My Multi-Million Dollar Grant for Coaches

Dear fellow coach:

I’m about to do the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my career. I’ve decided to forego the most reliable source of our revenue, which has been to train coaches on how to 100X their impact utilizing our publicly available tools. Instead, we’ll be offering coaches a multi-million dollar grant in 2020 to participate in this training without having to pay.

I’ve been strongly advised against this. Why give up our most reliable source of revenue? Could this be the dumbest risk I’ve ever taken? I can’t be sure, but in this week when we’re celebrating Martin Luther King’s legacy, I am more clear than ever that I need my fellow coaches in order to leave the legacy I want to leave. I want to dramatically accelerate the pace of working with coaches by removing the current financial barriers of $1K for the training.

You see, King was a key part of a whisper in my head that saved my life. From the beginning, the whisper was about my legacy.

Growing up in desperate poverty amidst family violence, I sought refuge in a cocoon of depression and isolation. But for as long as I can remember, there was a whisper in my head guiding me. It told me my path was to play on the world stage one day and change millions of lives, as my heroes Gandhi and Martin Luther King had done.

I never questioned where the whisper came from. I never doubted its truth. It has guided me ever since.

That whisper has led me through a fascinating journey of continual discovery — through psychology, neuroscience, engineering, and business. These culminated in me running the largest coach training organization in the world, which trained thousands of extraordinary coaches who changed lives.

The thing is, the whisper was always about “millions” of lives. It was always about massive scale. I didn’t know why, as I never felt a competitive ego attachment to any number.

The quest for massive scale led me to my Positive Intelligence research to get to the core, root-level mechanics of both happiness and performance. When my book hit a chord and was translated into 20 different languages, I thought the whisper had come true. After all, I was getting a ton of emails every day from people around the world saying I had changed their lives.

But when I checked with those people six months later, I often realized that many had reverted back to the old habits. Change was hard.

Looking deeper, I discovered that true transformation is only 20% about insight, 80% about mental muscle building. Insight alone wasn’t sustained.

So then I embarked on creating a virtual, app-guided PQ program to help people convert their inspiration into daily practice, to form new mental muscles and habits.

I was delighted to see that the PQ program had a life-changing impact that was now sustained. I had finally created the vehicle for honoring the promise of that whisper. But was I reaching millions?

And that’s where coaches came in. In many populations, only 20% of the group has 80% of the impact. That’s what I started to notice about the coaches who were participating in the PQ program. When I changed a coach’s life through my work, it ended up changing hundreds, sometimes thousands of others’. Coaches were 100Xing their own impact. Through them, I was 100Xing mine.

It became clear to me that to manifest the promise of that whisper, I needed to have thousands of coaches as my partners in changing lives.

This week we’re celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday. The whisper is back. And this time with more clarity and urgency than ever before. This time around, I understand why the whisper has always been about “millions” of lives.

You see, our world is at a critical fork in the road. The increasingly emboldened darker side of us threatens not only democratic institutions but also the health and even survival of our mother earth. The stakes have never been higher.

As coaches, we hold a key. Together we can awaken and unleash the vastly untapped good in the world to affect the outcome. And we need to do it with millions of people, so we can reach a tipping point. Scale matters.

So, on this special day, inspired by King’s dream, and burning with the urgency of our time, I have decided to do something bold which is more than a little scary. I’ve decided to forfeit millions of dollars in revenue from coaches participating in our six-week program, and instead grant the program to coaches, waving the $1,000/participant fee.

In my recent article, How to 100X Your Coaching Impact, I showed coaches how they could dramatically increase both the number of clients they could attract, and the impact on each client, using the PQ tools. By removing all financial barriers to participating, I want to greatly accelerate coaches learning these tools and massively increasing their impact on others.

We live in an age of cynicism when we’re suspicious of claims of such gifts. Is there a catch, a string attached, a hidden agenda?

There’s no catch, but there’s an important requirement that you actually do the rigorous work required of you throughout the six-week program. This is a “mental fitness” training that dramatically boosts your “inner Jedi” and weakens your inner “Darth Vaders,” to use a Star Wars metaphor. It’s mostly about mental muscle building, watching a weekly video and using an app to guide your daily practices for 15 minutes per day, for six weeks.

Until now, since the coaches had paid the $1,000 fee, that “skin in the game” helped motivate them to get their investment’s worth by doing the daily practices. That’s how they created massive value for themselves. Since that financial “skin in the game” will no longer be at play, I’m looking for only those coaches who are serious and ready to invest in themselves.

We’ll have a limit of 500 people for the first program that starts in a few weeks, and we want those slots to be filled by people who are fully committed.

(**UPDATE: we received an overwhelming response to this offer and this first cohort was quickly over-subscribed. We’re now accepting applications for the next cohort.**)

If this sounds like you, I’ll be hosting two live webinars next week that’ll go into more detail. During these sessions, I’ll show you how you can 100X your impact as a coach using our publicly-available, research-based tools, and how you get to practice these tools. I’ll also do a live Q&A toward the end to answer any other questions you still have. Then, for those who are ready to 100x their coaching impact,, I’ll give you the link for an online form where you can apply to be in the first group of 500, or put on the waitlist for the future groups.

As successful as you might be already, I invite you to consider how many more lives you could change. First, by growing yourself as a human being and coach. Then, by growing your reach and impact on others.

There is a reason you became a coach. Let’s make it count, at a time when our world is counting on you.

See you in the video webinar. (**UPDATE: The first cohort was quickly over-subscribed. We’re now accepting applications for the next cohort. Click here for details.**)