5 Lessons Every Coach and Business Owner Needs to Hear
Every few months, I like to use this podcast to document what I’m actually learning in real time.
The wins. The hard stuff. The things I’m still working through. The lessons that are starting to click because I’ve lived them long enough to finally understand what they were trying to teach me.
This episode is really that.
I pulled five lessons out of my journal from the first five months of 2026. Some are personal. Some are directly related to coaching and business. But honestly, they all apply if you’re leading people in any capacity.
If you’re a coach, entrepreneur, parent, manager, teacher, or somebody simply trying to become a better version of yourself, I think there’s something in here for you.
3 Key Takeaways
Protect your self-respect when life puts you under pressure.
Your standards, systems, and identity determine how consistently you show up.
Keep pursuing growth when the original pain that motivated you starts to fade.
Listen to the full Choose Hard episode here:
1. If You Maintain Anything, Maintain Respect
This might be the biggest personal lesson I’ve learned over the last couple of years.
There have been situations where I felt like I had every reason to react.
I could have lashed out. I could have thrown some punches verbally. I could have let emotion take over and probably had plenty of people tell me they understood why I did it.
But I didn’t.
And looking back, that might be one of the things I’m most proud of.
Because when pressure is applied, you find out pretty quickly whether your values are actually your values.
It’s easy to call yourself disciplined, respectful, honest, patient, or composed when everything is going well.
The test comes when somebody hurts you.
When you feel betrayed.
When business gets ugly.
When something you worked for falls apart.
When somebody says something about you that pisses you off.
That’s when your character gets exposed.
I’ve had people close to me tell me afterward that they respected the way I handled certain situations. What stood out to them wasn’t the outcome. They remembered how I carried myself through it.
That meant more to me than winning the argument ever would have.
I don’t need everybody to like me. I’m totally fine with somebody thinking I’m too intense, hating my mullet, or disagreeing with something I say.
Those are opinions.
What I care about is giving people no legitimate reason to say I was dishonest, disrespectful, hateful, or acted without integrity.
That gives me a clean conscience.
And I think there’s a huge amount of freedom in that.
You don’t control what somebody thinks about you. You absolutely control whether your actions give their criticism any truth.
So if everything else feels shaky, protect your respect.
Especially your respect for yourself.
2. Coaches Need Better Coaching Systems
This one has become painfully clear to me through mentoring coaches.
A few years ago, if you asked me why most online coaches struggled to grow, I probably would have given you an answer around leads, marketing, content, or sales.
Today, I think one of the biggest problems is happening after the client signs up.
The back end sucks.
The onboarding isn’t clear.
Check-ins are inconsistent.
Programming doesn’t follow a repeatable methodology.
The coach doesn’t have systems for handling plateaus, poor communication, adherence issues, progression, retention, or referrals.
And eventually the whole business gets bottlenecked because the coach can’t deliver efficiently enough to scale and isn’t delivering effectively enough to create undeniable transformations.
When we bring coaches into our mentorship and start looking under the hood of the business, we end up fixing the coaching process before a lot of the sexy business stuff.
Because more leads won’t solve a delivery problem.
If somebody hires you to lose fat and they go week after week without making progress, you need to look at your process.
If clients constantly disappear on you and dump three weeks of problems into one check-in, you need to look at your expectations, communication structure, and protocols.
If every program feels like you’re making it up from scratch, you need methodology.
Great coaching has structure behind it.
That structure should make you more efficient as a coach and make the client experience better at the same time.
The industry spent years getting obsessed with acquisition. Sales scripts. DMs. Content hacks. Funnels.
Somewhere along the way, people stopped talking enough about the actual craft of coaching.
That craft has to come back.
3. Core Values Need Standards and Rules
Everybody loves talking about core values.
But a core value written on a piece of paper doesn't do much for you when you’re tired, tempted, angry, or under pressure.
You need standards.
And then those standards need rules.
A standard is the expectation you have for yourself.
A rule makes that expectation actionable.
For example, one of my values is extreme ownership.
That becomes a standard for how I live: if I see something I’m capable of improving, I take responsibility for it.
My daughter has picked up on this without me sitting her down and giving her some giant lesson on personal responsibility.
She sees trash on the ground and tells me to pick it up.
We drive past somebody’s garbage can that tipped over, and she tells me to stop.
We saw a neighbor’s nativity scene knocked down by the wind and she wanted me to fix it.
Why?
Because she knows that’s what Dad does.
The rule creates the behavior often enough that the behavior becomes part of your identity.
You can apply that anywhere.
I have a rule that if I drink alcohol, I save it for Saturday.
So when somebody offers me a beer on Sunday, I don’t have to sit there debating whether I deserve it, whether it fits my macros, whether I've been good enough lately, or whether one beer really matters.
I just say, “I don’t drink on Sundays.”
The decision has already been made.
That’s powerful.
Your values shape your identity. Your identity creates standards. Your rules give you a way to actually live those standards when real life shows up.
Without that structure, values become nice words that disappear the second they become inconvenient.
4. Pain Can Get You Moving, But Purpose Has to Keep You Moving
Pain is an incredible motivator.
If you’re buried in debt, you’ll work your ass off to get out of it.
If you hate what you see in the mirror, that discomfort can finally get you into the gym.
If you’re lonely, you might make a real effort to meet somebody and build a relationship.
Pain creates urgency.
The problem comes when the pain starts disappearing.
Imagine holding your hand over a flame.
At first it burns like hell, so you move your hand away.
Then it goes from burning to hot.
Hot to warm.
Eventually that warmth is pretty comfortable.
And that’s where a lot of people stop.
We see this constantly with fat loss.
Somebody wants to lose 50 pounds. They lose 35 or 40. Their clothes fit better. Their confidence goes up. Their energy improves. They have healthier habits.
Life feels so much better that the original pain disappears.
And suddenly the last 10 or 15 pounds feel way harder to pursue.
The same thing happens in business.
You grind to escape financial stress. Eventually the bills are paid, business is stable, and that fire isn't burning your ass anymore.
The same thing can happen in relationships.
You chase somebody because you want to be with them. Then they commit to you and years later you stop courting them because you already “got” them.
That’s why at some point you have to deliberately shift your motivation.
You need a bigger vision pulling you forward.
You need to spend time thinking about your potential, the life you want, the person you could become, the marriage you want to create, the business you could build, and the health you want 20 years from now.
Running from pain works.
Eventually you create enough distance from it that you need something meaningful to run toward.
That transition is where a lot of people stall, self-sabotage, or settle for “good enough.”
I’ve learned that the closer you get to comfort, the more intentionally you have to turn up your desire for what’s possible.
5. Trust the Weaving Even When You Can Only See the Mess
The final lesson came from a sermon I heard, and the illustration stuck with me.
Think about a woven blanket or tapestry.
From one side, you see the finished image.
Flip it over and you see knots, loose threads, colors crossing all over each other, and something that looks like a complete mess.
The idea was that God is the weaver and we’re living underneath the tapestry.
We see the loose strings.
We see one difficult season crossing another difficult season.
We see the problem right in front of us and wonder why the hell it’s happening.
We don't always get to see the picture being created on the other side.
There are things I went through in 2024 and 2025 that made absolutely no sense to me while I was in them.
Now I can look back and see what they taught me.
I can see how some of those experiences prepared me to lead people I’m leading today.
I can see how they gave me a perspective I needed for things we’re building now.
And I can see how maintaining my composure during those seasons allowed me to eventually experience the fruit that came afterward.
The other part of the weaving analogy that hit me was the time.
A legitimate woven blanket can take more than 100 hours to create.
Meanwhile, we live in a world where I can click a button on Amazon and have a blanket sitting on my porch tomorrow.
We’ve gotten so used to immediate results that we start expecting life to operate on the same timeline.
It doesn't.
Some lessons take months.
Some take years.
Sometimes you put in the reps for a long time before you understand what they were producing.
That’s where faith comes in.
Faith gives you the ability to keep doing the right thing before you have proof that it’s working.
To keep your composure.
Keep working.
Keep showing up.
Keep treating people well.
Keep believing that the low might actually be preparing you for something higher.
I think every entrepreneur, coach, parent, and leader needs that reminder sometimes.
You don't have to understand the entire picture while it’s being woven.
You do need the patience and faith to keep showing up while it is.
The Lessons Usually Make Sense Later
When I look at these five lessons together, they all come back to something I’ve thought about a lot lately:
Who you become during the process matters.
Maintain respect when you’re tested.
Build systems strong enough to support the work you're doing.
Create standards that turn your values into actual behavior.
Learn how to keep pursuing your potential after life becomes comfortable.
And have enough faith to stay patient when you can only see the underside of what’s being built.
A lot of the best things I’m experiencing right now came from lessons I didn’t understand when I was learning them.
That’s part of why I love doing these episodes.
Sometimes documenting the lesson helps somebody else move through it a little better.
And sometimes saying it out loud reminds me that I’m still learning it too.
Listen to Episode #112 of the Choose Hard Podcast for the full conversation on the five lessons I’ve pulled from 2026 so far and how they’ve shaped the way I think about leadership, coaching, business, discipline, faith, and becoming the person I actually want to be.