Michael Kohan with The Elevate Life Project

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this morning. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast. Icf certified life coach with Elevate Life Project. Mr. Michael Kohan. Good morning, sir.

Michael Kohan: [00:00:35] Good morning. By the way, I love that sound intro and it pumped me up.

Stone Payton: [00:00:41] Well, good, because we got a lot of questions. I’m sure we won’t get to them all, but I think maybe a good place to start would be mission purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks, man?

Michael Kohan: [00:00:55] Well, it’s in my tagline. I basically just work with people to try to help them aim higher and elevate their life. I work with people that are typically 35 to 55 years old, spiritual, nonreligious, who are at a crossroad in their life, and they’re looking to make some changes, but they just don’t know how, whether they just don’t have enough time for their family or they are struggling financially, or they’re just trying to set some goals to take their life to the next level. I just sit with them. I kind of help them work through what’s holding them back, what is getting in their way mentally, emotionally and what changes they need to make to their lives so they can then form their own conscious choices to make their life the best version for themselves.

Stone Payton: [00:01:45] And I think I read in my notes where you do lean on some aspects of Eastern philosophy to help you serve these folks. Is that accurate?

Michael Kohan: [00:01:55] That’s 100% accurate. First of all, all psychology is comes from Eastern philosophy, Freud, Carl Jung, which are the founders of psychology. They took a lot of their cues and references from the Bhagavad Gita, which is a Hindu text on how to live a spiritual life in the material world and for a better part of a decade. At one point in my life, I was contemplating becoming a monk, and I was studying all these texts on Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, mysticism, and even dabbled in a lot of Judeo-Christian mysticism. And I take those teachings and I try to use them to help people remove those sort of negative predisposition ideas and thoughts that are just not serving them. Basically what I do is I take certain philosophies of like, you’re not the mind, you’re not the body, you’re something more. Well, what’s that mean? Well, that means that you’re not who you are in this material body. Then if we’re not, we are in this material body. Then we could do anything. We can change any aspect of our lives, because that’s not who we are.

Stone Payton: [00:03:02] As timeless as these ideas are, I’m operating under the impression that you believe with all of your heart that you can lean on this to to teach us all about how to successfully live in the modern world. Can you speak to that a little bit more?

Michael Kohan: [00:03:19] Well, like, let’s put it this way. Okay. All right. So from the human condition, we have two minds. We have the fight or flight mind or animal mind, because we are by nature, humans have animal bodies. So it’s either I’m going to kill this or I’m going to run from this. Either I can destroy this or it’s going to destroy me. I’m going to avoid pleasure or avoid pain and seek pleasure, right? That’s our lower selves. Then we have as humans are higher selves are our ability to think beyond our material gains of acquiring possessions just to feed our hunger. So if we understand those two concepts, which comes from spiritual practices, then we can begin to look at our lives and be like, okay, whatever is going on in my life is a choice. What I mean by that is we have that lower mind. In that higher mind. Our lower mind is to avoid pain and seek pleasure, which causes what? Suffering. That suffering is a choice we all go are going to go through struggles in life. We’re all going to go through periods where we have hardship, we have challenges that overcome and today more than we have ten years ago. Right. Look at the American economy. Look at, you know, the conversations we’re having in the public arena.

Michael Kohan: [00:04:46] There’s a lot of fear, a lot of a lot of strife. And that is all about suffering When we look at it from a spiritual standpoint, which is different, where in spirituality, we look at both our the good things we have in our lives and the pain that we’re having in our lives. It’s temporary. Then we can say, okay, whatever I’m going through right now, it’s temporary. If I’m struggling right now and I’m going through a hardship, that pain is inevitable. The suffering is by choice. So then I can look at this pain and say, okay, I know it’s temporary, so then I can then choose to make changes to it. And if I choose to take changes to it, that means I empower myself. And if I empower myself, that means I can do whatever I want in life. Now, some of us will have better luck and have big stages where we become massively successful and we come multi mega millionaires and billionaires, but most of us will not. But when we realize that if we choose to empower ourselves and we choose to recognize that what we’re experiencing is temporary, then we’re going to be successful no matter what. And that’s how spirituality helps us live better lives.

Stone Payton: [00:06:01] Okay. I got to know more about the back story, man. How in the world did you get into this line of work?

Michael Kohan: [00:06:08] All right. So I guess you could say I grew up in that classic American Northeast lifestyle. You know, both my parents were college educated, so it wasn’t a matter of me. If I was going to go to college, it was I’m going to college and I’m 45. So I went to college 25 years ago where college was not very expensive and my parents were also very affluent, so they were able to pay for my college. My entire four years of college cost less than a year at the same school now. And I was going to I was going to Rutgers and I was studying to become a therapist and I was getting my master’s in psychology. And 911 happened. And if you lived where I lived, we all went through, you know, the Northeast. If you lived in the Tri-State area, you had friends and family, you knew somebody. And I just kind of like had that like I give up moment in my life and I just sort of dropped out of grad school. I had an associate’s degree in business from community college also, and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do with my life. And my parents were like, Get a job. And I was like, Well, I wanted to do I guess. So I ended up getting a job working in corporate America, and through the course of about a ten year period, I found myself at 30 years old working for a real estate investment trust.

Michael Kohan: [00:07:34] I was making 175,000 a year +22 biannual bonuses, so I was making well over $250,000 a year. I had a great apartment in New York City across from the park. I had enough money to enjoy whatever I wanted to do, but I felt very empty inside and I was basically functioning. In a way where I would basically wake up in the morning do do, you know, do cocaine work all day? Come home exhausted at the end of the day, at like 9:00 at night, take a bunch of Valium pass out. And I did this for years until a friend of mine was like, You need to change your life. You’re going to die of a heart attack. You’re killing yourself. And I started seeing a therapist and the therapist started introduced me to yoga and the yoga studio that I went to, I just fell in love with because there and I just started just changing my life and studying spirituality and yoga and mysticism. And this this became everything for me. So on Tuesdays, I studied the Bhagavad Gita. On Thursdays. I went to a Buddhist class. On Fridays, I went to this very progressive Orthodox synagogue on Fridays for Shabbat dinner, and on Saturday they studied the Torah and Saturday afternoons I did more yoga and that’s all I did for about five years, or to the point where I decided to quit my job.

Michael Kohan: [00:09:07] I shaved my head and I was aspiring to be a monk. At one point I took what’s called first initiation, where you take the initial vows where you kind of step into monastic life. And then I met my wife and then I decided to change directions and with my wife and I started teaching yoga full time. And I loved it. But I was broke. I was poor, I was living off of me and my wife were living off of like $3,000 at one point. And the Northeast, that’s not a lot of money in north. In the Northeast, that’s like very poor. That’s like, I would say in Georgia, $1,500 a month. And I asked myself, like, what did I like about teaching yoga? What do I like? And it was about helping people. And then we realized I had this master’s in psychology sitting there. So we decided to go back and become a life coach. And that’s how I got into this. And I took those ten years of studying yoga and Jewish mysticism and Eastern philosophy and combined it with psychology and incorporated coaching techniques to start this business. And it just took off.

Stone Payton: [00:10:15] Well, I mean, you’re clearly finding the work incredibly rewarding. What are you enjoying the most? Do you and your wife both at this point in your practice?

Michael Kohan: [00:10:24] Well, I you know, I just love I just love I just love helping people. You know, there’s always one or two clients that just don’t work out for whatever reason either, and they just get really upset. But by and large, most of the clients I feel that I work with, I really do help them. I mean, I just help them just take their lives and make them easier. I don’t do these, like, programs or like sign up for my 12 week goal setting course and I’ll take your life to the next level. I do that, but mostly it’s just it’s mostly it’s just about my clients having somebody to talk to. Where they don’t need therapy, but they just need somebody to help them get better clarity and better perspective on how to handle their situations. And that just makes my life better because I get to earn a living. I make a good salary now, but I also get to make the world better. I’m leaving the world better than I got it. And I try to do that with everything now. Every time that we go somewhere, my wife and I are always like, How can we be better? People treat people better, How can we be better to the people that are working in the restaurants or the person that’s like picking up our garbage? That’s this. And that’s why I love what I do. And I think when I’m coaching people, I get to instill those values into people because that’s what’s missing. I think today that just that, that decency.

Stone Payton: [00:11:49] Yeah. So help me and our listeners help me get my arms around this term that I’m hearing more and more often now mindfulness speak to that a little bit, if you would.

Michael Kohan: [00:12:01] Mindfulness is, by and large just an easy way for individuals like myself to incorporate spirituality into your life without it being offensive. What we found was a lot of people became very triggered when you would bring in Buddhist or Hindu teachings into their lives because they thought it was going against their upbringing. So that’s where mindfulness comes from. It’s an adaptation of this idea that your thoughts and emotions affect your environment and your environment affects your thoughts and emotions. And through techniques like breathing properly, like learning how to breathe better. Because if you breathe shallow, your mind is very shallow. If you breathe deep, your mind is very deep like this. Think about that one. When you get into an argument with somebody, you watch your breath. It gets very short so that you react very threateningly. But if you’re in an argument and you learn to breathe deeply, you learn to become so those are the basic teachings of mindfulness. And then through meditation, we’re able to go into our subconscious mind to understand what’s going on beneath the surface so we can kind of clean out the garbage. And through other techniques like diet and exercise and what your environment, your home looks like all affects the quality of your of your life.

Stone Payton: [00:13:32] Another term that I’m running into is attachment. You know, I guess more accurately, it’s non-attachment to talk about where that applies.

Michael Kohan: [00:13:42] All right. It’s obviously viaggio pomodoro. It’s a Sanskrit saying through the practice of non-attachment, one attains enlightenment. What enlightenment basically is from a material standpoint is Uri. So we all have two lists. You and I have two lists. You want to like for those who are driving, don’t do this, but for those who you are not driving. Take a moment and flip your palms or turn upward like they’re facing the ceiling or the sky. And then look on your right hand and imagine you’re holding a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper is everything that you like about your life, who you are as a person, what you do for living your narrative. Everything about who you are that you love. Now look at your left hand and imagine a list of things that you don’t like about your life. All the struggles you’re going through, all your hardship, where you’re from, your narrative, your life, everything you don’t like about yourself and everything you do like about yourself are on two lists. Now we all have these two lists. When we are attached to something, we cling to the list of the things either we love about our lives and we ignore our problems, or we think there’s something to overcome or something that’s wrong with us. Or we cling to the negative list of all the things that we don’t like about our lives. And we feel that our lives are in despair when we don’t when we’re not attached to either or list.

Michael Kohan: [00:15:14] And we look at our list of the things that we like about ourselves with gratitude, like, Wow, I’m lucky I get to live in America. Wow, I’m lucky I’m I’m healthy or I get to I wow, I’m lucky. I woke up this morning and I look at my list of the things I don’t like about my life. Now there’s things that are wrong with me, but as opportunities for growth. Then we’re no longer attached. Because when we are attached, that means we try to cling to the things that we like or dislike and we try to run away from everything else, and that leads to suffering. There’s nothing wrong with driving a nice car. There’s nothing wrong with having a nice house. There’s nothing wrong with with having a nice life. But we have to understand that that’s all given to us temporarily. They’re not technically ours. Because when you leave this body, because the one absolute truth in this world is we’re all going to die. Right. You and I are going to die. So the house that we live in that we might be paying a mortgage to isn’t really ours. It’s a gift given to us. Because when we leave the body and we go on to our next state of consciousness, the house is still going to be there and someone else is going to have it.

Michael Kohan: [00:16:29] So it’s not really ours. And that goes with everything so that when you have your your high, your peaks, like we’re like, Yay, life is great. I just got a paycheck and life is good and I’m going to go to the mall and I’ll buy a bunch of crap that I don’t need, and you’re attached to that. Then you’re going to then be the next on Monday, be like, Wow, life sucks. I got no money. Now I’m attached to misery. When we understand that neither, we’re going to have both the highs and the lows and we’re not going to be attached to either or. And when things come will be grateful. When things leave, will we understand that that’s temporary also, and we just go through life with the ebbs and flows? I saw this during COVID, right? I saw this with a lot of my colleagues during COVID who who were motivational speakers and life coaches who when COVID happened and things shut down, they crumbled because their entire identity was revolved around. I’m a motivational speaker and I get to go on stage and travel across the country. And that all got shut down and they crumbled because they were attached to that identity versus other people I saw like myself were like, Well, I can’t do that anymore. That’s not who I am. I’m someone who helps people. So how else can I help people? That’s basically how non-attachment works.

Stone Payton: [00:17:46] So I’m sitting here palms up, trying to breathe more deeply because I want to make a little bit of a movement towards some of what you’re describing. And, you know, change is hard. It’s hard for me. I’ve seen other people struggle with change and fall very short of, you know, what are noble intentions. Is that your experience? And if so, why do you think change is so hard? Hard for people.

Michael Kohan: [00:18:12] Change for change is probably one of the hardest things to do, right? Because that goes back to your identity, back to attachment, right? How do we identify ourselves as people? We identify ourselves in what where we’re from, write our narrative. I’m for me, it’s I’m a white male from North America, grew up in New Jersey. I was born Jewish. I was raised Judeo-Christian, parents, got divorced, had it both apartments and a bat mitzvah or a bar mitzvah and a confirmation. And then that’s my that’s that’s that’s where I’m from. I went to I went to Rutgers. I live now. Who where do I live? I live in New Jersey. I’m married. That’s who I am now. And then what I do for a living. I’m a life coach. That’s how I identify myself. And everybody identifies themselves in those three ways. Where are they from? What do they do now for a living and where do they live? Like their narrative. When we want to change, right? We want to make changes to our lives, then what do we have to do? We have to change our identity. And that’s really hard for people because the other part of that equation is we don’t live in a vacuum. We live by collective.

Michael Kohan: [00:19:32] We as humans are group oriented by nature. We form groups. Right. This is the this is an easy explanation of why bad good people do bad things because it’s about joining a group. We are a part of a group, and in that group our identity is in alignment with other people in that group because that’s how we survive. We thrive and survive by being part of a group. So if I want to change, I have to both change the group I’m part of and my identity, and both of those lead to hardship. And so that’s why change is so hard. And the best way to put it is you’re not happy right now in your life of one aspect, right? And if you have to change, you’re going to have to change how you look at yourself, who you are as a person. And by and large, a lot of times you’re going to have to change who you spend your time with. And that’s going to maybe take a period of very painful period of your life. Giving up friends, giving up maybe some family members that are toxic. Changing your habits, changing your identity. And so we don’t want to do that because we look at where we’re at as painful, but we look at the change as worse.

Michael Kohan: [00:20:51] So we don’t want to go through it. But here’s the truth, though. If you aren’t happy now in one area of your life and you’ve got to go through the necessary changes, that is also going to be painful and you’re not going to be happy, what’s the difference? And that’s what you have to look at it to make those changes. Because if you do enough work eventually with hard with luck also though, because you’ll get to a place where you’re actually happy with your life. But most people don’t want to go through those steps of changing who they are, how they describe themselves, and changing like the people around them. And on the other side of the flip coin, the people around you don’t want you to change too, because that’s part of their identity. So as you grow, they start to they start to they start to push back on that because they don’t want to see you change because then it changes their identity. And so we have these two struggles going on, our internal identity, the necessary to change our habits, our lifestyle, the people around us, and other people pushing back against us.

Stone Payton: [00:21:59] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like you, a business like yours? How do you get the new clients?

Michael Kohan: [00:22:09] So I, I do it, which I don’t know why other people don’t do this. So I use a listing service called called BBC.com, where I spend. Between 275 to $500 a month, and I basically pay for leads. Bbc.com is one of the four sort of like high searchable, like life coaching Google searches that people that when you type in life coach will show up and you click on Bach and you’ll type in what you’re looking for and it will go out to people that signed up for this service. And I can click on that lead and give you a call. I get your name, phone number and email address. What makes me so successful versus other life coaches is the fact that I have consistent follow up. What happens is most people, when they click on that lead, they don’t call the client or b only call the client once and they don’t get them on the phone. They never call them again. And to when they click on the client, they tell the client who they are, not how they can help the client. So a lot of times I’ll be like, I’m a PhD in psychology and a life coach. Great. What are you going to do for the client? So that’s how I build my business. I use e-com, I click on the lead and then I call them four times. And after the fourth time, if they don’t call me back, I put them into my email funnel and then they start getting free information from me. I send out a week, a weekly blog, I send out free coaching videos, I sent out free audio, video coaching videos, and then eventually, when they’re ready, they end up coming back to me and signing up for coaching.

Stone Payton: [00:23:57] I am so glad that I asked that. That is really good information. So when a when a relationship with you and a client begins. Talk a little bit about some of some of what happens early. I’m operating under the impression there’s some conversation maybe largely centered around what they’re trying to accomplish. Talk a little bit about the early stages of the work, if you could.

Michael Kohan: [00:24:22] So what I always do with my clients is step one. I do what’s called a discovery call. It’s an industry standard. Basically, you sit on the call with a client for about a half hour to 45 minutes and you just you have a conversation like you and I are having where I ask the coach why they’re looking for a life coach. Get a little bit of their back story, try to figure out, try to pull out what their narrative is and really try to get to see what they’re looking for. I ask them questions like what would be a successful ending of a coaching relationship with me at the end of that discovery call, if if I feel like I can help them and if I’m the right fit for them, I’ll give them a free trial coaching session if I’m not a right fit for them and I don’t think I can help them, I’ll try to point them in the right direction. Sometimes I’d be like, You know, I think you need to see a therapist. So here are two like online therapy directories that you can use, or I think you need this type of coach. I’m not really qualified for what you’re looking for, so I recommend this type of coach you’re looking for and I’ll point them in that direction. But if I can help them, I do a free one three hour trial coaching session, which we typically do a rocking chair exercise, which is a visionary exercise where I’ll have them vision their future self and what they would like their future self to look like.

Michael Kohan: [00:25:42] And it helps me get a good narrative for them at the end of that, that discovery call and that trial coaching session, I’ll typically, unless they’re really not ready, I’ll start with goal setting and I’ll have them start to work with me on goals in four areas of their life Financial goals. Career professional goals, health and wellness goals, and then miscellaneous goals. Miscellaneous goals are things like travel, books, vacations, any sort of major purchases they want to do. And I find that helps me understand a little bit more about what’s going on in their life and where their struggles are. So when I can see what needs to be worked on, once that’s done, then it’s just opens up and it comes up by individual approach where it’s either I’m working on their communication skills, their time management skills, their are their emotional skills, or they have negative beliefs. And I sort of start to tailor it after that goal setting program to really figure out what their own individual needs, because everybody is different. And that’s why I don’t do I don’t put people into like nine session programs because it doesn’t work for them. Some people are like, Yeah, I want to set goals and as I’m working with them, I realize why they’re not setting their goals is because they lack boundaries. And so I have to do a whole coaching on how to develop boundaries or they don’t have good habits. So I’ll have to do a whole coaching series on habits, and that’s basically what I do.

Stone Payton: [00:27:17] All right, man, what is the best way for our listeners to connect with You begin to tap into your work, whatever you feel like is appropriate. Website email that LinkedIn.

Michael Kohan: [00:27:27] This, go to my website. Everything I do is at my website Elevate Life Project. They go to my website, they can sign up for our newsletter. So they go to my website, they can see, they can see my coaching rates, they go to my website, they can take a quiz on understanding their life purpose. They can watch my coaching videos, they can read my blog. It’s all there.

Stone Payton: [00:27:47] Well, Michael, it has been a real pleasure having you on the program today. Thank you so much for investing the time to visit with us and share your experience, expertise, insight and perspective. This has been a lot of fun, man. Thank you so much.

Michael Kohan: [00:28:03] Yeah, man, this is great. I love doing this. Like I said in the beginning, I’m good at talking. I’m terrible at being an interviewer. You were fantastic. So thank you.

Stone Payton: [00:28:12] My pleasure. Man. All right, until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today with Elevate Life Project, Mr. Michael Cohen and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.