With such a surge in everyone wanting to be a “speaker” or a “business coach” or a “brand ambassador” or a… (you fill in the blank)… the problem has quickly become overinflation of self. A meandering squad of self-important folks that really aren’t contributing to anyone’s benefit outside of their own by way of getting 200 likes on a Facebook post. And it’s typically a pic of themselves surrounded by other self important… well, idiots.
If you listen to the teachings of truly great speakers like Tony Robbins, Les Brown, John Maxwell, or Brian Tracy (there are many MANY others of sound teaching), you will find that these guys have spent some serious time (they’re whole lives) researching and STUDYING their message and what they teach.
They also display massive and measurable results in the work they do.
They’ve devoted everything to the STUDY of their art. Study is a really important word here. Studying is necessity in an endeavor of helping people by way of speaking, leading, and teaching. Without a significant level of discipline that you practice and countless hours devoted to the study of the thing you desire to pursue every day, then you’re speaking from a place of, I’ve-heard-this-said-on-a-few-YouTube-videos-so-I’ll-just-add-some-buzzwords-and-push-the-illusion-of-a-passion-of-wanting-to-help-people-but-really-it’s-just-my-pure-craving-for-attention-and-in-most-cases-money-to-seem-sincere.
This is all done in a booming voice that screams , “I’m a fake and a fraud but hopefully some people pick this up as genuine. And if they do, I’ll charge a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars for them to get on the phone with me.”
This is why I’m writing this post
To make people, who are doing things to better themselves, aware of these false prophets. When you’re on a journey of self-development and growth, you have to invest in yourself. You do this by way of books, audios, conferences, and association. All of these things cost money and often times, a significant amount of money. I promise that it’s worth it but just like anything you put money into, you want to be sure that it is as sound of an investment as possible.
The catch-22 with investing money into things like this is that you can’t buy self-development. You invest money in good teaching but it is ultimately up to you what you do with that teaching. If I read every book written by Tony Robbins and John Maxwell, but applied none of it to my life, then it was all for nothing.
A first and important step, though, is to invest in the right things. To invest in the right teaching. If my website looks better than the person’s who wants to charge me thousands of dollars for coaching, I’m not buying. And neither should you. If the person that calls themselves a coach or a speaker or whatever, puts out only low quality material like shoddy websites and videos, and they call that their portfolio, please do not pay this person attention and especially do not pay them money.
I don’t want false teaching. I don’t want bad teaching. I don’t want false doctrine.
Just because someone charges an obscene amount of money for their services does not mean their services are worth an obscene amount of money
In fact, I’m losing out on way more than just money. I’m losing time. And time is my most precious resource.This post may be bringing up some questions, like: “What makes you the expert?”, “What gives you ground to make such claims?”, or “What can I do to ensure I’m not scammed?”I’ll get to those in part 2. See you tomorrow!
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