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Business Coach : Go With The Best

Business Coach : Go With The Best

-That’s what you’re passionate about is teaching other people that they can do it.

-It’s the unselfishness. It’s not just about me. We live in this world together, and if we can literally embrace that and understand the impact and the power of that, we have really set ourselves on an entirely different course of discovery. Hire a business coach to help.

-I know that we’ve all been guilty of this at some point. We are watching TV. We’re watching Fox News, we’re watching CNN, we’re watching some television station. We’re watching somebody else write the book– somebody else make the movie– somebody else achieve the fitness goal– somebody else have the great family– somebody else have success. And we’re saying– not for me. That’s for somebody else. Maybe we don’t say it out loud, but we think– success is not for me. It’s for somebody else.

Can you explain to me, if that’s my mindset, in your mind, why are some people successful, Clifton, and why are some people not successful? That sounds like a question for a business coach.

-Well, you define success. And let’s say “not successful” refers to those people who have dreams, but they put their dreams on a Mason jar, and they screw a top on it and set it aside. That’s what I call not being successful. Because I think we all have dreams and ideas and gifts to bring.

But the successful person is the person who looks at that dream, looks at that idea, looks at that great thought that runs through their mind and says– wait a minute. I can start a DJ company.

No, you can’t. There’s already 20.

Or it’s the person who says– Clifton. there are 50,000 books coming out every year, maybe 100,000, and your name is not on one of them, and it never will be. Everybody wants to write a book. You’re not going to write a book.

But that successful person is driven by that gift, that vision, that dream that they have. And they proceed to do the things that are necessary to make it real. Just like a business coach

-A successful person has a big dream, but they’re willing to do the work necessary to make it become real.

-Right.

-Have you had any mentors in your life that have jumped into your life and have talked taught you these sorts of lessons? Any mentors you can think of?

-Without question. Again, it goes all way back to the fields in the Mississippi Delta. One story, real quickly. Bless this little baby. I had to pick 200 pounds of cotton. That was required of me by my great-aunt. You’d make $5 dollars a day if I picked 200 pounds of cotton.

CLAY CLARK: In today’s money, that might be $50 a day?

-I have no idea. But it wasn’t much then, and it’s probably not much now. The problem was I didn’t know how to get that. I had worked all my life, and I could get 175 pounds, 180 pounds, but there was a man in the fields, working with us, who could pick 600 pounds of cotton a day. That’s almost a trailerful of cotton. So I realized that someone knew more about how to do this than I did.

So I went to him one day. We called him Mr. Cooter Man.

-Mr. What Man?

-Cooter. C-O-O-T. That’s a pet name for a turtle. Mr. Turtle Man.

-Oh, really? Mr. Cooter Man. The Turtle Man. That might be my nickname. Turtle Man!

-So I said Mama [INAUDIBLE] is embarrassed– because Miss [INAUDIBLE]– that’s the lady who’s our neighbor, she kept saying this money ain’t going to amount to nothing, because he can’t pick 200 pounds of cotton. Every boy can pick 200 pounds of cotton.

So I go to this man, and I say– I got to pick 200 pounds of cotton.

He said– OK. The first thing I want you to do, I want you go to the fields with me.

CLAY CLARK: With me.

He said– I go early, before anybody else, so I’ll pick you up.

-So you’re shadowing the Turtle Man.

-You got that. He said– I want to get you your row right beside mine. I said– well, why are we going so early? It’s dark out here!

He said– don’t you realize that the cotton is wet when it’s dark? It’s heavy with dew. And it weighs three times as much. I didn’t know that. Because by the time I got to the field, the sun was there and dried it out. But Mr. Cooter Man knew that if you got there before the sun came out, you’d get heavy cotton!

-Boom! He found the shortcut!

-Thank you. And he shared it. That, to me, was the essence of mentoring– someone who was willing to share their secret and say– come alongside of me.

-So a mentor is anybody who knows a little bit more than you do about that subject. If I’m a mom and I’m watching this and maybe I feel like I’m not that great of a mom, I could find somebody who’s a great mom, or who I perceive to be, and that could be my business coach.

-If that person is willing to share.

-OK. If that person is willing to share.

-Because Mr. Cooter Man could easily have said– I can pick 600. You just pick cotton. You figure it out your own way, how to do it. But instead he said– I’ll pick you up.

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