In this moving episode Michael Seaver, author of A Practical Guide for Awakening to What’s Within and Finding Work-Life Integration shares how he transformed the pain of his personal story into progress for his clients.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome to the latest and greatest episode of the Secrets of the High Demand Coach podcast and I’m here with a new friend, Mr. Michael S. Seaver. Now Michael is an award winning executive coach, leadership consultant, keynote speaker, and he’s also author of the book I know, a practical guide to awakening what’s within and finding a work life integration. He’s got it right there. I love it. Michael is on a mission to unlock human potential and to help people uncover and live their purpose and live a more meaningful and authentic life. Michael, I’m so glad you’re here. I’d love to just start off and have you share your story. How’d you get into doing what you do? And I know it wasn’t exactly the typical journey that we all might expect.
Michael Seaver
No, thank you, Scott, for your time today. I was raised in a very small town in West Michigan and worked in the family landscaping lawn maintenance and snow plowing business from age 12. Until 24, got married, moved to the state of Arizona, worked in the hospitality industry for about four years, mainly at the Four Seasons Resort in north Scottsdale, wonderful, wonderful experience. Life really transformed for me in the year 2008 Was I was divorcing my wife, but also starting a master’s degree at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, which was the beginning of what I now refer to as my coaching career. I had never done any coaching whatsoever. But I was assigned a coach as an MBA student. And she gave me a series of assessments and asked me a series of questions. She said, you have what it makes what it takes to be able to be a coach, you really need to consider this. So I began a career in Human Resources at a large non for profit healthcare system that summer as an intern, came back as a second year student and started coaching first year students. And that was the trip for me because I realized I completely lost track of time. So my coaching career really started in the fall of 2009. I went to work for that same healthcare system right after finishing the MBA, did that for a couple of years, enjoyed it, but enjoyed coaching more. So at the beginning of 2011. I started my coaching practice formally. And so there’s been a lot of iterations on that since. So since the year 2011, I’ve been coaching, but I did have to work a little bit at a local university in Arizona to be able to make some money, teach some classes and get that kind of going. So 2015 was the actual very beginning of me working as a coach full time. And that has been a trip, it’s been wonderful. And so things really shifted and changed for me personally in the year 2019. Because even though my business was successful, I was still being confronted by a lot of challenging things. And this is what I talked about in the book is I contemplated suicide in the year 2019 in May. And so even, I’ve been able to help quite a few people. And I really did enjoy my work, there were still some personal demons that I was trying to process. Thankfully, I chose to stay spent the year 2019 really kind of getting to a place of healing, tell the story in the book, I spent a lot of time 2020 At the beginning of the pandemic kind of telling the story in the book. And so here, we are now kind of post pandemic, still doing a ton of coaching love and life a lot more than I’ve been able to kind of overcome some of those demons and just feels like I’m in a good place.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Now tell us a little bit more than about the kind of coaching, you know, we do. Because I know for your book, your book is just it’s a deep dive into who we are as people, right and the authentic real self, then you go into the business world, right, which can feel like the total opposite of that. So I love having conversations with folks who have a specialty like this and are willing to live it themselves, which is one of the things that I noticed about about you, as I was getting ready for the episode. So I’d love to hear how do you take that deep experience, right? All those lessons you’ve learned and then apply them and help people apply them in a business environment?
Michael Seaver
Yeah. So my business today is executive coaching. It’s team training, it’s organizational change consulting, that’s public speaking, I’ve got online courses, I lead a mastermind of a paid newsletter. So there are lots of different ways in which I can engage a person. And so for me, it’s very much about Yes, I do know an awful lot about the personal change process. Right. So if a person is I think, Scott, what you refer to as the early struggle, right? I’m with the individual, I’m at this place of being able to help them discover very, very important parts of themselves so they can be better leaders. I do great with businesses, I think it’s referred to as whitewater right at that that type of place where they’re, they’re growing, they don’t really have the need for an incredibly large human resources or organizational development department, but I can go in. So do I do trainings on disk communication, and then 12 driving forces about what motivates people or use core values to help people communicate a little bit better? Yes, I’ve done all those things. I’ve also had opportunities to go into businesses and kind of work as a staff psychologist, right. So I’ll be put on a retainer and go in and help provide coaching one to one to make sure lines of communication are open, makes sure that the employees are really engaged by the work that they’re doing. Do we need to shift some sort of a meeting structure or strategy in internal to the business so it can get very, very deep and very, very personal at the one to One level, but at the more structural organizational level, it’s about how do you open lines of communication between a supervisor and a direct report? And then what do you do to basically allow for that ethos to grow across the entire organization?
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? That’s so good. One of the things that’s fascinating about kind of our profession is folks come looking for help when things are rough, right as early struggles, not a fun period of time to be a business leader, Whitewater, not a fun period of time and be at every growing organization goes through these challenges. Somehow, all our you know, our inner demons, if you will seem to kind of go away when things are good. But they’re, they’re under the surface. So my question for you, and I’d love to hear your answer is, why is it that we don’t naturally take that time to work on those things? Like when things are good? Why is it that we take the gas? Do we let off the gas on that kind of interchange work?
Michael Seaver
Yeah, I think it comes down to people inside of comfort, it’s a lot more difficult to intentionally proactively confront our own fears. And that’s the real game, right is that if we’re going to become the best version of ourselves, we have to willingly proactively intentionally confront our fears. But that means that we lose control. And so people are not going to naturally walk into a space and do that unless they can see some sort of defined outcome that they’re working towards. So that’s a lot of my work, or a lot of the things that I try to help a leader with is that, first and foremost, confront your own fears, so that you can build an emotional intelligence, a resilience to become the leader that you wish you had, or that you want other people to have. But then you also have to create that safe environment. So as we know, from Gallup, and as we know, from Google and some of their work, we know that it’s difficult to create the environment where people feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable. So until the leader actually creates that environment inside the organization, people are just not going to confront their fears and actually make that growth occur.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right. Right. So good. So this whitewater stage hits, and most of our audience knows what that is. But it’s this period of time, when you’ve had your fun, things are going good, you keep doing the things that worked. And for some reason, they’re not working the way that they used to anymore, right. And that’s where a lot of folks will go out to find out now one of the challenges that folks do is they go out, and they kind of look for the silver bullet, we need someone to help fix our sales or our marketing, or we need an HR person to do hiring. And I would imagine that while you have some of the kind of more technical even strategic offerings, that you spent a lot more time dealing with issues that are more substantive and less fun to go looking for. from a sales perspective. What are the big kind of themes that you see, particularly leaders, founders, CEOs struggling with from in your work with them in that whitewater stage?
Michael Seaver
Yeah, I think it really comes down to that they’re so accustomed to being capable of solving all of these respective problems at various stages of the business. Now, all of a sudden, they need to start delegating, and they need to start creating a variety of meeting processes and a right of structures and systems. And it’s really difficult to let go of the various things that you’re so accustomed to doing. Right. And so creating the time and the energy in the structure that allows for other people to know exactly what standard operating procedures to perform exactly when to do it. And to start to think about organizational culture, which probably didn’t really, really wasn’t a focus at that point. So you’re instituting this idea of delegation and new SOPs, but at the same time, is you’re having to get very clear on what’s the organization’s mission? What is the core values? And what are the strategic imperatives or goals that you have for the next couple of years. And when organizations don’t take the time to solidify those things, it becomes really difficult for the change to actually occur.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right. Oh, that’s so good. So the question that I have for you then is what do you see folks trying to do before they bring you in or someone like you that that doesn’t work? Otherwise, they would they wouldn’t have brought you in? But what are the things that we try as leaders that end up letting us down at that point?
Michael Seaver
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of organizations that try to do right by creating relationships with consultants, like a Scott or a Michael. And they say, Okay, we want you to come in to do a training. But the issue that ends up happening is that most change fails, because they do the training, but it doesn’t become a part of everyday commonplace culture, right? It doesn’t become a part of meeting structures, it doesn’t become a part of conversations. So oftentimes change fails because the leadership doesn’t embody the change. They don’t talk about it right. They don’t make it top of mind. The gets broken communication right down the various levels of the hierarchy. So there’s not enough communication, or there’s not appropriate compensation models and structures set up to allow for the team to know that they’re supposed to be living that way. Right. So So whenever we see okay, there’s going to be some sort of training and we think that it’s going to be a be all end all saw If the problem No, that’s the introduction to you need to embody this as leader, you need to openly communicated about it more. And we need to wipe fear off the table for the staff members to make sure that they know that it’s okay that they can live it because they’re going to be rewarded for it monetarily.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right. Right. That’s good. That’s good. All right. Next question here. Actually, I’m going to tie a couple things together. You mentioned in your story that you had a coach who said, hey, you’ve actually got the workings of being a great coach. So what I’d love to hear from you is, it’s gonna be two parts. So one question. The first one is, what is it take to be a great coach? And knowing that, how do our listeners use that to find the right coach for them?
Michael Seaver
Yeah. I’m so thankful that that I was paired with a woman named Pam, who was my coach when I was a student back 2008 2009. And it just so happened that that she gave me the DISC assessment tool, driving forces assessment of core values career later, and a few others that were popular at the time. And then she helped to explain to me exactly what that meant for my life. Because I’m an introvert, naturally, I’m very detail oriented. So I needed to see the connection between what it was that I was being taught, and how it would actually affect my day to day habits, routines, and rituals. So when I think about great coaches, I think about an individual who has had any number of experiences for him or herself, right, so when we’re choosing coaches, we want to choose somebody who has had a lots of experience going through exactly what it is we’re about ready to do. Right? So I’m a Pisces, I’m a very introverted person, I love details, I love looking at things a little bit differently than the average person might. So when we think about finding a coach, has he or she walked a lot of other people through what it is that you’re trying to go through, as he or she gone through it themselves, right? Is he or she listening very, very actively and deeply? Like, can they really connect the dots in a way that you can’t? Are they going to be there for you instantaneously in the moment on the spot when when stuffs kind of hitting the fan? Right? That that I think is important. And I just think it’s important to be really seeing can this person get you to where it is that you’re trying to go. And so I’ve hired Reiki Masters, life coaches, therapists, executive coaches, a lot of mentors. And so I’m a continual learner, naturally, Scott. So it’s just important to me to be seeing things from different perspectives that I know for sure a client is going to come to me someday and say something that’d be like, I’ve never thought of it that way. But I know somebody who has let me pick up the phone and call them.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s a something that you hit that that really struck a chord for me is, we had someone on the show earlier, who said, If you want to know what the road looks like, ask them when on their way back. Right. And there’s, there’s such great advice in that. The challenge that I have with that is that there are lots of great coaches or take a hitting coach in baseball, for instance, who can’t hit anywhere near as good and never hit as good as the folks that they’re coaching. So there’s there’s sage advice and what he said, but I think when you’re looking for a coach, it’s a slightly different criteria. And if we’re not careful, we’ll overvalue the guy who did what we want to do. But there’s no evidence that they can actually teach you to do what they did. Right? So I love you, because you really drew that out. And I don’t know if he meant to do it, because you went through it really quickly. But you said like, Hey, someone who’s been down that road, or someone who’s helped other people down that road. And I think that’s just a really, really helpful distinction for folks that are looking, because being a coach is not about being the best. It’s not about being the hero, it’s not about being able to do everything better than anybody ever could or maybe once done it better than anybody could write. You don’t have to have been a CEO of $100 million organization to give sound advice to a CEO of $100 million organization. Yeah. And, and so you don’t necessarily need to look back at all the things that they did from, you know, dollars and cents and people and you know, pedigree, but you do have to look back into Hey, have they helped people do what I’m trying to do? And that’s that’s where something special really happens. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. You’re welcome. Excellent. All right. So what I’d like to do, this is the moment that I you know, I’m always eager to get to and I know our audience is waiting for it. Because this is a lot of fun. This is where I get some personal counseling. No, this is where we are some of the best advice that you have. And, and so what I’d like for you to do is just share, yeah, what’s the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s the one thing you wish everybody listening today knew?
Michael Seaver
I think there’s a number of things. But it I think that when we look at human life, we are far more similar than we are dissimilar, right? And so when we look at the various ways that we navigate the earth, and we go through all this transformations and changes, but number one is we are far more similar than we are dissimilar. And what I mean by that is, is that we all go through a series of challenges in our childhood, we all figured out a way to overcome them in our late 20s Early 30s. And then the highest and best use of our time, our mission, our purpose often becomes helping others to overcome the exact same challenge we overcame in those early years. Right. So the way that I often phrase this is that the secret is to be the person you needed when you were younger. Right? It’s that simple, right. And so it’s really that simple. So when we go through life, and we encounter a series of challenges, we find the most meaning we find the most healing when we help others overcome that same thing for ourselves. So even if you’re not a coach, you can still be a mentor, you can still be a counselor, you can still be a consultant, be thinking about the various things that you’ve overcome in your own life, and then say to myself, How can I help others overcome this for themselves, and then it will be so meaningful, and you will be so successful in the ways that you define success.
Scott Ritzheimer
That is absolutely unbelievable. I love that. So be the person you needed when you were younger. It’s just so good in so many ways. I was actually just talking about it this morning with a client and it is it’s it’s a much more fulfilling aspect of life, right? Like solving your own problems is a great, I solved my problem. But the fulfillment that comes and as a coach, you know, it’s we get a lot of this right. But the fulfillment that comes from helping someone else solve even that same problem is just second to none. So, so good. I love Michael. Alright. Question for you. Now, I’m going to have you take off your coach hat, right, I’m going to have you put on your CEO hat with the rest of us. Right. And, and sit in that CEO seat put us next question, and that is, what does the next stage of growth look like for you? Because I know, you know, I’ve worked with enough Coaches and Consultants so that we can spend our best energy on our clients, especially those of us who are introverted, which I’m one as well and not necessarily leave the time to do the things that we need to do to grow. So I’d love to hear how are you wrestling with that tension? And what are you doing to grow?
Michael Seaver
Yeah, it’s certainly it’s hit me hard since the 2020. Right, because 2020 2021 was like hey everybody all of a sudden is working from home, homeschooling their children, they’re learning they’re really capable of change in ways that they didn’t realize they were capable of. So this year and next year are very much about how are people going to assert themselves in ways that are really aligned with their life’s purpose or mission. Right, we’re seeing a very, very big transformation. astrologist call it the shift from the Age of Pisces into the Age of Aquarius. NASA calls that the precession of the equinoxes, we’re going through the great resignation, it’s quiet, quitting, there’s all these things, right. So we’re all being affected, the marketplace is changing. And so as I mentioned, right, and you to Scott, right, I’m an introvert. And so I have lots of different ways by which that I engage people and people around the world. But I realized that I learned the most, and I could help people the most when I was writing, right, I really enjoyed writing. So yes, have I written the book? I know, do I have a members only newsletter that I share on a weekly basis? And so part of what it is that I think is going to happen next is that I’m going to do one to one coaching less so that there can be scale found in a members only newsletter, right, a paid newsletter. So will I still travel for public presentations? And will I still do trainings virtually, if needed, of course, but do I see, as we move into a much more decentralized and Hola, kradic society, that I think that there’s more opportunities for scale. So as CEO, if I could tell coach Michael to coach a little bit less and spend a little bit more time writing, that’s probably where we’re headed.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s very good. A mentor of mine said, the only things you really leave behind are the impact you have on people’s lives and what you write down. That’s so good. So I love that you’re able to make that transition. It’s fascinating. Now, you do have a book out, we’ve not spent a whole bunch of time on it. But I’d love to give you just to give our audience a quick they’re just give us a quick kind of synopsis of the book, and then tell us how we can get our hands on a copy.
Michael Seaver
Thank you, Scott. So book is called I know. And it’s a used the William Bridges model of transition to kind of format the book. So the first three chapters are about how do you end and let go of the previous version of yourself. The second three chapters are about how do you define your new identity, right? So how do you look at your communication style core values, motivations, your life’s experiences, and bring them all together to define your new executive brand. And the third three chapters are about how do you then implement that brand in the workplace or in your life? How do you become a coach? How do you become a coach to other people? So the book is designed to walk people every chapter has stories from my clients, but also a five step process, and each chapter for them to be able to do something tactically for themselves. So if somebody wants the book, they can go from a place of disengagement or unhappiness or wonderment, that if they go through all the steps in the book, they’re going to be probably at a place of being engaged, maybe just a little bit more full of joy and maybe taking action in alignment with their life’s mission. Because we all have have a desire to grow and develop like that’s a really important thing. And I think that the way that we structured the book is it’s it’s very much about helping people move to that place of genuinely loving their life.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. Where can we get a copy?
Michael Seaver
So you can go to michaelsseaver.com/books, and you’ll see it there. But it’s available via 40,000 retailers around the globe. So Apple, Google, you can get it on Amazon, or you can get it at Barnes and Noble. There’s lots of places. So whether michaelsseaver.com/books or one of your favorite retailers, you’ll be able to find a copy.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. So michaelsseaver.com. I want to make sure we get that for everybody. Or anywhere books are sold, basically make it nice and easy for folks. But we’ll put the link to your site. I was on your site. It’s got just a mountain of resources for folks. So the book is only just the beginning. If you’d love to connect with Mike, we’ll hear more about what he does. I would strongly recommend that you head on over to the website. There’s just so much there. Michael, thank you so much for your time. So glad to have you on the show. And thank you for everyone listening. Thanks so much your time and attention mean the absolute world for us. We love that you were here. And I hope that this was every bit as meaningful and impactful for you as it was for me. And until next time. Take care.
Contact Michael Seaver
Michael S. Seaver is an award-winning executive coach, leadership consultant, keynote speaker, and author. He’s on a mission to unlock human potential to help people uncover and live their purpose, and live a more meaningful and authentic life. His unique methodology has revolutionized how leaders can live authentically and how organizations engage employees. He offers no-nonsense strategies to help people find confidence in their life’s narrative, commonalities across generations working today, and ways to communicate with emotional intelligence.
Michael’s newest book, I Know, is available in print, ebook, and audiobook. For more about Michael and his work, visit michaelsseaver.com.