Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Coaches Corner~Protests

As an extraordinary coach, you are not exempt from the pitfalls where our minds can take us.  You, too have blind spots that often rise up and bit you when you least expect it.  Whether or not you line up on the side of some issues may not be the merit of the situation but may simply be the result of your preconceived notion about the topic.  This blog addresses just that.

A woman recently took an onslaught of criticisms when she tweeted something to the effect the people protesting the flag in the National Football League games simply need Jesus. Using a tweet for such a profound statement may have been a mistake on her part, but suffice it to say that not only do the people protesting need Jesus, the people that they are accusing of racism need Jesus. The policemen allegedly shooting the hapless black victims needs Jesus. The hapless black victims need Jesus. Everyone needs Jesus. That is my point of view.

I want to point out that she was free to say what she said and she was free to take the criticism that she received because of it as I am. You can agree or disagree with the whole subject of Jesus Christ is you want to but the subject of Jesus Christ is actually not as toxic as some people want it to be and it's not as exceptional as other people want it to be. What is of note though is the different way that we all think of Jesus Christ. God, Jesus Christ in the flesh, gave each of us this fantastic mind we have and with this mind we have the freedom to think anything that we want.

He also provided with His word in the Bible and gave us many different principles that we can live by and those principles have come to my rescue on more than one occasion. For instance, many people spend their lives looking for love. Some people like the Dalai Lama says that human beings were made to be loved. I don't necessary agree with that because according to the Bible love is something that you do and it is an act of your will. The Bible tells us to love everybody. It even tells us to love our enemies and tells us to love the people that do us wrong and it also tells us to love ourselves. It tells us to love our neighbor. In fact, as far as the Bible seems to be concerned, we are all made to love, not be loved.

In my never-to-be-humble opinion, when you learn the true strength of love you will seek to love at every opportunity you can because love really brings closure. In the world we find ourselves in, many people feel less than their best. Many people feel unloved and I suspect that these people feel unloved because they don't love. Because they don't walk in the greatness that Jesus Christ said that they are in.

Now you can use your mind to be hurt or you an use your mind to be fantastic. I use my mind to be fantastic and I commit to loving all human beings and that's loving them to the point of death.

If you think someone was killed unjustly, what do you propose to do about it? Do you propose that you want to kill somebody? Well, even if you don't want to kill somebody, if you choose just to be hurt, to be angry, the person is not going to come back to life so you are just stuck being hurt and being angry. Or you could do what Jesus' teachings say to do. You can forgive them because once you forgive them and provide closure, then you are free and you're no longer bound by the emotions that you have for the person who unjustly killed somebody.

This may seem like an over-simplification to you and it might be. Over-simplification though it is, when you walk around in unforgiveness that's akin to drinking poison and expecting somebody else to die because they won't die. But when you forgive people, you are free. A simple emotion like anger, have you ever been angry at anybody? Have you been angry at anybody to the degree that you felt like spitting nails, you felt like killing them, you felt like wrapping your fingers around their neck and squeezing? How did you feel afterwards? Some people may say that they felt good after expressing it but knowing what you did to another human being, I think most people would have to agree anger is its own punishment.

So back to these guys in the National Football League. Like many people, even the people who are criticizing them, these individuals are choosing to feel less than their best. The teachings of Jesus Christ say to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and great Commandment. Loving one's self eliminates the fact that you're hurt. People who love themselves don't choose to be hurt, and ladies and gentlemen, I assure you being hurt is a choice. Whenever you think of a particular thing that someone said or particular thing that someone did, you have many ways to look at those things. When you consider that people have misunderstood your intentions, it's very easy to make a case for the fact that you can misunderstand other people's intentions as well.

When someone hurts you, there's no way that you can repay the hurt in kind just like they hurt you. If someone hurt you and you hurt them, well, the natural thing for human beings to do is for them to try to hurt you back and then you hurt them. And then you have a situation that is escalated and that happens all the time. The only way to end pain is to forgive and that is the lesson of Jesus Christ. If you only did one thing that Jesus Christ talks about, forgive, you would not find yourself on your knees because you think someone got treated unjustly.

My Pastor several years ago wrote a book entitled "Who Offended You and Stopped You From Receiving Your Miracle," and when you are offended, you can't receive a miracle. God cannot use you when you're offended because you are looking for some way to respond. You must come to the place where you forgive any and all offenses because to not do so just creates an environment for even more offense.

When my Pastor did this teaching he did an illustration where a person was offended and the offense was like a weight on their shoulder. So he had a guy stand up and another guy climb on his back, so walking around with offense, walking around with your feelings hurt, everything looks different. Everything looks like a pain, like some people say to a hammer everything looks like a nail, or to a person that's offended everything looks like an offense.

Then he saw how it happened and the person got offended the second time. So now he's walking around with two people on his back and he's weighed down even more. It is absolutely impossible to get the best out of your life walking around with offense.

It is difficult to embrace any of these principles because there are so many people willing to give you an excuse for being hurt. There are so many people willing to make a case for the fact that you've been done wrong. But you've got to realize that those people who make those excuses, those people are simply looking for entertainment. They're not looking to help you, and no matter how much they tell you that you got mistreated or how bad you feel about it or how many people say you're getting mistreated, none of that does any good into helping you move forward in your life.

The dirty little secret that many people don't have privy to is that you attract things to your life by the way that you think about your life. Whenever you think that you're hurt, you're going to attract more hurt into your life. So I urge you get Jesus if you don't have Jesus. Study how to forgive. Make a commitment that you are not going to walk around hurt. Make a commitment that pain is psychological and you can withstand whatever it is that comes your way. And it might be hard to do at first but after you do it a few times, it'll be easier. Believe me, I have forgiven a lot.

Don't buy into those people who tell you that you should be mad about this or that, because you shouldn't be mad about anything. When you're mad, you're the one that's mad. When you're hurt, you're the one that's hurt. So be strong and be courageous, and any thought that doesn't fill you with loving somebody, then you can stop thinking about that and think about something else.

Now if this has helped you, I appreciate you taking the time to read it, pass it on to somebody else, but don't pass it to somebody who is angry right now because they will simply negate its value. Pass it on to someone who may be able to use it later.The most common thing you get when you tell somebody that they're wrong, is some sort of defense and that helps no one. So I say to you, I've got Jesus. I need Jesus. And after reading this blog, you may have a better idea of what she meant by, "Duh, they need Jesus."


Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Coaches Corner~Tugs





As an extraordinary coach, you must always, always be tuned into the fact that your mind is your biggest asset. You are free to think about things any way that you want to. This story that I'm about to tell you is going to illustrate to you why I see the world that way.  You will understand why I believe that what you think about you bring about.   And it will also help you understand why I am so excited about what God is doing in my life. I'm excited about what God is doing in your life as well.   And it doesn't have to be that way.  That is the way that I choose to think about it and that is the way that empowers me.   Ask yourself, what empowers you?


There's a popular story about a little boy who was out flying a kite.   And his passers-by talk with him.  They ask him, "What're you doing?"   Well, he says, "I’m flying a kite."  But nobody can see the kite.   They said, "Well, how do you know that you're flying a kite if you can't see the kite?"   The little boy says, "Well, every now and then I feel a little tug." Short story, this is a very interesting story.  The way that God works in our lives is that he's there all the time, but we don't always know that he is there.   Every now and then he gives us a little tug, when something exciting happens, it could be something small, could be something large, but suffice it to say that every now and then each and every one of us gets a little tug.


A little tug came into my life this morning.   A while back I was an Uber driver.   As an Uber driver you pick up people all day long.   And day in and day out, 15 to 20 times a day, I would have the same conversation with people about how what you think about you bring about.   I would have the conversation about people demonstrating to them how you get in your life what you expect in your life, and what you expect is up to you.   It would be nothing for me to remind nearly everybody that got in my car that when you think a certain way, you feel a certain way.   And when you feel a certain way you do a certain thing. And when you do a certain thing you get a certain thing, thereby implementing the seed time and harvest principle.   I'm totally sold on this, and you will be to after you hear this story.


About 24 hours ago, I'm wearing these leather gloves while I'm driving, and of course people are teasing me about these leather gloves.   But what these gloves do is they dry out my hands, and my hands are ashy.   My wife told me one day that my hands looked ashy.   And so I decided to put a bottle of lotion in my vehicle so that when I take my gloves off when I get out of my vehicle I can put some lotion on, and my hands won't be dry.   That was 24 hours ago.   Fast forward to now while I'm making this blog.   A young lady gets in my car, I call her Izzy, and I told Izzy I would share the story with you so it's nothing private about it.   Out of the blue, Izzy says to me, "Do you have any lotion?" real innocently.   And when she said to me, "Did you have any lotion.", and I realized that just 24 hours earlier I put a bottle of lotion in my glove compartment, man, was I excited.   And I was excited because that was a little tug for me.


That was a little tug for me because that morning on my Uber route things hadn't been going as quickly as I was accustomed to them going.   And while I didn't doubt for a minute that God was still in charge, I was sort of apprehensive about what kind of day is it going to be because each day is different from the next one.   But when God did that I knew that he was telling me, "Dude, I got you handled just like always."   And God's got you handled too, just like always.   If you are averse to the idea of speaking of God in the public arena, then I'm probably not your coach.   If you think that church is a bunch of hogwash, once again, I'm probably not your coach.


And the fact that I'm not your coach only adds to the fact that you won't experience the benefit of what God is doing for me and what he is doing for others, but it's totally on you. Now, this blog today is not about getting you to become a Christian at all even though I'm a Christian, and I'm totally sold on it.   This blog about having you realize the power of that mind that you have. You can perceive what I'm telling you as just another thing or just another story if you want to.   But I'm encouraging you to keep in mind that your clients need a little tug every now and then. Take this blog, share it with them, help them see how the way that they look at things is crucial to their success. The way that you look at things will determine what you do.


If you think you are a failure, if you think that things are not going to work then you won't do anything.   If you wouldn't believe that a picture would appear on your television, you wouldn't even turn your television on.   And sometimes turning your television on can be the beginning of a phenomenal day believe it or not.   In this blog of mine that I'm writing you today, I want you to get it. That what you think about you bring about.   I want you to get it. That you are in charge.   And I want you to magnetize your mind to receive instances of when you get a little tug and share it with others, because for some of you this blog that you're reading is a little tug.   God, I love it when people think like me. The more people that think like me, the easier it is to be me, and I just love being me.   If this blog has helped you, please pass it on to someone.   Until the next time, you just have a good time.



Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Coaches' Corner-Omnipresence





This blog is all about how to build premium brand positioning through magnetic messaging perpetually displayed to your perfect ideal prospect, and to do so while having the appearance of your being absolutely everywhere in their universe. It will seem a little bit complex, but then you'll realize it actually isn't.


It all starts with something called magnetic messaging. What is magnetic messaging? Your clients have problems, which for you is pretty good because they pay you to solve them. For them it's pretty bad. Here's the deal. You have solutions to those problems. That's how you earn money. Magnetic messaging is a framework for creating a presence in your marketplace that highlights you as an authority on solving your prospect's problems. This is easier than it sounds. As a matter of fact, I'm going to tell you how to do all of that during this blog.


Once you have your magnetic messaging mapped out, you distribute it with something called targeted omnipresence. In this blog, I'm going to give you an overview of how targeted omnipresence works, and then in the next blog I'm going to show you how to map out magnetic messaging.


Let's talk about targeted omnipresence. This is an overview of the entire process, Several steps, really simple. The first thing we want to do is, once we know what to say — don't worry, we'll figure that in a minute — once you know what to say, to write a helpful article on your blog. Good thing about blogs is they're cheap and easy to set up and maintain. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to make a Facebook post on your fan page. You're going to need to have a real Facebook page, a fan page. We're going to make a Facebook post to that article. We're going to drive people to that article. It's going to start giving us a little bit of traffic.


In that same time frame, we're going to create a video covering the same messaging that you just did in your article. Basically, you're taking that article and you're just turning that content into a video. Before you let the concept of making a video freak you out, you should know that this type of video works great. If it's just your voice over a screen flow or, what do you call it, a PowerPoint presentation, that's totally fine. As a matter of fact, it has been tested live, on-camera, highly produced video versus little videos with slides and a voice over, and, believe it or not, little videos like those actually got completed more than the fancy kind, which is good news for us because it might mean that you don't have to spend a lot of time and money trying to make the video look fancy.


Once you've created the video, covering the same messaging that you did in your article, what you do is you take that video and you post it to your YouTube channel. You're going to need a YouTube channel. Another good thing about YouTube channels is they're free, so that's pretty sweet. You post the video to your YouTube channel. The next step there is you post that YouTube video on Facebook. Now you're driving traffic to the YouTube video as well. They're seeing the video on Facebook. They can go to your YouTube channel there. Finally, you extract the audio from your video and you use that audio as a podcast.


Look at all these steps here. We're talking about articles, videos, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, podcasts. Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? Here's the deal. It's actually not. If you think about it, what you're really doing is you're writing one blog post. Then you're just taking the same content of the blog post and you're recording a video out of it. If you wanted to, you could just put main slides to cover exactly what you said in the blog and then just make a video of those slides, just like I'm doing right now. Then you're posting stuff. Your real work is actually writing one blog post and then making a video saying the same thing that you said in the blog post. Then you're just making Facebook posts and stuff. That's not hard.


Why are we doing all this? The mission here is basically to draw people to you. We're really accomplishing several things. First, we're seeding the ground for something called low-hanging fruit. Low-hanging fruit are people who know you, who like you and trust you and want your stuff to begin with. These are your easy sales. People say, "Man, Victor, you've been really, really good at all of this kind of stuff. You have an unfair advantage because everybody knows you." That's true, and the reason they do is because I do stuff like this a lot. If you want to have that, where people know you and they like you and trust you and you don't really have to sell that hard, that's what this is for. We're seeding the ground with low-hanging fruit.


The second thing we're doing is we're building a situation where your ideal prospects will start seeing you everywhere. Here's the thing, actually the third thing I want to tell you, or fourth thing, is we're providing attractive bait for them. Here's the deal. Today, when people start getting in the buying mood, for something expensive especially, it's pretty rare that they see something and they immediately buy. It just doesn't really happen that way. Think about your own behavior. When you're selling something like advice, like consulting or coaching or professional services like that, and people get the bug about your stuff, what they're typically going to do is they're going to consume everything they can by you, not because they're investigating you or checking you out, but because they like it. The more of that you have out there, the more likely you are to accelerate the process between someone finding out about you and someone pulling the trigger and contacting you about becoming a customer or a client.


I know this from my own personal experience. You've probably had it happen in your life as a customer. First time it ever happened to me, I read about a guy named Frank Kern. I can't even remember how I heard about him, but I started looking for him on YouTube. I listened to everything by him that I could, watched everything by him that I could on YouTube, listened to every interview I could by him, every podcast I could by him. Finally wrote to his office and said, "Please, take my money." There was no marketing to me at all. Why? Because I was low-hanging fruit as a result of all of this cool stuff he had posted.


I should say that from the time I heard about Frank Kern until the time that I gave money was very short, it was maybe a few weeks, because there was so much stuff. I was able to consume it all. I was really getting into it and I was like, "Man, this guy's great. Go ahead and take my money." They never actually even had to send me a sales letter, which is perfect. Is that going to happen every time? No, but we want to facilitate it happening, because if you have enough going on, you'll start having a little bit of a system. You'll build a pipeline. What we're ultimately doing with all of this material is we're driving your ideal prospects to a campaign. That's how all of this stuff works.


Let me give you a visual process just to make it simple, because I know it might seem overwhelming. Here's the deal. We've got really four things. You put an article on a blog. That's  WordPress. If you're not techy, that's totally fine. WordPress is free. It comes with every internet hosting account in the world. You can set it up literally pressing a button. The blogs are really, really easy to use. That's wonderful. We just write a blog post. Then we go to Facebook and we say, "Hey, I just wrote this new blog post about xyz, and you can check it out here." I know you might be wondering, "What are we going to write the blog post about?" Don't worry about that. This is just an overview.


Our hardest work so far has been writing a blog post. Not too hard. We went to Facebook, said, "Go check out my blog post." You probably make Facebook posts every day, so that's not going to be too hard. What's going to happen is now people are going to start going to the blog and they're going to start liking your Facebook page. They're going to start getting value from you. We go and we take the very same thing that we wrote on the blog and we just make a video of it. If you're good on camera, get on camera. If you're not good on camera, you don't have good lights, don't have good audio, then don't worry about it. Make a ScreenCam video. People like those. You just want to record that video, upload it to YouTube, and then you just want to strip the audio out of that video and turn it into a podcast.


We've taken that one blog post and we now created three assets from it. We have the blog post itself, we have a video, and we have the podcast. Your market is going to want to get help from you in multiple ways. This is why we're doing it. We're using Facebook as a means to start distributing that content. Ultimately, all of this stuff is going to drive people to some sort of a lead capture page, an opt-in page where they can either opt in for a free report about the stuff you're talking about or they can request to talk to you or something. We'll talk about that a little later. Here's the overview.


It all sounds and it is very simple to do. It's not that hard to write a blog post, and it's not that hard to make a simple ScreenCam video. Here's the facts. I don't want to oversimplify it. Number one, if you have absolutely no market presence, meaning no one has ever heard of you ever, then using this method is going to take a little bit of time. That's totally cool. That's fine. If no one knows you, you don't have any Facebook following and you don't have a list, then it's going to take a little bit of time to build momentum here.


The second thing I want you to understand is this is not a substitute for actual advertising, but it does make your advertising more effective. I'll show you how to tie this in with advertising here later in our work together. This doesn't mean that, hey, you just go out and make Facebook posts all day and you'll get rich. That's not what I'm telling you. But this does help your advertising.


Also, this isn't an overnight mission. It's not like you're going to write one blog post and then the world is going to start coming to you saying, "Please take my money." You need to be doing one piece of content per week. If you think about it, if it takes you like four hours to do this every week or something — that's kind of a lot, really — then it's worth it, because by the end of a year you've got 52 different pieces of content. Actually, you've got 52 times 3. You've got 52 blog posts, you've got 52 videos, and you have 52 episodes of a podcast. You're everywhere. You're the real deal. You're legit. Hey, if you do two a week, you're crushing it. You're really, really rocking out.


That's the overview of this thing. I'm going to get into now a little bit more gradually in the rest of this little part here. In our next blog I'm going to tell you how to start finding out what your magnetic messaging should be, because you don't want to make a blog post or a video about just random stuff. In fact, there's really just going to be a very narrow window of stuff that you talk about.


I hope you enjoyed this overview. It's really simple to do. No problem. You got this. I'll walk you through it. But we've got to start with: What do you say? Now that you know the overview, we'll start figuring out what you're going to say. I'll see you in the next blog.