Deep Dive #16 - Khe Hy on Coaching and Finding Purpose

Khe is a teacher, coach, and speaker who has been called the “Oprah for Millennials” by CNN and blogs about transforming our relationship with time, work, money – and ultimately ourselves. He worked in finance for fifteen years before quitting his job in 2015 with a quest to understand “what it means to live an examined life”. In this second appearance from Khe, we dive into topics such as the value of coaching, finding purpose in life and the importance of enjoying the process.

Here are some of the highlights from our discussion:

“Often the life that we say that we want is incompatible with the life we are living”

A good coach is someone who keeps asking why. There are all different kinds of coaching which is why the label can lose its punch and, to a certain extent, has been stigmatised as a waste of time. However, a really good coach helps you align your daily behaviours to your overall values and the most effective way of doing this is to pose the ‘why’ question to everything that you do.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" Blaise Pascal

There’s a saying that defines love as the fullness of presence and the presence of fullness. When we’re in any activity, we should ask ourselves, is 100% of my presence focussed on the thing? Asking this helps us look for signs of misalignment. We should all explore these signs with curiosity and compassion because the key thing is to not beat ourself up about it if we’re not present but recognise it and see how we can change it towards alignment.

We shouldn’t be motivated by the outcome, we should be motivated by the process which should be FUN. When you have fun working on something 8, 10, 12 hours per day, the output is going to be significantly greater than if you had toiled through those hours waiting for the end of the day to arrive.

“If you are walking around with pebbles in your shoe you are not free”

In offering services, content or products, we should think more about creating value before capturing value. As creators we’re high on the creating value and we give away 99% of our content for free. But that still leaves 1% which is the small percentage that can capture value and we should thank them because they help fund all that free content and that 1% is the value that we need to capture.