Richard Harris is known for making individuals and businesses perform at their best through his life coaching sessions. As one of the UK’s leading life coaches, Richard’s techniques builds people up across all domains of their life – financial, social, physiological, psychological, spiritual.
We recently interviewed Richard to know more about his journey of becoming one of the UK’s highly sought after life coaches and also to know about the principles one can adopt to enhance one’s life.
Before you became a life Coach, you ran a successful tutoring agency. Tell us more about your experience of running a successful business and the transition from being a business owner to a life coach.
I have been an entrepreneur since I was 21. In the 12 years since then I started up 7 different companies. Some bombed, but others did fantastically well. My tutoring agency did pretty well. We had 30 tutors and two administrative staff at one point. I was also the top paid tutor in the East of England for a while. The secret was being better at marketing than my competitors and talking to my students as equals. I also started up a company which sold graduation gowns, a homestay business, and raised funding for a cryotherapy business which we had to abort before launch.
I realised that the CEO life is not for me. Instead, I want to live my life out geekily exploring the nuances of how consciousness works and how to get the most from it.
“Personal Development is a continuous exercise and not just a one-off thing one can attain by attending few hours of personal development session in a year” Your thoughts on this.
Personal development is something you do every day. Results are achieved by 1% improvements day-by-day with compound interest. Attending a personal development seminar can be fantastic to give you a wake up call, or to give you a few insights into personal development techniques. However, the real magic happens in the daily practice of your plan. A life coach can help here as accountability is one of the main assets we provide our clients.
You are a big proponent of periodic Fasting, Rising early, following strict diet etc. In this fast paced work environment, how can people follow these principles?
In this fast paced work environment, how can people not follow these principles? Particularly in the case of people who work high-level careers, the demands on us mentally, physically and spiritually are astronomical. Just to be able to get through the week, you must have your whole being working as effectively as it can. These principles, as well as many of the others I coach, are here to make the individual more robust and creative and effective. The time and energy invested in these techniques will pay dividends many times over.
In the case of rising early, assuming you get to bed correspondingly early, this should be one of the best productivity boosts you ever do.
Tell us more about your travel experience in South America.
I spent 4 months in South America in 2017. It was as good as you might imagine. I explored Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The South Americans taught me a great deal about how to feel more deeply and how to have a good time. The Andes mountain range was a sight to behold – I have never seen anything so colossal in all my life.
Visiting the heart of the Amazon in a city called Iquitos was particularly eye opening. I was privileged to get a little glimpse of how the indigenous people live there, and how their spiritual traditions have the capacity to heal – in some cases more reliably than Western medicine. The vastness of the Amazon jungle still fills me with awe, even as I type this.
I hope to go back to South America in the next year or two. I saw only the North West corner of it, and only 3 of its 12 countries.
In the last few years, numerous individuals and organizations have benefited from your Personal Development sessions. In your observation, what is the most common thing that people are looking to transform within themselves?
There are a few common denominators to coaching sessions. On a surface level, I get a lot of people who suffer from anxiety, I get lots of people going through a divorce – particularly men, I get people who have a passion for personal development and want to take that to the next level.
Underneath it all seems to be a common problem of being unable to turn one’s attention to the dark and painful aspects of one’s psyche. I think this might underlie virtually all of the problems we experience as humans.
Any suggestions you would like to give to aspiring entrepreneurs? How can Startups utilize your principles to achieve great results?
Haha, so many! Here are the main ones:
Work your arse off. Seriously. You have to work hard, hard, hard.
Cultivate excellent health. Your creativity and energy and staying power will be determined mostly by how robust your body is. Make sure your health practices improve every month, just as you would expect your various business disciplines to.
Write goals and work to their achievement. When you select a goal, make ones with 80% – 90% success probability.
Everything common is wrong. Don’t follow the crowd. If you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to reconsider.
I wrote an article which sums up a checklist for all the personal development principles here: https://richardharriscoaching.com/blog/self-improvement-tips
