Get a Life Coach

Former NFL superstar wide receiver Terrell Owens has had a life coach for the last two years. He says it has made a huge difference in his life and, if he had had a life coach during his playing days, it would probably have made him a better player too. Indeed, if he’d received life coaching during his playing days, he said, maybe he would still be playing now.

Everyone needs a co-active life coach to help them find their way through an increasingly complex professional world and personal life.

-CNN Interview September 2013

If I have one regret about my own career, it’s that my mentor passed away while I was still in my 20s and I never found another one until I turned 60. I believe that everyone, EVERYONE, should have a mentor or life coach. What a difference it can make to your quality of life. 

My new coach helped me narrow my focus– do more of what I am good at and less of everything else. She helped me find my “captain”– the personage who comes to me when I am troubled and who has my back. Whenever I feel uncertain, I can call on this being; then my breathing slows, I feel more relaxed, and I can concentrate as well as perform better.

My life coach now is also my wife, @desiradda. 

You can sign up for a FREE seminar with her, CLICK HERE. 

I wrote this testimonial for Dawn MacMillan Firestone:

“The greatest beneficiary of her coaching so far is, I believe, me. She’s helped me first narrow then improve my focus, find my life purpose, change my personal business model and achieve greater levels of success,” Bruce M Firestone, founder, Ottawa Senators, broker, Century 21 Explorer Realty, September 2013.

Now as I was listening to TO on CNN, it occurred to me that in addition to all the media training, nutrition advice and physical conditioning that sports teams provide their players, if I was still running the Ottawa Senators or any other major league sports franchise, I would make the extra investment and hire a co-active coach for every player.

Most of these coaches charge around $300 per month for two sessions so for a cost of $3,600 per year the team could provide their athletes a service that might not only help them on the field/ice/court but also at home, with their families and kids and after their retirement as well when other concerns settle in– financial, mental and physical health. When you are paying anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to $25 million per year to these people, $3,600 does not seem like a big investment especially if it leads to higher productivity and greater levels of satisfaction and happiness.

And, oh by the way, it makes sense for professionals in other (non-sports) fields to have life coaching too IMHO.

@profbruce

Postscript: Without a doubt, the other area of coaching most athletes need help with is managing their financial affairs. A huge number of highly paid players are broke at the end of their careers or within five years thereafter.

Know what the no. 1 thing in life is? Love? Money? Fame? Success? Nope, none of the above. It’s trust.

Every player has people around him or her (agents, friends, family, hangers-on, lawyers, accountants, entourage and sock people) who have can’t-miss business propositions. It’s nothing to blow a million dollars these days on a new failed bar or restaurant not to mention millions more on dubious loans, failed marriages, stupid business models, inflated property purchases in multiple cities…

Sports teams should make a more concerted effort to educate their players in this regard and players should never designate control over their financial affairs to anyone but themselves. Having said that, they need to find financial advisers that actually know what they are doing.

Remember, even if you have $10 million cash in your bank account at the end of your career, invested in t-bills at say 1.1% per annum, this is only $110,000 per year before tax. So if a decent financial planner can goose his or her returns to even just 3 or 4% without doing anything stupid, that’ll make a huge difference to the athlete’s post-retirement lifestyle.

BTW, exactly the same advice applies to the average working person– about life, about trust and about financial planning. 

Now I should add that in some research I did a few years ago, 61 of the top 100 richest Canadian families had all or substantially all their wealth invested in real estate so I believe that real property should form part of anyone’s financial planning. That’s why I wrote, Real Estate Investing Made Simple and why I am doing a free webinar called: How to Get Rich, Slow. It’s also why I do real estate coaching. How’s that for shameless self promotion?

@profbruce