Revealing Why I Invest 63% of My Disposable Income into Coaches, Courses and Masterminds

The Power of Belief

Apr 14, 2023

April 13th, 2023 — Greetings from Hamburg Germany 🇩🇪

Hey, welcome back to Woody’s World👋

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Today, I want to share with you why I reinvest a significant portion of my income into coaching, courses, and masterminds and what the unexpected benefit has been.

How the Beatles Changed My Life:

In 2020, I paid $420 to learn how to meditate.

Three years before, I was scrolling Wikipedia in my freshman dorm room. That’s when I landed on “The Beatles in India”

The Beatles in India: 'With their long hair and jokes, they blew our minds!' | The Beatles | The Guardian — The Indian man in the back founded TM

A couple of hyperlinks later and I discovered the wild world of transcendental meditation…

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but just before the pandemic hit, I found time to invest in the 8-hour course and started my meditation practice.

Was It Worth It?

Yes. 100%

Did I need to spend $420 to learn how to meditate?

Probably not…

If you’ve learned TM yourself or practiced something similar like Vipassana or mindfulness, you know the techniques are incredibly simple.

And sure, from investing in the course, I got the tangible skill of how to practice TM, but when I look back, I got a second benefit which was much more valuable.

The Intangible Benefit of Coaching

Before I took the TM course, I thought I couldn’t meditate.

Before I learned German, I thought I couldn’t reach fluency as an adult.

Before I closed my first ghostwriting client, I thought I couldn’t charge high ticket

Multiple people commenting on this “You speak better than some native speakers” blew my mind. Young Connor would never believe it.

Are You Seeing The Pattern Here?

When I sat down to meditate for the first time, my coach Jeanne, an older woman with silver hair taught me the extremely simple technique in a matter of minutes.

On day one, I had learned how to meditate.

By day four, I had laid the foundation of a daily practice that continues to this day.

But It Wasn’t Because of The Technique…

It was because of my conviction.

I was absolutely sure that what Jeanne and the TM organization were teaching me worked, and as a result it did, for me.

Before taking the course, I had tried countless times to make meditation work. Hungover mornings in my college dorm, group sessions after yoga classes, guided meditations on Spotify, but I could never make the habit stick.

Mostly, because I had a set of false beliefs holding me back:

Meditation is hard.
Meditation doesn’t work for me.
If I’m thinking, it means I’m not meditating.

Maybe you’ve had some of them too.

But by paying for Jeanne’s expert guidance, asking her questions, and following her advice, we annihilated those false beliefs. Three years later and I still meditate TM first thing every morning.

And It’s been life-changing:

Woody's World

On Meditation and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

I used to kill time by reading Wikipedia. One evening I started reading about the British Empire and ended with an article about the Beatles' trip to India, where they learned transcendental meditation(TM). Later, I read in Ray Dalio's book that the Beatles' trip inspired him to learn TM, and meditation had greatly improved his effectiveness. It seemed to be worth a shot, so in early 2020, I took an 8 hour TM course…

4 years ago · 3 likes · Connor Widmaier

Other Coaching Investments I’ve Made

In the past year, I’ve made two other major investments in coaching:

Twitter Writing Coach

To grow my Twitter and deliver for my ghostwriting clients

Sales coach

To launch my first coaching offer

And neither of them reinvented the wheel with their techniques or tactics.

Don’t get me wrong, the tactics, skills, and “know-how” made a difference. But again, the biggest benefit was how they helped me see reality more clearly and obliterate the false beliefs in my mind holding me back from success.

One last example: Lessons from a $5000 CEO Course

I once ghostwrote for a Silicon Valley Executive Coach.

A huge bonus was to sit in on their $5000 CEO course. When I reflect on what and how they taught, most of what they were doing was obliterating their students’ (other CEOs) false beliefs about their ability to give up control of the business and win back their time.

Even at the top, false beliefs are our worst enemy.

This Is Not Some Woo-Woo Positive Thinking BS

It’s about pairing the tangibles (skill, know-how) which most people already possess, or can quickly learn, with the intangibles (belief, thoughts) which most people lack.

And I’ve found coaching to be an excellent vehicle to do that.

P.S. If you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of coaching.

So a couple of months ago I decided to start offering it myself. This month, I just started with my first full-time clients:

3 for Ghostwriting (scale from $1,000/mo to $5,000/mo in 60 days)
1 for Personal Branding on Twitter

That doesn’t mean I’ll be using this newsletter to hard sell you, but I may start placing gentle Call-to-Actions at the end of these letters.

If that offends you, you’re welcome to unsubscribe.

If you want to stick around, please let me know what you’d like to hear more of in the comment section: