We’re All Looking at the Same Moon: AI, Humanity, and the Heart That Connects Us

Welcome to the show. Tired of the hype about living a dream? It's time for truth.This is the place for tools, power and real talk so you can create the life you dream and deserve your ultimate life. Subscribe, share, create. You have infinite power. Hello and welcome to this episode of your ultimate life.I've been doing a lot of episodes about coaching and to me, achieving a life of purpose, prosperity and joy has a lot to do with the practice of coaching. Not because I'm a coach, but because I've discovered in my own life that it's a big deal. Like I could not get to where I am without help.And I use the word coaching as a catch all. But for me, in the journey that I've had since 2007, which is when some dramatic things happened in my life to change everything.I've used counselors, I've used rehab centers, I've used more counselors and a lot of coaching from, from different kinds of coaches. And I still have coaches today.And it isn't just because I'm a coach, because I think, you know, I think a person who's trying to make a living or trying to make a difference in the world as a coach, you know, being in the people encouragement business or the people loving or uplifting or showing a new vista business, you know, that kind of thing, I think people like that, that don't have a coach or, you know, sometimes they say they're a fraud and I don't mean that they're insincere.I mean they're not taking their position or their opportunity seriously because I play the piano and I have since I was young, maybe five or so, and my first lessons were from my mom and those were all the way through high school. Eventually I had later in my adult years some lessons from a professional pianist.But my point is, if I want to get better slow, then I can learn how to practice and I can get a little bit better on my own. And I did that for many years.Now, in hindsight, I realized that not hiring, not going to a high end piano teacher straight up limited my piano growth. I play, I play well.I play classical and jazz, improv and stuff, but I don't play like I could if I had spent the effort and energy intentionally hiring a fabulous piano teacher or a series of them and then spent more time. Now there was a period of time where I spent, you know, the traditional four hours a day on the bench, not six, but four hours a day.And during that time I got better, but I didn't know what I didn't know.And so even though I looked stuff up and I was doing exercises and, you know, Hennon and all the kinds of things that, you know, everybody knows who plays the piano, you know, Chopin etudes and so forth, I didn't make the kind of progress I could. So I don't feel sad about that. I did lots of things in my life that's fine. And I play really well now. Okay. But I notice the difference.So here's a question for you. Is life really like you want it?If it is, you're done, you're happy, move forward exactly like you're doing, and add good to the world in every way you can.What I noticed about my life and about lots of folks that I talk to is there's this underlying yearning, a yearning to do good, a yearning to do more, a yearning to make a meaningful contribution. We can say that lots of different ways. I want to make a difference, I want to help people. I want to add good to the world, right?And when I question them further or ask a little more, it's like, you know, they want to do it a certain way. I want to get rid of hunger or literacy or help people in a relationship situations or with divorce or whatever. I hear that all the time.And there's 2100, not 2100 different ways to describe that. Two things are true.One is almost always 99.9% of the time, the choice that they have about what they want to do to help comes from their own life experience. In other words, they went through a difficult thing. Financial bankruptcies or difficult stuff.I just interviewed a lady for my podcast whose episode will be coming out not too many days after or before this one right here. And that's with her description. Her and her husband got smashed in the dot com bust of 2001. I know it's 25 and that's a long time ago. And they got.Then they picked themselves up and figured out more financial strategies and they chose real estate.And of course, when 2008 came around, they got smashed again because they didn't know what they didn't know, even though they had followed, you know, some people, they weren't prepared. And they stayed struggling for some time. And now they've discovered a new and get. The operative word is they discovered.And the reason they discovered it is they went places, went to seminars, read books, guess what, bought programs, got coaching so that they could not only recover from the disaster, but thrive. And now, always 100 of the time, I want to help others, man. I want to help people.And I don't know exactly the system that they have, but point of the podcast wasn't marketing for them in terms of that system. There's websites that I gave or that they she gave or you can look it up if that matters to you. But universally struggle recovery service.So I'm asking you right now, what is your struggle recovery service.Now that's everybody feels that who's gone through some kind of struggle, who's who's made a recovery and then they feel like, wow, I'm doing okay now. I want to help, I want to give back, add good to the world.There's a special group of people and those are who those who say I want to be in the it's calling it coaching business. Sometimes I call it the people encouragement business. Although it's more than that.It is making a choice to be available in a powerful, loving, service oriented way that most people don't do. Now, I'm not saying most people don't help others, they do.But in coaching, my discovery is for me, it's a choice to be on the beam of service all the time, be on the beam of love, hold no grudges, forgive everyone everything.And I know that sounds difficult or crazy, and it was to start with, but I find that when I don't live that way, I don't have real power to coach people powerfully. I have power to coach them half baked. And I see that as universally true.When I talk to different coaches and I talk to a lot, you know, I'm doing these podcasts on Thursday. The Thursday episode, starting September 25th, is about coaching and the rise of AI, which is a book that's coming out on the 23rd of October.And if you see this after that, it's already out. And it's about the gigantic disruption that's going to happen in the coaching industry.That disruption is giving rise to a series of five episodes, actually 10, that I'm going to do over the next several weeks because they're not going to be all in a row. I have guests in between. And then I have the special episodes on Thursday where I'm interviewing coaches specifically about AI.But here's the arc of the first five of those episodes. I want to talk about what real coaching is and what they all have in common. And to me, that's more important now than ever. And I'll tell you why.Because coaching is radically changing. The act of being a coach.Up to now, people identified as a coach, action coach, Or John Maxwell coach or three principles coach or NLP coach or a landmark, you know, coach. And they would list a system, somatic coach.And they would list a system that they had learned and maybe more than one, along with one or two or three modalities, you know, meditation or stuff in the body, focusing on trauma healing and stuff like that. And they would rely on those systems as their tool belt. Okay.And maybe they're trained in two or three different modalities and so they come with a more robust tool belt. And for many years that was, that was kind of okay. And I say kind of because the coaching industry has been in trouble for a long time.It's been limping along. Right. My right today forgetting AI pre AI, 55% of coaches couldn't make 50k US a year. Well, that's, you know, not really enough to get by in life.Right. And so you either have to have a second job or be in a two income household. And on top of that, most coaches income goes up and down.You know, oh, I got some clients. Oh they're, I got clients ending, I got to go out and prospect. And they, you know, hate the prospecting part.That feeling may be true if you do other things where you got to go find clients, financial services, insurance salesmen, car salesmen, mortgage brokers. I mean there's all kinds of professions where you got to go find clients and coaching is just one of them.But coaching I find is particularly difficult. And here's the reason. People who've gone through struggles want to help people and then decide they could make a difference.Not just a little, but a lot. And they want to become coaches. Struggle more than anyone I know with imposter syndrome. Not good enough.Doubt, fear, self sabotage and all that list of stuff. And then they go get some training or whatever to overcome that. But they don't really do a very good job of actually overcoming it internally.They, they sit at a place of struggle. And if they have a good coach and they're engaged in a good coaching container, then they make some progress.But the problem is real good coaches are more expensive and if you're making 50k or less, it's hard to afford a really good coach. So you're sitting in this loop of I can't pay for it and I can't make fast enough progress without it. And you know that drill, right?It's like trying to build a business. The myth that I have to spend money in order to make money.And when I make some more money, then I'll have some money to spend on advertising and marketing and Google Ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, whatever, right? And it always seems like there's no way out. Well, there is. There is.And over the next five weeks, five episodes, it's going to be episode 10, 33, 36, 39, 42 and 45. Every third episode, I'm going to talk about this evolution and what's required of coaching because it's going to change.It's no longer going to be, okay, well, I'm a somatic coach. I'm an NLP coach. None of that's going to matter. And it's because AI is going to get rid of all that distinction. The LLMs, large language models.Doesn't matter which one you use most experience with ChatGPT, but they're going to get rid of that. Not that those tools aren't valuable, but they're going to be able to use them better than you do.And so then you have to ask yourself, what is left for me? What's left for me? And the first question is, I want to, I want to ask you.Is coaching schools up to now, excuse me, argue with each other about methodologies? The ICF methodology is another big one. Supposed to be, you know, completely hands off. You never give advice.The, the theory is the client always has their own wisdom. You ask directional questions to get them to, quote, discover that wisdom.And you know, that is another methodology that, like the others I named, all that kind of stuff isn't going to matter anymore. And so here's a funny question. Why do so many coaching schools fight over words when we're all looking at the same moon? There's the moon.It gives light to the earth at night in different phases. And yet we struggle. The coaching world has struggled and argued over the right words to describe that light.And that's one of the reasons there's been so much failure in the coaching profession to start with. And it's going to get a thousand times worse because AI models are getting so good. I've seen several.I have seen models built by coaches already that will blow most other this middle tier of coaches out of the water. So what's authentic, what is real? And that's what I want to talk about. What has to progress over time in order to, to stay in this game.Now, if you're a coach and you want to stay in the game, you need to pay attention. First thing you need to do. And yeah, this is a pitch, you need to go get coaching. And the rise of AI, it's on Amazon. And you need to get it.I've did a deep analysis of 11 different coaching methodologies and analyze their vulnerability, how good they are at getting people to their, you know, purported goal line and letting helping people accomplish the things they want. People don't hire a coach because they want a coach.People hire a coach because they want to fix a relationship or make more money or be happier in their own skin or quit sabotaging themselves or get over fear in public or of presentations or of stage fright or speaking or a combination of all those things. And me, I was stuck in decades of depression, self loathing. And so when I went first to therapy and then to coaching, I needed to get rid of that.I needed to get to a place where I trusted myself. I have confidence in my voice, my principles, my learnings and my knowing. And I have.And that's how come I know how powerful this is and what a gigantic difference it makes. It's made a huge difference in my life. So here's, here's the thing. Every. And this goes right in with what do coaches need to do?And this is a question I'm asking all the coaches that show up on the Thursday episodes. What do coaches need to do different to save their skins? And by extension, if you're not a coach, this episode is not.Well, I blow this off because it's for coaches. No, it's not. If you're thinking about getting the help you need to live your ultimate life.And these questions are really important for you too because it's going to be really tempting to think, well, I got all these AI coaching models. I'll just buy one for $97 a month and I'm all good, right? No, the $97 a month or 197 or 2 $97 a month, $297 a month coaching models.And they're already showing up. I've seen some, several. They're good and they're fabulous and they're, they're scary good as far as they go.And they will deal with superficial and medium level barriers, blocks and difficulties. Okay, now this is for both coaches and those who want to make great strides in personal growth. And every coach better have their hand up.And that's what I'm saying. If every coach isn't like, I need to make great strides, then you're not going to stay in business because staying afloat is not an option.Keeping going like we used to is not an option. The skill of the programmers and these LLMs to even simulate emotion and feel Authentic and powerful is off the charts.I know because I experienced some of that as I was writing the book.I was talking to one of the guys that I interviewed on the Thursday podcast, and he was telling me that he used one of those models, and it brought him to tears. He was emotional. The connection was so powerful. And so immediately he. He said to himself, wow, if this can do that, what's left?And the answer is, there's a lot left. And the answer, the thought. For you guys that are not coaches but are looking for rapid and powerful growth, you need to look for these things.It's not about the model. It's not about the words. It's not about the frameworks. There is an illusion of difference, landmark distinctions, and three principal insights.Spiritual direction. They're all different dialects of the same language. Okay. It is the ego's need to differentiate versus the spirit's hunger for resonance.Now, if you're looking to grow, okay, then go get a coach. And here's how you tell if they're good.When you're in their presence, do you feel absolutely elevated, seen powerful, like they are listening to you, like you're the only being on earth? Does your capability index, does it soar without even any words, just being in their presence? And if that's not true, go find a different one.And coaches who hear this, you're going to get pissed off because I say that.But that's the ante, you and me, and I'm including me in that we have to do the work on ourselves every day, the work of growth that we're trying to help clients do we have to do that work every day so much that we stand in power all the time, that it is the essence of our being. The guy that I mentioned earlier who moved to a different city, and he's going to.He's a coach, and he was talking about how he's creating or starting to create clients in the new place. And he is a powerful coach. And so he's just going to meet business owners. Where would they be?Chambers of commerce, entrepreneur meetups, you know, those kind of things. And getting in conversation, not saying, hey, I'm a coach. Do you need help? But being that presence of loving, listening and powerful connection.So there's two points here. One, if you're a coach, you have to develop that, and if you don't, you're dead. Two, if you're looking for the.To make the best out of your life, if you're tired of settling, if you've climbed the wall of Success. And then you way up the ladder, and you're in the C suite and you're making 1, 2, 3, 500,000, a million dollars a year, and you're not happy.Like, you're not ecstatic. Jumping up and down. You love your life. You love everything about it. Then you have to ask yourself, why not?And you have to go get the help to find out what's missing, because something is missing. You deserve to be. You can be living the ultimate life. I know that because I live that.And there are specific things that you can learn to do, to live in purpose, prosperity, and joy every day to where you feel like you're connected to a purpose. And it's interesting when I talk to people, and I talk to them a lot, who are successful entrepreneurs. And now they found a.They found a purpose, right? They found a thing they want to do.And when they describe what they're about as an entrepreneur, I know right now, coach and an entrepreneur, he's in Australia, and he's created this group of 12 people. They're each very influential. And the project they're working on is to infuse the principle of love in every vertical.Like in business, in government, in finance, like to stop treating it like this squishy craps outside. And they're going at it. And these 12 powerful people have formed a nonprofit.They're building a retreat center in the Himalayas, of course, of all places, right? And so they're about this.I know another fellow who has a successful business, and his yearning is to help young men, you know, feel better about themselves and have more options than he did. And he's well underway creating that thing.Now, those are two examples of people who have overcome their own difficulties because both their stories are amazing. They have then become successful. They have felt that yearning. I want to give back. That you might be feeling, I know you're feeling.If you're one of those people that's overcome struggle and you've created success, you are feeling the yearning to give back. And 80% of you haven't decided what that looks like yet. 80% of you are like, you know, I really want to do something that matters.I want to create a difference in the world. I don't know how to do it yet. I don't know what my mission is. What's my purpose here. That's the key. Finding that is not difficult.There is a structured process to do that. If you'd like help finding your mission, finding your divine purpose, your gifts, the thing you are born to do, reach out.There's a URL right here at the bottom. Kellenflukermedia.com and there's a contact form there. And I can help you do that.The reason I can is because I developed a process to do that first for myself and then for others. And so you, you deserve to have a good cause, a powerful motivator. And let me tell you, when you have that. Ooh. Like, you wake up excited every day.You're focused, you're stoked, you're ready to roll.So I want to go back now to what we were talking about to start with, when I said coaching, schools have, up to now, argued about semantics, about different approaches. This way is better, that way's better, and I have more power than you do.And all that argument is is going to be like people arguing whose fault it was that the dam broke when they're staring at the wall of water. Like you've all seen a tsunami disaster movie. Right when the wall of water's coming, everybody's better be just heading for high ground.Any time spent pointing fingers or arguing about how come we didn't know earlier or what caused this just assures that more people are going to get killed or hurt. That's what's going on.If we still talk about these meaningless differences in coaching, what matters is authenticity, your own development, that you're powerfully working on it all the time, every single day, and that you're willing to make the sacrifices required to stay ahead on the mountain of growth. Like, if I hire a coach, they. They need to be further than I am so they can help me up.They need to be more diligent, more focused, have more experience in the difficulties of growth. Not cooler tools. I like tools, okay? I read people's posts and I make notes, and I get to edit people's books.One of the fun things about my job, my business, is I help people write books. And in that process, I get to edit them. And every single book that I edit is a joy because I learned things.And most of the people writing books are writing them about their own journey, their own struggles they're overcoming, and how they would help people with the things they've learned. And so they present them in these books and I get to edit them. And I've learned all kinds of stuff. And there's several coming out right now.One's called the Renewable you by Kayleigh Williams. One's called Masters of Badassery by Martha Kachavska. And read I'm sorry, Wade Reed has written one.And there's some more, and I'm not remembering all their names right now, but point is, everybody who has that story of overcoming and then desire to serve, one of the ways they're doing it is writing a book and figuring out how to teach.And that's another quote, methodology, and what I've told all my authors and myself, because I'm just finishing the book to Coaching in The Rise of AI be out on October 23, which is probably in the past when you hear this, that those methodologies won't matter unless you and I as a coach are a product of the product.Now, if you're not a coach and you want to make the kind of growth that's available through coaching, and your goal is to become a product of that innate presence and power that comes to your coach when they're constantly working. And if you have somebody that doesn't inspire you like that, fire them. They're not doing anything.They're going to be washed out to sea in the tsunami of AI possibilities.All right, so the next thing that I want to talk about in this context is I was a consultant for a long time, and a consultant is supposed to know answers. You got to know the answer and give people the answers. You better be right. And you get to charge a lot because you're supposed to know stuff.Or you do the research and figure it out. Coaching is completely different. In the beginning, I didn't understand the difference between coaching and teaching. And I'll tell you what it is.Teaching is just that I'm explaining to you something you need to know to solve a situation that you're in.Coaching is getting in the trenches and being with you energetically so that you make the changes that are necessary to do that, accomplish the thing that you have learned. So you might learn, I need to write better copy, because better sales letters, conversations, better for my sales calls.You might know that and then go learn it and still be held back because you are afraid of rejection. And so you don't make the phone calls you need to or send the dms, or if you do, it's timid and small, well, how effective is that? How do you.How do you like it?Or I like it when someone approaches us that doesn't feel certain about what they've got, the features, advantages, benefits, you know why it matters. We're like, I don't have time for this. Go away.And so whether you're looking to grow yourself or you're looking to help others grow, the process is the same. It's Just that if you want to be a coach, you better be way further ahead.You better be way further ahead because you can't reach back or down and help somebody up if you're not constantly moving up the mountain. All right, remember, like I said, consulting, teaching, the same thing. It's about sharing information, knowledge.Coaching is about helping someone make the internal and external changes until they become habitual, and then they can apply that, learning that, apply that knowledge. When you look at sports, you know the great coaches that are held in high esteem. You know the name, college football coaches, basketball coaches.I'm not going to say their names because I'm going to screw it up. I know Vince Lombardi and the guy that coached the Chicago Bulls and the several college coaches.They were so good, not because of their skill at basketball, but their skill at people. And that isn't about teaching. That's about who you're being.So I invite you to consider whether, even if you're not a coach, let's say you're leading your team. This has to do with leadership.Also, if you're leading your team with love and encouragement, or you're coaching your clients with love and encouragement, that's going to be way more powerful, last way longer, and create much more progress than just teaching. Telling them what to do, telling someone what to do is going to last a short period of time.And as soon as it becomes difficult, as soon as fear is involved, as soon as the first round or two of failure or uncertainty comes, all of your work will be undone. Now, one of the things that's difficult, whether you're making growth for yourself or you're a coach trying to help clients, is ego.When ego is running the show, you're dead. Nobody responds well to ego. And it's really obvious.So an example is if I'm trying to get a client, and it doesn't matter if it's a coaching client or an insurance client, if I show up in the conversation in a way that says, oh, I need this client, please buy my stuff, what can I say to make you see how valuable this is? Please buy my stuff. You know, we want to puke and can't wait to end the conversation.If you're selling insurance and I sit with you and you ask me really good questions, and I can tell that you're listening and really concerned about what I want in a year, 2, 5, 10 for myself, for my kids, for potential death benefits, for retirement. And. And I know that you're powerfully listening by how you're showing me and listening and by how you build whatever it is that you have to offer.I'm way more likely to trust you and to dig in to the possibility of us working together. That same thing is true if you're trying to help somebody through coaching instead of life insurance. Okay.And when you have ego get in the way, Ego needs to be right. Ego needs to not make mistakes. I know. I lived there for decades. I needed to be right. I needed not to be embarrassed.It went to great lengths to do that, and that shows up in a lot of places. So I want you to think about this both from the perspective of. Of personal growth for yourself and as a coach. Okay? Now, you and I, we.We sit at an unprecedented time in history. It used to be difficult for us to get information and knowledge 100 years ago. Then libraries came along where books were put together and wow.We could go to the library. Wow. And check out books.And suddenly the knowledge of the world became available, and all I had to do was go to the library, and then I had to read the book and study a little bit. Some time went by, and then we created the Internet.And the Internet has developed and so forth, and it's full of good stuff and garbage, but the Internet now brought the library to my living room. And, you know, I. I don't know about you, but I was a kid, I used to go to the library, and I would look up a book, and my library didn't have it.Maybe somewhere else in the city had it, or maybe the city didn't even have it. And sometimes libraries borrowed and so forth, and so you had to wait and all that kind of stuff. The Internet got rid of all that.You can have every book all the time, right here, right now. I don't care what it is. You can be reading it tonight and learning. And so that shortened that learning time.Now AI has come, and it's shortened expertise, the ability to assimilate, to read all that stuff, gather it up, assimilate what makes sense, give you really good opinions, and get you somewhere into a place of knowledge way faster. Nothing showed that more powerfully than the last two years of my health experience.I've had different health challenges, and what they were doesn't matter. But Joy has been really diligent about using ChatGPT to look stuff up and integrate it with what we talk to the doctors about.And it's been spectacular because she's been able to learn so much and gather the combined expertise. Right? So that's all available at the touch of a Few buttons and, you know, moving your mouse around a little. Okay.In personal development, there's one additional barrier, and the barrier is our willingness to apply what we learn because we have been taught we're not really good enough. Maybe we've had some failures. Maybe our upbringing was such that we were, you know, dissed a lot. You'll never amount to anything.And all that kind of stuff, stuff that you hear in stories.And so in addition to the information which is now available instantly and the expertise distilling, what's the best information that's available instantly, too? What AI can do is it can make encouragement available immediately, and that's AI bots. And that's going to take out the whole middle part of coaching.What it can't do and never will is AI can't bleed. AI can't be. And I don't mean literally, although obviously code can't bleed.It's not going to be able to sit with me in the midst of my fear and worry and give me simply the space of love and encouragement that a powerful coach can do. It's not going to be able to say to me, you can do this.Yes, it can say those words and it might write them powerfully because it's really good with language. But it's not going to have the kind of connection that someone I trust has. And you know that, and you can feel what I. What I'm saying here.So this process, the next 10 episodes, I'm going to talk about this arc coaching schools. You're going to be obsolete. Your methods and things are going to be useless. And it doesn't mean that what you teach isn't valuable.It's going to be democratized and homogenized. If you're going to create powerful coaches, you're going to have to have that be the decoration.And the key to getting power is the embodiment of the truth that you teach.If you can teach me a methodology, but I can't get to where I own it and do it and bleed it, and it leaks out of my eyes and ears so that everybody who I don't even talk to but in my presence feels it, I'm. I'm going to be out of business, and so are you. So this might sound like a doom saying, and it isn't.But it is a call to action and a call to arms, because I intend to stay in the coaching business. I intend and already feel like I'm in that top echelon, but I think that the top 95 or the top 5% is all that's going to survive.And the top 5% of coaches isn't going to be the ones who know the most modalities. It's going to be the ones who who are living the truth of what they teach.Incidentally, I think that's going to be true for many other businesses and many other functions. AI robots is going to automate a lot of stuff and you and I are going to be freed up. Freed up to do what? The things that only humans can do.Love, create, think, do stuff that isn't mundane and repetitive. I think that's joyful. I think that's wonderful.I think that's going to give us more time, more effort and more focus to go forward and create your ultimate life. 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 kellenfluecigermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here YourUltimateLife CA Subscribe Share Stand with your heart in the sky and your feet are the ground.