Work harder on yourself than you do on your business, and your business will be great!
– Jim Rohn
My coaching clients often tell me that I am 50% business coach, and 50% life coach – this is a compliment that I deeply cherish. Sadly, many good people hire a coach, because they want “things” to change, but are either unwilling to address the defects of character that cause them to struggle, and/or they are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
What we need to understand is that unless we are willing to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves, a coach is not going to have any positive impact in our lives. We want it NOW; we assign our problems to other people and other things; we blame market conditions; we are unwilling to make a steadfast commitment to the goals that we set; the list of excuses for failing to look into the mirror is inexhaustible! Our environment, our businesses, our relationships, and literally everything in one’s personal universe is a merciless reflection of who he/she has become. And if we want the outer picture to change, we must begin by dealing with our internal head trash, which is actually the core issue.
I heard a speaker a few weeks ago (at a marriage conference that Karyn and I attended) say that we typically “rationalize” our unwillingness to change; he went on to say that what we are really doing is telling ourselves “rational lies!” And just this morning, someone told me that the reason he was flirting with losing his driving license for having earned multiple speeding tickets was because he had a “heavy foot!” I inquired as to whether anyone else in his family tree also suffered from this same genetic defect!
If we want “things” to change, we must ask ourselves some very tough questions. And the most important question of all is – how am I contributing to the unhappiness and frustration that I have chosen to create, by refusing to work harder on myself, than on anything else? If we want the outer picture to change, we must begin with the inner portrait that we have painted.
If I want things to change, I must begin by subjecting myself to a brutally honest self-examination!
© John G. 2021
