The Price of Being a High Performer with Rich Litvin - a podcast by Mark McGuinness

This week's guest on the 21st Century Creative podcast is Rich Litvin, a coach who specialises in taking high achievers to the greatest levels of success.







Rich's coaching clients include Olympic athletes, Presidential candidates, Hollywood film directors, Special Forces operatives and serial entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of 4PC—a community of leaders, entrepreneurs and coaches who encourage and support each other to reach their fullest potential and make their greatest contribution.



Rich is a valued thought leader within the coaching community, building on the success of his first book, The Prosperous Coach. If you’re a coach who wants to build a successful coaching business by making a big impact for your clients, you will find The Prosperous Coach essential reading.



I’ve personally benefitted from Rich’s wisdom and guidance, by attending his Coaching Intensive events on both sides of the Atlantic, first as a delegate and later as a speaker. (See the photo at the top of this post for a fun moment at one of Rich's Intensives.)



One big thing I learned from Rich was to embrace the fact I do my best work as a coach when I follow my own inclinations and work with high performing creatives, and that by working with them, I can have an outsized impact on the world.



And this is typical of Rich - whoever he works with, he encourages and challenges them to be more themselves, to take their unique gift and hone it in pursuit of their unconventional ambitions.



But high performance comes at a big price - it can lead to loneliness, to pressure, to disillusionment, and if we’re not careful, to burnout.



In this interview I ask Rich about what separates the highest performers from the rest, and how to avoid the pitfalls of success. As always, Rich was generous with his wisdom and open about his own struggles and challenges.



If you’re a high performer yourself - or if you aspire to reach the top of your creative profession - you’ll find plenty to inspire you in this interview, as well as a gentle reminder to take better care of yourself along the way.



Rich has kindly put together a set of resources for 21st Century Creative listeners, to help you make the most of your talents, including his 'Exponential Success Scorecard' and a preview draft of his new book, The Success Paradox -- you can pick these up here.



Rich Litvin interview transcript



MARK: Rich, what made you want to be a coach?



RICH: You take me back about 12 or 13 years, Mark, because I was a high school teacher at the time on a fast track. I've always been driven. I've always been ambitious. And I was on a fast track to be a head teacher and I went to do what was called back then, maybe it still is, the national professional qualification of the headship and we were trained in coaching skills. It was just becoming in vogue really for leaders to understand the power of coaching and we were trained in coaching. And within a year, I'd lost my job.



I went to work at a new school with a very inspiring boss. We were going to change the nature of education. And within a few weeks of me arriving, he got pushed out by someone at even a higher level than him, government level. And the new boss arrived and she wanted her own team and very unceremoniously, I was told there was not a place for me in that organization. But I had coaching in my toolkit and I ran away, if I'm really honest, I was pretty humiliated by being fired. Ran away to Thailand to sit on a beach, do a bit of yoga. And I can make it sound like a cool story, but I was pretty humbled by what happened.



But I was sitting on a beach with a pack of playing cards with coaching questions on and people would say, 'What are they?' And I'd say, 'It's called coaching.' And they would say,

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