Hello and welcome back to another episode of chasing excellence.
I am patrick.
I'm here, as always, with ben.
How you doing, buddy?
Doing great thanks, patrick.
Today we've got another one of our i don't know what to call them the, the mini episodes.
We're going to answer a chase club members question.
We've been doing this once or twice a month.
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Here is the question.
We've got today, it's from David.
Thank you, David, for sending this in.
He says, or he asks, do you guys have coaches and mentors, both in fitness or in life in general?
We often hear you recommending books or authors, but do you get input from mentors?
Do you believe it's essential?
I always hear that coaches need coaches.
Do you agree?
What say you?
What say you?
Okay, so maybe to answer the question very poignantly, are they essential?
They're not essential.
Essential means that without them, you can't do it.
So they are not essential, but do I think that they are incredibly beneficial?
The answer is yes.
Are they a shortcut?
Yes.
Do they get you places you couldn't go otherwise?
Yes. on your own faster.
Yes.
And that's the job of a leader.
That's the job of a coach is to get someone to get to places that they couldn't go on their own.
So love it.
The strange thing is like this is the profession I've chosen to do, which is to be a coach and be a mentor.
What's strange about that is I don't have anyone that I – this is different than mentors.
It's more like models.
But I never had a good coach growing up.
Maybe it's because I was never good enough on a sports team that I never got it.
Maybe it's because I traveled around a little bit too much.
As a kid, I lived in three different countries.
So maybe it was that I didn't have enough time and you weren't placed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or maybe it was that I was too like fixed mindset and I just didn't gravitate towards coaching well enough.
So they didn't invest back into me or maybe I was just lazy.
So the shortage of that is yeah, I don't have that like thing that I model from a, from that type of mentorship.
That is now like grooming me as I've grown up from the early days, though.
And he said in the question, and I know that, Patrick, you do the same.
We're in a little bit different environment, where we have so much information available to us in so many different formats that you can essentially be mentored.
Maybe mentor is not the right word because you don't get the –
You can be coached as a one-to-many by basically about anybody that you choose.
And I've definitely done that through reading mostly.
But I definitely have actual mentors in business.
I do not have that in terms of fitness.
In the early days, Glassman was that for me.
And all of the level one seminar and everything that was coming out through CrossFit.
I just devoured and tried to imagine them in the room with me all the time.
But it was not a true participant coach athlete relationship like a true mentor would be.
But I would say that that was the first one that I had in terms of coach.
I've also worked with a professional coach when I was doing triathlons.
So I got coached in that aspect.
But in terms of Business, very much so.
I've talked about that.
We've worked with professional coaching through the, originally through the EOS model.
We worked with a implementer that came and ran our quarterly meetings.
And I recently went back and did it again for a couple sessions just to see what that was like and what we were missing out on.
I've also weekly spent time with people.
Marcus has been on the show, and there was a period of time for about half a year maybe that I met with him every week for a long time, for three hours.
Was that structured like we have a plan or was it just like we're going to spend time together?
Because this is one of the things I want to talk to or ask you about.
Like what?
Yeah.
Like talk to me a little bit about how you did that, because I think there's an interesting blend there that maybe is worth looking at, which is like mentor coach slash, friend.
And like, how do you navigate balance those things so that it.
Yeah.
Continues to be a friendship, doesn't transcend into just a mentor mentee kind of relationship.
Like, how do you how did you guys or how do you make that work?
Yeah, we would.
It was a blend of both.
Right.
So we enjoyed spending time with each other.
That's how it started was just let's we both felt the benefit of being each other's company.
I think it's one of the best things that we can do, particularly as middle aged men, is seek out people that you enjoy and find value and people that lift you up.
So we realized that in each other.
So we sought each other out.
And that's how it started, as a friendship which started off as let's get together and work out and then hang out.
That's what it started as.
That started as more of like a quarterly thing and that became a type of thing where we did it weekly, because we found just that much more value in it.
We blocked off – I blocked off from 730 until 11 o'clock every Wednesday and we would take the 730 class together.
And then from there, it was usually the first –
And this was not structured, but this is how it just kind of morphed the first.
45 minutes.
Ish was just like personal catch up, like what's going on in your life, what's going on in mine?
We got to know each other very well because we did this every week.
And then it would bleed into.
Then it would kind of morph into talking about where I was in the comp train business.
And it was a true mentor-mentee role at that point because he was also trying to create a system, a structure.
So he was getting benefit because he wanted to use me as the beta for what he could then bring to other people.
Interesting.
Got it.
He basically calls it like tens to hundreds to thousands to millions.
Like how do you actually scale?
And this is business focused?
Business focused.
Think about that when you talk about it.
Yep.
Got it.
So we would talk a lot about the comp train and what comp train was and what we should be focusing on.
As somebody that's trying to go from the thousands up,
So how do we actually do that?
And he's done it at such a bigger scale that I have and he's so much –
As a reminder for folks, he's the co-founder of Noble, who we're talking about.
Yeah, that's right.
And co-founder of Noble, but also has had a – his success with Noble was not a mistake.
Yeah, correct.
He didn't stumble his way into that.
Yeah, worked at MIT, you know, in the entrepreneurship.
He worked as a – sort of a venture type based company where they would invest in other ones.
He also spent years during Reebok's kind of rise when they did a phenomenal job.
He was essentially kind of global marketing for Reebok.
So he has the, he knows what he's doing.
Which I do not, you know, in terms of like I'm trying to.
We all are trying to figure out as we go, but some people have figured out more.
So that's certainly one that I've leaned into a lot.
So grateful for that.
The business actual, literally structured coaching which we've done, which also can coincides with like you can reach out and calls in between um.
So I had that as a mentor.
And then I would call my relationship with one of my best friends Derek, as sort of both a business, but also as a life.
We share a lot of what we call sort of this, we just call it tracking.
And we just talked about it here.
But it's basically we share each other's – what we're trying to do in terms of vision mission, purpose of our lives.
And what are we trying to accomplish in our one-year, three-year goals?
And then what are we focused on this quarter and what are we tracking?
And so we get to tracking along the way.
And we.
It's the same type of thing where we usually get together and we try.
This doesn't actually work out as well, but monthly we get together for a few hours to kind of catch up on this stuff.
And then we try to once a quarter actually ends up being probably more like every other quarter get together for a full day.
In that sense, what we'll do is we'll do like a three-hour hike.
We'll go into the mountains and we'll climb a mountain.
And then afterwards we get together and talk about this stuff together in depth, so that becomes a full out.
You know, half a day of hiking, half a day of so yeah, so a couple days, a couple times a year you, you kind of do a couple times a year, we do that yeah yeah yeah, really cool.
So that that's kind of what I thought we might get into, which is a little bit of this like blending between coaches and friends and Like how you make that work, because I'm similar to you, I guess, in some degrees, in terms of like not having formal coaches.
And it is something that I've thought about personally.
And I and I struggle with it being on the receiving end of that sort of relationship.
I'm really good like you.
Like there's a reason the show is what it is like when.
In most of my relationships in my life, I tend to be the one listening and asking questions and, where I can, giving advice, whether that's health business life, whatever.
And I'm really comfortable in that role almost.
And thinking about this question and thinking about David's question I started thinking about well, I wonder if I'm partly good at and comfortable in that role, because I'm not good at and not comfortable in the, in the inverse, in the, in the person who's asking for help and the person who's saying you know, I can't, I haven't figured this out yet or I'm struggling with this.
And I do think that that is probably true for me.
And so I guess a question which is like how do you, How do you think about your role in asking for help, as well as providing help when people ask for it?
How do you balance those things?
Because I don't feel like I balance them well.
I default to the part, the role that i'm comfortable with and, i think, to my own detriment.
So i'm curious, you know, maybe i'm just asking for advice like how do you switch that around and turn that part of your brain off and turn the other part of your brain on to be receptive instead of?
You know, giving there's any relationship has to be reciprocal, right?
So if you're going to get value, you have to give value.
And I I find this.
There's been plenty of times where people have reached out to me and said will you mentor me?
Yeah.
And the answer is no.
I don't have the time to just kind of give in that sense.
I choose to do it in other ways, which I do mentor select people.
And we've talked about this before, but I just got back last week from being out and visiting the prisoners that I mentor.
I was actually lucky enough to present to 800 of them.
I have a tight group of people that I work with across about four different prisons but was able to present as part of a leadership summit to a whole bunch of them.
So I do mentor them with... But I get something in return for that.
It is so fulfilling for me to see these people changing and what these people are doing.
And I...
I get as much out of that.
And this is, but in the other sense.
So the let's talk about the, the three relationships that I just discussed, which was business coach Marcus and Derek.
The reciprocal I do with the business coach is I pay them money.
It is.
It's a very professional thing.
And that's the exchange of values.
You're going to give me this advice and I'm going to give you money.
Very straightforward, very transactional.
In terms of Derek and Marcus.
In the Marcus sense.
Marcus leans on me as he's so curious and so interested in two things.
One, in health and fitness.
Yep.
So I am his health and fitness mentor.
So it becomes reciprocal.
He asked me questions about health and fitness.
I asked him questions about business.
Then we work as a equal thought partner in how to live better, more meaningful lives, how to get closer to the essence of our soul.
So that works really, really well because there is this trade of value back and forth.
We are essentially equals, just experts in different domains.
That's the same relationship I essentially have with Derek, but Derek's a little bit different, where he has more you call it like potentially professional success.
Like he's run a bigger business than I have.
So I kind of leaned into him in some of those categories.
But I think that I've cultivated a little bit more of a culture and a stronger team environment.
So there's that reciprocal.
It's like I'm the culture guy when it comes to business.
He's the operational excellence side of things.
So we pass him forth and we have very, very similar business models.
He's a wealth management and I run a gym.
Essentially, it's the same type of business in terms of the way that you work with clients.
Oddly enough, but it really is.
And then we are again thought partners back and forth in terms of the – so kind of equal peers in terms of how to live a life in alignment with our true values.
So it really comes down to – to get back to the essence of the question.
The way you get there is you feel like both parties are contributing.
So if you have the, it's kind of like therapy, right?
In therapy.
You go to therapy where you pay the therapist.
The therapist isn't getting anything out of that.
So there's lots of value for you and there's lots of value for them.
Therapy works great in that sense.
If there's not going to be exchange of value for true mentorship, there has to be something else.
And this is where you know I didn't get this.
But like, if you're asking for mentorship from you know this uh, Warren Buffett.
Before he was, Warren Buffett reached out to Benjamin Graham, who was one of the lead investors at the time, and asked him to mentor him.
And he said, in exchange, I will work for you for free.
And Benjamin Graham's response was, you're overpriced.
Because he knew that like there's so much that you have to do to pour into a mentee.
The mentor has to do a lot of work.
So even for somebody that said I will come and work for you for full time and do anything and everything that you wanted me to do, that's still not enough value.
And that's, I think, what most people miss when they go and they ask someone to mentor them.
There's been plenty of times people have reached out to me and be like, hey, will you mentor me?
And there's not an exchange of value.
And the answer is going to be no.
Like I'd have to give up. we all realize that we have finite resources.
And the biggest one is my attention to my time.
So that means I'm going to be taking something away where I'm already trying to optimize every moment that I have of my life to invest into said stranger Or not.
Or like somebody that, like was a former intern that now is leaving, is like hey, now will you mentor me as I go through my career path.
And we have to go with equal exchanges of value.
So what if we're going to reach out to a mentor?
What are we going to give them in return?
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I think maybe the last thing worth talking about here we're just thinking about coaches and mentors is the value of getting out of your own head to see what you don't see, to gain experience that you can't or you haven't yet had yourself.
So I'm curious, like when you think about whether it's Marcus or Derek or the business coach or any other number of you know experiences like how, what is the value to you of trying to see what you're in the middle of by kind of zooming all the way out of it, right?
Because I think, whether it's business or health or personal whatever, it's nearly impossible to actually see 360 degrees.
It's nearly impossible to see everything because you're so inside of it.
You're so stuck in the way you see things, your perspective, your history, your experience, etc.
So I'm just curious, like how do you try to get out of your own way in these relationships, in these contexts, so that you can get what all coaching, what all mentorship is meant to do, which is get you from point A to point B, to point C, like?
How do you not resist it?
How do you get into it in a way that is useful?
How do you, what advice might you have to others, especially maybe others who have a sort of relationship in the same way that maybe you and Marcus do or you and Derek do, where it's a friendship, but it's a friendship that has some?
Structure might not be the right word to it, but it's got something more than just like hey, you want to go hang out?
How do you make it useful in the way that we've been talking about?
I think this comes down to a question that was asked recently, which is like, how do it was asked?
I think I answered on a solo episode, but it was asked about the two of us, which is, it seems like you guys have the ability to retain a lot of information.
Yep.
How do you guys. learn?
And I kind of answered that very mechanically in terms of the way that I like read.
But I think the biggest aspect of it is one thing is I said in that which was I don't read to be entertained.
I read to see if there's a thing that I can do to improve something.
So as we're, as I'm going through, I'm recently on a major Hermosi kick.
I bought all of his books and it's like – as I'm going through those, I'm also co-reading it with other people that I know and I can just tell they're not doing the same practice that I am, which is I'm seeing this as –
He is telling me, Hermosi is telling me as if I'm in a college course and I have to do these things.
Not like, well, here's the reasons that this won't work in my business.
Or just reading it just to kind of like, oh, this is a really cool thing.
Oh, this is cool.
And then reading it, to be entertained, to get to the end of the book and have the dopamine response of like I finish things, I do things and all that.
It truly is This section, what would it look like if we were to do this in our business?
What would need to change?
Who do I need to talk to?
What is the messaging that we need to go out?
How is this going to be responded to by the membership?
What does this do to change the financials? what does this do to change the operating system?
What does this do to change the roles and responsibilities of our coaches?
Does this require a new hire?
Who might that be?
Where will we get that person?
Like I'm trying to like literally like not just kind of like walk through it.
Like, Like detail mind map each point he brings up.
So I'm literally like exploring it.
Not literally.
I am exploring it as much as I possibly can mentally and rehearsing it and trying to bring it to life as much as possible.
And I think this is the benefit I've had of like when I'm interested in things, when I'm interested in things, this is the way my brain works.
So when I read something about, you know, I read Outlive and the stats that come up through the.
The studies that are referenced are so meaningful and interesting to me that I try to figure out like how might that change our programming and how might I present this to my class, and what maybe social media posts can we do about this, and how might this change the way that I actually navigate my own health, fitness and trajectory?
So it's this really big internalization, massive curiosity and exploration about how can each of these things And that's the approach that I would bring to every conversation I have with any one of these mentors
I am the mentee and everything that you say to me.
The reason I'm in this relationship is because I know you've fought more of these battles than I have.
Like I have yet – imagine like a soldier that has yet to go into battle, talking to somebody that has been through dozens and dozens and dozens of battles.
Like dude, just tell me.
And this is what's so beneficial for particularly like the business coach.
He has run literally this is no exaggeration, but like literally thousands and thousands and thousands of quarterly meetings.
So he just sees he has more connective tissue than I do.
Where he can just see this is going to lead to this and the shortcut to get there is this, where it takes me a lot longer to do that.
So when he presents something, it's like, I'm just so open and receptive.
Now there's times where he pushes on actual business model or actual customer things or actual product stuff.
That's where we can push back.
But in terms of the way to structure OKRs this quarter versus last quarter, the way to navigate a tough conversation, the way to make decisions like oh my gosh, this guy's a stud.
It's amazing.
It's incredible to be in that environment.
So it's very It's very easy to allow myself to be the student in those environments, because I know that they have way more understanding and can see things that I can't see.
I think it's less about like zooming out with each other.
That's more of like a thought experiment that you and I would do, like challenge each other.
Like, well, what if we thought of this?
And what if we thought of that?
Have we thought of it from this perspective?
They don't even need to do the zooming out things because they've been doing through it so much.
That just built in.
Yeah.
It's kind of like you know, the best coaches in a game can't tell you why they're, or athletes can't tell you why they're making decisions.
Mm hmm.
They just intuitively like this is what Gretzky was the best at.
Gretzky would go to where the puck was going to be.
He wasn't the fastest.
He wasn't the best stick handler, but he would be where the puck is going to go.
That was his innate ability.
And that's what these great mentors have is an innate ability because of the hours and hours and hours that they've done.
They can't even probably explain it.
It's like me in a coaching environment down in the gym.
Like I can sense things because I've done it for 10,000 hours.
I can sense things that a new coach can't sense.
I can't tell you why.
I don't have an ability to say that because of this, this, and this, but you just can feel it.
When you're in the presence of that, it's awesome because it truly you know.
The saying is like smart people learn from other people's mistakes or learn from their mistakes.
Smart people learn from their mistakes.
Like the really, really smart people learn from other people's mistakes.
So they've made so many more good and bad decisions that it's so.
The actual what happens is the trust level goes up.
Right.
So. you and I don't have that same level.
If we were trying to navigate what's the right way to run a business, we wouldn't have that huge, massive trust in each other because we've had, we don't have the scars to prove it.
Yep.
So we just have to keep on asking ourselves questions and zooming out where they go?
Hey, I understand what you're saying, but I'm going to really strongly suggest we go in this direction.
You're like, yeah, got it.
I think the last thing, and I think it harkens back to what you were talking about with the reading and the learning and the mind mapping
I think the one thing that again just going back to David's question is the value of coaches or mentors, whether it's through a book, whether it's through a friend, whether it's through somebody you pay.
I think my big takeaway from everything you just laid out was also not only the value of those relationships, but also the patience with exploring whatever you're getting back from that individual again, whether it's a chapter of a book or whether it's a proper coaching session but just the patience of connecting the dots with okay.
If I do that, then this might have to happen.
And does that make sense?
Or does that cause, you know, does that break something else over here if I change that?
And if so, who do I need to talk to?
All you know, connecting all that instead of what I think is really common and easy to do, which is, please give me the answer.
I'm going to go do that answer and hope it works, right?
Or please give me the answer so that I can stop struggling with this thing versus Let me see what I do not see yet.
Give me perspective.
Give me your perspective, either through a good question or through your own experience.
Let me see what I do not see yet, because ultimately that's, I think, what we're really aiming at, which is to see things more clearly than we would if we never say hey, I need some help.
If we never say, what do you think about this?
If we never say, man, I'm really struggling with this thing.
It's not only the vulnerability to recognize that and to seek out answers and guidance, but then it's the patience of sitting with whatever we get back and actually seeing well, what can we do with this?
Does it make sense?
What questions do I still have?
What does that open up for me in terms of options, in terms of perspective?
I think that's really...
That's what we're aiming for.
So however, we get that again.
Whether it's somebody like you Ben, who's got really smart friends who you know, you guys can sit down and hang out.
Whether it's a coach you pay for, it's your coach at the gym, whatever it might be.
I think those are all the – that's what we're looking for.
So whether it's formal, whether it's informal, I think that that's the –
That's what I think David is getting at.
And I think what you're putting on the table, I think, is the material of what ultimately gets us to where a good coach or a good mentor, a good book, whatever might get us.
Yeah, I think you're right.
The patience aspect is important.
It's patience, but you also said another word there, which is the vulnerability.
I think that that is probably, and I'll put like a third kind of like overlapping circle on that, which is the curiosity.
Right.
If you're not in curiosity, you could you could kind of dovetail and just like growth mindset.
Like I want to be coach.
I want the reason I'm here is because I want to improve.
So the way to improve is to be really vulnerable.
Like think about the therapy session again.
Like if you're putting on your armor, you're not going to get anywhere.
The best thing to do is just be like and here's the things I'm struggling with and here's the things that I don't know what I'm doing.
And the more vulnerable you are.
And so I think it kind of goes in those three things.
It's like, you got to come in with a growth mindset.
Like you're not here to prove how smart you are.
That's the opposite of what this thing is about.
Then be incredibly vulnerable.
Here's what I'm struggling with.
I think that that's probably the thing I've learned the most about any of these relationships is the vulnerability aspect.
It has to be there.
Otherwise, you're just going to stay on the surface.
You're not going to get anywhere.
And then the next one is, and you're bringing us, is patience.
It might take them a little while to figure this out.
And they might not give you, as you said, like here to here.
All right, they might give you here and it might be off a little bit, but directionally right.
And that's what ends up happening.
Is it's only after you exploring it for a period of time, after that that actually you get to move in the right direction?
So I think those three things, if we were to bring that to, what are the prerequisites as the mentee that we should bring, it would be that curiosity, vulnerability and patience.
I love it.
Cool.
That's a good spot to wrap it up.
David, thank you for the question.
Again, if you want to get a question like this into an episode, join us in the Chase Club chasingexcellenceemail.
The link will be in the show notes and Ben and I will be back soon.
Thank you so much for being here.
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Five big ideas, three reflection questions, and one key takeaway.
Check it out at the link in in the show notes.
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