What "Being Coachable" Actually Looks Like

Let me show you what life’s most important skill looks like.

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What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast, I hope you guys are pumped today. Today, I'm going to talk to you guys about some crazy stuff I'm doing right now and I want you understand the secret behind what I think is probably the most important skillset you can possibly learn during this life and that is how to be coachable. All right, all right. So, I am... it's late night and I'm actually driving to go get my son from one of his friend's houses and I got, it's probably 10-minute drive so it's like, I would jump out and hang out with you guys while we're going.

And I am at the end of day number one of a water fast. Yes, a water fast. I'm literally going to drink nothing but water for the next five days. I think some of you guys are rolling your eyes and you think I'm insane. I know this because I posted on Instagram today and I got thousands of messages coming back to me, from everybody telling me why I'm dumb, why I'm smart and about a million things in between.

But that doesn't matter to me because I'm doing it for a purpose and a reason and I'll explain why here in a second. But before I do, I want to talk about what I think is one of the most, maybe not want of the, but probably the most important skillset you can learn in this life. And I don't know how I was blessed with it and I didn't even know I had it until I remember my ... it was actually my sophomore year in high school and I joined this freestyle wrestling team and the team was called Elite and I was probably the worst kid to join Elite.

Somehow my dad got me in and it was all these guys who were amazing at wrestling. It was a private club for these guys and they all, "I'm sure you'll get better." I was in this group and I was having so much fun being around these guys who were amazing. I've seen them winning all these big tournaments and everything. And so, I remember going to one of our tournaments, wrestlers tournament and I don't remember exactly how, but I just remember a wrestlers match and I lost.

And the coach pulled me off side and it was Greg Williams, he's now actually the Head Wrestling Coach at UVU, but he was my freestyle wrestling coach in this little club we were in. And I remember he pulled me off side he said, "Hey Russell, this is what you're doing wrong." And just like a normal coach, he walks you through to two, three or four things. I was like, "Okay." And so, I paid attention, I listened and in the next match, went through I wrestled and I did the things that he told me to do. Surprise, surprise, right?

So, I did the things like I literally just ... he told me to do something so I did. And I remember the next match I won, I came off the mat, he looked at me kind of strange, I said, "What?" He said, "You're one of the most coachable athletes I've ever met." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Most kids I tell them what to do over and over and over and over and over again before it ever sticks." He's like, "I told you what to do and you went in the next match and then you just did it." And he said, "You're one of the most coachable athletes I've ever met."

And I remember hearing him say that I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool." And so then, became part of my identity, I'm coachable. My coach tells me something, I'm not going to be skeptical, I'm not going to talk back, I'm going to shut my mouth, I'm going to listen, I'm going to just do what he says. He's my coach, he knows more than I do so I'm going to become as coachable as humanly possible.

And over the next eight years of my wrestling career, I think that's why I succeeded at high levels because I was so coachable. Same thing is true for me when I started business. I would come in and I would hire a coach or I would read a book and whatever the book said, I would just follow it, I just did the thing. And long and behold, I became successful because of it. And it's been interesting as I've been on the other side of this now and I've had a chance to coach tons of people and help people.

It's interesting how few or how uncoachable most people are. They want to come back and tell you their opinion and why they think they're right and why this and why that and it's just like, "Why would you do that? You hired me to be your coach." It's like, "You literally paid me to teach you this thing and now you're fighting me." It doesn't make any sense to me. I hire somebody as a coach or someone I paid, I just I do what they say.

I remember actually, I'm in the middle of my fourth book right now, which has been a fun project to start on. I'm not telling too many details about it yet but there's this one quote in here and it was actually from my friend and he wrote the article about his morning routine and it was so funny. And he's just like talking about all the things he does and how crazy they are and one of the things that he mentioned, I can't remember what it was, it was something weird.

And he's like, "Why do I do that?" He's like, "Because Tony Robbins told me so." He said, "I obey all giants with helicopters and stage presence." I thought it was so funny. I was like, "Yes, that's how I am. I obey all giants with helicopters and stage presence. I obey all people who I hire, all coaches, all people who I want to learn from, I obey them, I listen to them, I ask them their advice and then I just do the thing they said." It's the weirdest thing in the world.

We recently here at ClickFunnels had a chance to meet with this dude, who's literally one of the smartest students I've ever met. And we were lucky enough he sat down for four hours, four or five hours with us and walked us through. Looking at our business like, "Hey, I would do this, I would do this," and he gives us all these things to do. And so me and Dave Woodward were just taking notes as fast as we can and all the things and just like, "Oh my gosh, this guy's amazing."

I remember we got done with the day, it ended and he messaged us a couple of weeks later, two or three weeks later, he's like, "Hey, you want to jump on a call and go over the stuff again?" Like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Well, do you want to go over the stuff we talked about and figure out ways to start implementing?" Like, "No, you understand you don't know how we work. We're implementing everything you said, we literally," and we started going through the we did this, we did this, we did this," and the guy was like, "Oh my gosh," he's like, "I've never had somebody who just did what I told him to do like that before. Yeah, we're very, very coachable. We listen and then we'd do what you say."

And so, that's key. So, I want to show it to you because that goes back to my water fast that I'm dealing with right now. So day number one's almost done. And the reason why I'm doing a water fast, actually there's two things. My dad was a insurance agent for State Farm Insurance. I remember that he would, obviously they sell auto insurance and health insurance and all the different, house insurance and things like that. But the one that was the hardest to sell was life insurance.

And we were asking him, "Why is it so hard to sell life insurance?" And he said, "Because it's a preventative not a cure." After you get sick, you want life insurance. After you get sick… but it's hard because ahead of time you’re like, "Oh, I'm never going to be sick, I'm going to be fine." It's just like aspirin, no one wants to pre-buy aspirin but if you got a headache, you will give your right arm for some aspirin, right?

It's the prevention versus a cure. People don't want to do the prevention and you see it right now, it's insane in our society. People are getting sick and all the problems and everyone will go and they want a magic cure for this thing. But nobody will go back to the root cause and like, "Hey, we're actually super unhealthy, we should change our diet and exercise." The fact that nobody on the news or on TV has mentioned that over the last 12 months is insane.

Anyway, I'll get off that soap box in a minute but most people will not go for a preventative, how do you say it, preventative. You know what I'm saying? They wait for a cure though. And I'm not that way. I want to like, "What's a preventative ahead of time?" And so, one of my friends, he joined my inner circle a few years ago his name's Chris Wark and if you've heard of Chris before, he has Chrisbeatscancer.com or Chrisbeatcancer.com. And he is someone who came down he had, I think stage three cancer and ended up curing himself from it naturally without any chemotherapy and all these other things.

And then, he's gone on and help hundreds of other people on this journey as well. And he's just an amazing person. He spoke at Funnel Hacking Live one or two years ago and just have so much respect for him. But he came out with the book. And so, I don't have cancer but I was like, the book came out I was like, "I'm going to read this book," and so I bought the book and I listened to it and then he had a course, I bought the course, I went to the course.

I'm like, "I'm going through all this stuff because I'm like, "Man, I don't want cancer." I can go wait until I got cancer and then I got to figure this stuff out or freak out or I can be like, "Hey, I don't want cancer. Let me preventatively figure out who's the dude or the lady who's already solved this problem, who's got the framework that fixes this problem and let me figure it out?" And what's crazy and again, I'm not an expert on this at all so don't take my opinion. But if you love someone who has cancer, you should go to chrisbeatcance