Transforming Lives Through Coaching: Insights from Townsend Wardlaw

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Hello there.

Welcome to today's episode of youf Ultimate Life, the podcast dedicated to helping you create purpose, prosperity and joy by serving with the gifts, talents and life experience that you have.

I'm excited today to have a special guest, Townsend Wardlaw.

Welcome to the show, Townsend.

Thank you, Kellen.

Great to be here.

Great to see you again.

Fabulous to see you.

So I'm going to start with a question.

I may have told you ahead of time, but I usually don't.

And I don't want you to.

I don't want you to, you know, make an effort to be modest or to anything.

I just want you to talk about it.

And the question is, tell us, how does Townsend add good to the world?

I love that question.

If I'm, if I'm not being honest, if I'm not being modest, I am being honest, not being modest.

Remember, the greatest good that I bring to the world is sharing my gift of helping people make money.

I've always had a gift for, for making money.

For a lot of years, money was the.

The end, not the means or even just some sort of fun prize at the end.

I, I sorted through that in my own, in my own mind.

But throughout my life I've.

I've worked with all sorts of people, all kinds of different environments in my, My passion is playing a game called Build, Build a business.

Make.

Make money for the sheer fun and joy of it.

And these days I get to do that in a couple of different realms.

One of my favorite realms is something I call the Coaches Operating system, which is a community I've created to serve and support coaches on the journey to mastering the business of coaching.

I have a tremendous passion for the profession of coaching for coaches and believe deeply that coaches had the capacity to move the needle on the world, have a massive impact on the consciousness of the planet.

There's just one little challenge and that is they don't really know how to build the business around coaching, oftentimes one that even supports their life.

So a lot of folks get into the profession of coaching, go through a training or certification program, really passionate about it, and they sit there on the other side going, this isn't working.

And they are constrained and limited and frustrated by the fact that they, they are not able to share their gifts with the World and they're not able to create what they want in the world and the entire community.

We're coming up on a thousand members right now is entirely a service project, a gift to the world and to coaches, and it is assisting coaches in lily transforming their ability to go out and earn an income doing something they love that serves the world.

Tell me why you think coaching as a whole has the ability, power to move the needle in changing the consciousness of the world.

Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, well, let me think of the most compact answer.

People do really well when they are fully expressed.

People do really well when they are at peace.

People really enjoy life and, and create love and kindness and joy in the world when they can see clearly.

And there's a lot of things I mean by see or clearly or not seeing clearly.

And there's a lot of people in the world who don't see clearly.

There's a lot of trauma, there's a lot of challenge, there's a lot of frustration.

There's a lot of just people running around trying to sort stuff out in their lives.

People that are unhappy, people that are unfulfilled, etc.

Well, what do they do about that?

We got the pharmaceutical industry who's certainly more than willing to help, and a lot of people choose that path.

We have the, the industry and, and there's a lot of usefulness to it in, in and around the world of psychotherapy and what have you.

It seems there's a lot of people in the world on a journey to try and be happier, be more fulfilled, be more creative, have more fun, have more love in their life.

Coaches are one service provider to that and it happens to be very scalable set of resources.

There's actually a very low bar to entry and they have the capacity to help set people free from their thoughts, from their ideas.

I mean, I think anybody who just listens to you or watches what you do would get the very clear idea that if I take some of these ideas in, I'm gonna have a better quality of life.

I'm gonna appreciate, enjoy it more.

I'm gonna be nicer to my spouse, I'm gonna be more loving to my children, my co workers.

Coaches are one tool in that arsenal and I think a very productive and scalable tool.

So I'm all in on them.

That's wonderful.

And I totally, 100% agree with you.

I have a bunch of fun names I call coaching the People Encouragement business and the Anxiety Annihilation business and the Obstacle obliteration business and blind Spot protection service.

And I like have a dozen of those that are kind of fun, right?

Yeah.

And that I have three or four of them that I just said, but there's a whole bunch of them.

And you've hit on something really important.

Our coaches, who is a person who, through whatever life circumstance they've been through, has come to the place where they feel like you expressed that their best expression of themselves is to be a light, a catalyst, a guide, an encourager of others who are trying to deal with, you know, the daily traumas and old stuff that happened to us and all that.

And yet that very same group who've chosen that profession have this difficulty doing it in a way, in a format, in a structure to make enough money so that it is good for them.

Because when you're doing.

When you're pouring your heart and soul into helping people and yet your bank account doesn't let you be in at least reasonable certainty or ease to some degree, then there's this energetic conflict.

And so that's an interesting dichotomy that people that are very.

People that are trying to do this struggle with the necessities and the societal pounding that more is better.

Yeah.

There is no such thing as a product or a service that sells itself, that speaks for itself, that is inherently valuable.

I used to do a lot in the world of corporate sales training, corporate sales, team building and development.

One of the exercises I would run teams through to help dispel this idea that there's anything that would sell itself was play a game called you need to bring to market a pill that cures cancer.

So the.

The setup was you work for a company that's developed a cure for literally all kinds of cancer, and it's a simple pill.

You take the pill once and cancer is eradicated.

You've got 10 of them at your disposal to bring to bear and to go out and seed the market.

How are we going to go out and sell this and generate what we call a go to market strategy?

And I won't go into all the details, but there's this idea, oh, well, who wouldn't want that?

That will just be easy.

Right?

Who wouldn't want.

Well, the problem is, as soon as you go out there with a pill that cures cancer, you realize there are people who are in denial that they have cancer.

There are people that have cancer, but they're already receiving treatment for it.

That will probably kill them, but they're committed to.

That's the treatment.

There are people who are of the belief that surely Something that cures cancer in a pill can't be real.

It must be a scam.

It's not straightforward.

It's not easy.

So no matter how valuable the service, no matter how powerful the coach, if they can't sell their services, if they can't acquire clients, they're going to be sitting there coaching friends and family and flogging Facebook.

And to me, that's a tragedy.

I love that, and it's so true.

And when you add to that the often the very thing that made a person choose the people encouragement business, you know that the very thing that made them do that also made them doubt their own worth and feel less than and feel like they're not important and be down on the who cares about me scale, which is another juxtaposition.

I went through a bunch of crap.

I'm not that important, and why did I have all this crap done to me?

And on top of that, the issue of money and everything else.

And so there's two, at least those two things that are hurdles.

Though coaching has a low bar to entry, it has some heavy barriers to success because of those kinds of things.

Talk a little bit about that.

Well, I'll talk about the supply side.

First of all, there are immeasurable, innumerable, whatever you would call it, entities out there that will, for a fee, some low, some high, mint a new coach.

They'll give you the process, the tools, the techniques to be a coach, what have you.

They'll get you all filled with the juju that I can go out and coach people.

What they don't do is tell you, well, how are you going to go and present that?

How are you going to share this?

How are you going to market yourself?

How are you going to sell to people?

Now that's the bad news.

The worst news is a coach gets out there in the marketplace going, okay, now, now what do I do?

How do I create demand for this?

How do I let people know?

As you said, there's all sorts of fear, uncertainty and doubt and insecurity that exists.

Like, who am I to even be doing this right?

Sort of like you're given a magic wand and you're sort of reticent to let people know, which end do I hold?

Yeah, which end will people look at me like I'm a craz crazy thinking I can grant wishes.

So they.

They go out and they.

And they pretty quickly experience some frustration at trying to pick this thing that they love and are passionate about.

Well, it gets worse because now in their Facebook feed, our Post after post after post from other coaches who make it look like they're killing it.

Every, everybody's making a million dollars a year without even trying.

And every third or fourth post is an advertisement, is a promotional post from some entity that says, oh, we've got the secret to growing your coaching.

We've got the secret to a hundred thousand dollar a year clients.

We've got the secret to grow into 10k overnight without everybody's pitching.

So they take a little more of their money because they had to put the coaching school on the credit card and they say, okay, I'm going to invest in this company.

They're going, they're going to help me sell.

They go through the program, they put more money in their credit card, they're more in debt and they don't get any results out of that.

Now, of course, nobody out there is saying this is all a scam.

Everybody, because that's what you're taught, is told to share how great they're doing, how successful their practice now full it is.

So you think it must be me, I must be the here, I must suck at this.

I don't deserve.

Right.

It's just this incredible typhoon of dysfunctionality that pisses me off.

Dude, I love it and I love that it pisses you off and I love how well you've described it.

So let's get to some teaching that is there.

The Facebook feeds are there.

The ads are there.

Every other one on LinkedIn I get 15, literally 15 outreaches a day.

Maybe 10, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but 10 of someone that's going to set appointments and bring clients into my business.

And I never ignore all of them, but we get them.

And before I knew what I was doing and some years ago I would see that and I felt just like you thought, oh gee, I wonder if that's cool.

I wonder if I should.

Should do this, that and the other.

So what is the antidote to this whirlwind of.

I won't even say people are lying or phony, but this whirlwind of essentially energetic poison.

Now what?

Yeah, well, the first thing is I would say an acceptance of.

As with any business, building a successful coaching practice will take time.

There are no overnight successes.

Right?

What I will say to folks very, very comfortably is it will take you at least six years from the time you turn pro.

You say, I'm going to be a coach, I'm going to make money off it.

It will take you at least six years to build a practice of coaching that will sustain yourself, that will pay your bills.

Now that seems like a long time to compare to what people are saying, but I've been in the world of helping people grow businesses for decades.

That's actually pretty common.

It takes some time to learn enough about how all of it works.

There's positioning, there's engagement, there's social media, there's outreach, there's list building, there's the discovery project, there's making proposals, there's learning to talk about money, there's follow up.

And underneath it all there's another, I would say, more important and fundamental dynamic going on, which is the idea that there is a market of people waiting for coaches waiting for you to announce that you're a coach.

They can say, oh good, I've been looking for a coach.

Here we go.

That, that is the fundamental illusion here.

What I say to new coaches or even aspiring coaches is part of the reason it takes.

The time it takes to build a coaching practice is one.

There's a lot to learn about running a business.

Most people getting into coaching have never run a business.

Never run a business.

Right.

And newsflash, coaching is a business like anything else.

If you want to be a lawyer, you can go to law school, then you have to learn how to build a law business.

Yep.

The fundamental distinction here is that you will not build your coaching business with people out in the market who are looking for a coach, who are ready for coaching.

If I take 100 coaches and line them up and say, what do you, what are you looking for?

What's the Perfect client?

Probably 98 or 99 of them will say something like, well, I want somebody who understands coaching, knows what it is, values it, has the money ready, is committed to their chain.

All these things, it's nonsense.

Building a business around coaching is actually the art of reaching out and connecting with people who have real issues, have real problems, have real needs, but are not currently looking for coaching and don't have a desire for coaching, don't understand coaching and probably have an aversion to coaching because of all the noise out there.

So you're not going to build a business with people who are what we call problem aware and solution aware.

You're going to build the business by beginning to create relationships with folks, not as a coach, but as a human, to help them learn about you as a human, not as a coach.

Help them build credibility and trust in you as a human, not as a coach.

And over time, their problem ain't going away.

And over time, you'll have the ability to educate them about how coaching works, serve them in other ways that don't generate revenue.

And over time, they will, I will say, gradually have a readiness for coaching.

You have to create your own market.

It's like if you're gonna have a salad for dinner, imagine you got to go and plant the lettuce and the tomatoes and the carrots, water them, nurture them, feed them, et cetera, harvest them to make the salad.

That's how you're going to build a business.

Not by saying, well, you know, I'll just go to the store and buy lettuce.

I love it.

And I want, I want to just for a moment ask you if you've listened to this episode and you're a coach, go back and listen to that segment again.

Because people think nobody, nobody wants coaching.

Nobody walks around and says, give me some coaching, man.

I need coaching.

People have problems.

Maybe they've tried 5 things, 2 things, 27 things to solve it, or maybe they've never even told themselves about it, really, honestly.

And.

But yet everybody wants to solve whatever that thorn is in their side.

And so when you said they're not problem aware, solution aware, that is so important.

And the idea that you're going to have to go plant the lettuce and it's going to take you a season to grow the lettuce and the tomatoes and the radishes and whatever the heck you put on your salad is so true and so valuable.

And so I'm just putting a comma here saying the last five, three minutes, four minutes, whatever it was, is dense, it was important, and it's a good summary of the beginning processes of doing this.

So that was fabulous.

So then what?

So you've now you've told me I'm a beginning or intermediate or it doesn't matter coach that hasn't heard this before.

I finally realized I'm not going to go out and say, find people that are singing the song, give me some of that sweet coaching.

And they're.

And I finally realize I have to do that.

And then I think, how long is that going to take?

And what am I going to do to pay my bills and holy crap, and the rest of the stuff that goes with that, Then what?

Well, let's assume you've come to grips with it's going to take some time.

So what's the journey one should be on?

Right, that's the, that's the frame I'm taking.

What I will tell you and I'll put an asterisk Here, this is the purpose of the coaches operating system, to guide people on that journey, to give them the resources to give them everything they need to learn this stuff.

There's a lot to learn.

But zooming out to the, you know, whether you're a coach or anybody, what I say is bringing your product or service to market in a non technical way, not using any fancy jargon, is simple.

You have to identify people that might be willing to get into a conversation with you.

You have to find a way to get into conversation with them and have them interacting, not just bombarding them.

Once they've begun to interact with you again, not about your product or service or coaching, but just interact with you.

At that point you can start to play the game called let's explore.

If there's something you want, you want a problem removed, you want access to an opportunity and, and you can't just say to somebody what's your problem?

What do you need?

Because often they don't even know.

After that is the process.

And I think of all these as discrete processes.

People say, well, how do I sell?

Well, selling is a series of processes, like I said, figuring out who might talk to you, getting them to talk to you, having conversations.

In those conversations, beginning to discern and help them discover what they really want, when they want it, how they would value it.

Only after that is it appropriate to implement the process that I call presenting the idea that we could help them with it and they may not be ready for it at that point.

They may be grateful that you've helped them see the problem.

But we're humans, we have this little weird personality trait which is we like to go try stuff ourselves and fail a bunch and get really frustrated before willing to get help.

So I need to have a whole process around, even a conversation related to you're ready for help.

Are you desirous of help?

Will you value help?

If I get through that, then I've got a process called talking about money and the relationship required to do so and proposing it.

So what people think about selling, which is making the offer, well, that actually happens pretty far down the line and requires a lot of building of trust, of credibility, of authority, of intimacy.

Because we're not talking about buying gum or concert tickets or whatever.

We're talking about the stuff that's up here and in here that people have been carting around for, you know, most of their lives.

I just love that.

It's funny when I have, I have a challenge that I run called crush your client enrollment.

And I also call it, love them, coach them, sign them as a sort of a framework to walk, talk about that journey.

And one of the things I say is the first thing you need to learn to do as you become a coach is you need to learn to exercise your give a crap muscle because you have this idea that you don't have to do that.

And people aren't going to talk about, they're not even going to explore internally with you until they feel like, you know the old phrase it.

Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Yeah, that has to be there in coaching.

It doesn't have to be there in tennis shoes or in bolts or in anything else because I don't need to tell you my deepest problems.

If I want to buy a pair of tennis shoes, do they fit and do they feel good?

And that's the end of the conversation.

Coaching, especially when you're talking about, you know, higher ticket, bigger problem kind of stuff, it requires trust, it requires a relationship, it requires people willing to look in a mirror and be truthful about it instead of hide behind the stuff.

And so there.

Your five or six discrete processes are powerful and important and help people along that journey.

And they take time to learn.

They take time to learn.

And mastery only comes after doing it a lot.

Right.

What I often say to folks is if you spend your first year just learning how to get people to nicely say not interested, that's a winning formula, right?

The practice of identifying a prospect as we call somebody who's not a customer yet, the process of getting their attention, not in a, in a, you know, I want to coach you way, but just, just simple attention.

And this is very much the prosperous coach methodology.

I love what Rich Litvin and Steve Chandler wrote.

You know, at this point, going on something 13, 14 years, it is about connecting.

You have to learn to connect with people.

And a lot of those connections aren't going to go anywhere.

That doesn't mean it's wasted time.

For one, you're planting seeds or what's going to happen down the road with them, right?

They might begin to develop need over time.

The other is you're building the muscle of how do I just get people to hear me and say, no thank you, right?

You got to build up a little bit of a skin around that.

Most, most people are not wired for rejection.

Most people are not wired for.

You're going to get a lot of no.

So simply the process of practicing consistent, systematic outreach is absolutely valuable.

And then there's, well, what do I say?

What Do I tell people?

What am I reaching out of?

I mean, there's.

I read some place, this was a while ago, that learning to ride a bicycle is actually the sum of something.

Maybe it's 15 or 16, 17, discrete, separate things.

You have to learn about centripetal force, about counter steering.

I mean, there's all these physical components of riding a bicycle, which is why you watch somebody riding a bicycle and they're wobbly, they don't get it, and then they get it.

And that's the best metaphor I can have for coaching, is it's going to feel like you have no idea what you're doing.

This is all a mess.

Nothing's working until it starts working.

So you have to have the time, you have to have the trust, you have to have a system, you have to have the means.

Somehow you got to support yourself.

Because if you're waking up every day going, man, if I.

If I could tell you the number of people who tell me, I just launched my business as a coach, I've got six months to replace my income, I'm like, well, you should start looking for a job now because you're not going to do it.

And more importantly, that, that neediness, that urgency is going to create rep compulsion everywhere.

Nobody's going to want to work with somebody who's trying to get a client so they can pay their bills.

I mean, that's, that's the antithesis of coaching.

And overlaying that with the whole whatever you went through in your life that drove you to be a coach in the first place, like if that isn't.

If that isn't handled or handled at least enough.

Like I always say, a coach that doesn't have a coach is a fraud.

And people get pissed off when I say that.

But the truth of that is, if you're not actively engaged in the process of being vulnerable, looking in the mirror, being open and that sort of thing, then you're going to have a real barrier to that sort of thing, all the way from the neediness.

And the phrase needy is creepy.

And that either came out of that book or Chandler said it at one of the meetings or something.

All of that is foundational.

And that neediness is so it's like poison.

It poisons the energy, it poisons the atmosphere.

It's repulsive, just like you said.

And so my phrase that I use to encapsulate that for myself, and I put it in my own PTAC personal truth documents, it says, I look for.

This is my business plan.

I look for people to love, opportunities to serve and problems to solve, and clients come in abundance.

Yeah, I love that.

And that's.

Yeah, that's it.

And getting that not just heard, but internalized, which is what you said about the process of internalizing each of those five or six discrete steps.

You're not going to read it and hear it and then get it done.

Yeah.

There's another element I think, that complements what you're talking about, and that is.

And I stole this from somebody.

I can't remember who I stole it from.

But fundamentally, you can go through all the coaching certification, training that you want.

Well, here you are as a coach.

The question is, who are you qualified to coach?

Right.

Who do you really have the knowledge, the expertise, the ethos, the compassion, the comparative experiences to coach?

Particularly when you're a coach in the first, I would even say five, maybe ten years, your practice.

This does change over time.

But early in your practice, and five to ten years is early, you're literally not qualified to coach.

Most people on the planet, right?

People say, well, I'm now a coach and I want to coach millionaires or billionaires.

You ain't a billionaire.

You don't know anything about that world.

You have no relatedness to it.

You don't understand it.

In theory, you can.

What I'm going to tell you is they're not interested.

So when they're looking at who do I want to coach me, they're not going to have somebody just came out of coaching school, has never made more than $35,000.

That's not how it's going to work.

Who are you qualified to coach?

Well, you're qualified to coach.

The person you are most qualified to coach are those that have the same experiences that you have had to process through, learn through, work through, figure out, right?

The people we are most qualified to coach are actually earlier versions of ourselves.

So that, to me, is the most logical place to start.

You don't have to be there forever, right?

You can go on to coach billionaires.

You don't have to be a billionaire.

But you have to have enough confidence, certainty, worth, that you've generated internally from having served people and created transformations and insights, et cetera.

That's not going to happen.

Going after, you know, the biggest giant lion on the Serengeti, let's start hunting quail or dove or something, you know, that's a little more closer to our heart.

I have a phrase that I say, and one of the most profound experiences in a coach's life is when they come to the realization that they are their own avatar.

Yeah.

It literally is an aha.

And I say it to people and they'll come back three, four years later saying you were right.

It is again, duh.

Yeah.

Well, that realization, it's so freeing because people say, who do you want to coach?

Well, I want to coach CEOs and they say that sort of thing because they have the idea that they can afford me and I won't get as parade of I can't afford your fees conversations.

So obviously I want to coach.

And unless you've been somewhere near the C suite and had some comparative experiences, your language won't allow you to relate.

Yeah, you really don't understand the world.

You l.

And and people want to feel understood and heard before they're going to trust you.

Right.

They're not going to, they're not going to give you the real deal if you have no idea.

And they're not going to educate you on their experiences because they can't.

I love that.

So I want you to talk now for a minute about what, what drove you, like you've done a lot of business work for a long time, et cetera, et cetera.

What drove you to create the coaches operating system and process coach ideas?

And Chandler and some of you that watch this, you're not going to know who these people are.

So Steve Chandler is a very, very renowned coach.

He's written more books than me and that's, you know, I've only written 20 and he's got 40 something so way past there.

And Rich is another coach, Rich Litvin and et cetera, et cetera.

So what drove you to create and do this coaches operating system?

I love that question because the answer is, at least to me, really fun.

So back in 2023, a little bit of background, I started in the corporate world, corporate sales.

I left the corporate world, started my own company, ran it for eight years, grew it, and I like to say I exited.

And that didn't entail a big check in my bank account.

That entailed landing the plane without killing anybody, as I like to say, and walking away with only a bankruptcy and a divorce and little just, you know, basic things.

So I had my experience as a founder and then I spent about 12 years consulting with founders, particularly founders who had failed or were at the journey where I started to.

Things started to break down for me.

Around 2018, I got exposed to coaching.

Rich Slippin was my first, I call him my first big boy coach.

And I decided I really want to be A coach.

I want to employ coaching as a tool set separate and distinct from consulting.

My market was the same.

I still serve founders, but rather than serving them from a consulting standpoint where I'm the expert, I have all the answers, I want to serve them from a coaching standpoint, which implies the expertise is in them, the answers are in them.

I simply support them in seeing themselves in the world differently.

So that's my life.

I serve founders typically somewhere on the journey between 2 and 10 million and I have more business than I'll never need for the rest of my life.

I work with typically a handful of folks at a time.

Most of the folks I work with I've been working with for years and will work with for the next 10 or 20 years across three or four companies.

So I'm, I'm done looking for business.

So got to 20, 23 and I had the idea, you know, it would be really valuable, I think, for me to find ways to serve those who will never work with you, never afford me.

And I had the idea that I could support founders who were on the journey to a million.

And you know, I was going to create a little community around that.

So I did some, some, some copywriting and I did some marketing and I set some stuff up and I announced this thing that I was doing called Early Stage Founders Business Accelerator.

It was a scholarship funded container that I was going to run for founders on the journey to a million to assist them, support them.

It was going to be completely scholarship funded for them.

They wouldn't have to pay well.

I've got a fairly extensive network on LinkedIn and other places and I'm good at generating traffic and using copy, etc.

So as the, as the application started coming in, much to my chagrin, I had a handful of founders and I had all these coaches and my initial thought was what, what, what, what's with these coaches?

Why are they in here?

I don't want to coach coaches.

They're not part of my ICP as we call it.

I'm not interested in coaching them.

And, and the universe, very, very politely but firmly let me know that actually you're going to do that too.

And, and I've got past experiences with, with trying to ignore or argue with the universe and those didn't go well.

So I said, you don't win those arguments.

I, I've learned that I don't win those arguments, so I don't argue anymore.

So I said, okay, I'll give that a shot.

I launched a second container at the Time.

It was called Coaches and solopreneurs Business Accelerator.

Same idea twice a month, every two weeks, I would coach the coaches in a live coaching format.

They'd be getting questions, very informal, and 100% scholarship funded.

Well, in about three months.

My founders container had a dozen people, maybe 20.

The coaching container had 80 people on a waitlist.

And I'm like, this is fascinating.

I had no idea, A, there was that much demand, B, that I'd be having this much fun.

So I was having a blast.

I would just show up every couple weeks and I'm sharing what is obvious to me about building a business, generating clients, enrolling all this stuff, and people are eating it up and it's incredible.

So that takes us to about the summer of 2023.

And all of this was done on WhatsApp and Google Forms and Google Sheets and very informal.

It was very powerful.

It was also turning into a lot of work because people would come into this container and the.

The premise was, I want to help coaches get to 100k.

It's just an arbitrary number, but you can actually have a pretty decent lifestyle.

The problem is 0 to 100k is an extraordinarily large range.

And not only do I like working with people who want to get to 100k, the folks on the other side were really struggling with my style of coaching, the directness, the demands.

I mean, they're just trying to figure out which way is up.

So I started wrestling with this.

I'd had about 80 people in the container on an ongoing basis, but many folks would come in and then quickly leave or leave after a couple months.

It wasn't for them.

It was too much.

It was too advanced, what have you.

So I kept thinking, how do I serve more?

How do I grow this?

How do I create more of a continuum without creating a lot of work?

Around that time, I got exposed to community software companies like School SK o o L or Mighty Networks, which I use and love.

And I got fascinated with this technology.

And I had this idea, and I say, I had this idea.

The universe was like, check this out.

That I could create an online community that would solve the problem of the continuum here.

It would.

It would allow for more resources and allow me to move upstream to folks who weren't ready to coach with me.

So In December of 2023, I actually launched the online version of now, what's called the Coaches operating system.

As of today, we're almost at a thousand members.

There's the 100K accelerator, which I teach, which is principally for coaches who've gotten about 35k to 100, there's the 35k Academy, which is for coaches that are just starting.

I don't even teach that.

I've got a group of other coaches that are doing pretty well that are teaching that container.

I've got a membership area called Path to Pro, which for a nominal fee, I actually run courses and specific curriculum around that.

There's a whole community section, tons of resources.

And then I've also in the last six months began running what I called guilds, where I invite other coaches or people that serve coaches to come into the community and have their own sub community to focus on a specialty area of coaching.

And one of the things I've done is gone out and partner with those who are out in the world creating really legitimate coaching schools.

Carolyn Friar Jones runs a school in the west coast.

She's got a guild inside of the coaches operating system, which is kind of an on ramp for who her school anchors.

Jane over in the UK has an incredible program.

He's got a guild, a space within coach's operating system that he teaches and shares his wisdom and then people get exposed to him.

So part of my real goal and vision here is number one, this is not just the Townsend show and I'm teaching everybody in more work, but two, that coaches can come in and regardless of where they are on their journey and what their particular interest is, they can find a little corner of the community that really resonates for them and helps them build their business.

I love it.

So we've used up our time and I want to ask you two things.

One, final messages of invitation or encouragement.

And then I want you to tell us exactly where to find stuff so that people could find you find more stuff.

Where to find out about the operating system and the guilds that you've talked about and everything else.

So any final messages for people that hear it, whether they're coaches or not, and then where to find all this?

My message is pretty straightforward and that is we are truly living in the most incredible time in the history of humanity.

The access to information, the access to technology, the access to opportunity, the ability to take whatever is in here or here and bring it into the world and make a business out of it.

The lines of personal and professional lives have never before been at least as a possibility.

So just completely joined?

Yeah.

And the truth is, it was always that way.

We just pretended that you were going to leave your at home and come to work and do other stuff.

Yeah.

Now there's no excuse, right?

If you are not living a life where you are full of joy, expressed, loving what you do, feeling like you're whatever the hell you want to do, this is the time to do it and there are infinite resources to assist you in that.

The coaches operating system is just one such example that there's tons of stuff out there because I'm not the only person out there saying oh well I want to help these kind of people.

There's so much out there.

That's my message of inspiration to find the coaches operating system.

You can certainly look me up online.

Anywhere you find me.

On all the socials will be references to the coaches operating System, the coaches OS and it's either coaches with an S or an ES.

It doesn't matter.

The coachesos.com will take you to the landing page for the community.

The community's hosted on Mighty networks.

It is a free lifetime membership.

There is no cost to join and the vast majority, 90% of the resources, maybe 95 inside the community won't cost you a dime.

We're running really, really interesting programming.

Bring in guest experts.

I have a master class every two weeks.

It is incredible, incredible community that's building and so many people coming in to give of their knowledge and their talent to help coaches on their journey to master the business of coaching.

Townsend, thank you for being here today.

And more importantly than that, I want to thank you for who you're being in the world because based on what you just said, you know, you're putting heart, soul, love, time, effort, energy, thought, encouragement and you know, goodness knows we can use all the encouragement we can get.

So I want to honor you, acknowledge you and thank you for that and for being here today.

It was my pleasure, my friend.

Much enjoyed.

You know listeners, whatever you do, there's benefit, powerful benefit and if you're a coach times 10, pay attention because nothing's going to happen unless you do something different.

And I can promise you that if you take action and do something different because of what you've heard and look up towns and the coaches OS if that's what you're doing.

These tools will help you to create your ultimate life.

Never hold back and you'll never ask why.

Open your heart in this town, right here, right now.

Your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you.

Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to kellen flukermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here.

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