In this episode, I talk with personal development & executive coach, expert speaker & author, and supermom of five, Kim Ades on a number of topics including her coaching business and her journey.

About Kim Ades

Kim Ades, MBA is president and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and JournalEngine Software. Author, speaker, entrepreneur, coach, and mother of 5, Kim is one of North America’s foremost experts on coaching high-prole executives by teaching them the principles of thought mastery. By using her unique process of coaching through journaling, she works with clients who are intelligent, driven, and ambitious and helps them examine and tweak their thinking in order to yield extraordinary results.

What Kim Stands For

Kim stands for helping people see themselves in a powerful light through the process of thought mastery.

Key Takeaways

• No matter the industry and position, those people with high degree of emotional resilience are more likely to succeed.
• When thinking is aligned with goals, action naturally unfolds.
• We need to shift our thinking before shifting our behavior.

The 3 habits that contributed to most of Kim’s success:

1. Journaling
2. Keep getting up (don’t give up)
3. Continuously trying new things

Biggest Hurdles

That I could actually be the president of my own company – the idea that I didn’t need a sidekick or someone else to make that happen.

Looking Into the Future

We need to spend our time understanding the relationship between thoughts and outcomes and work towards an increased level of personal control and management.

The Nightmare Gift

The sale of her last business through a shotgun agreement.

Interview Links

• JournalEngine
• Frame Of Mind Coaching
• Frame Of Mind Coaching Blog
• Dropbox
• Skype

The Resource

The Art of Possibility, Ben Zander

The Doozy

You are way smarter than you think. Focus on your niche market.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey everyone, this is Mel Abraham, the author of the #1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy and welcome to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show and in this episode, it’s going to be a lot of fun because I get a chance to go up to Canada and meet with a new friend of mine; is doing some amazing, incredible things in coaching, in the executive space, in mindset and entrepreneurship.

Her name is Kim Ades and she is an MBA. She is the president and founder of The Frame of Mind Coaching and Journal Engine software. She is an author and a speaker, an entrepreneur, a coach and probably the greatest role of all a mother of 5. Kim is one of North America’s foremost experts on coaching high profile executives by teaching them the principles of thought mastery.

I know you know how I think that our perspective as entrepreneurs, as thoughtpreneurs, as thought leaders, as leaders in general, we need to shift thinking first before we shift behavior and so, I’m blessed to have her on the show.

Mel: Welcome Kim. It’s great to have you here.

Kim: I’m really excited to be here and it sounds like we’re on the same page. So, I’m really excited to be having this conversation with you.

Mel: Thank you. Thank you. I think we are and you know, the interesting thing is—you and I had this—the first time we met kind of face to face, digitally, at least. Your team reached out to me and once I had a chance to review some of the things you do, I said, “Wow, we’re on parallel paths” and do me a favor. Just for our audience, just to let, and I call them the Solution Nation.

But just let them know kind of your journey. I kind of gave a bit of a background of what you do or where you’ve come from. But in your own words, your journey, did you expect to be here? How did we get here and how did we come up with the insights that really start to drive the things that you do?

Kim: So, did I expect to be here? I don’t think anyone’s asked me that question before so it’s a good question. I didn’t necessarily expect to be here but it is absolutely a natural unfolding of what was supposed to happen for me, if that makes any sense.

Ever since I was a kid, I was always the person that everybody went to when they had a problem, when they had something they were struggling with I was the voice of wisdom, right. So, it’s not; it’s definitely a place; that’s the perfect place for me, completely suitable. But how did I get here from a more strategic or tactical standpoint is that I am an entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, if you will and I used to own a company that built simulation based assessments and what we did was help companies make better hiring decisions by looking at their skillsets, their personality, their IQ and really trying to identify what makes a top performer in any given industry, in any given field.

And so, we ended up testing hundreds of thousands of people to really figure out who is the right person for this position and what we discovered after testing all these people and collecting so many data points was that top performers have something in common and it’s not necessarily what you would expect and it didn’t matter what industry it was, it didn’t matter what position they were going for but people who had a higher degree of emotional resilience were going to be much more likely to succeed than anybody else.

And when I looked at the coaching industry what I noticed was that by and large, the coaching industry was not designed necessarily to help people build their emotional resilience but it was truly designed to help people reach goals by taking action. And I kind of felt like that’s cool but it’s missing something. And I felt like what we really need to do is help people take the step that precedes action and that is exactly what you mentioned earlier, it’s shifting their thinking so that their thinking is aligned with their goals and when that happens, action naturally takes place or action naturally unfolds.

And so, that was really where it all started and I kind of felt like, “I could create a new coaching model that would have a profound, deep, long lasting effect on clients by really helping them look at their thinking and helping them build their emotional resilience so that they’re handling the adversity that comes their way and turning it into something good.”

Mel: So cool to hear you say that because listen, I’m a CPA which in Canada is a Chartered Accountant so, I’m one of those left brain thinkers but in all of my experience doing work with entrepreneurs and businesses, buying and selling and building and doing that the ultra-uber successful businesses come from the right brain. They understand, I found that they understand and Solution Nation, I hope you heard what Kim said. That the emotional connection becomes so, so important to your customers, to yourself, to your significant others, to the culture that you create in the business that, that ultimately drives our success points.

Would you say that’s the case, Kim?

Kim: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting that you use the word “The Emotional Connection” and for me, emotional connection follows when you’re heading in the right direction and what I find is by and large, people have these massive goals that they want to reach and they start taking action but they don’t realize that their pointed in the other direction.

And they don’t take a moment to say, “Where am I? Where am I going? And what direction do I need to navigate myself in, in order to head in the right direction?”

And that’s the, what you would say, The Emotional Component. I would say, that’s The Emotional Resilience Component. And really help people understand that their thinking is what drives their results followed by their action but first the thinking part has to be correctly designed and correctly oriented and so, that’s the work that I do with my clients and it sounds like that’s very much the same as what you do with your clients.

Mel: Well, it certainly is consistent because I think that like you said, “Thought precedes behavior” and the challenge that I found is that sometimes we let out thoughts do their own thinking and we don’t control them.

You said, people end up going the wrong direction. I kind of give this analogy. I said, “Can you imagine just running down to the shore, grabbing a boat with no oars, no life preservers, not sure what river it is, you don’t even know where the current is, you don’t know what the weather is and you jump in the boat and you wonder why 5 years down the road, you’re going, I don’t know how I got here.”

And I mean, how many of us have done that professionally and I even in personal relationships where we stepped into a relationship that after we were in it for a while, we realized, “This wasn’t where I wanted to be. This was not where I wanted to go” and one of the key elements that I try to get people to think about is to live life with intention and that intention has to come from thoughts first.

Kim: Well, that’s exactly right and what I find is that clients I coach, very often, they just forget where they’re going. They just forget because they’re so in it and they’re so caught up in it and they’re so wrapped up in the drama and the day to day and the situation they’re in that they forget where it is that they ultimately want to be and they almost really turn their backs on that sometimes.

Mel: So, let me ask this. I’ve got a whole bunch of questions but let me just; along this point because I like the path that you’re going down is so, say I’m an executive or say I’m an entrepreneur or I’m a new entrepreneur, what’s one of the first things that you look for? What’s one of the first things that you turn around and say, “Hey, before we do anything let’s do this to figure out how you think?” Is it figuring out how they think or what they’re thinking?

Kim: Well, the first thing I want to do is kind of assess where their starting point is. I want to see what’s going right in their lives and what isn’t going right but more than anything, I want to see how they feel about those things. So, what I do is I want to take a snapshot, I want to take an assessment of:

• Where are you right now?
• Where do you stand?
• Where are you physically positioned?
• Where are you mentally positioned, emotionally positioned?

So, that I can understand what you’re grappling with, understand what you want to see different in your life and then I start to understand what brought them to that place. And so, always, the starting point is to really assess not only their situation but their thinking about their situation. That’s the starting point.

Mel: Do you have a formal assessment that you take them through, like the one you were talking about or is it more of an informal conversation with them?

Kim: Well, it’s a bit of both. So, I invite anybody who is listening to assess their frame of mind or their thinking. We have an assessment that we use on our website and that gives us a starting point. So, anyone’s invited to take that assessment and again, one of the most important things before taking action, before moving forward, before heading to where you think you want to go is to figure out where am I now and to address the areas where you’re not incongruent with your goals. And so, that’s my starting point always.

When we coach people, what we do is, we do a few things because what we’re trying to do is teach people how to monitor and observe their own thinking and to start becoming a master of their own thinking so that they can actively move in the direction that they would like to move in intentionally, right.

And so, what we do is first of all, we record every single call and we ask our clients to listen to their recording so that they can hear themselves and hear the language they use, the stories they tell and start to pick up the patterns that they fall into over and over and over again so that they can listen from a little bit of an objective standpoint and really hear how it is that they show up.

The second thing that we do is we ask our clients to journal in an online journal every single day for the duration of the coaching period. So, we give them a question to begin with, to get the ball rolling and to get their juices flowing. And then, when they journal, their journal goes to their coach. We have a team of coaches. So, it goes to their coach. The coach reads and responds to the journal and so, they’re in a dialogue with their coach every single day and what are we doing?

• We’re looking at their thinking.
• We’re looking at their patterns.
• We’re looking at where they get trapped.
• We’re looking at their beliefs, their perspectives, their values, their past experiences.
• We’re looking at the messages they receive and the messages they keep repeating to themselves over and over again that are keeping them trapped.

It’s almost like they’re held hostage in their own thinking and what we do is, basically we unlock them from that state and allow them to then determine where they want to go.

Mel: Great, great. So, let me take a step back. This discovery process, is this something that you ended up having to go through yourself to get yourself to where you’re at, here at the …

Kim: Well, I’ve been a journal-er my whole life and I have to say that, that had a huge impact on me and you know, there’s a technique to journaling that helps you move forward and there’s a technique that helps you kind of just stay where you are. So, journaling has played a big role.

I’ve had many, many coaches. I’ve had many, many amazing coaches and many, many not amazing coaches and that has helped me kind of sort through and really understand, what are the elements for incredible coaching?

And so, I’m always doing my own personal development work like that’s our job we have to do in order to be able to deliver top-notch coaching but at the same time, I think that I’ve come to a certain understanding of coaching that looks a little bit different from the norm, that takes on a different flavor, a different approach, a different philosophy and deliver as a completely different experience for clients.

Mel: So, as you look at that journey, what do you think and I know that one of the answers is probably journaling. But what do you think are the 3 habits that if you had to pick 3 that contributed the most to your success, to your rise and to your clients’ success?

Kim: So, yeah journaling is one for sure and what journaling has help me do is, it has helped me, it’s a bit of place for me to unload to release whatever it is that I’m feeling—fear, anxiety, worry, disappointments, confusion or whatever it is. So, it allows me to dump it all out but then, always at the end of my journal and for whoever is listening, I recommend this too if you’re journalers then journal and let it all out and then at the end of that particular entry, save some time, save some space and literally write down the words, “Okay, I’m done and it’s time to turn myself around.”

And then, ask yourself, “What do I want? Where am I going? What would I like to have in my life? How will this look?”

When you’re constantly ending that way, what you’re doing is you’re building the muscle of turning yourself towards what you want and so, journaling definitely number 1 habit.

Number 2 habit is that honestly, I just keep getting up. So, it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been knocked down, I just, just keep getting up.

And then, the third habit I would say is, I’m a big, huge experimenter. I’m willing to fail. I’m willing to try things I’ve never tried before. I’m willing to try things in small doses to see how it goes and then grow it from there like I never give up the opportunity to try something new.

Mel: Sweet. So, and Solution Nation, if you think about this for a moment because I think you said, Kim you said something that is really insightful and I think really important; I love hearing what you said about how you finish that journal entry because most of the time what we do is we use the journal as a dump and we just, we dump but we never reconnect it to our future, connect it to what we want, connect it into the direction we want to go and re-attach ourselves to what needs, what we need to move forward and re-acquaint ourselves possibly with levels of the celebration and gratitude for where we are and I think that, that shifts so much of that journaling experience that it’s a tremendous insight that you’re giving there.

Kim: Well and because the thread of the journal is if you keep telling the same old story over and over again, you don’t change your story, you don’t get to a new place. And so, it’s okay to tell the story but it’s not okay to live in that story if that story doesn’t work for you.

So, you need to leverage your journal and allow it to take you to a new place and so, really the purpose of the journal is to help you build the muscle of pivoting towards what you want and so, think of it like an ab. An ab muscle where you’re constantly trying to … and it’s the same concept except the journal is how you turn towards where you want to go and until you’re always remembering at the end of the day, here’s where I’m going. I can’t tell you how many people I work with who just simply forget where they’re going.

Mel: So true, so true. They get distracted, they get disappointed, they get let down and like you said, your second habit, always getting up. I had someone in my life who used to tell me. He says, “I know that I can get you to do anything in your life. All I got to do is tell you, you can’t.”

And he was right. Tell me I can’t and I’m going to do whatever I can to try and prove you’re wrong which is good and bad but it’s better today than when I have the adolescent tendencies of being dared to go do, “Oh yeah, I can jump off the bleaches, we’ll be fine”.

And you know, I think that, that’s really an important thing for…you know, we’re talking in the context of entrepreneurs and business and everything but I just in life in general, how often do we get lost? There’s the book, The Five Biggest Regrets of Dying, Bronnie Ware, who said that one of the biggest regrets is that they never have the courage to live the life that they wanted and I just can’t imagine being in the last weeks of your life realizing, “Oh my god, I didn’t live my life.”

And like, that’s sad. It’s awful and so, when you turn around and you use your process, we get a chance to look back and go, I lived my life and I think that that’s a gift that you’re giving people.

Kim: Well I live my life and the areas where I got scared or the areas that I got lost, I didn’t stay there very long because we all get lost, we all go down rather sometimes. Even the most evolved. We all get stuck but I didn’t stay there forever and I had the courage to really look at it, address it and get past it and that’s really what we’re after.

Mel: Dynamite, dynamite. So, this is a question I ask often. It’s what I call, The Nightmare Gift. I see your eyebrows go up. So, there’s always a time, there’s a shift in our lives that in the moment felt like a nightmare. It was just a disaster. Everything is falling apart and you go, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.”

I know for me, at one point, it was my partners deciding that they didn’t want to be partners with me and here I was a single fulltime dad and just bought a new house and at the time I thought, this is one of the worst things that could happen to me but the gift that came out of it—when I get a chance to kind of cliché Steve Jobs and connecting the dots backwards kind of concept when I look backwards, man it was a gift.

I wouldn’t, you and I wouldn’t be talking today. I wouldn’t have had the book out. I wouldn’t have done the things that I’ve done. I wouldn’t have met the incredible people that I get to serve if it wasn’t for that momentary nightmare. So, curious if you’ve had, you’ve probably had a couple of those in your…tell us about one of those and how you navigated out of that.

Kim: So, one of those nightmare moments for me was in my past business I had 3 partners. One of them is my ex-husband and so, that was a really tough time for me when we kind of, for a while, thought we could work together and that was like the worst idea known to man. And so, things just got more and more tense, more and more difficult. It became a very difficult environment to be in and one thing led to another, he wanted me to buy him out, I tried to buy him out. It didn’t work, he rejected my offers and it was just a very, very tough period until it kind of crescendo’ed and what happened was, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a Shotgun Clause.

Have you ever heard of that?

Mel: Yes.

Kim: So, a shotgun clause is really when you make an offer and you say, “I will buy you out at this price and if you don’t like that then you buy me out at that price.” So, my ex-husband encouraged me to give him a shotgun offer and at that point I was a single mother. I had a home, I needed to get a mortgage, I needed like a lot went on the line to make this happen and I kind of, stretched my own personal, financial resources to come up with an offer.

He didn’t like the offer. He turned around and partnered with someone who wasn’t an ideal partner and ended up buying me out and it was my company, it was my baby and that very day was the nightmare day when he literally held the door for me as I took my boxes of things from my office and left.

By the way, I’m back in that physical space right now. You’re seeing me there.

Mel: Alright.

Kim: So, that was a very, very tough time for me because my whole identity was wrapped up in that company. Yes, I was a mother but everybody knew me as the president and founder of Upward Motion and so, what happens to me now, who am I know, where do I go, what do I do, I own that business with two partners. Can I go at it alone? Do I have it in me?

You know, I need these other skills that I don’t necessarily have. How do I make that happen? And so, absolutely, it was the best thing that happened, it led me to here but it was a scary time. I had a lot of insecurity. I didn’t know where I was going next but I guess everybody has those moments.

Mel: Without a doubt. What was the driving force that kept you going? I’m guessing, I have a feeling but we will see.

Kim: Well, you’re guessing it was my kids but it wasn’t my kids. (Okay) The driving force that kept me going is the idea that I can’t sit in a muddy place for too long. I just have to take the next step and the next step at that point was actually, I got recruited by a coaching company to be their VP of marketing and I remember, seeing their mission statement, something along the lines of “Helping people live extraordinary lives” or something like that.

I’m like, “Yes, that’s for me.” And so, then I went to work for that company and started to realize how the majority of the coaching world works, what the industry is about and realize that it wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m really not designed to work for someone else. I am an entrepreneur. I have that entrepreneurial spirit. I look at the world differently. I want to do things my way and so, I ended up lasting there for about 8 or 9 months and then, we decided to call it a day and here we are. Shortly thereafter, I did my own thing.

Mel: Wonderful, wonderful. Well, it’s not atypical for folks. I know that. I tell people that, “I’m self-employed because I’m unemployable.” Probably. Give me corporate boundaries and I will screw them up within the first week.

Kim: I totally get where you are coming from. It’s hard for me to live with rules and regulations. It’s just tough. I need to be able to have the freedom of creation and so, that’s how Frame of Mind coaching was born really.

Mel: And I think that, that’s really the word that comes to mind for me is the agility: to be agile enough to make the moves and the decisions that need to be made in the moment to the facilitate accomplishing where you want to go and not from a… because clearly everything that you do is driven by impacting people’s lives to get them to greater heights if you will and so, your ability to be able to make choices, make decisions to facilitate that. Great, yeah there’s a commercial end to it; you need to make money doing it but bottom line is: You would make zero money if you were making no impact.

So, the key is really having the agility to make the choices that need to be made to serve your clients, serve your audience, serve your customers at the highest level.

Kim: That’s right and you know there is this concept, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, “What would you do if you made no money doing it? Would you still choose to do what you’re doing?”

And it’s funny, my daughter asked me. I have 5 kids. My youngest is my daughter and she said, “Have you ever thought of selling your company?”

I’m like, “Yeah, I could sell it if one day may be.”

She goes, “What would you do?”

I said, “You can’t take the coach out of the coach. You just can’t. I’d still coach.”

Like, it would look may be a little different. I’d call it maybe something different like you just can’t take the coach out of the coach. So, I absolutely do what I do to have an impact but I also do, and I’m very clear about this, I also do what I do because it impacts me.

Mel: Yeah and at the same time and I’m going to; we’ll personalize this in a sec because I know you said, you just said, you have 5 kids. How does…because I was a single fulltime dad. My son is now 26 years old. He’s had his own business since 16 and so, he’s been…I raised him since he was 5 and a half, 6 years old and so, he got infected by the entrepreneurial bug through me and I see our relationship, our friendship has raised to a lot of different levels. We’re very, very close but we’re also business colleagues in a sense, business partners, advisors to each other now.

And how do you see this impacting your relationship with your 5 kids?

Kim: Well before I answer that question. What kind of business does your son run?

Mel: He runs all of my … he does all of my online marketing, the technology, the marketing side, the funnels, and does all of that and it came out of…he was one of those kids that was locked in the bedroom playing computer games all the time and back when he was 15, I got him a domain name (his name) and Dreamweaver software and like, within a week, he goes, “Dad, go look at my website.”

And I see this website with videos and I said, “Dude, can you do one for me?”

And so, that then, when he realized, “Oh wait, I can make money doing this” and then it bridged. He has worked with some of the top internet marketers. He does a lot of the stuff for—he’s worked with Frank Curan, Brendon Burchard.

Kim: What’s his name?

Mel: Jeremy Abraham.

Kim: Oh, okay.

Mel: So, he’s done a lot that way.

Kim: That’s very, very cool. So, you were definitely business partners and you gave him his first chance. (Yes) What’s interesting, the reason I asked is because my daughter is a bit of an entrepreneur herself and what she does is she makes art. She makes art out of paper and crayon and she just makes these crazy, crazy designs and right now she’s going to these art shows, like these little art markets and she buys a booth and she sets up the booth and she sells her stuff.

And the conversation like just to answer the question, how does it affect your relationship, the conversation is, “Do you love making art or maybe there is a business opportunity in teaching young people how to make this art? Maybe you can create a school. Maybe there is a different way of doing this that is a little bit more profitable. Let’s talk about where you get the most reward from. Is it from making the art or perhaps it can come from somewhere else.”

So, you know, there is definitely a business conversation that takes place in my home all the time. We’re constantly talking about business ideas and marketing and target markets and strategy and all that kind of stuff but over and above that my kids have learned what we would call the “Frame of Mind Coaching Principles” and it’s really the idea of now,

• How can you think about things in a way that serves you?
• How can you look at yourself in a way where you’re not a victim?
• How can you interact with people and see the best in them?
• How do you recover from failure or disappointment?

And so, I mean, that stuff is drilled into their heads and it’s not through a drilling process. I would say it’s more through osmosis. They just kind of picked it up along the way.

Mel: It’s so true. When I first released my podcast and my book, the very first review on my podcast and the very first review on my book was from my son and his subject line of the review was, “I literally lived this podcast. I literally lived this book.” He says, “Mel’s my dad” and these are the values, these are the things and from a parent, from me that’s a huge gift to realize that you know how you go and you go, “I don’t know if I’m getting through to him” but then all of a sudden it comes out and you see that and you go, “They’re going to be all right.”

Kim: Yeah, it’s amazing when they take what you apply and/or take what you’ve taught or take what you lived and apply it to their own lives and they come back with examples. So, yeah I can relate to that, a 100%.

Mel: That’s cool. That’s cool to hear. So, now let me step out to a client; somewhat of a case study. Just how, because what I want to do is demonstrate for the listeners and the readers, how important the mindset, the thought process, understanding how you’re thinking is and so, if you could maybe, relate to (obviously without disclosing client information) but relate to maybe kind of a before and after how this impacts results, life and journeys.

Kim: So, I will give you one example of a client that has given me full permission to talk about him and kind of tell his story. So, he came to me as a referral from another client and he was introduced to me this way. He is an incredible guy, brilliant; he has stage 4 cancer.

And so, I thought to myself, “Wow, this is a very interesting opportunity for me to really grow as a coach but also to make a really big impact on someone who is dealing with really the end stages of their lives.”

And so, when I met him, I said, “Okay, so why do you want to go through coaching? What is it that you want to achieve?”

And he is a guy who owns a … he is an entrepreneur and he owns a company that helps people make evaluations and fundraise and that type of thing. He said, “I want to be more productive.”

And I said, “Well, what do you mean.”

He said, “Well, I have two years to live and I need to get more done in a day. Can you help me accomplish that?”

And it struck me as a strange desire because when you get to the end of your days, you don’t think, “Oh wow, I wish I worked more.” Right? You just don’t think that way and I started to understand my job wasn’t to help him increase his productivity. My job was to help him take things off his plate; to help him find a really, really good team so that he could focus on the most important things in his life. And the most important things in his life is he wants to make a difference in the world.

And so, what we did was, we started to hire people. He was a kind of guy who had to sign off on every single evaluation because he felt like he had to cross t’s and dot the i’s and make sure it was all properly done and we got him a team that was better than him. And so, he learned to let that go.

Now, he is offloading some of the marketing and the sales activities. So, what’s he focusing on? His bucket list. My job, I knew, was to help him reduce his stress. Why? When you have a lower stress level, you have a better fighting chance. And so, these are the type of things we’re talking about. We’re talking about how you really want to live your life; not how you want to die.

• How do you want to live your life?
• What’s most important to you?
• And what’s getting in the way?

And we are on a fast track here. We have to quickly move those things out of the way so that he can focus on what’s most important to him.

So, that’s an example of someone I’m working with and the truth of the matter is everybody is the same, right?

Mel: Absolutely.

Kim: You know, it’s just that this is a little more accentuated due to the timeframe or to the known timeframe anyways.

Mel: And I think that’s the key. You know, he happens to have at least an idea of what that timeframe is. Many of us don’t know. I mean, it could be; this leads me to one of my favorite quotes by someone named Osho.

He said, “We often talk about is there life after death. The question we ought to ask is did we live before dying?”

Such a great thing because so many times we put things off and this is why I talk about life by design and the concept of legacy and we talk about legacy and we say, “Well, I want to leave a legacy.” No, no, no, no, you and I, we create legacy in the moment. Right now, you Kim and I are creating something of a legacy right now and if we understood that each and every moment is a legacy moment.

It’s not something that we leave behind when we leave this earthly place and we go wherever we believe we go but it is something that we create right here and now, every conversation, every chance meeting, every business meeting, every time we get up and present that there may be that one person out there that needed to hear that message, needed to read that message in that moment and that brings them back from the edge and that’s the legacy that — we may want to serve the masses but we’re serving the one and I think that, that’s hugely important to realize that, “Well, how am I living each day?”

And as much as we say, it’s cliché, you are never promised a tomorrow but we seem to forget it. We don’t take the time.

Kim: And so, that’s one example but of course they’re not always dramatic.

• We help people recover from job loss.
• We help people recover from relationship loss.
• We help people build their businesses and increase their revenues.
• We help people get massive promotions.
• We help people get physically healthier and lower their blood pressure.
• We help all of that.

And the way we do it is simply by examining their thinking and helping them shift their thinking so that they’re thinking and serving them rather than interfering with their ability to live their goals and get what they want.

Mel: Do you find it challenging at times getting some of your potential customers or even your clients that come in to realize the importance of mindset because it seems to have been pushed to such a level of…it becomes such a cliché and it’s lost its effect but it’s important.

Kim: Interestingly, I hardly ever use the word mindset. I just don’t and I try to stay away from the cliché that you hear so often in the kind of the personal development world. I just try to stay away from it but a funny thing happened. I was working with a lawyer who runs a very successful company in Toronto and now, he came on through again referral and he started coaching.

“Okay, so what books do you recommend”

I said, “Okay well, you can read this book.”

I gave him a book called Scaling Up which is a business book. I said, “You can read that.”

And so, he said, “Okay, I read the first chapter. Let’s discuss it.”

I’m like, “Okay, what do you want to discuss.”

And then, like a couple of weeks in, he’s like, “I don’t understand. Are we supposed to review this book?”

I’m like, “You’re an intelligent man. You don’t need me to help you review a book.” I said, “That’s not what we are here to do.”

Anyway, by week 5, he is like, “Oh, I get it now. I really get. I understand what you’re doing with me here.”

And literally, like I’m still working with him and he journal’ed and he sent me a message. In the journal he is like, “You know, I noticed over the past two months, people are telling me that I look great. Is that normal?”

I said, “Actually, it kind of is because your energy has shifted and it’s not uncommon for people to tell my clients that they look taller, younger, brighter.”

He’s like, “Wow, if that’s the case sign me up for more.”

So, we took him from a place where he was totally focused on the tactics of running his business to a place where he understands the relationship or the connection between his thinking and this access of his whole entire life. And so, that made a massive change.

So, no people don’t always understand what they are signing up for at the very beginning but they learn, they learn pretty fast.

Mel: Pretty quick. Yeah. That’s so cool. So, we’re coming towards the end here. I just and I’m going to just hit on a couple of other questions. I always want to leave, just kind of, I get curious as to what it is that how we use technology and how may be you use technology. If there is a technological tool that shifts your effectiveness, your productivity or your ability to connect, what is the one thing that really kind of from a technology standpoint, really kind of hits home for you?

Kim: So, you know I will answer that in a very biased way. I created a piece of software called Journal Engine and that piece of software is absolutely the cornerstone and the centerpiece of my business. That’s what helps me drive amazing results for my clients.

But for whoever’s listening, and is not a coach, and they are asking me what technology do I use? I use Dropbox. It allows me to connect from anywhere. It allows me to kind of access my files from anywhere. I use Skype. I use Zoom now, I use and I absolutely use a conference line actually to allow my clients to dial in at no cost and record the calls and that’s a huge part of what I do.

Mel: Dynamite. So, if you had a chance; now this is like that doozy question that we try to ask so, if you had a chance to kind of go back in time to when you were first starting up and had 15 minutes to whisper in your ear about the journey ahead, with the intent to kind of save you some heartache, some grief or accelerate your direction or growth, what would you say to yourself?

Kim: I think I would probably say, “You are way smarter than you think.” I think that I grew out for years and years, I never really looked at myself as a particularly intelligent person. In school, I was B+, A- student. I wasn’t terrible. I wasn’t fantastic. I kind of rode the mid line and so, there was never any indicator of my brilliance in any way and so, I never, I always looked at others for their intelligence.

You could say, I never necessarily relied on my own. And so, at some point, I kind of realized, “Hey, I can kind of ride with the superstars. I kind of have a certain measure of contribution to make.” And I think I would just tell myself like, “Hey, relax. You’re okay. You’re smart. Don’t worry, you got it.”

Mel: It’s so cool. It’s so cool to be able to look back because I think we all end up in some senses in that moment where we question our capabilities, our capacity, our abilities and especially in today’s social media connected world where you have, it’s so easy for people to—my wife and I we were talking about this that I think I believe, social media has actually de-socialized society a lot. That when you have people that are willing to type things in a text or write things on a periscope that you would never dream of saying to them face-to-face; usually sexually oriented or that rude.

Like, one of my YouTube things. They said, someone posted, “Your hairstyle is ugly.”

I’m like, “Come on there’s plenty of other things that you could find out about me other than my hairstyle.”

And we desensitized ourselves at some level and to reconnect with that past and to realize that there will be especially in social media connected world, people that

• Will challenge you,
• Will ridicule you,
• Will argue against you, or
• Make statements like that.

That going back to the word you used, “resilience”, you got to be so, so instrumental, so important to your success, so important to your longevity, your ability to navigate, your ability to get yourself above that, to transcend the low level kinds of commentary that may come out because we’re driven by that bigger purpose, that bigger thing, that bigger impact. There may be that one but there’s a whole bunch of others that needed to hear what you have to say Kim.

Kim: Well, I appreciate it. It’s just such a pleasure to talk to you. So refreshing to talk to someone who totally gets what I’m trying to impart. So, I appreciate the time. It’s been wonderful.

Mel: Well, thanks Kim. And then, one last thing. If anyone in Solution Nation wants to find out about some of the things you do, some of the resources and some of the things, where can we send them?

Kim: Best place to go is frameofmindcoaching.com. I mentioned the assessment at the beginning of the conversation and I encourage anybody who is listening to try that to take an assessment. The blog is there. Podcasts are there. This will be posted there for sure and lots of interesting stories, videos, testimonials, anything you want; best place to learn more.

Mel: Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you Kim. There you go Solution Nation and as Kim said, get a chance to examine your thoughts and realize that the thoughts are the roots to your action, they are roots to your results at some level and that if our thoughts aren’t right then our results won’t be right and so, do what it takes to get those straight. Do what is takes to examine them, reflect on them and even tear them apart at some level so you have to put them back together in a way that serves you to serve the journey that you want to be and the direction that you want to be in.

And if you have questions or comments or anything, make sure that you leave those below and as always, Share this with the people that you think are near and dear to you that you think this would serve them and make sure you subscribe, stay with us. Let’s keep the dialogue going and I look forward to seeing you all soon on the next episode.

Until we get a chance to see each other again,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers, bye!!

— End Transcript —

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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them again. Cheers, Mel

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