Why Coaching Is Dying: The Truth No One Wants to Hear

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Hey there.

And welcome to this episode of your ultimate life, the podcast I created to help you realize the truth of purpose, prosperity and joy.

You can live your life that way, and it's yours to create.

Today, I have a special guest, Townsend Wardlaw, with me here on the show.

Welcome to the show, Townsend.

Nice to be back.

Yeah.

So, you know, you'd been here before and you were thinking about something out loud the other day that I had been thinking about.

In fact, it's causing me to launched something new in January that I'm not talking about yet.

But I'd been thinking about that and then I saw your post about AI and about the elevating standards, about the elimination of mundane work and anything below 50% competence in practically any field except changing your oil, maybe.

You know, those kind of things.

And it made me want to just have that conversation for people, maybe about coaching and maybe about a lot of things where it's sort of resetting what's possible and what's available.

So I want to ask you a question that I've asked before, but I want.

I don't know who's heard your other episode, but I want you to tell me.

And tell us, what are the different channels that Townsend uses to add good to the world?

Well, I'm on the.

I'm on the socials.

I've got a.

I've got a Facebook presence.

I use that to share knowledge with coaches.

I use LinkedIn to share knowledge with founders.

I have a substack, which I love doing longer form writing.

And whoever reads that, reads that.

That's fun.

That's a great place to express deeper ideas where people have more than the attention span of a gnat.

As of a couple of years ago, I launched a community and I've been really big into private digital communities, getting people off of Facebook into a private digital community.

I use Mighty Networks and there's other technologies around there, but I don't like the idea of really sharing the good stuff in a feed where people are scrolling and twitting and doing whatever they do.

So I've got a community of coaches called the Coaches operating system, where I share my gift of turning coaching into income, and sizable income at that.

It's spectacular.

And you just told me that you're busy writing a really important work, which is the Book of Townsend.

Do you have a name yet?

The working title is the how of Being.

How of Being.

Yeah.

You know what's funny?

I've been asked to speak at a conference, not this month, but next month.

And I.

The address or the subject of the talk is the how of the how.

And the reason is because, well, you know, people tell you what to do and then they say, well, how do you do that?

And then they tell you how to do it and you still don't know how to do it.

Because what they're really asking is 1, 2, 3, 4.

They're asking about that.

And so the how of the how is about not the 1, 2, 3 of or 4 of everything, but how to go about creating the 1, 2, 3, 4.

The 1, 2, 3, 4 of creating the how of the how.

Because it's.

Yeah, the process is the same, steps are different, depends on what you do.

Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, I love that.

Well, that's amazing.

And I've read your post.

In fact, that's where I saw the one and I've seen some others that, that you have shared that.

I've enjoyed that.

That made me know that this conversation was a good one to have.

So let's just start there.

Tell me what your musing was about.

AI and this is going to be the first episode where I've talked to somebody about what it's doing and what it is and what it isn't.

If you can specifically tie it into the coaching post if you want to.

Yeah, I think.

Tell me about that.

Yeah.

So little context.

I launched this community a couple years ago purely as a.

As a labor of love, a give back.

I don't do this to create my income.

I have a very successful, very specific niche coaching practice.

And what I was seeing was a gap in the world of coaching where there's a lot of coaches, a lot of entities creating new coaches, certifying coaches, teaching coaching methodology.

And the vast majority of coaches are unable to turn any knowledge of coaching into income.

Not surprisingly, coaches don't necessarily tend to be the folks who come out of hardcore sales background or love, cold calling or outreach or what have you.

So you've got this increasing influx of folks who are passionate about serving the world and ultimately they're constipated, I like to say, because they don't know how to create clients, they don't know how to sell coaching.

So the initial idea of the community was simple.

I want to be the conduit by which coaches master the Business of coaching.

We've grown.

We got to about 1600 members over the past couple years.

It's been an incredible community, very vibrant and it truly is a community in the sense that there, there, there's more than just towns in India.

There's lots of voices and thought leaders and people that are sharing their knowledge.

It's been phenomenal.

About a month ago, my wife Louisa, my amazing wife Luisa and I were having a little bit of a, not a, not a conflict, but let's just say some friction in our, in our relationship and what we were working through.

We went to bed and the next morning I woke to a very chipper, happy Louisa wandering around.

I said, how are you doing today?

She goes, wonderful.

I said, anything about last night you want to revisit?

She goes, no.

I, I talked about it with Chat GPT and I got it all sorted and I, my first thought was, that's amazing.

How, how beautiful.

Now this is the only time I had exposure to somebody using Chat GBT for, for some inner work and some help.

But this was my wife, right?

We have very deep conversations.

We both operated a very high degree of conscience.

We both have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaching.

And what got her through something was, you know, the thing that lives on her phone and, and in that instant, all this other information and little, little breadcrumbs that I've been picking up kind of alchemized or catalyzed, and I thought, oh, I'm on the wrong mission here.

Like, this isn't going to work.

Meaning coaching as we know it is done.

The profession of coaching as we know it is done and over it will never be the same.

Now, it might take some months or years for that to be fully realized, but I've been party two and had a first row seat to disruption of industries since the late 1990s.

So the telecom industry, right?

We used to sell long distance, Kellen, like people used to pay for long distance.

I remember CIOs sitting down, we would talk about call centers and customer care and they said, our customers will never send us emails.

They only want to talk to us on the phone.

Right?

I mean, you think about this stuff and I thought, it's done, it's over.

And the thought occurred to me.

The mission of the Coaches operating system, which up till now has been to assist coaches on the path to mastering the business of coaching.

Well, I might as well say the mission of my community is to assist wagon wheel builders in mastering the wagon wheel business.

No matter how much you master it, the amount of revenue that will be available for the industry is, is, is going to decrease to a very, very small number that will, will make its way to humans.

And I didn't know what was going to happen next, but I said, oh, we got to do something different.

I could, I could kind of go down that road, but I'll pause there and say it was instantaneous.

And I see AI in lots of different domains and I, and I see how it's going to affect, you know, high tech sales.

So coaching is just going to be another area.

Turns out AI is a, is a really effective coach.

And there's studies that are starting to come out that people actually prefer being coached by AI and having AI therapist.

So this fist on your table, you know, coaches will always have a place.

Yeah, you'll always have a place.

You just won't make any money.

So this isn't about evaporation of coaching.

Coaching will always be around.

It is the value that people will be able to create as you know, a professional coach.

So that's a fascinating observation.

And after we had our initial email exchange or text or whatever, I was thinking about the much broader application of that, as you mentioned, about many things and I just, as I, I think I said before we started, you know, at the 50 level of confidence at least, or competence, everything is going to disappear except mowing your lawn and you know, changing your oil and trimming your trees because AI isn't going to do that ever.

Well, till we get robots, I'd say.

Your numbers, I say your number's low.

I'd say 90 competence.

Well, you're not in the top 10% of something.

Yeah, and maybe it is, but we're not going to spend any time conversing about that.

At a minimum 50% and maybe it will be 90.

So that can be looked at as a horrifying thing or it can be looked at as a liberating thing.

What would you say to somebody who you, you tell that to and gobsmacked, their jaw hits the floor and they say, what do I do?

This is like the post 2008 crash when as the economy recovered, half the jobs that existed before went away because of the Internet and automation and other kinds of things.

So.

So now what?

Yeah, I'd say how, how fascinating and beautiful.

Right.

And this isn't new.

The phenomenon of something come along.

Some technology coming along that displaces an entire industry or profession is not new.

And something always comes after it.

There's always something else in my life.

One of the things that's been, I'd say most rewarding is putting myself out of a job before that job disintegrated.

I've gotten very comfortable with tearing down everything in my life and creating from the next.

Now the misperception people have is that, well, I'm starting from scratch.

Well, yes, you would be if you believe.

Right.

And a lot of people do that your value is in the competency and knowledge you have in something.

Well, this is where AI changed the entire paradigm because fundamentally, knowledge, information, competency, expertise, that itself is commoditized.

There is not one domain that given, I don't know, a couple days or a week or, or a little chip in my head, I can't be as competent from a knowledge standpoint as the top experts in the world.

Now what do you do with that?

That's a whole nother question.

But really to me this is an upending of where is value created?

Right.

The Internet was the first like oh, information is free.

Yeah.

Well now expertise is free.

I've already built GPTs that coach coaches better than I do.

If, if the coaches are just asking the question, I'm answering the question.

Does as good a job as I do, I, I, I, I meet every couple weeks with a group of coaches in our 100k accelerator and they ask questions and I show them.

This week I just asked it real time the question and it gave an answer because it's been trained by the hundreds of hours of me coaching.

It gives the better answer than I do.

And if you want to watch a video of me talking about it, click on the little references.

Pretty soon you'll be able to say do that in Mandarin.

Pretty soon you better say make me a video of that of towns and speaking Mandarin and it'll do it.

You know it's funny because one of the things that I.

Two examples in music in the late, in the 80s, early early 80s, there was an invention that became commercialized is gifted before that but synthesizers and when synthesizers came into being, music stores freaked out, musicians freaked out, Hollywood orchestras freaked out.

It's going to put all the musicians in the world out of business.

And in fact I had a job for a while going around to music stores teach their salesmen, had a program and sell their synthesizers because I saw them come and I said I know where this is going.

So I, I owned a recording studio and I bought a bunch of them and became the studio in Phoenix where you're at, where people came to do one man things like did lots and lots of whole albums.

And here we are decades later and nobody went out of business.

And musicians still have orchestras and, you know, the whole thing is different and synthesizers have a whole place and genre and et cetera, et cetera.

So that struck me, you know, and people have had a heart attack about the whole thing as kind of a different version of that same story.

One of the greatest books I ever read came out late 90s, I think it was called the Experience Economy.

And it was a very academic book, Harvard Business for you Press.

And it took a very academic scientific look at economies, how economies thrive.

So at one point in time, the United States of America was a raw materials economy, Right.

We produced iron ore and copper and we still produce those things.

But that was this major source of gdp.

The next evolution of that was manufacturing.

Right.

I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, which was a really big manufacturing city.

Olin Firearms, Winchester Fire, all sorts of things.

When I was growing up in the 80s, there was all this noise about, oh my God, we're becoming a services economy.

Right.

There was literally that.

Yeah.

Conversation.

Yeah.

There was upheaval that we were losing our manufacturing base because it was starting to go offshore.

Well, turns out by the time people started noticing it, less than 50% of the GDP was even manufacturing.

We'd already become a service economy.

So the book really went into depth of what comes after services and what are the gradients of services.

And what it suggested was the next phase beyond services are experiences.

And it even took different levels of experiences.

And it's all about how do you create resistance to the forces of commoditization which ultimately drives the price down to almost nothing.

Right.

McDonald's is a commodity.

It competes on price and speed.

And those things.

I remember Rainforest Cafe came out and it was this whole thing.

People would stand in line because you're going to be in a rainforest.

Well, if you look at what's happening today and just, just in the.

In the food and entertainment world, it's all about who can create the most rich and unique experiences.

Now what the book talked about and only started to touch on what was the highest level of experience that could be conveyed, that had the greatest resistance to commoditization, price, competition, et cetera, was transformation, which is where coaching comes in.

And if you think about coaching as a profession, there is a continuum from coaching, where people think it's information and transference of knowledge all the way to true transformation.

And all that's happening is we're.

We're kind of catching up, if you will, with the Reality that the only element of value that people will continue to pay another human for is real transformation.

Now we can talk about what that is or how that works, but fundamentally, people will never stop paying for transformation.

I've got some ideas of how AI can't create transformation the way a human does.

But still coming back to the profession of coaching or any profession, by that matter, for that matter, right.

If, if you're simply giving information or helping people or doing stuff or right.

If you're a.

If you're a part of the solution, part of the desired result, your.

Your value is going to be pushed down to marginal.

If you are tied to the transformation of the human with the money in their account, you'll.

You'll be fine.

So what do you think?

I.

I agree.

So I'm not even going to challenge any of those things because they're along the lines of my own thinking and it's why I'm planning my next thing for next year, because of this thing I've been thinking about for a few months and that.

So then What?

So if 90%, I don't know how many coaches there are in North America or in the country or whatever, hundreds of thousands or something, if 90% of them are going to have to find something else to do or going to struggle and have two jobs where coaching, instead of becoming a fulfillment exercise, that it satisfies their need to give back to a burden.

It's an albatross.

So you spend a lot of hours and make minimum wage.

What are they going to need to do?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Well, first thing is they're going to have to get extraordinarily good at coaching.

Right.

Which is a bit of the paradox.

A lot of people think they're a good coach.

What I would say is how much coaching have you done?

At the end of the day, you want to get extraordinary anything you do, a lot of it.

I'm an extraordinary coach.

It's not scientific or fascinating.

I coach 1200-1500 hours a year and I've been doing that for more than a decade.

Okay.

I've got some experience here.

Well, how do I do that?

Well, you have to be able to enroll.

You have to be able to create clientele at any price to get good at that.

You can't, you can't practice coaching, you know, by yourself.

You can practice coaching with chat, gbt.

I've created some things around that, but it's not the same.

So the table stakes, if you will, are going to be the degree to which you are an extraordinary coach.

That's number one.

Number two, fundamentally, the thing that I don't believe AI will ever be able to replicate are authentic human experiences.

At the end of the day, transformation is an individual's application of information into action that gets them from their current state to their desired future.

And not just like a temporary tweak or a short term change, but like a fundamental transformation.

You can get there with information, you can get there with advice, but for some leaps, and it turns out the big ones, sitting across from someone who can look you in the eye and say, yeah, I almost died, or I did die, well, that's going to be really hard to replicate authentic human experience.

And not the pretty shit either.

No, no, never.

Like 99.9 not.

And as you know, since you read the book you talked about earlier and people have seen this before, the story arc, it talks about the developmental story matrix where you look at the events in your life and that sort of thing.

And the ones that go in there are almost always the messy ones.

And we have a choice whether they ruin us or refine us.

And they might ruin us for a year or ten or a decade or two, and then they might refine us.

And that moment of choice around refinement, the moment of choice that a client might make around refinement, can't be powered by reading the words on a screen.

It has to be powered by the authenticity and support of the true exchange of power that we can't even quantify.

Yeah, you know, that's the place where this goes.

So if you say, well, all you coaches are going to have to get your crap together and figure out how to become extraordinary coaches and they look at you either somewhere between I already am or I thought I was and obviously I'm not, so I suck.

And now what?

Like, there's either going to be a mass exodus or there's going to be a need and the courage that it takes to make, like one of the clients that you might have, or I might have to make a massive shift in transformation, the courage that that takes is going to be replicated in each one of those people who have to say, I can't do that.

Really, I can pretend all I want, but I can't do it.

And they're going to have to demonstrate in the very courage that they have been imagining to evoke in people they have been trying to serve.

Yeah, yeah.

It's to me, a bit of a paradox because I don't believe that the path to be an extraordinary Coach or making the cut, where it's going to go.

I don't think it's all that complicated.

And at the same time, people have a tremendous difficulty with it.

And it involves stepping into discomfort all across the spectrum, both in terms of how you enroll and also how you serve.

The vast majority of coaches, I believe, show up to look good to people.

Please.

To be liked, to get paid, to get a renewal.

Right.

All these, you know, things that make sense.

But what takes courage is in the moment to speak something to a client that has a 50, 50 shot of fundamentally.

Fundamentally creating the motivation for them to step into transformation.

Or them telling you to go f yourself and never talking to you again, ask for their money back.

It's a 50, 50 shot.

I couldn't agree more.

You remember that clip of the movie where the guy, the coach, is talking to the kids on a high school football team and he tells the guy to carry him back and he goes the whole length of the field?

Remember that?

Like that?

Yeah.

Okay.

That's the kind of thing that people just don't have the courage to do.

Yeah.

One of the most frequent things that I coach on in the community are the questions that people ask.

Right.

Fundamentally, I think if they can ask better questions, they'll find better answers, find what they want.

And a lot of times when we're coaching on the questions, what I.

What I hone in on are the.

The degree of.

The degree to which their questions sound like this.

How do I fill my upcoming retreat with fun and ease?

And first of all, I go, well, timeout.

Do you want fun and ease?

You want to fill your retreat?

And what the hell does fun and ease have to do with it?

So we seek comfort, right?

We seek comfort, assurance that everything's going to be okay.

It's a very human desire, avoidance of pain.

And what I say to folks is, if you want to be in the business of coaching, well, the first thing you need to get clear with is where are you avoiding pain in your own life or you're not being real about where you're out of integrity?

And if you don't clear that out, you got not much to coach on.

Once you do, you got a lot to coach on.

You could see it everywhere in others, right?

I coach founders.

I was a founder.

I built a business, crashed the business, went bankrupt, killed the marriage, cheated on my wife, dated my.

The whole thing.

I got it so I can sit across from somebody.

And by the way, I've cleaned all that up.

I've gotten back in integrity with My ex wife with my kids, all sorts of things.

I could sit across from a founder and they're going, blah, blah, blah.

I say, how long have you been cheating on your wife?

I'll look him in the eye and just ask him that.

Yeah.

Because I know you do.

You do.

I'll tell you that.

It's a story.

It was a guy.

I had a guy for client, help him with his business.

And he'd been a client for about two years.

And one day he came and asked me if I could help his son.

And I knew he had kids and I.

But I.

I don't know.

What does he need help with?

Well, he's a heroin addict.

And I said, okay, how bad does he want to quit?

Like, how bad does he want to do this?

Well, he was in between his junior and senior year of college.

He had had a scholarship, and then he had a girlfriend and had a kid, and some demons had come up for him and he'd lost the show and it'd been a couple of years.

And he said, well, he's really motivated now because he's about ready to lose all the rest of stuff.

And of course, I didn't know that was his dad's perspective.

And I told him, okay.

Well, happened to be local.

Most of my clients are not, but this one was.

So I said, okay, we'll bring him over so he can come over on a Saturday morning.

And he and his dad came in to sit down and I kicked the dad out and sat down with the kid and I said, okay, you know, and I asked him some questions and did that kind of stuff.

And then he said he really wanted to do this.

And I say, okay, so give me everything.

And he'd used the morning before, and it was heroin, and it was not trivial, you know, give me everything.

Give me all your cards, your money, your cash.

He did all that.

And I said, now give me your secret stash.

And he looked at me and I.

Said, dude, yeah, I know.

And I told him the story.

Yeah, just a little piece.

And he's like, okay.

And he gave it to me and I said, now, how bad do you want to do this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AI ain't going to do that.

And it won't know to do that.

It won't know to do that.

At least not the versions that we're seeing projected for you.

You could program it with that script and to look at.

But.

But sitting across from somebody who had the stash, and that's not replicable.

Yeah, not repeatable.

So let's talk about that courage that someone has to have.

And I meet them.

You do.

You just described to me the number of people that are there who think they're coaches or who are trying to be coaches but are not in integrity with their own words, their own teachings and their own efforts to coach.

What do they.

If some coach listens to this and starts asking themselves, is it me?

You know, in the mirror, what do you.

What do you think?

The first, second, third, like, tell me you have the opportunity, somebody's going to listen to this and say, is that me?

What would you tell them to do?

And when you say, is that me?

Do you mean am I one of these ones out of integrity?

Am I one of these ones that's been pretending, hoping to do good, entering conversations, wondering about enrollments, did a service, all of the stuff that you said.

Yeah, got it.

All that if, if you're asking the question, the answer is yes, it's you, because it's all of us.

We're all full of.

I'm full of.

I just haven't found everywhere I'm full of yet.

That's, that's, that's, that's my approach.

So start where you are, which is where am I lying?

Where am I not telling the truth?

Where am I concealing?

You won't take long.

You'll have an idea that is the seed of your practice.

And I mean that quite literally.

The thing about coaching, I work with coaches on their offers, on their, on their way.

What do they think their niche should be, and all sorts of crap.

Here's my simple, simple rule about that.

You are only qualified to serve one person, and that is some earlier version of yourself.

That's it.

People try to find their niche.

Forget your niche.

Map your journey.

Follow Kellen's story arc.

That's you.

Stop fucking around with it.

That's you.

So pick a time in your life where you were full of crap and you got through it and start talking about it.

Share about it, write about it.

Not to look good, not like, look at me, but like, really, really write about what a mess you made.

People will come out of the woodwork and say, I thought I was the only one.

Literally, it's, it's not complicated.

Just literally look at your life and.

Say, it isn't complicated, but it's hard because people have.

People are buried in the infection of the WIT fungus W I T o T, which is what I think others think.

I love that expression of yours.

Listen, it may be this or that.

It doesn't matter.

You want it or not?

No.

Nobody needs to follow this path to be an extraordinary coach.

There will always be coaches.

Your friends will always let you coach.

Your family will let you coach.

You'll be able to coach for free.

You'll find people that love your coaching and you'll find some other way to make income.

It'll be fine.

Don't worry about it.

But let's get real.

Either you want this so badly that you're committed to it, or you don't, and it doesn't matter.

The world's going to need lots of Uber drivers and grubhub drivers and, you know, Amazon prime drivers.

We need lots of those.

So don't worry about it.

It'll be fine.

We'll have a UBI at some points.

You can get your UBI Universal, Bacon Sigma and coach.

Your thing.

The conversation we had last time, and I don't know if it was on the camera or not, but you're talking about, you know, your life story, what have you.

As I.

As I shared before we got on reading your book, which I recommend you should hold it up and show it to people, was great assistance in my education and my getting the message.

The only thing people care about is how'd you get here?

Right?

Like you say, as part of that exercise, I've been.

I've been speaking, I've been telling my story, like, you know, in.

In into a transcriber, and then I have chat gbg go through it.

I say, chat GPT.

Where am I leaving out?

What am I probably hiding that you get, like, ChatGPT is great for that.

So as I'm going through all this, I was narrating the story of my business going down, my first marriage going down, and the infidelity that caused it.

And I've told this story for decades.

I've been so vulnerable and transparent about.

I cheated on my wife.

And this whole process, I said, what am I not being honest about?

I've told this story.

I'll tell anybody about it.

I'm not ashamed of it.

Well, what I saw, Kellen, I was ashamed of.

And what I saw was.

Wait a minute.

Infidelity didn't start with this woman that you had intercourse with started 10 years earlier.

And I.

And I found the incident where it started, and it was.

And it was innocent.

And I went down the rabbit hole of what?

What haven't I told?

Well, I told this story.

I haven't told the whole story of, you know, two years into my marriage or a year I'm on A business trip, and I'm out to dinner someplace, and I go out to a bar and I'm like, dancing with some woman.

Okay, that's not cheating, but that's outside the integrity.

I stepped out of integrity in that moment.

And then I basically went through every little detail, all these unpleasant, embarrassing things to get real for me.

And then I had Chat GPT help me write an article about it, put it on substack.

That is my highest performing substack article ever.

It has outperformed all my other 40 or 50 articles on there combined because it's real and it's raw and it's in the shit.

So this isn't complicated.

Look where your life has been a mess.

Get real about it.

Talk about it, script it, whatever, write about it, share about it.

Not to tell a lesson or to put.

And if you've had this problem, call me, we'll talk.

No, not as a pitch.

Just share it.

For you, not for them.

And what I promise is they'll come.

You know, you're the first person that has said something in different words that.

And I love it because I haven't heard anybody say it before.

I say the greatest moment in a coach's journey is the minute they discover they are their own avatar.

And you said that.

And you said early version yourself.

And that's how I say it.

I say, the minute you figure out you're your own Avatar, you're 1,000 steps, you know how to talk to them, you know what they're hurting, you know exactly what's going on because you're your own avatar.

So when you said that, that just tickled because I thought, yeah, I.

You know, I love that because I've been.

No, nobody ever listens.

Nobody ever listens.

You could tell the coach, like, you could be coming out of coaching school with certificate.

You tell them that, and they'll go, okay, and then they'll go create their niche.

I want to serve, you know, French princes and people with, yeah, whatever, dude.

I.

I love it.

And so I endorse that completely.

Not that it matters that I do or don't or that you think it or not, but what you need to think about, you that are listening, that might be coaching or thinking about it, is you're talking to a couple of people that have been doing this for a couple of minutes.

And the pain of the discovery has taken thousands of hours or hundreds of thousands of dollars or years or whatever.

And if you choose for a moment to pay attention, you can save some piece of that.

If you choose to have the courage to be vulnerable because it's not complicated, like Townsend said, but it isn't easy.

What are you most ashamed of?

Right.

Look in the mirror.

Don't ask, am I being inauthentic?

Yes, you are.

Trust me.

Trust yourself.

Just ask, what am I most embarrassed about?

What am I most ashamed of?

When I think about it, I cringe.

What do I want nobody to know, even myself?

I push it out of my mind.

That's, that's, that's, that's, that's the juice right there.

It's everything.

That's the only thing you're qualified to coach on.

So one of the things that people ask, going down that road a little bit further, because this is all in service of the conversation, that 90% of coaches won't be able to make money because they're not willing to do this work.

The 10% that are extraordinary, that are able to create the kind of experiences we talked about earlier.

What has to.

How bad does somebody have to want this in order to be that vulnerable?

I think they have to be willing to die for it.

And I mean that metaphorically and physically, right?

At the end of the day, you can trade a million things for integrity, right?

There's some, some shopping mall out there where, where everything's for sale.

Safety, security, love, kindness, money, sex.

All you got to trade is your integrity.

And by integrity, I don't mean like, are you a good person?

I mean, are you saying what actually is true, what you think, what happened?

So this isn't all that surprising, right?

You want to be in the top of anything.

Look at the medical profession.

It used to be being a doctor was a great profession.

You know, most doctors who spend a decade in medical school have hundreds of thousands, sometimes a million dollars in debt make less than a hundred thousand dollars, most of them dentists, same thing.

Chiropractors.

This is kind of how it works, right?

I wanted to be a professional bike racer growing up, right?

In high school, I started training.

There was nobody who trained harder than I was.

I had the right equipment, I had the right coaches diet.

I worked my ass off.

And when it came right down to it, and I mean this quite literally, I was not willing to die in that moment to do what was necessary to win.

And I'm not embarrassed of it.

Like, I kind of think that's crazy.

Like what I've seen people do in competitive sports, what they put like, like, I'll die, I don't care.

I'll, I'll die instead of quit.

I'M not saying it's a good, healthy mentality.

I'm not saying it's the right one.

I'm just saying in any domain where money is reserved for the elite, right, like, you don't need to be in the top 10 of Uber drivers.

You will need, and this is what AI is catalyzing, you will need to be in the top five or even 1% of attorneys.

You will need to be in the top 1 or 5% of accountants, CPAs, whatever.

You will need to be in the top 1 to 5.

Nobody else will make money.

That's just the way it is.

By the way, it's been like that in auto racing for ever.

Top 1% of drivers make money, everybody else starves.

That's how it is in professional sports.

All these kids with their coaches and soccer.

It's like, you think your kid's going to be in the NBA?

I don't think so.

I don't care what camps you send them to.

Top 1%.

And they have to be willing to die for it.

This is just moved into that category, that's all.

I love that because if you talk up, talk to people or about people like, you know, Kobe Bryant, who died a little while ago in that crash, if you know when they've now made public about his training regimes and about things he was willing to do, like, what else do you need to say?

That, yeah, the guy was a psychopath, right?

And brilliant and incredible, and in that world, that's the only way you get there.

He wasn't just in the NBA, he was in the top of the NBA.

You could say, well, that's not fair, or I don't care.

This is about economics and forces of our ecosystem.

So I'm going to dive into this die thing because when you said that, the energy was a little bit like, you have to be willing to die for it.

And I want to go there straight up.

I love it.

Because if you say you want to, the mission that I have with the 300 million, when I say radical excellence, or I say a heart to serve, or I say fierce life ownership and use those modifiers, we use that kind of crap in marketing all the time to sound, you know, invite, invite people to stuff.

And I wonder, when I ask people this, what is it in your life that means enough to you that you would do anything for it?

You would, you would.

I have people.

I want this.

Okay, cool.

What are you doing now?

Da da da, da, da.

Okay, well, what do I need to do?

Well, let's start with this, this, and this and this.

And I asked first, what would you be willing to all do?

Anything.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

How about this, this, this, and this?

Oh, man, I didn't know you meant that.

You know that conversation right out of the box, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Do you ever see the movie the Kingsman?

No.

Funny movie.

It's sort of like this British spy, whatever.

Doesn't really matter.

The point is he's getting trained to be a spy in this elite little group called kinsmen.

And they have to go through all these tests, very physical, and this or that, drowning, whatever.

The last test is, they've been raising this puppy and they go, kill the puppy.

Like, you want in.

You got to kill the dog.

And it's a test, and I won't give a spoiler alert.

But as an idea, right.

I don't suggest people go out, kill puppies, or I don't suggest people go and die, but as an idea, what won't you do?

How bad do you want this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think you're right.

AI is catalyzing that, and it is that truth in everything.

When you think about attaining the pinnacle of personal development.

Yeah.

When you, you.

We talked about integrity before the call a bit.

And if you say, you know, I have integrity, are there lines you won't cross and things you won't do, meaning I.

I just won't do it.

Kill me.

I don't.

I don't care.

Yeah.

I won't.

I won't.

I won't do that.

Yeah.

And that's a question.

And that might seem strange to think about or even talk about when we're talking about what AI does.

But if you.

If you think about creating an extraordinary experience for someone, why do you think, you know, they have hot coals and they have these other extreme things in events from decades.

It's just to test that feeling, to prove to yourself what you're willing to do.

Yeah.

To me, it's very simple.

And it comes down to meaning or fulfillment or whatever word meaning, fulfillment, purpose, whatever.

Right.

Most people's lives have precious little of any of that.

They have a job they tolerate, they have a spouse they tolerate.

They have kids that tolerate.

They're kind of going through the motions.

So if you think of a continuum from meaningless to absolute meaning, well, what's the test of something that has ultimate meaning?

Well, I'd rather die than live without it.

So this is just that applied to the domain we call what we do to earn our money.

That's all it is.

And for better or Worse, AI is just, let's say, giving us a hand.

It has just said to probably billions of people, yeah, you don't need to do that.

That's really not necessary.

We pay you to do that, but it's really not necessary.

So you're free.

Like, literally, you're free.

The stuff you're.

You're doing, if you're, if you're sitting in front of a computer all day, moving stuff around and talking to people and, and doing stuff, you're free.

There are agents, AI agents that do that today.

I've heard of, and from somebody I trust.

There's already technology that will replace 90% of all inbound technology sales.

You're free, because if AI can replace it, chances are you weren't deriving much meaning from in the first place.

You didn't really want to be there.

So I'm going to take you, take that word right there, you're free, and then ask you a question that I just want you to think about for a second and pontificate.

How terrifying is that statement?

Absolutely terrifying.

Absolutely terrifying.

I don't know the number, but it's in the hundreds of folks where I've received a call, people on my network, people that I've coded, yeah, I got laid off today.

And I have the same response to every single one of.

I always say the same thing.

Congratulations, you're free.

And I know they're terrified.

On the other side of fear, Right?

What was it, the Will Smith video, if you haven't seen it, on the Other side of Fears.

Everything you want.

And everybody's sitting there going, but I'm scared.

Yes, I know.

So then the question for the meaning of your ultimate life podcast is acknowledging the fear.

You can argue with the truth at 70, 90, 92%.

I don't care.

You can argue with laid off, not laid off, or whatever, but when you are free, then what does your life mean?

What are you going to make it mean at that moment?

Because it is in that place that you have the opportunity to come face to face with the question of who am I?

Yeah, I love that.

What I say is freedom only occurs and is only possible in truth.

Right?

You only are free to make a choice when you are speaking the truth about what is.

When you're in denial, what is, or unconscious of what is.

Whatever action you're taking is not actual choice.

It's not freedom.

It's a prison.

Right?

And let's just play it the other way.

You don't need to be in the top 1%.

So part of freedom for me would be an ask or 5% or 7 or whatever would be in saying, is coaching somebody something.

I'm willing to die if I can't make money with it.

Am I willing to die trying to earn my income?

The answer is heck no.

Fabulous.

That doesn't mean you give up coaching.

You're now free to pursue coaching as you choose and figure out how to make money.

That's going to be important.

Right.

You have clear eyes.

You can see everything.

You now have all the power because you got open eyes.

You see what's happening.

It's in the denial of what is that we're imprisoned.

What a wake up call.

Because we so often identify with who we are is how we make money.

And what you just said is you're free.

Yeah, you got to make some money over here somewhere, whatever.

And that's really what it is.

You gotta eat.

And there's a million ways to go figure out what to do to eat.

It's got nothing to do with the truth of your gifts, the truth of your being, how you give to the world.

Like you describe, when I ask you how you had good to the world, you describe several opportunities.

But I know if we had more time, there are lots of other ways that don't have anything to do with making money that are just as meaningful and fulfilling.

And incidentally, there's a few of them that I have organized to get paid for.

Yeah.

And what I would say is they show up, I don't have to worry too much about them.

Right.

And I mean this literally.

The, the, the day I was free with coaching was the day I said, yeah, I'll do this even if I can't make money with it.

Like if I get locked in prison, I'll be coaching in there.

If I'm on the street, I'll be coaching there and the rest will sort itself out.

And that would probably suck.

It doesn't matter.

I'm not going to stop doing this.

Right.

I show up to serve.

I am committed to coaching.

And what I believe, my truth is whoever is in front of me there for me to coach.

Now let's walk through that.

I don't have a large circle of friends.

So one of the things that I sacrifice for what I am committed to, where I derive my worth and enrichment and value is I have friends.

And if they're not cool with, I'm also coach and I'll ship it.

We ain't friends.

I don't have chit chat friends.

I don't go out for beers.

I don't, you know, play on the Ultimate Football League or whatever.

It's called fantasy.

I don't do that.

So it's a choice.

I choose this.

And that moves all these other things out of the way, and it's not a problem.

And people have opinions about it.

Okay.

I love that people ask me what I do for fun.

And I, I, I have a background that isn't the one that's up right now, but the background that I have up sometimes is this one.

And people ask me what I do, and the answer is that, yeah, that's all I'm doing.

First breath to last all day, every day.

I'm done.

I'm doing that this year.

Yeah.

And incidentally, yeah, I helped some people write books and I make some money and it's fine, but that's what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I love that I spend time with my wife, which mostly comprises of us just doing an activity together, me holding space and listening to her.

I eat, I sleep, I go to the bathroom, and I coach.

There's not much else.

I love it.

And thank you for saying that because it's so true of me, of my life also.

So here's the invitation.

So we're going to wrap up here, but I want to ask if I.

What didn't I ask you?

What didn't you address?

That dives into the truth, because the way we've talked about it, it could feel scary or bleak to somebody if they choose to have that lens.

The truth is you can create your own life, which is what the other background said a minute ago.

And you're doing that whether you mean to or want to or not.

Are you doing it intentionally or not?

But what else.

What is the truth that we can leave here as an encourager in the context of the things that we've talked about?

That's a great question.

The answer that comes to mind is, is we've got fear.

Wrong.

We've got, we've got the idea of fear and discomfort backwards, and we don't have time to delve into why or how it doesn't really matter.

Fear, uncertainty, discomfort, all those things, what if they were simply indicators of what we should step into and move towards?

And what if you.

There's the old Seinfeld episode of Opposite George where one day he decides to just do the opposite of everything that occurs to him.

And, and it goes incredibly well.

I, I think that's.

Somehow I've stumbled into life like that.

I just looked at what everybody was doing and said, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do the opposite.

Worked out pretty well.

Now that doesn't mean it was fun or entertaining or enjoyable or comfortable.

I just got this idea very early on and it was really subconscious that everybody else is moving away from this.

I think I'll move before towards it now.

I'm not talking about, you know, let me go pet the lion, but for the vast majority of other things in this world, at the state we are in, in humanity, there's very little that's going to kill you or even harm you really badly.

So I would say the truth is we need to look at our relationship with fear and the idea that that's something we must move away from versus what if it's something we can be with?

What would that create for us?

Fabulous.

Thank you for sharing that.

And I want I just again find myself agreeing.

Fear and discomfort is something perhaps as an indicator you should move toward.

Because the truth is, very little is going to really hurt you or kill you.

It's the story about what it might do or feel like.

And you're afraid of feeling that feeling.

And that has nothing to do with anything except a story.

Townsend, thanks for showing up today for me with me.

Thank you, brother.

Great to see you again.

It's great to see you.

This has been an interesting episode, folks.

I want you to go back and listen to this and take home the idea that something you're afraid of might be an invitation to grow.

It might be an invitation to discover opportunity.

It might be an indication for something you really will value.

After you get past the broken glass.

You gotta crawl over for a minute.

Maybe because that we talk all the time about creating your own life and you need to do those difficult things and lean into them if you want to create your ultimate life.

Never hold back and you'll never ask why.

Open your heart 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 kellenfluekermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here YourUltimate Life CA subscribe Share.