I am joined by none other than Alex Moscow, who is not only a very good personal friend of mine, but he’s a specialist in helping people develop something which he calls the Congruent Coach and a master at public speaking. He helps coaches develop their own businesses, earning six, seven figures, and even more, Alex, welcome to the podcast.
Adam: I think that a lot of the time, people don’t attempt to start their own business or they allow their business to stagnate because they feel they have their own issues that are holding them back or they’re not worthy, or their own complications. Could you share some of that and maybe give some enlightenment into some of the problems you faced and how you overcame them?
Alex: Well, Adam, I’ve never actually had any problems in my life… No, I’m totally kidding. I’m totally good. I actually got into the coaching space and into development transformation because I’ve had a challenge with a speech impediment, a stutter, for a large part of my life. When in school, I was very, very shy. My deepest fear was going to talk to a stranger and make friends. So I grew up like that, and even though I still did excel in sports and did well in school academically, it was a huge challenge in my life to not be able to think one thing, but not be able to say it.
So that was super, super painful, even when I look back and I’ve done a lot of work around what happened in childhood, I’ve done a lot of transformational work there. I look back and I’ve always known that I wanted to really help people. I wanted to help people essentially create a better life. That’s the way I would say it, growing up where I was, strangely enough, all my friends would come to me for advice.
So I was the kid with a stutter and everyone came to me for advice, which I thought was strange. I really liked it, but I didn’t have the confidence to be able to truly help people because my story was “well if there are all these other kids who don’t have a stutter, why would somebody come to me?”
Fast forward to college and it was right after Cinco de Mayo, San Diego state university, it was May 6th, 2008 two in the morning. I got home from a party, and at 5:38, my whole window shattered. I’m woken up out of an intoxicated sleep. I’m with huge assault rifles pointed down my face and there are four men in SWAT gear and they’re yelling “DEA! DEA!” and they threw me on the floor and I got arrested for selling drugs.
At that time, I had a chance. I’m sitting in the back seat of the cop car thinking, how did I get here? I was a 4.3 student who graduated from high school. I had a loving family who was super supportive and I looked back, I wasn’t selling drugs for the money. I was selling drugs because I just wanted people to like me and it was a great way to meet people. I look back and it was one of the first times where I realized that I would overcompensate for everything because I didn’t feel good enough.
I felt like I needed to do more and above and I wasn’t good enough on my own how I was because I had this challenge with my speech. So after I was arrested, I was brought to my first personal development event. That’s where I really got into it. I learned about mindset and I learned about limiting beliefs, and I learned about how it’s not just mindset, but how do you actually transform those limiting beliefs?
I realized that it wasn’t my stutter that needed to change. It was my story and my relationship to that part of me. For so many years I was making it wrong or bad, or it was such a limitation on my life. In business, it showed up in sales, and sales are the lifeblood of a business. Talking to strangers and making sales was a huge stretch for me. I also realized that if I believed in the product and the services I had, I had a moral and an ethical obligation to be able to sell it to that person, if they were the right fit.
Adam: Here’s what I love about you. Most people’s biggest fear and psychologists have done this multiple times, they’ve found it’s public speaking. I would argue that you have more of a reason than anybody to be afraid of public speaking, yet you’ve overcome an incredible speech impediment to not only be a public speaker but a salesperson. Someone who even sells from a stage and helps coach people to become a more confident version of themselves when they’re speaking. Even though they don’t have the same difficulties you have. What would you say was the secret that helped get past that? Because you’ve obviously dealt with all this drama, did you do any lessons or how did you do it? How did you get past it?
Alex: Yeah, thanks. That’s such a good question. As I said, when I was 19, I went to my first seminar and I’ve been in seminar rooms, I’ve been going to workshops, I’ve been going to retreats. I’ve traveled all over the world investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into my personal growth, and what I recognized was growing up, traditional speech therapy just didn’t work for me.
For me, it was the more connected that I got to myself, and the more I cleared out trauma, cleared out all the living stories that lived inside of me, that’s when my speech started to become more fluent. As I realized that, like, I DO have value to share with the world, I do have something to offer. Then what it became to me, was less of, “do I do this?” It became more of a responsibility, and I think it’s the choice.
Transformation happens in the moment of making a decision, and for me, it was a decision of, I was no longer willing to let my own limitations and my own story get in the way of myself helping other people. I think it was the moment, that decision looking for, and being scared but going for it anyway. You know, I still get the nerves, even hopping on this podcast right now, it still comes up here and there, but it doesn’t have ownership over me anymore.
It still comes up on my sales calls. It still comes up when I meet new people. It still comes up when I speak on stage and I do that a lot. So I believe that all of us get to make a decision and what I’ve recognized was that whenever I was having a challenge or I was playing small, I was making it about me, what are people going to think about me? They’re going to think that I stood. They’re going to think something’s wrong with me. That’s all thinking about myself, whereas when I focused on what is the value I have to share and how can I help other people? I’ve stopped thinking about myself and started to think about how can I serve, that’s when everything shifted for me.
Adam: You have this brand, The Congruent Coach. Why did you choose that brand? We’ve had other experts on here before that talk about the power of coaching and why coaching’s good or whether coaching is going away. What makes Congruent Coach different?
Alex: I believe that we choose our company names for our brands oftentimes because it’s the lesson that we also get to learn most. It’s a lesson that we keep learning, and so for me, I’ve been in the coaching and event via the online marketing space for the past 10 years now. For the first four and a half years, I was working for someone else. One of my mentors had a coaching business that was helping coaches and experts grow their business online and offline.
I’m so grateful for that opportunity because I was working with a lot of leaders in the coaching and online marketing space. What I noticed was that a lot of the heroes who I would look up to when I would meet them and I would see behind the scenes, there was an incongruence in their life. Maybe they were great in business in helping people make money, but their relationship was falling apart or they were great in helping people make money with their health.
There was like a secret diagnosis that happened that no one was talking about. Also, there were people who were in the transformation space, talking about mindset and or transformation in living your best life essentially. And their lives did not look like what they were talking about on stage. So that was like an incongruence to me and it was really disappointing. It didn’t put a good taste in my mouth of what this industry was about.
So when I started my own business, I had a mentor that I’m not going to name, but this person was huge in the marketing space, arguably one of the most influential marketers. What this person taught me was that if you want your clients to continue to keep purchasing from you and to keep on buying product after product, you have to create separation in distance.
The further you keep your clients away, the more they’ll buy from you, don’t ever go out with them to the bar and get a drink. You can show your face and you could have a little conversation with them, but you want to leave as quickly as possible, like create that distance. That just never felt right to me, like in my gut. I was just like, that’s not the way that I wanted to run my business. So when I launched my business, I took all of the different models and frameworks that I learned from the past four and a half years of helping my mentor build his multi-seven-figure business, helping a lot of his clients, and helping a lot of his strategic partners.
What I realized was that after building it on my own, the best way to attract ideal dream fit clients who are committed to doing the work, who are happy to pay whatever price I’m charging, who get awesome results, and send raving referrals was to be the most congruent and expressed version of myself.
I’ll give you a short story of how this happened. I love going to music festivals. I love going to music festivals, even to this day, my queen Jen and I go to Burning Man every year, I love that part of my life. This was four and a half years ago when I was going to a music festival called “Lightning In A Bottle” and I just ran an event and we crushed it at our event. I bought tickets to Lightning In A Bottle, but I never told my clients. I was terrified, there was something in me that just shared that, one voice told me that I needed to tell them, and there was another voice in my head that said, your clients are going to leave.
You just did hundreds of thousands of dollars at your event. They’re going to leave if they find out that you’re going to go to a music festival for four days. So I made the decision that I was going to tell them and the exact opposite happened. They were so grateful! I told them and they were so encouraging, they were like, “oh my goodness!” Some of them are like, “I’ve been before, I’ll see you there.” Others were like, “That makes us so happy that you’re taking time to go do that.” Others were saying, “Hey, like this gives me permission to go on a vacation with my kids that I’ve been talking about for so long.”
So that was a huge shift for me, realizing that me living my life, gave my clients permission to live their life too. Then that snowballed into my events, we have visionary art on the walls from Burning Man. Sometimes we have different musical performances. Our events are a huge expression of mine. I love house music, I’ve traveled all over the world for the past 12 years following some of my favorite DJs around.
Our music at our events even has a very different feel than most other seminars out there. The sound quality of the speakers that we invest in for the experience, that’s created live experiences with your tribe, is what builds customers for years and loyal customers year after year after year, based upon that experience that you create.
So that was a long answer to your question about how Congruent Coach came to be. But I feel like it’s important because I feel like so many people are talking about, “Hey, you have to do this marketing funnel.” There are so many people that teach us that the most effective way to build your business is to model success. Don’t reinvent the wheel. I think there’s some truth to that. But what I’ve discovered is how to create exponential results, how do you make the model work for you? How do you infuse your uniqueness in your own congruence of how you would do it in your model, based upon the success principles that other people have laid out.
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