Lain Lee shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Lain, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
I have a 4 year old. Almost every moment of every day with her has me laughing, and every second of every day leaves me feeling proud and honored to be her daddy.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Lain Lee, but professionally I go by “Coach Lain”. My brand is Coach Lain LLC, a globally recognized mental performance coaching and tumbling technique brand, specializing in helping high-performing athletes & individuals outperform their greatest anxieties, doubts, fears, and traumas.
What makes my brand interesting is that we’re positioned to stand out within the main industry we’re involved in (cheerleading) and in fact transcend industries. We are actually expanding our reach, moving into other sports and working with high-performing professionals in the tech world.
But truly what makes my brand unique is the tone and focus on the individual. My grandfather used to have a saying that was his core belief, so much so that it’s engraved on his headstone – “Everybody is somebody.” Years ago, I adopted this saying for the Coach Lain brand, adding “Everybody is somebody, who deserves to be confident.” At Coach Lain, we don’t focus on the performance, we focus on the individual. Because your performance cannot improve if you don’t know what’s wrong specifically, and it cannot improve simply through mantras and mindset training, that’s only treating symptoms. We focus on getting to the root cause of the “issue” for each individual client we work with, catering our coaching to each individual person.
Because we’re all humans at the end of the day, and we all struggle.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What was your earliest memory of feeling powerful?
Man, so many great questions here, I wish I was able to answer more.
But my earliest memory of feeling powerful, or more accurately, empowered, was when I was 10 years old.
Since I can remember, I’ve always been an illustrator. I love drawing cartoon & comic book characters and creating backstories for them. Disney animation was a HUGE influence as well, and watching & fantasizing about working for them was apart of my daily routine.
When I was 10, my family lived outside of Pisa, Italy and it was then that my illustrating became apart of my identity. I carried sketchbooks with me everywhere I went, sketching constantly. At school, I’d met another kid who loved to draw almost as much as I did, and together we amassed a collection of characters we were quite proud of. We were going to create our own line of comic books with these characters, and one day, cartoons like Fox’s X-Men series.
One night, I was drawing quietly in our living room in Italy when I nonchalantly shared with my dad, who was sat as his computer working, “Dad, I want to be an animator for Disney one day.” With the most love a parent could have in a moment like that, my dad stopped everything he was doing, turned around and said, “Oh yeah? Then let’s tell them!”
I looked up at him bewildered, like, “What?!? How?!?” He smirked confidently as he walked over to the phone and dialed the number for information in the United States, and casually obtained a contact number for the Disney Animation Studios in Buena Vista, Florida.
Now at this point, I have no idea how he pulled this off, but he got a contact name for the actual animation department. And within the next few days, we were shipping off a stack of me & my buddy’s drawings to a person named “Chris” in Florida.
After what felt like years, we received a response from Chris 3 months later, on official Disney Animation letterhead. They applauded our efforts and celebrated our love for illustration, and encouraged us to continue drawing & studying animation throughout our schooling. And perhaps one day, if we kept in touch, we would even have an opportunity to work at Disney.
Of course, life has it’s way of leading us down different paths, and my buddy and I lost contact the moment I left Italy. But that’s not the takeaway…
This was the moment I became empowered because my dad taught me the power of just trying. Through this one instance, he taught me that people aren’t as inaccessible as we treat them, and that the greatest thing that can happen when you take a leap of faith in reaching out to someone is that they say “no”. This one experience is how I ended up appearing in a Carlos Santana music video, or directing music videos for musical artists I admired. It’s how I ended up working for myself successfully for over a decade, and meeting my wife.
To talk to my dad about this moment today, he barely remembers it. But it shows how important it is to listen to your kids and invest your greatest asset into their ambitions – your time and attention.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
“Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship.” ~ Denzel Washington
There’s an important distinction that I always make with my athletes. “No pain, no gain” is a terrible adage developed by motivation culture to sell workout programs. In truth, pain & suffering are not something you’re supposed to work through. Pain doesn’t instruct, it doesn’t teach. Suffering doesn’t inform. They’re meant to trigger your Acute Stress Response (Fight, Flight, or Freeze) and get you to move away from the danger and return you to safety as quickly as possible.
Instead, we should look to struggle as our teach. Struggle comes from hardship, and hardship is what builds resilience.
Struggle has only ever taught me that I’m not incapable or inept, but instead, that I’m so much MORE capable than I ever thought. It challenges me in a good way, in a way that helps me to level up my skills and venture further out of my comfort zone. In fact, struggle has only ever been associated with me reconditioning my response to discomfort.
So for me, suffering taught me that I’m doing something entirely wrong and that it’s time to pivot. Once pivoted, struggle has always taught me to get more comfortable being uncomfortable, and reminded me that we humans suffer greater in imagination than in reality. So that at the end of my struggle, I utter the same four words we all say once we’ve traversed the tumultuous path to success — “That wasn’t that bad.”
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What’s a belief or project you’re committed to, no matter how long it takes?
Again, so so many wonderful questions, but this one resonates with me the most.
Two of the questions you asked was, “What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?” and “Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?”
All three of these questions culminate to this answer — mental blocks, fear, and discomfort.
This is the belief that I’m committed to for life – fear is not the enemy; mental blocks are not what you think they are; and discomfort is the root cause of all of life’s maladies.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
That vulnerability is a super power, motivation culture is a cash grab, and discomfort is the key to unlocking our greatest potential.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://trainwithcoachlain.com
- Instagram: @coachlain
- Linkedin: @coachlain
- Twitter: @coachlain
- Facebook: @coachlain
- Youtube: @coachlain
- Other: I’m @CoachLain everywhere!
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
