Business Coach : Life Lessons
DANIEL MCKENNA: What’s up, guys? My name is Daniel McKenna. I’m the Executive Producer here at Thrive 15, and once I tried out for a college baseball team without ever actually playing baseball. Today, we have Business Coach Clay Clark sitting down with Sean Kouplen, and we’re talking about the 12 life lessons that every human should know in this business education training.
Now, Sean Kouplen is quite the human. He was actually a bank owner before the age of 35. He is also a venture capitalist and has his hands in several different businesses. He knows a thing or two about success. The life lessons that he is going to teach you today are going to help you have success as a human on this planet Earth.
Here at Thrive 15, knowledge and business education without application is meaningless. It’s what we say. It’s what we believe, which means if you’re watching today’s lesson and you don’t actually learn anything and you don’t actually apply anything, watching today’s lesson is going to be more meaningless than applying pepper spray as a seasoning.
-Sean Kouplen.
-Hello Clay.
-How are you, my friend?
-Great.
-Hey, for anybody watching this today, and if you’re not totally up on your Sean Kouplen knowledge, I’m going to just give you a quick, quick history. He owns a bank, and so therefore in my mind, you are qualified to talk about some of these life lessons that we all need to know to become successful.
-That’s a low qualification. Yeah.
-Because you didn’t start off wealthy. I mean, you weren’t raised in a family where all the kids had a bank and–
-No. No. The kids barely had a bedroom.
CLAY CLARK: Could you walk me through when you– how big is your family?
-There was just four of us, my mom, dad and myself and my sister. My grandfather and father were and are both farmers. And so whenever I graduated from college, my dad informed me that there wasn’t enough room for all of us on the farm. So I needed to go get a job. So I really started from scratch.
-So you didn’t come from a long line of silver spoon, super wealthy, regal? OK. All right. So I just want to make sure, if you’re watching this, I think sometimes when we see successful people, maybe we think, oh well, they must have lucked their way into it or they inherited it.
But you worked your way up. A lot of people helped you along the way, but you did work your way up there. And you wrote a book called 12 Life Lessons Every Graduate Should Know.
And when I was on the beach in South Beach, I had the opportunity to read the Kindle version of this book. And I really am going to just change the title a little bit for us. So it should be 12 Life Lessons Every Human Should Know.
-Good.
-Because as I read it I thought, you know what?
-You’re broadening my market.
-There we go.
-That’s very good.
-Well, as I read it I just thought, you know what? These are things that every person needs to know. So I thought how we could do this is I’m going to go ahead and read the life lesson. And I’m going to let you hammer home why it’s important for us to know it.
-Good.
-So here we go. Life lesson number one,from a business coach, the five advancement skills. Time management, communication skills, emotional intelligence, networking, and trust. Let’s talk about these five skills and specifically time management. Why do we have to know these skills?
-We try in the book, we try to begin with the end in mind. So our goal is to be successful. All of us, and we define success a different way, all of us do. But I think at the end of the day what I tried to do was say, OK. In my experience, if you have these five skills, you will have a greater chance of being successful than if you don’t.
Just a little bit of background. I wrote the book. I love to teach, and I was teaching at night at Oklahoma State University here in Tulsa. And every time I would finish a class, I would have anywhere from 5 to 20 students stay around wanting to talk about success. And primarily, their confusion with success.
How do I know what I want to do when I grow up? I’m in a company that I like and I’m stuck. I’m not moving anywhere.
I’m in a company I don’t like. How do I switch jobs? How do I get the job that I want? I know what I want to do, but it’s highly competitive.
And so over time and hours of conversation, I began to realize there was really a need for this information. So that’s how 12 Life Lessons was born. The five advancement skills, I’ll just hit on them briefly. If you have been looking for a business coach, take note now.
A business coach will tell you 
Time management. What you find is as you progress in your career, you’re also progressing in your family. You’re also typically progressing in your outside community activities, and time becomes a real issue. In fact, it becomes your most limiting factor.
And so the ability to manage time well, to be organized– now, you’re a time management junkie. I’ve seen your daily schedule. It scares me. So that is a very critical skill in being successful, and particularly in being an executive.
Communication skills. You have to have the ability to both verbally and communicate well, both verbally and in a written fashion. Any business coach will tell you, That is how we are judged. Our intelligence, our abilities are judged by what we say and write.
And so I think it’s critical that we hone those. And I mentioned these skills because I think all of us need to work on these skills our entire life. I don’t think it is something that we just stop when we get out of college or high school.
Emotional intelligence. This one is the ability to sense how others are feeling and to react appropriately based upon where they are. as a business coach, you want to have very intelligent employees who are analytically and technically very proficient.
But they can never become managers or executive level managers, because they don’t have the ability to relate to other people around them. They say the wrong thing at the wrong time. They don’t connect well with either their employees or clients. And so emotional intelligence, I think is the third important advancement
skill.
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