I had an interesting insight this morning.
Putting a price tag on any product, service, or coaching is going to be a lie. My courses. My strategy sessions. My coaching. My health consultations. My activators. My Water Energizer. My Heaven on Earth…
Really, almost any product.
For one main reason:
You, The Buyer, create the value for yourself!
Nothing has value without someone realizing it… Making it real… But in addition to it: without saying it does, without someone valuing it. So that means, that the issue is value or valuation. If we didn’t have different values, if we valued everything the same, the world would be a lot easier place to navigate.
Around the time of the second world war and the Holocaust, a German boy puzzled himself with the same questions. Fatherland, Jews, peace… he had these heavy duty questions, and he saw that each person he observed valued those differently.
His original name was Robert Schirokauer. He changed his name to Robert Hartman later. He came to the United States and developed theories and even a measuring tool of people’s values… I took his test, back in 1998-ish, this is how I know about him.
What I found out in that test, Value Profile, shocked me… in fact shook me to my core: I didn’t value people. I didn’t value them higher than stuff… in fact I treated people as tools, and not more. I used people and then I set them aside when I didn’t need them. I had no use for them when I had no need for them.
Since then I have grown, and most growth came from this newfound awareness of how I value, or don’t value people, ideas, and things.
I have found that most people are unaware of what they value, and are surprised at their own actions, or inaction.
They don’t know that how they value things effect their lives more than anything else. They don’t know that the value is entirely up to them, that value can be grown by activating “value”. Realizing value.
I grew up with an appreciation for education. Appreciation is the verb saying ‘you value’: The root of the word is precious, i.e. valuable.
I instinctively knew, then tested, that my participation increases the value. I am what people call ‘the eager beaver student.’ The kind you hated in school, and maybe even now. This is probably why I actually learned the material they taught in school, because I knew that my participation is what actually creates the value.
I KNEW that my participation is what actually creates the value
I am still the same way… although the type of participation has changed… it is no longer school… or rarely.
Anything that doesn’t allow for participation I can’t learn.
You can only learn ‘about’ without participation… Useless. Participation is the enzyme, or catalyst that activates the value you get.
There is no value in the thing… nonactivated value is not value. It cannot exist in reality.
Recently I have tested this theory of mine with a student who wasn’t doing well at the time. I decided to give him opportunities to activate the value, advise him how to do it, and see what comes out of it.
I had done it before, but wasn’t documenting it… so this was going to be proof positive… or not.
I encouraged the student to use teaching to activate what he wanted to learn.
I also suggested that he takes on a study partner or two. And then asked him to present the material to two different classes I teach.
Like Cinderella, he responded and now he is my pride and joy. He is smart, has good questions, and is getting a whole lot out of his studies.
Yet… he still struggles with the idea of value. He is looking for value, tries to see it, doesn’t yet understand that value is created. Doesn’t see that there is no value in reality. Value is a function of languaging, it only exists in the speaking…
Your relationship to your word as your power tool is the difference between living a life you love and live it powerfully… or a so-so, humdrum life where you are floating, on the big ocean of life, in a boat without a rudder.
What gives direction to life, to your actions, and how you feel about yourself and your life is the rudder… the words that you speak as an act of creating yourself and your life. And the value.
We call that speaking that creates declaration.
Everyone I know thinks that positive thinking is about any thought or any speaking… but it’s the view of an uneducated, unconscious, can’t tell their ass from a hole in the ground person, and a total misunderstanding of the principle.
Not every word is a rudder, and not every word changes reality, not every word changes the reality of who you are and how you see the world.
As long as your integrity, your relationship to your word is low, no word changes anything, including your promises.
But once you raise your integrity to at least 10%, you get into the zone where you can declare… Declare what lights you up, declare what is important to you, declare where that ship of yours is going to go.
The relationship between word and you becomes even stronger at around 30%… Most people I measure have a level of integrity between 1% and 10%, people who have done well as my students had as high as 30% integrity.
Landmark Education’s system is to hide (not say) why they ask you to do certain things… The purpose of the guest game and other promises is to strengthen your integrity, and debriefing is to strengthen your responsibility.
Not surprisingly participants hate it… If I were at 1% level, I would hate it too. But I am not, and have never been. My integrity started at 30%…
As a result of my ‘high’ integrity I was the exception and I got immense value out of my participation in Landmark Education. The correct wording is ‘I realized immense value out of my participation in Landmark Education…’ As I said, the value is made by you, it cannot be received, it cannot be given to you.
And even if you SEE VALUE when you buy, the value disappears unless you keep on realizing it by your participation.
One of my 30% integrity people sent me a thank you note today after I thanked her for her unsolicited donation:
Thank you so much and you are welcome for my somewhat small donation. You are worth every penny to me . The time you spend with us, the research and all the thinking and catching you do and articles you write, if put in to money no one would afford it. You and your work are really priceless. ~ Amy
Wouldn’t you want to get value the way she does? Start strengthening your relationship to your word, and you can be like her.
1. the value is in the eye of the buyer…
2. the value literally changes with what the buyer can and will do with what they bought.
The buyer needs to become ready to use the coaching and generate big value with it. Cooking recipes come to mind. Unless you know cooking without recipes, unless you develop a feel for what works together, every recipe will be a disaster for you.
Value is created by you… but can you create value? Are you ready?
Back in 2004, I attended an online-marketing conference in Washington DC. I ran into this awkward dude, Tellman Knudson, and we started to chat. He said that I was sitting on a goldmine. That was invisible to me…
He told me, in about an hour “session” what it is I should do to mine the gold instead of sitting on it.
It was all wasted on me. It actually increased my sense of worthlessness… I had no ‘access’ to the value in that coaching. Later I did every course, every coaching program of his, with the exact same result… Except, now, 15 years later, I am starting to implement…
A year later I ran into famed marketer, Alex Mandossian, who spent two hours with me, because HE got excited about the goldmine I was sitting on.
I remember watching what he did on his computer to show me… but it was all the work of a magician: I didn’t see what he did with his hands… It was also useless to me.
Later I spent another 30 grands on useless-to-me coaching, Rich Shefren, and many others… I got not a single cent return on my investment.
Five years later I did a course with Henry Gold, he is still around. He comped me into his course, because we had lunch in Las Vegas… Hey, sometimes all it takes is to be entertaining to get a course for free.
This whole ‘marketing’ thing started to make sense by then. I started to see what I could learn to do…
Six years of no useful action, no results up to this point! Oh, and some 30 grands spent.
I sweet-talked one of Henry’s students into teaming up with me. The setup worked. I volunteered to teach in a class, teach to do what I could not do, what I didn’t understand, but I saw that without that, without teaching it, any goldmine would remain just an uncomfortable thing to sit on.
It worked…
I created an eight module course called Listbuilding Mechanics… Unfortunately people got tired or discouraged and never did the last two modules. I haven’t even created the video for modules seven and eight… are still on my “to learn” list.
Without students to teach it… it will remain unlearned. But interestingly many of the students of that little course became marketers… while I haven’t.
I priced my course so low that it was a no-brainer for anyone who wanted to learn the content. In addition, I gave hands-on consulting, for free, because I needed the practice, I needed to learn what I was teaching.
It worked for me. I have observed my students even after they finished the course. Many became successful marketers. With the six modules of the training.
I have always dreamed of teaching… teaching those who can use what I teach. Who will use what I teach.
There is this massive disconnect in most areas of online teaching. People are buying the thousand, two thousand dollar coaching packages. Programs that are above the level where they can ACTUALIZE, realize the value.
People, says the Peter Principle, always want to go to the level where they are incompetent… it’s like the Dark Side guides them there. This is the biggest reason those programs produce only 1-2% results… this is why Frank Kern, a famed marketer, decided to leave the lucrative field of teaching. It is demoralizing to teach and produce little or no success for your clients and students.
And me and my little course that cost a pittance, produced results for them, very little money for me. Goldmine… no shovel. lol.
I have seen that to be someone worth to be coached, someone who will realize value in coaching, you need to become someone who can.
You need to raise your integrity level. You need to be consistent. You need to be willing and able to say no to distraction and do what you said you would do.
I have a preparatory program. I have many names for it… one of them is hero program.
You choose one of several different paths… one of them is to promise to listen, every day, to a 100 hour long audio. Not the whole thing, just 30 minutes to an hour a day.
Another method is the 4 daily tasks… and you can even start with one to strengthen yourself… even 1 daily task is too much for most people right now.
One of my clients promised to raise her business 1% a week… doesn’t sound much, but if you look, every week… you need a strategy, a plan, and consistent action.
Unless you can become worth a damn, and you aren’t! you are not coachable… and you probably won’t amount to much.
I coached in a lot of courses in Landmark Education.
My favorite was the 17 week long course, where I could take the participants through a whole journey.
I started each 17 week relationship with two questions: do you want to do the 150 dollar, the 1,500 dollar, or the hundred thousand dollar course?
This was as close as I could ever get to activate the relationship between the self and the word… to enable the participant to create value.
The second question was: what will potentially take you out of this course? People, surprisingly, knew. And they told me. Me, armed with this knowledge, could bring them back from quitting.
I learned this from Werner Erhard who used to interview his staff members and their intendeds before they tied the knot… He asked: what will break you apart, what will make you want a divorce.
You know what you want… and you also know what will take you out… take you out so you won’t have it.
Tell me so I can fight against it with you.
If you are ready to grow and embark on a project to become worth a damn, the hero program may be the path for you.
You need to know what you are shooting for… but you don’t need to have a long range plan… But if what you are going for is not important enough for you, you’ll fail.
Decide that you want the 100K program and then tailor your actions to that. That is what I would do…
Embark on the hero program to become worth a damn
