Shirzad Chamine: Author of the New York Times Bestselling Book Positive Intelligence

Shirzad Chamine, author of the NYT bestselling book Positive Intelligence, shares his incredible journey from a childhood of poverty and oppression to becoming a successful entrepreneur and thought leader. A devastating professional setback led Shirzad on a path of self-discovery and healing that became the foundation for his groundbreaking work on Positive Intelligence.

Shirzad explains how we all have an inner judge, the universal voice that shames and guilts us. He identified 10 saboteurs that hold us back, and the 5 sage powers that help us thrive - Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate and Activate. While writing a bestselling book changed many lives, Shirzad realized that true lasting transformation comes from turning insight into sustained daily practice. This led him to create the hugely impactful Positive Intelligence app.

Shirzad movingly describes life as a hero's journey, where every chapter, even the painful ones, serve a purpose. He encourages us to embrace our story and manifest what wants to emerge next. Reflecting on his time as CEO of the renowned Coach Training Institute, Shirzad shares how building a business with love and genuine care for transformation at its core leads to incredible impact. An inspiring conversation on navigating adversity and creating positive change at scale.

Transcript

Shirzad: A lot of what was preventing me from having the impact I could have was limiting assumptions I had about how can one be a giver and also really insist on being financially prosperous, putting oxygen mask on myself first so that I could be there for others.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the author of The New York Times bestselling book, Positive Intelligence. He lectures on Positive Intelligence at Stanford University and is a former CEO of CTI, the Coaches Training Institute. Please welcome Shirzad Chamine.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Shirzad.

Shirzad: Hello, Alex. Great to see you again.

Alex: Likewise. Great having you in the podcast today. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, what are we drinking today?

Shirzad: Okay, we are drinking a Tazo’s Wild Sweet Orange Tea and it has emerged as my favorite because actually it has a sweet and tangy taste and it is so sweet that you don’t need to add sweeteners and too good to be true but I checked and at least the company claims that it has no calories or carbs so it’s one of those amazing things. 

Alex: Well, I have to believe them so, yeah, I’ve never had it before so thank you for suggesting it. 

Shirzad: All right. It has orange peel and licorice root and I think lemongrass and all sorts of good stuff.

Alex: It’s great. I’ve seen it around but I’ve never actually had it so thank you. I’ve gotten a lot of new teas, tried some interesting coffees throughout this Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee journey so, yeah, it’s always good to add new stuff. Such a pleasure to have you here. I am really curious about the work that you do and I know like positive intelligence has such a good ring to it and it’s actually quite interesting and I think coaches find it very interesting so it will be cool to learn a little bit more about your story. Tell me about your career. How did you end up kind of working on positive intelligence, like take me way back to the beginning, how did it all come together?

Shirzad: Depends how far back you want me to go but, basically, the genesis of all of this is growing up in pretty horrific environment, in poverty, with four siblings, and my parents in a ghetto and my father was a very scary man and —

Alex: Where did you grow up?

Shirzad: I grew up in the Middle East as part of a small ethnic minority. We were Zoroastrians and they are very few Zoroastrians left, oppressed by pretty much 99 percent majority in the regions I grew up. So we have been persecuted for 13 centuries and I only later realized that the rage that my father always had, which terrified me, was really generational rage against oppression that my community had suffered for all those centuries. But, to a kid, all I knew was I had a terrifying and angry father around and so my way of dealing with this is I went to cocoon, isolating cocoon of self-isolation, and which later ended up being diagnosed as clinical depression. I was in clinical depression first 30 years of my life. It was a way of me protecting myself against the violence around me. And the thing that saved me was this whisper in the back of my mind, I don’t know where the whisper came from, I never questioned that, but there was a whisper that said, “Shirzad, your path is one day to play on the world stage and change millions of lives,” like my heroes, Martin Luther King and Gandhi. And so I always knew that my path was supposed to be about changing lives and I wanted it to be about millions of lives, that scale mattered. It wasn’t about the ego; it was about the size of the impact on the world. And so I trusted that whisper and that whisper has guide me all my life. And, truthfully, initially, where it took me is needing to heal myself. I grew up, again, with depression and a lot of rage and so after I left the Middle East, came to the United States, this was when I was 17 years old, for years, I noticed that I was destroying every relationship that I had through a lot of pain and rage that I had and also the true wake-up call happened for me where I had gone to Stanford Business School, I had ended up after business school funding a company based on some visionary ideas about software, attracted some of the luminaries of Silicon Valley to be my investors and board members, attracted some of my classmates from Stanford Business School to work with me as president of the company and others, and two years into the company in the most painful day of my life professionally, I got lunch somewhere in Palo Alto near my office, went upstairs to our office and my heart sank because I looked at the boardroom and saw that my chairman of the board was sitting in the room and my president, my classmate from Stanford I had hired as president was sitting there with my senior directors, they were there to have a palace coup, to have an intervention on me, saying, “Shirzad, you have shifted from being a visionary leader to such a horrific, micromanaging, uninspiring leader. We do not want to work for you anymore. And this is destroying the very company that you started.” And I was demoted that day and it was the most devastating day of my life until that day, which ended up becoming the genesis of me figuring out what had taken me from being such a visionary, inspiring leader to such a horrific micromanaging leader nobody wanted to work for. And this incredible pain I felt, where is it coming from and how do I deal with it? So that started a self-healing journey and process that had me discover a lot of things that actually worked with personal healing and transformation that eventually became the genesis of what’s in Positive Intelligence.

Alex: What a fascinating story. I love kind of how from a low point that you kind of turned that into a learning journey. It is such a motivating, powerful force when you are in, really against the wall or you’re in a very low point, to be able to turn that as — and you said, ultimately, when you look down the line as an advantage. It is so motivating to be in those kinds of positions. But not everyone takes that and leverages that energy to create something incredible so love to hear that story and I’m eager to learn more about kind of the next steps after that. 

Shirzad: And, Alex, what you just mentioned is, there is an entire chapter in my book that’s called The Sage Perspective and The Sage Perspective literally is that every circumstance can be converted into a gift, an opportunity. Every circumstance, no matter how horrific, can eventually be converted into gifts and opportunities for you, the world, and your loved ones and that’s what happened to me, that most horrific day of my life ended up being the most transformational positive day of my life, which is why I’m sitting here. And, basically, what happened is, even though I was demoted, I had to keep going back to the company because I had brought in all the investors, I had brought in all the clients, I couldn’t just walk away so I had to keep walking into a company, working with people who I thought that had betrayed me and you can imagine how profoundly painful it was. I could hardly breathe walking back into an environment every day and meeting with my prior team, and so I had no choice but to find out what’s pain about, what’s this deep suffering about, what this shame is about, what this rage is about, and how do I heal that, and as I got into those questions, then, of course, I tried everything that was available to me. I tried therapy, I tried transformational workshops where you do all sorts of amazing things. For a while, I read every self-help book there was and I tried coaching and what I found, every one of these things, temporarily helped me feel better but I kept going back to my old behavior. I kept going back to my old behavior and so I felt the increased shame and guilt about what’s wrong with me, all of these amazing things that are supposed to transform you, you still keep coming back to your old behavior. Until I really stumbled on one of the most important things about Positive Intelligence, which is true transformation is 20 percent about insight and our high experiences, 80 percent of it is about building mental muscles, neural pathways in your brain that takes those great insights and converts them into daily habits in your life, otherwise, and the reason is that all the bad habits live in the brain in the form of neural pathways that cause those automatic reactions and I call those mental muscles. You don’t fight muscle with insight, you fight muscle with muscle, so I needed to actually rewire my brain, those neural pathways, muscles of the positive part of my brain to counter the existing muscles of the negative part of my brain. That’s why Positive Intelligence we basically say is about mental fitness. Mental fitness is about building muscles and maintaining mental muscles rather than thinking that just by having a workshop, reading a book, or doing a coaching session, you’re going to have the aha experience that will change your life. It won’t change your life. It will if you convert that into daily practices that build neural pathways and convert them into daily habits.

Alex: Tell me about the journey from that low point and having to go in and out of that office for some time and the shame that you felt and that beginning of a recognition that there’s something — you know, I liked that you took responsibility and you saw an opportunity for change. Tell me about how that evolved to kind of the next step in your career and how that ultimately became the foundation for the work that you did creating the positive intelligence framework, if you want to call it that?

Shirzad: Yeah, the first thing that I had to intercept was the source of my daily suffering. I realized that it really is the most fundamental cause of my suffering was a voice in my own head that every single day insisted on shaming me and guilting me for all my past mistakes and all of my shortcomings, and the most devastating thing that was happening to me was not people in the company or outside world, it was this voice I was waking up every morning and how insistent it was on beating me up over and over and over again for exactly the same thing. I mean, what’s the value of me continually doing that? And I eventually ended up calling this the judge voice, the judge saboteur voice, and, actually, then I realized the judge voice is not a strong enough word for it. I called him the executioner. He was that brutal, that devastating in saying, “Shirzad, you’re unworthy of any love or success. Any of your past successes were the result of luck and circumstance,” the imposter syndrome kind of thing. “You don’t deserve anything and you’re just not worthy.” And I needed to basically begin to realize, oh, this voice is not my friend and, actually, it’s not the voice of truth, it’s just a voice, and that I don’t have to trust everything this voice is saying and I began separating my true self from this voice, which I call the judge. And I eventually ended up realizing, first of all, this judge voice is universal, that every human being on the planet has a version of the judge which is judging themselves, judging others, and judging circumstances constantly and having —

Alex: It’s better to talk to the judge than the executioner, right? 

Shirzad: Exactly, yeah. So the judge made it a little easier to relate to. So, first of all, as I identified the judge in myself, then I started realizing every single person I’m interacting with has a variation of the judge judging themselves, judging others, judging circumstance of their life so then I realized, okay, all of us have a voice that is destructive and not helpful to us and then I started realizing there are other ways I sabotage myself that are a little different from my friends the way they sabotage themselves so I realized, oh, there are other, what I call saboteurs, voices that sabotage us that are actually not universal like the judge, they are different from person to person. That’s where I ended up doing massive research which led to the saboteur assessment which identified ten saboteurs, not just the judge, but nine other saboteurs, and they have names like the controller, the stickler, the victim, the restless, the hyperrational, the hypervigilant, the pleaser, the avoider, and so different people have different ones, it’s a five-minute saboteur assessment that a lot of the coaches are using these days to help with their clients.

Alex: That’s awesome. So, tell me about the continuation of the entrepreneurial drive that you had to build that company, raise that money, that transition into creating this framework and it’s more kind of like a consultative kind of approach, so you went from being an entrepreneur in the tech space to using those energies and that experience towards this new path, so tell me about that process.

Shirzad: Yeah. I ended up — first of all, the research ended up eventually including more than a million participants, a lot of fields, executive teams, world-class athletes, and the basis of research reviews factor analysis. 

Alex: Oh, factor analysis. Every time I hear it, takes me back to my dissertation. The trauma, the trauma. Yes. I like factor analysis.

Shirzad: I hope you’re not triggering your trauma here, Alex.

Alex: I actually like factor analysis but, yeah.

Shirzad: So for people that don’t know factor analysis, what I love about it is that it goes to the root cause of what’s really happening in a complex situation. And my metaphor is you do factor analysis on colors, you realize there are only three factors, there are only three colors and all you need is a color palette of three to paint any canvas. We did factor analysis on —

Alex: That’s a good way to think about factor analysis and explain it. Yeah, yeah. 

Shirzad: Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah, taking it back to the basics, the root causes. Yeah.

Shirzad: It’s root cause and I realized there is no root cause or assessment of what optimizes our wellness, performance, and relationships. When it comes to personal and professional development, factor analysis hasn’t been done and so I did that factor analysis of what optimizes wellness, performance, and relationships. In what ways do we sabotage our wellness, performance, relationships? In what ways do we, on the opposite side, optimize it? And out of that research came the ten saboteurs or the 10 factors that we discovered that negatively impact wellness, performance, and relationships and the positive side, we discovered five positive factors and we ended up calling these, if the saboteurs are sabotaging you, then the counterpart to the saboteur is your sage, the positive part of your brain, and the five superpowers of the sage that came from this research were empathize, which we know, you know, bringing love and empathy to yourself and others; explore, which is about beginner’s mind, deep curiosity about what’s really going on, discovering the deeper truth of things; innovate, which is obvious, coming up with out-of-the-box ideas and more and better ideas; navigate, which is being guided by a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, what brings value, purpose, and meaning to our life, having that inner compass; and activate, which is about moving into action, not in a typical way, but moving into action in a calm, clear-headed, laser-focused, fearless moving into action where we are not distracted by all the drama of the saboteurs and calm, clear-headed, laser-focused on the action that needs to be taken. So those became the five superpowers of the sage.

Alex: How do you compare the superpowers and this ten factor model? How does that compare to, let’s say, a personality assessment, looking at the five factor model?

Shirzad: Yeah, what we find is that one of the things that happens when people use personality assessment too often, actually, they may be mistyped and misassessed and also it sometimes gives them a little bit of wrong incentive for doubling down on bad behavior. To give you an example, sometimes, when people do some strength assessments, they say, “You know what, I am the activator type. I’m not the creative type, that’s somebody else,” and, actually, if you over activate, you become a controller and that’s a saboteur. Overactivity is actually not a great thing. Overusing your strengths becomes your greatest weakness and that’s what saboteurs do, they overuse your strength to make them your greatest weakness. So we actually don’t use the saboteur assessment as a typing system. We never tell people you are the controller type, that’s who you’re born to be, that’s who you are. We actually say, actually, right now, it appears that from your actions, controller is the way you self sabotage the most and then stickler is the next and then maybe victim is the next, whatever. And that can change as you work on those patterns. For example, my number one self sabotage way was the victim saboteur. That’s how I was in clinical depression for 30 years. I felt sorry for myself and self-pity was the way I soothed myself. It was a bad replacement for love and, at some point, I realized I wanted to work on that. Now, the victim is no longer my top saboteur, it’s actually my bottom saboteur. So, it would have been wrong for somebody to say, “You are the victim type of person,” I just happen to have a victim saboteur. So in that sense, we are very careful to use the saboteur assessment not as a typing system but as a self-discovery that allows you to keep shifting and changing and your saboteurs to get weaker as you go. 

Alex: That makes sense. So let’s go back to that journey. So, what prompted you to want to work on positive intelligence and create this measure? What was that transition like? How many years in between like getting that company and starting this?

Shirzad: Well, back to the whisper, right? So the whisper in childhood that sustained me, “Well, Shirzad, your path is to play on the world stage and change millions of lives like your heroes, Martin Luther King and Gandhi,” so millions of lives was always in my head. I always was following a path of what would bring massive, scalable, affordable, true life changing transformation. I thought that based on this research, if I put that in a book called Positive Intelligence and lots of people read that and find it life changing, then I’m done. Whisper manifested. So, indeed, the book just becomes a New York Times bestseller. it gets translated to 20 different languages, and I started getting emails and messages from people around the world saying, “This changed my life, this changed my life, this changed my life,” and I said, “Okay, mission manifested, lives changed, millions, done. I’m done.” And then the problem is I would reach out to them six months later, “Hey, how are you doing?” and vast majority of them would say, “You know what, I’ve gone back to my old behavior.” And then I thought, okay, maybe if I just do powerful workshops, intensive workshops, after a few days or whatever, people will get it and then, again, after those workshops, people saying, “This was the most life changing thing I did. I’m gonna be so different.” Three months later, “I’m back to my old behavior.” So I got really, really clear that this simple operating system we have created, as simple as it is, hey, intercept your saboteurs, do these brain activation techniques to energize the sage, positive part of your brain, and use your positive superpowers, the five superpowers, that’s a simple operating system, but even as simple as that is, most people needed some kind of help practicing on a daily basis so that these brain rewiring things actually happen, these become habits for life. That’s how I decided we have got to create an app and a technology that enables people to go from being inspired, that 20 percent insight to that 80 percent muscle building. And so I got convinced that we need technology for that and so we created an app. Now, this has been several years in the making, we are into multiple next generations of it, but, basically, the app takes all of these teachings and parses them out into six weeks of one week, let’s just focus on your judge saboteur. Another week, let’s just focus on your top other saboteurs, controller, victim, whatever it is. Another week, let’s just focus on the sage perspective that says every circumstance can be converted into gift and opportunity, let’s practice that, and three weeks focusing on each of the five sage powers. Now, we have a lasting transformation truly occurring where now when we reach out to people six months later, they’re still doing the practice. 90 percent plus says it massively changed their wellness, they’re far less stressed, it really impacted their relationships, really impacted their performance so that whisper is finally being manifested with the help of technology, which I thought was the missing part. 

Alex: That’s great. I love how you picked up on your journey and connected with that initial intention to impact millions of people. So, what has been the most rewarding part of having gone from that? It’s almost like a hero’s journey, right? So, that dark night of the soul when you came into the office and taking it to creating positive intelligence, what has been the most rewarding part of that journey for you?

Shirzad: Alex, I love you using hero’s journey and I truly believe that all of us are in the hero’s journey and most of us don’t realize it. In retrospect, when I look back at my life, it is as if everything was a perfect design for me to manifesting exactly what I’m manifesting. As I look at my childhood, I would not want anything about it different. I wouldn’t want any of the trauma taken away. I wouldn’t want any of the pain taken away because all it was what gave me all of the compassion and the discovery and the depth and all of the stuff that ended up being so critical. I would not take away that traumatic moment in my office being demoted. All of it is as if perfect design. And so one of the things that I actually do in our coach training, I have people ask themselves, “What if my life was a perfectly written novel, written by the perfect novelist, where every chapter has been happening for a reason? What if you go back to your life and say every chapter was the perfect chapter, what’s the title of that chapter? What’s the purpose of that chapter? What was the meaning of that chapter?” and back to your thing about hero’s journey, if I was witnessing all of that on the screen with a hero going through all these chapters, in preparation in the hero’s journey, what wants to happen next for this hero? So that we really bring this beautiful embracing of everything about our life and saying, “What if everything happened for a reason, what wants to happen next for this amazing, beautiful hero?” So we fall in love with ourselves and we fall in love with our life and we see the meaning of everything that has happened and that helps us manifest what wants to happen next because I absolutely believe we are all on a hero’s journey. Unfortunately, most of us don’t realize it. Most of us keep judging our past and judging our present and fail to see the gift, the gift, the gift that every chapter has been and, therefore, what’s possible for us next. And so that has been one of the biggest takeaway for me. It’s all beautiful mystery unfolding in life.

Alex: You had this chapter in your career as well as CEO of CTI, Coaches Training Institute, which is known as one of the best coach training schools out there and I meet a lot of coaches that just love the coactive approach, so tell me about that part of your journey. How was it running one of the top coach education companies? What were some of the highlights for you for those, I think, six years or so? 

Shirzad: Yeah, I think I ran CTI six or seven years and what I love is that the founders of CTI, Henry, Karen, and Laura, were truly genuine in their desire for transformation. And so the essence of the company was love, was giving. So what I got to see is that if the essence is genuine, if a company exists in order to make a difference that, permeates into a culture and that permeates into every interaction with the client and that eventually permeates into truly transforming people’s lives. And that I contrast it against too often I have been part of organizations led sometimes by one individual, sometimes by more, who try to teach something to the world where behind the curtains you realize actually they’re not walking the walk. And I had in my life, and call it the solution, I’m very disappointed when I discovered some of my teachers, some of my gurus, some of the people I followed, when I really got to know them, they weren’t walking the walk. And so it became so important to me, something I brought into Positive Intelligence, what we keep saying every day is we do not want to be teaching anything to the world that we are not practicing every day, and including me as CEO being held accountable. So I have asked my entire company hold me accountable for what we teach. Every time I’m in saboteur mode, everybody in the company has the right to say, “Hey, stop, couple of minutes of shifting our brain activation so we shift to positive mode.” So being authentic with what we do, walking the walk, has been a very big learning and inspiration that I brought from CTI.

Alex: Yeah. As coaches, I think it’s so important to walk the talk because it depends on — I’ve always been also very in tune with that, like when I’m doing coaching, I want to make sure that I’m in a position where anything that comes up with a client, you feel like it’s something that you could do yourself as well. So I actually went through like a jarring kind of personal situation that happened to me this year and one of the things that I enjoyed the most out of my own dark night of the soul was that when push came to shove, I was the person who I thought I was. When something extreme happens to you, you’re like, are you going to be that person that you think you are? Are you going to face things the way that you would ideally face them? Are you going to react in alignment with your values? And, sometimes in life I think we do and sometimes we don’t but it is that pursuit of being able to align with your values, which means you have to know what your values are and then you have to know how far away are you from those values. And I like that you bring up the fact that we’re all living that hero’s journey and maybe for some it’s clear that they are going through that process and the stages look more defined and in some other cases, some people don’t know about Joseph Campbell, don’t know about the hero’s journey, and even if they do or they don’t, they can’t see it in their own lives. But I agree. That’s why I think it’s so powerful the arc of kind of how you talk about myths. It’s so relatable. That’s one of the beautiful things about art and storytelling is that when art is truly powerful, it’s almost like it connects you to these universal forms that feel like, ultimately, a reconnection with what you truly are. But it’s hard to see that in the day to day lives of people, right? So, when you’re working with a coach that is aligned with those values, I think, ultimately, transcending the approach that a coach might use, the models, the assessment you use, I think connecting with someone that is aligned with those values, I think it makes a difference. It’s not something I would scientifically test but, for me, I think it makes a difference. What do you think?

Shirzad: I totally agree. And as a matter of fact, one of the reasons I’m here, Alex, is because that aspect of you being that authentic and purpose driven was obvious to me when we interacted last time, the interactions I’ve had. So I got to experience you as a kindred spirit, somebody who is essentially about changing lives and making a difference. And in that authenticity, you then motivated me to want to be part of this conversation. Because I really respect that purpose-driven mission that you bring to the work that your organization does and your organization is adding huge value to creating a village for coaches and bringing them together and I’ve benefited a lot from the work that you do and that congruity between your values and what you talk to the world about is part of the reason I’m here. So it does — I think people pick up on that. There’s a little bit of antenna we have for authenticity and truth and when we pick up on that, it’s magnetic. When somebody is that way, we are magnetically drawn to them and it has an impact.

Alex: Thank you, Shirzad. I really appreciate it. When you think about where the world is today, I mean, we are certainly experiencing geopolitical, a storm of different issues. There’s all sorts of things happening in the world. A lot of really good stuff, the rise of AI which I think summarizes a lot of the — there’s a lot of exciting things but also there’s a lot of challenging things that come with it. What is the role of coaching in the 21st century? Enabling a world that is more aligned with what we would hope in a more kind of utopic kind of situation.

Shirzad: Oh, you’re getting excited now. All right. So, about, what? Three years ago, I realized I am waking up in a state of resignation and fear because I was seeing the rise of racism, sexism, darker voices in at least the United States becoming increasingly bold voices and threatening democracy and threatening even the survival of our planet, and I until then had kind of believed a little bit in the possibility of politicians but I started realizing politicians are not only not going to save us, but some of the politicians we are seeing were the actual absolute source of generating this level of untruth and rise of sexism, racism, and darker forces. What I step back on is my resignation was coming from the old model, that says politicians are the leaders and leaders are democracy and they’re going to lead our world into a better place and I realized actually politicians are now increasing the source of the problem, not the solution. So, who can be the source of the solution? Politicians come and go but coaches are here to stay and coaches have a far more lasting impact in the work that we do on human being and on becoming a generator of positivity and good rather than the opposite. So I actually started realizing this intuitive detraction that I had to the world of coaching was not beginning to manifest itself. Sometimes, for the big part, they were going to play on changing millions of lives so it was the coaches who are going to be agents of that transformation on the planet. And from that place, I really woke up what — we took some actions on that. For example, we have a $1000 app-guided mental fitness program that coaches were primarily purchasing from us and we actually made that into a grant and in the past 3 years, we have granted coaches our mental fitness app-guided program and more than 60,000 coaches have taken advantage of that grant and the purpose for it was we want every coach on the planet to have bigger impact, attracting more clients than they have been, get over their fears about how to attract more clients and be more prosperous as a coach and with each of those clients, have a more massive impact on those clients, more transformative, again, with the use of app technology and things like that so that the impact that the coach has on each client is more lasting and also they can attract more clients because too many awesome coaches in the world don’t have enough clients, and part of it is because they don’t know how to get over their fears and assumptions about money and prosperity and all that stuff and they are missing a lot of their potential.

Alex: Yeah. I think it’s interesting that so many people want to be coaches and so very few are actually as successful as a coach as they want to be. I think the people that are sometimes the most successful in the coaching industry are those that are hitting you on LinkedIn saying that they help coaches get leads and things like that.

Shirzad: Exactly, yes.

Alex: So coaches sometimes kind of go and pursue some of those avenues and those programs to be a better at marketing yourself as a coach ends up kind of sucking up a lot of coaches’ money but don’t necessarily gives you the return. It’s so interesting. I get so many of those requests on LinkedIn, it’s like, “Hey, I help coaches grow seven-figure practices,” and I’m like, ugh, it’s like I don’t know about that.

Shirzad: Yeah.

Alex: But, yeah, I think one of the really exciting things about coaching is I think truly is in the process of becoming more of a truly a profession where there’s clear pathways for people to go through a certification program that’s very good and then start your coaching business. Before, it was kind of like yoga training. Most people that go through it have a great experience, they learn a lot but don’t necessarily become yoga teachers. I think the same happened with coaches, but now there’s a much larger market for coaching services. There’s a lot more demand. The clients know what to look for, organizations know how to be strategic about the deployment of coaching services and they also know that what happens when you don’t have coaching in a large organization so it’s —

Shirzad: Exactly, yeah.

Alex: This is an exciting time. As we close this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, anything you would like to add about your journey, about how you’re seeing coaching today, about the work that you’re doing? Would love to hear it.

Shirzad: Yeah, I would love every coach to begin to truly see themselves as a potential agent of helping save our planet. That’s how important our role is. And to question every voice in your head that diminishes who you are and how you became a coach and relay that to that or any assumptions you have about how prosperous you can be as you’re a coach because a lot of coaches, we are givers as a coach, we are here to change other people’s lives, I had to overcome all sorts of lies my head used to make, like, “Hey, Gandhi is your hero, Gandhi wasn’t asking for money or anything,” I had shame about asking for money. I had shame about being prosperous. I had guilt about all of that stuff. So what I realized is a lot of what was preventing me from having the impact I could have was limiting assumptions I had about how can one be a giver and also really insist on being financially prosperous, putting oxygen mask on myself first so that I could be there for others. So I would love for coaches to honor themselves more, love themselves more, more deeply trust themselves. Put the oxygen mask on yourself so that you can actually have a bigger impact on the planet. Take care of yourself. A drained and exhausted coach who is always worried about where the finances are coming from is not going to have the impact on the planet that you could otherwise. So, you are an important part of saving our planet and it’s such an honor to be with fellow coaches because, hey, what an honor to be primarily about changing lives.

Alex: Thank you, Shirzad. Thank you for joining me in this episode today.

Shirzad: All right, Alex, that was fun and easy. You made it fun and easy.