we restructured the business and the partnership. At this point it is important to mention that Tom and I were working with all of our sales and marketing clients on a 2 to 1 basis. The reason why we invested the effort to restructure the business and the partnership is because we had discovered an almost magical synergy that came from working together. This applied to doing project work together, and it also applied to doing client work as a team. A certain magical synergy existed in how our ways of seeing and processing the world came together as a professional team.
When the dust settled, we were no longer offering coaching under the guise of sales and marketing, we had switched to one simple offering…. coaching. By doing this our only focus became serving clients by creating powerful, life changing conversations that changed lives forever. Not only had we switched to coaching, we switched our model to an invitation and referral based practice. That changed everything, now instead of closing sales, we were opening relationships. We got really excited about what we were doing, and the joy and alignment we first found as business partners returned. Not only did the joy return, the magic increased exponentially. As we restructured the business out of the new alignment that we discovered, we followed the blueprint laid out by Rich Litvin in “The Prosperous Coach” and it has changed the way that we do business.
What I really appreciate about Rich’s model is that the entire process honours the humanity of both the coach and the coachee. I find that the language of “closing a client” is a language that limits the scope and imagination of relationships. It comes from traditional, old school, social media based sales and marketing. Instead, we focus on creating clients. From the first conversation it is an exploration of imagination and alignment. It is about asking the right question at the right time and creating space for the answer to land within the client. Creating a space for everyone to pause gives the chance to create a profound shift. One that comes from taking the time to step out of a cerebral and intellectual exploration. Stepping back gives us as coaches the opportunity to relax and hold the space as the coachee drops in and allows the new information to shift from an intellectual space and drop into their hearts. By meditating on the information and inviting an emotional experience that is opened in the heart space, the coachee walks away experiencing an emotional shift, rather than a list of intellectual concepts that they should and should not do. Creating emotional experiences of a new and exciting future that is co created are far more empowering when it comes to creating transformation that is both sustainable and life changing.
What we do with our clients during a session is sit them down and ask them, what is the impossible dream that you have. Where in your life are you shooting for the moon? Sit with that question for a minute and ponder, where are you shooting for the moon. Or, where would you like to shoot for the moon and what’s stopping you? Who do you know that could help you take the next step? What happens if you decide to have just one powerful conversation with the right person about what it is that is ready to burst forth and bloom out of you? Take a moment and close your eyes, imagine what it feels like to live in the world where the thing you have imagined already exists. If your too busy to sit for even five minutes then the next time you go to the bathroom, use that as an escape from the everyday. Take that time to immerse yourself in the future that you desire to create. Immerse yourself in what the future feels like, create a new set of emotions to support the creation of a new reality.
These are the principles that we use to transform the lives of our clients, the trajectory of our business and the business partnership that sustains us both. Discovering what really makes us alive is both empowering and invigorating and we are thrilled to catch the alignment wave. Whether it is as individuals, business partners or in session work with coachees, catching the alignment wave is always a powerful and life changing experience.
