Ep. 141 | Nobody Outgrows Needing a Coach

Sep 1

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

What if the reason your growth has plateaued isn't a lack of effort, but a lack of coaching?

In this episode of the 100xLife Podcast, Rob Dayton makes the case that every single person needs a kingdom coach, and every single person is becoming one. Drawing on decades of his own coaching experiences, from a high school cross country coach to the coaching relationships built into the 100xLife process, Rob reframes discipleship itself as kingdom coaching, and explains why this relationship should never be a one-way street.

Using the four R's from his book, retain, resist, refocus, reproduce, Rob walks through Jesus' parable of the sower to show why growth in following Jesus isn't a one-time achievement but a lifelong process. He makes a compelling case for why even the most seasoned pastors, teachers, and coaches still need someone coaching them, and why a coach who isn't being coached themselves doesn't actually believe in the process they're offering others.

This episode also makes a direct, practical challenge: consider becoming a 100xLife Coach yourself, and consider who your own kingdom coach should be right now.

You'll Hear

Why Rob considers every good coach a "kingdom coach," whether or not faith is explicitly part of the relationship
The four R's, retain, resist, refocus, reproduce, and how they map to the parable of the sower
Why "refocus" might be the most overlooked and necessary of the four
Why even renowned pastors and Bible scholars need a kingdom coach
What near-death experience research reveals about why this world is so easy to get lost in
Why Rob believes coaching should typically be a paid relationship, not a free one
A direct challenge to consider becoming a 100xLife Coach yourself

Journal Prompt

Holy Spirit, remind me of the kingdom coaches who have been in my life. What changed in me because of each of them?
Who is coaching me right now? If no one, who is the best kingdom coach for me in this season?

Links
📘 100xLife Book →
🔥 Become a 100xLife Coach →
🚀 Take the 62 Day Challenge →

Recommended Reading

Imagine Heaven by John Burke
Referenced regarding near-death experience research and what it reveals about the clarity of heaven versus the "darkness" of life on earth.

Click to find on Amazon →

Rob Dayton (00:00)
Hey 100x lifers, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you had an incredible week.
Man, the last three podcasts we have done have been so incredible for me personally. first one three times ago, Jacob Reeve, one of the guys I partnered with in House of Prayer. It was actually his vision back in Santa Barbara. Then Holly Malmsten, also from the House of Prayer. Man, great conversations, pretty wild stuff in our journey, in my journey in following Jesus. Pretty cool. And then JD Fitz last week talked about suffering.
And that was really helpful for me. I really appreciated JD and and his particular circumstance with being an amputee and how that really has changed his ability to love and the way he sees people. And those are worth going back and listening to. Today I want to talk to you about a kingdom coach.
I want to talk to you about kingdom coaching. In my perspective, everyone needs a kingdom coach. And everyone is becoming a kingdom coach. There's only two things. if we want to get good at something, we have coaches. You when we were young, we were on teams. my most important coaching experience was in high school.
with a cross country coach. And what I learned through that coach was fundamental to 100xLife The the key lesson is that my body can complain as much as it's like it likes, but I always have more capacity than my body will tell me. In other words, I'm an overcomer. It's a n it's right from Jesus' overcoming and you're an overcomer. I learned that from a coach.
And then you have coaches that maybe help you academically, and how important are they? Maybe you have a writing coach, maybe you have a coach in another sport. Maybe some of those coaching relationships were less formal. You might have called that coach a mentor, or maybe you experienced a facilitator who was walking you through content in a group. That's a coaching experience.
You know, it's interesting in the last, I'd say, two decades, the concept of life coach has been all over the place. People are talking about I'm a life coach, I'm a life coach. In my brain, every single coach is a life coach. In other words, a good coach
Will always take anything that you're learning to do back to the essence and structure of how life works and how you can maximize your well-being. And from that perspective, Jesus, the designer of this life, is the best coach. And so every single one of us needs a kingdom coach. We need a kingdom coach. Why would you not have a kingdom coach?
you'd get coaching for college was a big coaching experience, or you coach for, like we said, a sport, why would you not have a kingdom coach? If if following Jesus is the most important thing to you, why would you not have a coach to maximize your ability to follow Jesus?
Let that sit with you. You need a kingdom coach. And then conversely, everyone is becoming a kingdom coach. They they're all becoming kingdom coaches because this is the discipleship model.
But before you actually disciple people, you actually need to be discipled. You need to have someone coach you. So I'm gonna use that term kingdom coach as kind of like the new way of talking about discipleship. It's coaching people in the things of Jesus. It's coaching people in the process of growth that Jesus invites us into. And I would say ultimately, it's coaching us into the behaviors of love.
A 100xLife is a kingdom coaching process. You go through it with other followers of Jesus, being coached by someone who has completed the challenge in the past. That's as simple as it is. And in this context, coach means someone who has wrestled with the words of Jesus to apply and automatically live them in thought and in practice. So a coach is already kind of in that process.
A coach is on the process with you. I think that that's really important. They carry never-ending reflection on how they are living the words of Jesus. In other words, they haven't just arrived. They understand that the journey never ends because we can always increase in our capacity to love like Jesus. So a kingdom coach is a facilitator, a guide, an encourager.
A kingdom coach is vulnerable. This is really important, vulnerable and open about where they are growing and their ability to love like Jesus, where they're falling short in loving like Jesus. Every kingdom coach is being led by another kingdom coach. In other words, if you have a kingdom coach, make sure they also have a kingdom coach. if you're a coach and you don't have a coach, that means you do not believe.
In coaching. That's what that means. Like, if if you're you're asking me to be coached by you and you don't have a coach, do you really believe in coaching? So all of us in the kingdom, we are becoming a kingdom coach and we will always have a kingdom coach. A coach is looking for every opportunity to learn and continually grow.
And their ability to love like Jesus. The goal of 100x life living is to fully embody and live the words of Jesus. And this is what I call the behaviors of love. You were on this journey with me. I wrote 100x life because this is how Jesus transformed me, and I want the same for you. I'm committed to continuously exploring ways to help each member of the body of Christ grow in knowing Jesus.
And loving like him. That's my commitment. That's why this podcast. That's why my life. It's just I want to be the best kingdom coach that I can be. So today I want to show you how Jesus' 100x process of growing in his word.
His words reveal the importance of this kingdom coaching principle. In other words, the concept that everyone has a kingdom coach and everyone's becoming a kingdom coach. And every kingdom coach has a kingdom coach. Why is that? What is it about Jesus' 100x life process that requires us to continually have a coach, even if we're coaching?
Well, you'll recall that the 100xLife process of Jesus is found in the parable of the sower. It is the four soils that Jesus explains. and then in the book, I've given you the four Rs. So this is how Jesus would say, we're gonna process his words. We're gonna retain, we're gonna resist, we're gonna refocus, and we're gonna reproduce. This is what Jesus is after. So let me go through each one of these just really briefly, retaining the word.
Or a word of Jesus is simply having it within us. We know what it is. For example, do not worry. That word, I'm fully retained that one. I know it. In fact, the reason I know it is because when I start to worry, I'm like, wow, I'm worrying. Like there's there's a heightened sense of
When we do something, how there's a word of Jesus that's confronting us. That word of Jesus is now in us. It's not in the Bible. It's actually in us. It could be Holy Spirit reminding us of the Word of Jesus. That is the role of the Holy Spirit as described by Jesus in John 14 to remind you of everything I've taught you. So yeah, that could be happening, but you have put the words of Jesus into your body, into your brain, into your mind.
You have placed them in there because you have gone and looked for them and you've talked about them and you've learned them and now they're in you. And not all of them are in you. You know, which one's not in you? I don't know. love your enemies is a pretty difficult thing to do. I hear the way people talk my most days. Doesn't sound like love your enemies. Or maybe you're complaining about something, which is a worry, or it's a fear.
That doesn't sound like retaining the words of Jesus.
So we can we can be really good at one word of Jesus and really poor at another word of Jesus. In other words, we're retaining some and we're not retaining others. This process works per word, not with the whole entire set of words. And how many words are there of Jesus? Has he stopped speaking yet? I mean, we've identified 55 in the commands of Christ within the gospels, but he's still speaking. Second is resist. Now, this is the gym process where we have to endure trial.
Resistance, we have to endure in last week's podcast. Suffering. We endure suffering for a purpose. We endure pain in the gym. If no pain, there's no gain. We we endure pain for a purpose. in our minds we have to go through this process of exercise where we fail, we succeed, we succeed, we fail, we succeed, and we get better and better and better because we're working out the muscles, if you will, of that.
particular words of Jesus. in the book, I said it for me.
To not actually think of having sex with another woman. That took three years. That was a three-year process, a three-year journey of rewiring the way my mind thinks. That took a lot of resistance. It took a lot of success plus failure plus success plus failure, not beating myself up, but just thinking I'm in a gym. Jesus, the cross, has created this world to be a gym where you can endure trial, you can endure.
Endure pain. You can endure, in this case, resistance, and that resistance leads to maturity, to wisdom, to completeness. So the resist is the active reach. It's the active process of exercising the word of Jesus that you've retained. You're thinking about it, you're speaking about it, and you're putting it forth in your actions, the behaviors of love, whichever one that is you're working on.
And then refocus. Refocus is a different practice. It's for people who have maybe already gotten, they've been in the resist before and they've done really well. And maybe they they've ver reproduced, but now they are not reproducing. In other words, they know how to produce, but they are not producing. This is kind of the slippery slope, in my estimation, of the body of Christ. It can be so easy to sit in the pew and say, Amen.
To the preacher who's preaching the word of God and not thinking about now, am I actually living this one out? Am I actually doing it? So refocus is about engaging in the words of Jesus that we have capacity to live, but we've decided, it's too hard.
It's too hard to love my enemies. It's too it's too hard not to worry. I can I can just talk about this thing that's frustrating me. I'm just gonna share it with you. And then you start catastrophizing. Your imagination ramps something up before you know it, you're in different place. It's kind of like when you just let your guard down.
And now I'm I I need to refocus. I need to find out. I need to actually be evaluate myself on where I've lost my edge. I've lost my drive to stay in the gym because you never leave the gym, which is core to what I'm talking to you about today. And then finally reproduce. So retain, resist, refocus, reproduce. These are the four soils in the parable of the sower.
retained in you know, is where the seed is the seed gonna be retained in the soil? That's what Jesus said. Resist is does does the seed actually germinate a plant and resist the evil one and what the evil one does to t to steal the word and to destroy the word. Refocus is when the enemy distracts.
distract. So we got to refocus and on reproducing. And the goal is the reproduction. That's the foresoil that Jesus says in a good heart reproduces some 30, 60, 100 times what was sown. That's where we get 100 X. Every word of Jesus is a 100X word. There's no such thing as a word of Jesus that's only 30 X or zero X. In other words, this puts the burden on us. Yes, God
Grants us faith. Yes, God grants us all sorts of power. But Jesus is saying, this is a work of you So work that you decide. You are an image-bearer of God. You are created in the image of God. You are like Him. God is love. You are created in the image of love. And you are to reproduce love. That is your design. And that takes a choice. Just like God can choose, the Trinity can choose whatever they want. You're created in His image. You can choose to be whoever you want.
You choose love, you choose fear. The work of 100x life is all on you. Yes, you have the power and authority of Jesus to get to help you, to spur you on, but you can choose to produce absolutely nothing. You can choose to settle for 30x. You can choose to go, wow, I'm above 50%. Let's go, 60%, 60x, or I'm gonna choose 100x. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for it. I'm going to maximize, would be another way of saying it. I'm gonna maximize the words of Jesus.
And his behaviors of love to increase my abilities. So this process Jesus designed is to take us into reproducing his words. Each of his words is a behavior of love. So in essence, we are reproducing love. And love is the foundation of the kingdom and the fulfillment of the covenantal law.
Jesus says, hey, there's just two things. You do these two things, you fulfilled the law. Those two things are that you would love the Lord your God with all your being. In other words, love the Trinity with everything you got: body, mind, soul, spirit, all your strength. And you love others like Jesus. Notice how I changed that up. Because you're familiar with
Love the Lord your God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself. But in John 13 Jesus says, Hey, a new commandment I give you, love others like I love you.
And so we can replace that one. My opinion as to why why Jesus up, you know, gave that love your neighbor as yourself an upgrade is because I don't think that we love ourselves. A lot of us don't love ourselves. if we love our neighbor as ourselves and we don't love ourselves, we've got a problem. We are not fulfilling the covenant of law. So the two commandments that Jesus invite us, There's only one verb.
In these two commandments. And the verb is love. That is the thing that you, my friend, are given a choice. You're invited by Jesus to choose love. You need to choose love. And so the four R's take us through the process of choosing love or having love abide in us. So when we think, speak, and act in love, we have reproduced the words of Jesus.
And always as a reminder, there are many aspects of love that exist. You might be really good at one aspect of love and fall short of another. You know, we talked about worry. If you're not worrying, you're not working in walking in fear, you're walking in love. But then can you love your enemy?
Is that something that you can do? Maybe you're good at one and not the other. Forgiveness. That's one that I've gotten really, really good at. You know, I can still be tested. That's the refocus. I need to be aware of where I'm not fulfilling that word of Jesus, that one aspect of love. So the four R process can and should be used with each word of Jesus.
Infinitum forever for as long as you're living. Notice that between retain and reproduce, Jesus invites.
Two general realities of someone in his 100x life process those that are working to resist and those that are working to refocus. This is the core aspect of why everyone needs a coach and everyone is becoming a kingdom coach. It's because of resist and refocus. One working to resist is actively exercising the word of Jesus. Okay. So you're acting actively exercising it, and one working to refocus is someone who has gained the capacity.
Capacity to reproduce in the past, but they no longer are reproducing. So this is why the process is never ending. It just never ends. This side of heaven, you're always going to be working and building your capacity to love. And you build your capacity to love like Jesus
When you're in the gym on each of his words that are in the Bible. And then also the words that he's telling you to do, what he's staying saying to you to do you. So even when we succeed in reproducing the words of Jesus, we can stagnate, we can forget. And we can go back to our old ways of thinking, speaking, and acting. This is kind of like when I get lazy.
And I don't have my guard up, and I'm not taking it serious. One one thing that's really interesting about people who have had near-death experiences and have gone to heaven, I call this the science of heaven. I'm constantly talking about Imagine Heaven and John Burke's work to really put all those themes together into one book. One of the aspects of they report that heaven.
Is so real and clear. In other words, when you get to heaven, you experience reality. All the things here on earth that don't make sense or seemingly are contradictions in the the the Bible, they all make sense when you get to heaven. Everything makes sense, everything's really clear. And what people notice is when they go back to earth, because all near-death experiences, all the people who've been to heaven who've reported it, obviously, have reported.
Turn to earth and what they all report when they come back to earth is man, this place is it's blurry, it's not clear, it's easily lost, it's in darkness. You know what the Bible calls about darkness, John saying that the light came into the world, which is Jesus, and and the darkness did not recognize the light.
We are living in this cloak of darkness that has so many deceptions. If we could be someone who had a near death experience, we would see the contrast pretty clearly. But since we don't have that, we have to work to understand this world is dark. And so it's so easy to stagnate, to be distracted, to be caught up in the things of this world, the pleasures, the worries.
the pursuit of other things. It's so easy to be caught up in those things. And so we have to be good at refocusing. It doesn't matter how good of a kingdom coach you are or how many people you've discipled.
You constantly need to refocus and make sure that the deception of this world is not taking you back, is not shortchanging you in your ability to live the abundant life. When we live in love and the behaviors of love, that is the abundant life Jesus is inviting us into.
So I I hope that that's resourceful to you to understand that within the 100xLife of retaining, resisting, refocusing, and reproducing the words of Jesus, his behaviors of love.
We always are gonna need a coach, a kingdom coach, whether that person is a mentor and there's not a formal relationship, or whether it is a formal relationship, I encourage you to have a formal coaching relationship. So that's inviting someone in to actually challenge you, to s and to actually notice things, to ask you the right questions. And then we all need to be asked those questions, even if we're the best kingdom coach ever, even if we're a renowned
Biblical scholar, or have you know known throughout the world as they is a voice for Jesus or a voice for his process? Even those people, in fact, maybe they need a kingdom coach more than anyone else. Can you imagine if every pastor of every church
That thing in Churchianity where that pastor is teaching on any given Sunday, someday Saturday, maybe your Saturday night, whatever you're doing in that construct of Churchianity, wouldn't it be amazing if every pastor had a kingdom coach? This does not exist, people. This does not exist. It is so unreasonable to put a pastor in a role where the expectation is you are the guy.
In my brain, the most appropriate position a pastor can take is someone who says, Look, I'm here to guide you. I'm here to coach you, but I need to coach too. I'm growing alongside you. I might be a little ahead more ahead in some of the words of Jesus, in my ability to exercise love. But in other areas, you congregation members might exceed me. And so I need a kingdom coach. Wouldn't that be amazing?
And so here's the journal prompt for you. you just write. Who has been the kingdom coaches in my life? Who are those people? Holy Spirit, remind me of those kingdom coaches that were in my past. Maybe write a little bit about what changed in you with each of those people. And then look back at your list. How long is your list?
How many people have you formally said, hey, I'd really like you to coach me? I'd like you to guide me in this kingdom process. I want you to challenge me. I want you to make sure that I'm in the gym and that I'm retaining, resisting, refocusing, and certainly reproducing. Who are those people? And then who's coaching you now? Now that could be, that could be a no-one, but there's probably someone.
Who you allow or invite to speak into your life. There could be someone. And if there's no one, the question is: who is the best candidate for this season, for this time in life, for the end of 2026? Who is the best kingdom coach for me right now? And I encourage you to formalize that relationship. Well, here's what it looks like to formalize that relationship.
It looks like it says, hey, we meet a certain rhythm. There's a certain rhythm we're going to meet. And there's a certain expectation. In other words, this is how it works. I get to speak into your life. I get to be vulnerable. I invite you into vulnerability. I want you to tell me what's really going on. I want to hear the deepest, darkest struggles. Pastors can't tell the deepest, dark, dark, darkest struggles to anyone because then the they're like, now they're disqualified. But of course.
Of course, every man or woman who is a pastor, if you believe women should be pastors, I don't I don't care. You you you decide, but each one of those people has a place in their life where they haven't arrived, where they're not living the words of Jesus.
I I don't know. I feel like can I get an amen on that one? And so they need a coach. If you can't be vulnerable with your coach and tell them where you're at, even your darkest things, if you can't process, the coach will not be valuable to you.
So, what is this formal relationship that you can set up? And who is the person in the 100X Life coaching process, typically are surrounding the 100X Life Challenge, which is going to be coming up here in January 2nd? I encourage you to get one of those. Like maybe that's the answer. Maybe you are a 100x life participant. You've been through the process, you've read the book, you're actually you understand the four R's. You're actually in the gym. It's your goal in life, it's your pursuit to do.
To live a 100x of what Jesus' word says. Wow, you need a coach. And maybe.
The best way to do that is to become a coach and actually help other people along their way. I I gotta tell you, that is why I am a kingdom coach. The main reason I'm in a kingdom coach position is I want to participate with others in exploring where I'm still falling short, where I need to refocus, where I need to retain and resist, get in the gym constantly. You never stop. c can you imagine if someone said, Hey, you need to be in the gym for the next six months?
And then after that, you're good. Rest of your life's gonna be fine. You're gonna be healthy. No, that's ridiculous. We are in the gym continually. We're in the gym for the rest of our lives to make sure we increase and maintain strength, mobility, so that we don't have an early death and that we can actually live out our kingdom calling to the days God has given us. That is why you're in the physical gym or
working out and it's no different word the words of Jesus. We constantly need fine-tuning. We constantly need to up our game. Maybe we're only producing a certain multiplication of the words of Jesus and we want to get to that 100x. I encourage you to become a 100x life coach. the team has put the the links in the show notes for you to do that. And also
Consider who is your kingdom coach? Who is the the man or woman who needs to speak into your life that you want to set up an intentional relationship with? I propose a paid relationship because this free thing where we just get free doesn't work. The reason why you put your heart
and soul into college is because it costs a lot of money. And if your parents paid for it, maybe you didn't put your heart and soul into it. That was my story. I I didn't I mean I've I'd love to relive those years again. And if I was paying for it, I would have taken it much seriously. So maybe there's a there's also a financial aspect of coaching, certainly in the coaching throughout the other coaching, whether you're getting a coach for the gym or you're getting a coach
For an executive coach to in your work, those are all financial financial relationships. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that can actually serve you better to say, Hey, let's agree on a price for your time. Serve me well. I will use the the service you give me and I will multiply that a hundred times.
And reproduce love in my life. That is our goal. Guys, I hope you have a wonderful week. Consider becoming a 100x life coach. Consider the coach that you need right now, the kingdom coach you need right now. And let's go live 100x of the words of Jesus and his process of love. We will see you next week.