4 Must Read Business Books For Meditation & Mindfulness Coaches
In this solo episode, I talk about four business books that have shaped the way I share my work. I share a summary of each and lessons you can put into practice right away to grow your mindful business and coaching practice. Enjoy!
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Podcast Transcript
Hello, my name is Lou Redmond and welcome to another solo episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am your host. If this is your first time here. I am a coach, meditation teacher and creator and I love helping people with who want to grow their impact and income in the wellness and spiritual business space. What a interesting word, spiritual business. And I love the intersection of this. I know there's a lot out there. There's a lot of shady stuff out there, I should say. And so I really want to use this podcast as a way to explore how do we do this with integrity, how do we recognize our own value and worth and how do we not become egomaniacs that want to get more money? That's kind of the the whole side of it because things can get slippery quickly. And if you listen to my podcast on On Greed, you've heard some stories of my own experience with this. So I love bringing awareness and conversation to these spaces and today is a fun one because it gives you some things to look into. I'm going to share four books that, that I think are crucial for a creator and coach in this world. And they're kind of there's a little different energy, a few different books. But I'll just. Let's start with number one. And this is a very recent book and one that I have listened to. I just bought the hard copy because I want to read it again, even though I've taken notes with it while I listen to it. And that book is Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan. This book is so simple and clear in the steps that you can take to bring your idea to reality. And I followed Noah for almost nine years now. He is the real deal. He is someone you want to learn business from because he's not like someone who's made their millions out of teaching other people how to make millions. Noah Kagan has actually ran and operated actual businesses. He has an actual eight figure business that he runs called Appsumo. He was one of the early employees at Facebook. He is is a real deal entrepreneur, not just someone who creates courses and in some ways kind of what I do, but just go at me like, don't learn from me, learn from Noah Kagan. So I love Noah. I love his energy. He has a big YouTube channel now, but I've been following for years and I was so excited when he wrote this book. And like I said, it's so simple and clear and helpful and it actually works. I've been doing this on my own. If you saw my email about Learn how to create a meditation course course that I'm doing. It came from an inspiration from this book to pre sell something to validate the idea that some people want it before you spend the time and energy and money creating the thing. And so that's what I did. I wanted to validate and actually get some money up front. Because when we get money up front for something, it's so much easier to be like, okay, I'm going to make this happen. And so I've even used this book in my Mastermind where people are taking massive action and seeing, seeing results. So highly recommend just kind of more meta philosophy. One of the things I love in this is just now, not how so often we have an idea and we want to figure out how. Well, okay, how do I do this? What do I. What certifications do I need to make right? How do I, you know, figure out the right product? How do I get this app all off the ground or whatever? And the now not how puts us into action because how is just a lot of stalling. In some ways it kind of creates a comfort buffer before we can actually just take action and say, well, how do I test this? Now maybe I just text three people and say, hey, here's my idea. Would you pay for this? Like, would you want this? And getting actual feedback, really taking the mindset of a scientist and your goal is to experiment and as quickly as possible see what works and see what doesn't. And you only do that through taking action. So this book is huge on action, which I'm huge on action because that's how I've gotten here. I have gotten here by acting way before I was ready. And so I believe in this wholeheartedly. There's so much in this book I won't take too much time to share because I want you to pick it up and work on it, work through it on your own. But another practice something that you could do today, something that if you took my course, I have an insight Timer course called Learn to Stop Caring what Others think. And I actually use this in the course based on hearing it from an interview with him, Noah and Tim Ferriss. And that is the Coffee Discount challenge. And this is a practice in learning how to ask. In the last episode, a thousand true fans, we talked about the power of asking that if we don't extend a bridge for people to give us something, then it's never going to happen. There's a quote that those people who get what they want, they do it because they know how to ask for it. And it's very vulnerable to ask. We open ourselves up for rejection, and so we don't do it. We don't actually ask for what we want. This is reminding me of a great Jim Carrey YouTube video of him giving a speech to ask the universe for what you want. Highly recommend checking that out. But that's a side note. Learning how to ask and learning to be okay with people saying no, I like to call it. In another course, I did rejection therapy. Can we just get rejected over and over again? Where rejection doesn't feel bad, it actually is a sign that we're leaning in. And so one way to practice this is what Noah says, the coffee discount challenge. It's super simple, but you'll often figure out ways to make excuses to not do it. And so the challenge is to go to your local coffee shop or any coffee shop and simply make your order and then say, hey, can I get a 10% discount? And then don't speak. And the barista might be like, that's strange. I don't know if I can do that. Let me see. They might get the manager. They might say, why? And then you could say, as Noah says in this book, well, I'm taking a business course and this is a practice for me to try. So you can kind of say it. I think actually that's. That's a little cheapening it because it feels comfortable to say, well, I'm doing this thing. Like, I kind of think that your answer to that should be like, well, you don't get for things that you don't ask for. They might be like, damn, you're right. I'm gonna give you a 10% discount. And so sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. And doesn't matter. The practice is in asking for it. And you'll find how great it is when sometimes they're like, sure, yeah, we'll give you that. And like, wow, I just had to ask for. Or they'll say like, no, we can't do that. And you say, okay, great. And you go about your day. Now, Noah says in this book, you're going to find ways to not do it. You're going to be like, well, I know this person. I'm going to see him again. This is stupid. This is whatever. And so notice those voices, because those are the same voices that show up when you want to bring your idea into the world, right? Oh, no, it's going to be stupid. No one's going to like it that it's the same. It's different but it's working with that same energy of our inner critic that's going to shoot us down and sabotage. And so this is a micro practice to notice those voices. Now this sounds dumb. I'm not all that. All that and say, you know what? What if I actually did something and actually went and tried? So please go try the coffee discount challenge. Go pick up Million Dollar Weekend and thank me later and let me know how it goes if you do. I love hearing from it. I hear from people from my course all the time that actually do it. It makes me so happy. Number two, this is a mindset book that is worth it just for what I'm about to share. So I've listened to this book twice. I probably should pick up the copy so I can read it and actually take some notes. But it's the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. Gay is kind of a more executive type of coach and has built a really big business in that world. And he wrote this book called the Big Leap. And what I love about this is he points this limiting factor that we all have and he calls it the upper limit problem that we tend to have a certain level of comfort that we stay in. We're comfortable with things going wrong or we're uncomfortable when things go too right. When things are really going well for us, we sabotage. He calls this the upper limit problem. We hit this glass ceiling where things are going, oh my God, this is actually too great. There's gotta be something wrong. Something's gonna go wrong, right? So we have these self sabotaging beliefs that bring us back down. And so this is just a great book to open our minds to expand that glass ceiling so we don't limit ourselves. This book helped me come up with a mantra that I use in one of my courses. Develop unshakable conf. It is. It can keep getting better when things are really moving for us. Can we just open? Can we feel it open to it and say whoa? Yeah, it can keep getting better. And that just allows that glass ceiling to shoot up as we continue to grow and let ourselves experience more. All right, number three. And these. The Million Dollar Weekend in the last book is more businessy. But these are. You'll get it. It's a little less tactical business business. I like to think more on philosophical business. And this next book is just that as well. It is by Derek Sivers, who's one of my favorite humans ever. He wrote a few books. He's written a bunch of books and he had a company called CD Baby that I believe in like the 2000s to. To maybe 90s or not sure. Anyway, whenever CDs were really big, he helped indie musicians create their CDs and it became a huge business. He sold it for $20 million and he gave all of the money away to charity. Because that's the kind of guy that Derek Sivers is. He is someone who's a minimalist and he was making good money and he's like, yeah, I just don't need it. Like, it's. He's a. He's a big on, you know, what's efficient, what's actually going to create the most. And so he donated to charity and was able to. And he has a great living and he sells a bunch of books now, but he always donates his money. It's. He's a phenomenal person. He was also a circus performer for 10 years. He's just a unique, beautiful character. Anyway, he wrote this little book. I think it's only an audiobook. It might be 90 minutes long. It's called Anything youg Want. And the reason why I recommend this book because it gets you out of thinking that you have to do your business or your work, like anyone has done that. It really is your playground that you get to do anything you want in your little world of your business that you create that if you want to at 12pm on noon, you know, yell to the world through your live event that you're doing and just start breaking out in a. In a song that then you can do that. This is the dumbest example ever, but really you get to make it fun. So it's asking yourself, how do you bring. How do you see your business as this canvas of creativity and do it in a way that no one else is doing it. Derek has a great story in there about what he used to give as a thank you letter for when people would buy a CD from them. Because, you know, thank you letters from companies are pretty generic and boring. Thank you for your order. You know, here's your confirmation number and, you know, you'll expect to receive it in, you know, four to five business days. And so he had this elaborate thank you email that I recommend checking out. It was something like, you know, we're overjoyed with your order. You know, tiny elves have taken it into a satin sheet and have packaged it all nicely. You know, when your order goes out, the whole town came out to have a parade and we cheered your name loudly and, you know, celebrated you something like extravagant and ridiculous like that. And it just Goes to show that people love that. They loved getting that. That, that became what Seth Godin, who I'll talk about in a second, became remarkable, right? To make something remarkable means people remark on it. That's it. People talk about it. And so his marketing was just being himself and being goofy and having fun with things. And all of a sudden blogs picked up this thank you letter and it became this kind of phenomena, this viral Internet sensation about this company that does something different. And that became the best marketing. And it was all free and it was just from being different and being creative. Right? And so if you don't listen to that book, at least just take that. Just take that. That you get to make up how you do this. You get to make it up. And when you do that from soul from a deeper calling. Man, this is just so fun. This is why I love this podcast. This is why I love this work. Because I want to see more people having fun, sharing their gifts and being supported by doing that. All right, that's number three last book for now. Maybe I'll do another episode of Books because there's probably 50 I could talk about here. But as just to think about how you market. One of my other favorite writers, Seth Godin, wrote this book called this is Marketing. And again, it's more high level philosophical. Philosophical. Philosophical. I'm still not saying it right. Anyway, it is high level philosophical kind of book and it gives you ideas of what people, what attracts people to your work. One of Seth's famous sayings is people like us do things like this. And you know, speaking from last episode, sharing Kevin Kelly's A Thousand True Fans, it's. Seth would talk about it as like your minimum viable audience. Like what's the minimum amount of people that you need to impact to make your income and make your living. And so thinking about that, your minimum viable audience and how do you reach those people, how do you speak to those people, how do they see themselves in what you have to share? And so the book is just a really inspiring one. Again, more high level. There's definitely not a lot of tactics like, you know, here put this marketing strategy into play. That's not Seth. He's more of a philosopher. So highly recommend giving that if you're wanting to think about how you share yourself. Because all of this is marketing. I'm marketing right now that this is actually marketing. This is marketing. Me speaking, talking about the book. This is marketing. How meta is that? Right? Marketing to me is just showing up and being in front of people and speaking to things, right? It's, you know, advertising or promoting is more like, hey, I have this product, come do this. You know, that's part of this too. But right now we're marketing by just who we're being. So check out that book. Hope that some of this resonates with you. Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks Anything youg Want by Derek Sivers this is Marketing by Seth Godin thanks so much for listening. I hope some of this is valuable to you. Let me know if you pick up a book how they resonate with you. Feel free to send a voice note or an email to me about books you've read that have been helpful for you and your business and spiritual creative journey. I'd love to hear from you. And if you like the show, leave a review. Takes 30 seconds, maybe even less than that. Just scroll down, pause for a second. It'll help so much. Leave a review and let me know what you think of this podcast. Deeply, deeply appreciate it. And until next time, we'll see you soon. Thanks so much for listening and lots of love