LifeCoach Mahdi

I am back with a follow up on my experience with HalalBucks business coaching.

One of the first assignments I received from my business coach was simply to START, i.e. to start some business activity no matter how small or insignificant it may seem. The point was to STOP sitting around waiting for the perfect opportunity and to start immediately with whatever. It was important to get into the habit of leaving my comfort zone. It was important to start getting experience even if it was with small things, because big opportunities will come and I have to be ready for them. And the right way to prepare is to play around and gain experience with the small ones.

So, here is how it went:

Day 1:

* Assignment #2 received.
* Decided to try to sell some old coins on eBay (the previous owner of my current apartment left them in my basement)
* Searched the web for “old coin cleaning techniques” – found out lots of useful stuff.
* Contacted various family members and asked them if they have any old coins or paper money.

Day 2:

* Received a package by post from Slovenia. Some cool postal stamps were on it. I decided to try to sell them online.

Day 3:

* Contacted various family members and asked them to collect postal stamps if they get any at home or work. My thinking was: stamps from my part of the world countries are probably not very common. Collectors might be interested.
* Asked front desk lady at my company to save for me postal stamps that she gets on incoming mail.
* Received feedback from a family member that she already collected various old coins and postal stamps for me. Cool. :) 

Day 4:

* Classified coin collection (by country, by year). Did this with my daughter and used it as play time with her. Very cool!
* Encountered first problem after starting to photograph the coins. Could not get the picture focused. 
* Did competitor analysis (searched eBay for other stamps and coin sellers). I was disappointed by results (this stuff is sold in bundles and for very little money (1-10US$ per bundle of very old pieces)). Decided to try to sell my stuff in bundles as well.

Day 5:

* Searched local eBay sites for competitor analysis and got further disappointing results (almost nobody is bidding even on collections far better than mine).
* Not giving up, I managed to make some good looking pictures of first groups of coins I’ll try to sell.

Day 6:

* Listed 4 lots of old European coins for sale on eBay. Total investment US$0.60.

Day 9:

* Looked for the stamps I wanted to sell (my kids were playing around them and I could not find them ).

Day 12:

* By this time, 6 days went by since my posting on eBay and none of my listings received any bids…
* Desperate circumstances require desperate measures. So, I went to the local flea market and sold all coins I had to a seller for 1 EUR.
* Took my wife’s old College Biology book which she asked me to throw away and sold it to a flea market seller for 0.50 EUR.   

Day 16:

* Got additional 5 stamps that I’ll try to sell on eBay. One of them was collected by my daughter! She was so excited to have found it!
* The assigned was due! I did not have much to show, but at least I took the initiative. My coach was happy because that is exactly what he wanted me to do.

In short, the summary of my endeavor was as follows:

Outcome:
2.3 US$ revenue – 0.6 US$ investment = 1.7 US$ profit

What have I learned:
* selling is challenging
* selling small-value items on eBay is problematic due to shipping cost (I was selling lots of coins for $1 but because of their weight the shipping was 5-10 times more than that)
* I should probably use a “proven system” for starting online business rather then re-inventing the wheel.
* The most important lesson: Waiting for the RIGHT opportunity can take a life time. The time to act is NOW!

Decisions:
* All future coins I get, I will try to sell to flea market resellers. I will not get much money, but it is very time efficient.
* I will still try to sell old post stamps online since the shipping cost will not be an issue.
* If I go into online selling business, I will do so by using a proven system (like the one recommended to me by my very business-savvy life coach :)). This would cost more in the beginning, but I am sure it would be by far more effective in the long run.

Mahdi
Certified LifeCoach
The male half of coaching-duo.com

Some time ago I decided to sign up with a HalalBucks business coach. I was at a point in my life where I was re-connecting with some of my old but abandoned business goals so from that perspective the business coaching offer came at the right point in time.

We started off easy with questions such as why did I join, what I expected to get out of it, what are my goals in life etc.

But then, the questions got tough. I was not able to simply give an answer off the top of my head. I had to really sit down and give it some serious thought.

For example, one of the questions that really got me thinking was: “What is preventing you from achieving your goals?” The answers I came up with were really revealing to me.

REASON 1:

From life coaching I had already learned that in most cases the thing that is preventing us from achieving our goals are certain beliefs we have adopted. For example, someone would like to be a university professor, but he has adopted belief that he is not good enough. So he does not even try. But if he actually tried, he could have done it.

So, I thought about my case along these lines as well and I concluded that the following belief is what is preventing me from achieving my business/financial goals: “If you want to get rich, you have to be a crook.”

In the interest of space I will not go into the details about how I adopted this belief. Let it suffice to say that my personal experience was such that everywhere I looked, both locally and globally, the successful business people were either simply crooks, or they were involved in haram businesses, or they were involved in questionable business practices etc. And I simply was not (and still am not) ready for such compromises. So I said to myself: “Dude, better be ‘poor’ and stay out of shady things rather than getting your hands dirty.” And that is how I all but abandoned all my business / financial dreams. BUT NOW, having experienced HalalBucks business coaching, and life coaching in general, I am all excited. I again see the light on the horizon, and I see that doing something BIG and halal is possible after all.

REASON 2:

The second obstacles I identified on my path of achieving my goals is that “I DON’T FEEL THE PAIN”. What I mean is that when you are forced into a corner, and you see no easy way out, you are FORCED to make a MAJOR move. So, if one did not have a job, or did not have money, he would feel this pain that would create this urgency to act. But alhamdulillah with my already US$ six-figure-income, I have a very easy life. And this comfort is something that I think was keeping me ‘asleep’.

Now, my life coaching and business coaching experience has awakened a sleeping LION inshaAllah. Because this experience made me realize that I am actually using only 5% of my potential. And this fact - this knowledge that major portion of my potential is unused - is painful.

That is why again, after a long time, I started feeling the urgency to act.

And I did start acting alhamdulillah. More about that in my next blog inshaAllah.

Coach Mahdi
DiscoverU Certified LifeCoach
The male half of coaching-duo.com

It was a Saturday just like any other. But Allah s.w.t. had something in store for us.

My wife called me behind her laptop screen and said: “Honey, come! You’ve got to see this! Muhammad Alshareef has started some new thing on the internet and it seems real weird.”

And indeed weird it was. He was asking for a whole lot of money for something called “life coaching” that was running under the banner of his new venture - DiscoverU Life. What’s more, he was doing this in a format I had previously always associated with internet scam: a long online text full of HUGE and hard-to-believe promises for achieving unrealistic goals in an unbelievably short period of time. It reminded me of one of those commercials that say: “eat all you want, don’t exercise and still loose 30 pounds in two weeks, plus keep them off for ever!”

But knowing Muhammad personally and having witnessed his amazing successes with other things he was involved with, I did not hesitate much before I decided to take him up on his offer. I signed up for DiscoverU and – WOW!!! Boy, was I in for a ride!

Within weeks, I was like a totally born-again ME. I started discovering answers for soooooo many questions that have been bugging me for sooooo long. I found new energy, new motivation and new drive. My wife and I re-connected with some of our dreams that we had abandoned over the years, we started aiming even higher in what we wanted to achieve in our lives, we gained clarity on our ultimate visions and purposes in various aspects of our lives, our connection with Allah s.w.t. improved tremendously, we started seeing astonishing financial benefits, and much, much more, alhamdulilallah. 

Having experienced all of this, there was no doubt in our mind: we wanted to become life coaches ourselves. The benefits we received were too good for us to keep this “a secret.” The world had to hear about this and we wanted to be a part of carrying the message.

And hence here we are. Certified as Life Coaches by DiscoverU Life and trained in this art by Muhammad Alshareef himself.

And we are here to tell the world about it and to offer the skills we’ve learned to make amazing positive change in the lives of inshaAllah so many others.

We have started the journey and the bus has left the station. But it is still not too late for you to hop along, and I sure hope you do…

Coach Mahdi
DiscoverU Certified LifeCoach
The male half of coaching-duo.com

Thank you for visiting my blog. InshaAllah my first post will be available on August 28, 2008.