Advisors: Helping You Get the Life You want

There are lots of people who do similar work to mine. Very good doctors, very good coaches, very good teachers, very good therapists, very good ministers, and very good mentors exist out there who can help you get the life you want. If you have never taken the plunge to go outside yourself for solutions, why not try it? Fear or embarassment or pride are self-defeating reasons to stay where you are, when you're not happy there and would really like to be somewhere else.

The best people-helpers do the same thing, whether they are conscious of it or not. When they start with the "identified patient", be it a person, family, business or team, this principle guides their decisions:

Heal the Leader, Heal the Group

Simple, right? How they do this is very important.

First, they identify the leader. Most times, it's the boss, the mom, the dad, the coach, the teacher, the obvious. Sometimes, especially in a business setting, the leader can be a team player and the boss submits to his or her direction. In this case, another problem exists and needs to be dealt with first--abdicating leadership causes great confusion and frustration for those who are lead.

Second, they identify the problem. That might not be obvious at first. Very often, people come for help saying "my son won't go off the drugs" or "the team just won't get behind this new set of objectives" or "the student has attention problems and won't be still in class." Rarely is the stated concern the chief problem. "I want to get rid of my anxiety" might actually be "I'm angry as hell at the way my dad controlled my life, now I'm in a job I hate and it's all his fault".

Third, they have the client clearly state his or her desired goal. Does this sound easy? For an outsider looking on someone's life, it is easy as pie. For the person, team, family, etc., it can be a struggle to articulate what they want. Saying "I don't want to fight anymore" or "I'm sick of being a nervous wreck" or "I'm tired of not meeting my business unit's goals because all my team members are lazy do-nothings" is NOT saying what they want. It is saying what they DON'T want. Going forward with any client without them having a clear objective is an absolute waste of time. The best helpers won't do it. How do you know if you're successful if you don't know where you're going? Make them state their desired outcome at the start.

Finally, they put together a plan to help the client to get from where they are, to where they are going. The plan must be solid, yet flexible with identifiable ways to measure progress. Good progress. The client must be working. The coach can't make the baskets for the player, can he? A good helper gives the tools and facilitates the clients growth to do what must be done himself. It is his or her life, their family, their business: they must love it.

These principles can help business leaders, parents, teachers get the best out of their charges. The best are already doing. Interestingly, the best also avail themselves of help from advisors, too.

In order to get to get to the next level of performance faster, seeking help from someone beyond your level helps. When I played the violin, there came a point where my teacher could help me no more. She recommended her teacher so that I could go to the next level. In both cases, I needed a teacher, helper, guide because there were many things I just couldn't learn myself, no matter how much I tried.

This is such a fundamental principle of life, yet people often only apply it to literal things like singing or running. But what about life? Do you have a guide in your spiritual life? Your career? Your family? Your parenting? We can't all be the authority on everything. Growth can be accelerated with help. This is constructive.

Many people, myself included at times, wait until life is "broke" before they fix it. The truth is, their life isn't being maintained and cared for very well and then it falls apart at the first big stress. The most successful people HATE fixing broken things, they like BUILDING things--including their lives.

Find someone to help you to the next level. You might have to pay for it. So what? If you get what you want so much faster and so much better than you imagined possible, you won't be thinking in terms of dollars anymore, you'll be thinking in the terms of all people of greatness: TIME. Great people redeem time. Failures waste it rarely realizing until it's too late that it is the most precious thing they have.