Smart Owners Think They Don't Need a Business Coach. They're Exactly Who Does

There's something standing in the middle of your business right now, in plain sight.

You've walked past it a thousand times. And you cannot see it.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast.

Today's episode is a Wednesday Special Edition. Every week I write a newsletter called What's Real? where I expose the lies most people believe and reveal the truths they were never taught. And every Wednesday, I bring that week's edition to you in audio, right here.

Because the most dangerous lies don't look like lies. They look like golden cages. They look like success. The most successful people are the most deceived, because the lies that trap them look like achievements. That's what this whole show is about.

On Mondays I sit down with somebody who believed one of those lies and discovered the truth the hard way. Wednesdays, like today, I bring you the Wednesday Special Edition. Either way, the mission is the same.

Go to therealjasonduncan.com/articles and subscribe for free to get the What's Real? newsletter delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning before this episode drops. That's therealjasonduncan.com/articles - link is in the show notes.

This week's post is called "Smart Owners Think They Don't Need a Business Coach. They're Exactly Who Does."

I want to tell you about a famous experiment, and if you've never seen the video, the link is in the show notes so you can watch it later and feel this one for yourself.

Here's how it goes. They show people a short clip of a group passing a basketball around, and they give the viewer one job. Count how many times the team in white passes the ball. That's it. So people lock in, and they count. And right in the middle of that clip, a person in a full gorilla suit walks into the frame, stops, beats their chest, and strolls off the other side. On screen for nine full seconds. A gorilla. And about half the people counting passes never see it at all.

Now, you're probably sitting there thinking you'd have caught it. Of course you would. So here's the part that ought to get your attention. When researchers tell people about the gorilla ahead of time, and then ask if they would have spotted it, about ninety percent are dead certain they would have. Certain. And half of them are wrong. That gap, between how much you're sure you see and how much you actually see, is the most expensive blind spot you own.

Maybe you're telling yourself that only distracted amateurs miss the gorilla. I told myself the same thing. So did a team of researchers, so they went and tested it on real experts. They took twenty-four trained radiologists, the doctors whose entire job is to stare at scans and catch the one tiny thing that's wrong, and they had them hunt for cancer nodules in a set of lung images. And into the last scan, they dropped a picture of a gorilla. Not a small one. A gorilla forty-eight times the size of the nodules those doctors were searching for. Eighty-three percent of them missed it completely. And the eye-tracking showed most of them looked directly at it. They stared right at the gorilla and never saw it.

They didn't miss it in spite of being focused. They missed it because they were focused. The better you get at locking onto what you're looking for, the better you get at missing whatever you're not.

So when you tell me you don't need anybody looking over your shoulder, because nobody knows your business like you do, I believe you. You do know it better than anyone alive. And that is exactly the problem. You're the radiologist staring at your own scan, and the gorilla has been standing in the middle of it for years.

Let's get clear on what a blind spot actually is. It isn't something you're bad at. It isn't a weakness you already know about and you're working on. A blind spot is, by definition, the thing you cannot see. If you could see it, it wouldn't be a blind spot. It'd just be another item on your to-do list. And here's what that means. You can't fix what you can't see, and you cannot see your own blind spot, no matter how sharp you are. You can read every book and take every assessment and journal till your hand cramps, and you still can't climb outside your own head to look back at yourself. Nobody can. That's not a character flaw. It's just how eyes work. They point out, not in.

I found this out the hard way. For years I ran a business doing seven figures, winning the awards, the whole deal, and I could not for the life of me figure out why I felt so trapped inside my own success. I was too close to it. It took my coach saying one sentence out loud to finally show me the gorilla. He said, "The reason you want out is the same reason no one would want in." The business was built entirely around me. I'd been staring at that scan for years and never saw it. He saw it in about ten minutes.

So let me tell you exactly what I do about my own blind spots, and it's probably not what you'd guess from a guy who teaches this for a living. Once a month, I get on a plane to Pensacola. I fly down there to sit in a room with my own business coach and pay him to look at the things I can't. On purpose. With my own money. I've been on the Inc. five thousand. I built a company, got it to run without me, and walked out of the daily grind. I teach owners how to do the same thing. And I still write that check, still book that flight, still hand somebody else the job of spotting what I'm built to miss. Not because I'm behind. Because I never want to go back to being the guy staring at his own scan alone.

And this isn't soft, feel-good spending. The International Coaching Federation found that companies who actually track it see a median return of seven times what they put into coaching, and eighty-six percent at least make their money back. Think about who keeps a coach. Every serious athlete on earth. The people at the very top of the mountain are the ones most committed to having somebody else point out what they're missing. The idea that coaching is for people who can't cut it has the whole thing backwards.

And you're not hiring somebody smarter than you to hand you the answers. You're probably the smartest person in your business, and any good coach knows that walking in. You're not paying for their brain. You're paying for their angle. A second set of eyes that stands outside your head, where they can see the gorilla you are guaranteed to miss from the inside. You still design the way out. That stays yours. The coach just walks the building with you and points at the crack in the foundation you've strolled past a thousand times.

Edward never let anybody look. Ten years, sixty, seventy, sometimes eighty hour weeks, dead sure he had it handled, right up until he tried to sell and found out his business was worth almost nothing without him sitting in the middle of it. James brought in outside eyes early, before anybody forced him to, and by year four his company ran without him. Same trap sitting in front of both men. One of them just let somebody help him see it.

There's a proverb that says this so plainly it almost stings. Proverbs twelve, verse fifteen. "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice." Notice it doesn't say the fool is dumb. It says he's right in his own eyes. Totally convinced. Completely sure. Just like the ninety percent who knew they'd have caught the gorilla. The wise man isn't the one with better eyesight. He's the one humble enough to know his eyes have a blind spot, and to let somebody else look. That's the whole difference. Not brains. Willingness.

Read the full post at therealjasonduncan.com/articles. Link is in the show notes.

This whole episode is about letting somebody outside your own head show you what you can't see for yourself. And nowhere is that more true than with your money, where most people have never once been shown there's another way to build wealth than the one everybody just assumes. Which brings me to this week's sponsor.

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My financial advisor is Mark Willis at Lake Growth Financial. If you want to find out what this could look like for your situation, you can get a free consultation with Mark by going to therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself. That's therealjasonduncan.com/bankonyourself. Link is in the show notes.

Build wealth that serves your life, not the other way around.

That's a wrap on this Wednesday special edition. If today somebody finally pointed at a gorilla you'd been staring straight past, send this episode to one person who's still sure they'd have caught it.

The gold is the lie.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.