Business Coach : Characteristics You Need
-On a daily basis, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that say things like– I want to write a book. Or recently, my incredible wife, who is with us here today, she’s watching today, she has decided that she’s going to write a book. We have five kids. So trying to write a book with five kids, it’s tough, you know? You’ve got the five kids, and then you’ve got the book. And if they’re awake and you’re awake and you’re trying to write, you don’t really get a lot of continuous uninterrupted thoughts there. Any business coach knows this.
You have multiple businesses you’re always involved in. You have the bank obligations. You have a relationship with your wife and your son. Where did you find time to write a book? If you have a business coach they can help you find time. Or if I’m an entrepreneur and I’m trying to do something like write a book or something that’s really a big project like that, where do you find time for that?
-First of all, you have to put writing a book into several categories, in my opinion. Some people write, and it becomes a cathartic opportunity for them, just to get things off their chest.
-Can you define cathartic, just in case I don’t know what that means?
-It’s like introspection. You’re looking at your own journey, be it good or bad, and you’re having these wrestling matches in your mind. You’re writing them out. If that’s the case, I think your feelings will dictate how and when you do that. A business coach can help you overcome.
But let’s say that you’re writing a book that relates to your business, and there’s a direct correlation between the book and the success of the business. Then you have a different way of writing. You’re more in a scheduling mode there, because now that has become an extension of the business. It is not just an idea– I want to write; I want to get this out of my head.
-Well, you’ve written how many books now?
-13. So when you write a book, what time of the day do you write this book?
-My writing is not determined by the clock. It is determined by an internal reference point that I have something to say. I’m the type of guy that I write for myself, first and foremost. If I don’t like what I’ve said, I don’t expect anyone else to embrace it. I read my own books.
Last night, I’m getting ready to go to Australia to do some work, and I was thinking about all that I had to do, but not from a busy standpoint. I’m thinking about how can I really make this good, really solid and good? But the idea came to me at 2:30 this morning.
-You got up at 2:30 this morning?
-I got up at 2:30.
-Man, you should have called me, bro. I was up then. That’s crazy.
-I got up at 2:30, and I just got on that computer, and I just went crazy writing.
-Does this happen to you often? Where you get up at 2:30?
-Yeah. Well, from the writing perspective.
-So do you usually write before anybody else is awake? Is it safe to say you write in the mornings?
-Writing has a personality. The process has a personality. And you have to be very careful, because it can end up being a third person in the house of two.
-Oh!
-You’ve got five kids? And you’ve got a husband and a wife. That’s seven people. But if writing becomes the eighth person, it can be a problem.
-So if someone right now wants to write a book, would you recommend they do it in the mornings, Brother Clifton? Or at night? Should they go off to the hotel and write the book? What should they do? Hire a business coach!
-I don’t think there are there any specific recommendations if they want to write, because I think the surroundings of the person– whether that person is married or single, whether that person works eight days a week, or whether that person worked 28/10. All of those things enter in as to how you utilize your time.
-I’m going to harass you about this point, because I want this answer. I need this answer.
-That book, Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, that’s a bestselling book– made into a movie. The time you wrote that, you were employed somewhere, right?
-When I started writing that book, I was much younger than you are today. I was a soldier.
CLIFTON TAULBERT: Really.
-I was a soldier.
CLIFTON TAULBERT: You were in the military.
-I was in the military.
CLIFTON TAULBERT: And you just wrote it when you had some downtime, or at night?
-No. There was a little bit more to it than that. I was at the very end of the Vietnam War. And many of my friends were being shipped off to Vietnam. And a high percentage of them never returned. And I great fear that this was going to happen to me.
So the writing process, for me, it became like this quilt that I would wrap myself up in the stories, where I was safe, where I was young, and where life was in front of me. And that’s when I began writing those stories.
So I had to work in the day, obviously, in the military, but at night, you have choices– what you want to do. And my choice was to write. And I would write at night.