KarFei Cheah

Malaysia

You have created this new book ‘Master Your Mind’.

Can you tell me about what you do on a day-to-day basis?

What I do right now is I coach, I call myself a Peak Performance Coach. What I do is that I work with young professionals and executives to really help them to be able to perform at their peak. What I mean by their peak is basically helping people to look at all facets of their life. One of the things I realized over the years, I’ve been coaching for almost ten years right now, is that young professionals who come to me for coaching or development, a lot of them focus on one or two things like it’s all about my career or it’s all about health and fitness which is great but there are other facets of life that have an impact on what you do. I work with young professionals in one-on-one sessions and in seminars and I work with executives. Right now I’m coaching directors in multinational companies on their leadership competencies and capabilities and so on so that’s in a nutshell what I do. So I have my own coaching business called Life Redesigned where I run seminars and I do one-on-one coaching. I have clients in Europe and in the Middle East and in the U.S. where I work one-on-one on a monthly basis. And on top of that, I run my own seminars here in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur where I run a weekend seminar to really help young professionals in Malaysia to be able to create and live a happy life. Last but not least, I am also a resident coach, meaning I coach internally. With all of this, I am now writing a book which is an accumulation of my 10 years of coaching experience.

What inspired you to write this book?

I think for me the experience I spoke about was the inspiration behind it. And the second thing is that it’s actually my 10th year in coaching next year and I was thinking what could be a great way to contribute, what have I done the past 10 years that I could contribute to more people, and I guess one other way to do it is a book because time is finite and I need to be able to help more people and one way to do that is a book. I’m also really afraid of writing the book because I personally don’t think I’m a good writer. I was born in a very traditional Chinese family, Chinese and English are not my mother tongue. So writing these things it’s a bit of a tricky thing for me but I really felt it was the right time for me to launch a book on my 10th anniversary of coaching to really let it out. I don’t know how to put it, but just being born in a traditional family in a village and small-town and so on, having confidence and really being able to show up and talk was when people would think that you’re crazy because it’s saying that this guy is just showing off. So I just want to put it all there to change people’s perceptions.

Challenges

I got my first coaching certification when I was 20, I started my first coaching business when I was 21 and of course, being a coach at the age of 21 was a big struggle. Big companies don’t know who you are, they don’t understand what coaching is, so it was a big struggle in the beginning of coaching. The reason why I wrote this book is because of how coaching has changed my life. As you can read from the title, first you master your mind and then you design your life. When I was 18 I could barely raise my hand up in class. I was probably the last person to volunteer myself to speak. However, after 2 years I had a coach and that coach helped me to change my life. He helped me to build up my confidence and he gave me the compass to do what I want to do. For me personally, after having worked with thousands of young professionals and people, I’ve learned that people set goals and they want certain things in their life, not because they really want it, but because it’s part of social conditioning, it’s what their friends want, what their friends are doing, what a parent should do, it’s certain things that they see on social media. They think they want it but actually, it’s been conditioned. I want to really help people to look at all this conditioning and really have an awareness and understanding of where all this conditioning came from so they can consciously design a life that they want. For me, fundamentally that’s the most important thing and this is the reason why I designed my company called Life Redesigned and I realized a lot of people have not been designing their life so I wanted to create a company, a movement that helps people redesign their life.

The Challenge of Passion vs. Conviction

When I first started my business, one of the big challenges was when I got my coaching certification at the age of 20 and I was really driven by passion. I’m not sure if you have experienced that time when you were really passionate about something and you feel that that thing is gonna change the world. Well for me coaching was that. When I got my coaching certification I felt that coaching was the magic pill that would solve all the problems in this world. In that moment of pure passion, I started a company with a business partner. We rented an office and printed out name cards and I had to go into a couple of multinational companies and pitch ourselves on how coaching can change the world. A few years down the road it was tough, we were drained financially, we had a couple of projects but it didn’t make sense for us to keep going. Emotionally we were off, we didn’t want to go to work anymore or to run the company. The problem was that we spent more time doing the corporate, selling ourselves, doing business development, rather than actually doing the coaching, and this made us feel resistance toward what we really wanted to do.

People talk about finding a passion and you never work a day in your life, I have to say I disagree because passion alone won’t bring you far. Passion will kickstart certain things but what you need is a conviction, that belief that you can pivot to something else but that passion for what you are doing keeps you doing what you love to do. After three and a half years of really burning out, we got head-hunted by Mind Valley. He said that we could join his company and run our business from the side. That was this turning point. I’ve been with Mind Valley for years and it’s interesting that it’s helped me to grow in everything in my life. It has given me so many resources, exposure, and experience to be able to coach so many people around the world.

Resources

For me, one of the most important resources has been having mentors. In my opinion mentors in different areas of your life is key. I had mentors in different areas of my life in business, in personal life, and so on and that has been the biggest game-changer for me. In the words of Tony Robbins, “Success gives clues.” So in order for you to want to be successful, you need to be able to learn from people who have done that already so you know how to do it or then shortcut so you can get to your successes faster. In a way, it makes sense because in the world we are living in right now things should be faster and take less time than it did for your mentors.

Secondly having a strong support and social network. I was privileged that I was part of International Connector and the people that I connected with. For example, I had a call 2 months ago, to bounce ideas with Jen Young, from New Zealand, who is a part of the IC network.

I was part of global shapers for 5 years, going into my 6th year. I met all of these global changemakers there are people who are politicians going into politics there are people going into climate change, really making a difference in the world and these are the people that pushed me forward like what am I contributing to the world. Last is reading about your subject matter to really understand and dive deep into the topic of your interest.

Advice for Others

I would want to live by the motto the tagline of my company, “Live life by design, not by default.” A lot of people ask me about living life by design and living the life you want, and ask me what if it’s not what I want 5–10 years from now? That’s the beauty of life. It’s for you to create. Life is like clay and it’s for you to do what you want and sculpt what you want with it.

But a lot of people are fixated by the fact that if I choose a life goal now that I have to stick with it for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years. It’s just not that way at all. When you decide on one thing right now and you move toward it and then you decide you don’t like it, then you create another one. The only problem with that is that people have so much fear that they are afraid to change their life vision but I think that it is more important to decide on your life vision right now and go all out for it rather than just sitting here and waiting for it to happen, being unhappy and unfulfilled in your life.

People need to know that it’s okay, we are living in a world full of opportunities and abundance and you can have anything you want at different stages of your life, so might as well decide on one thing right now and then change to do something else if that doesn’t work out.

Future Projects

I’m working on turning my seminars into a digital program, it’s about skill. I want to be able to get more people to experience this 6 weeks of life coaching so they can spend 6–8 weeks consciously redesigning and working on their life goals.

Generally, I do these more virtually because most of my clients are international. Honestly, Malaysians generally can’t pay the rate that I’m getting right now for one-on-one coaching. So it’s a bit tricky, which is why I created my weekend seminar to get 20–30 people together to help them cram everything into 2 days and then spread it across 3 months where I do group coaching once a month rather than individual so it’s my way of reducing the price so that more people can attend and have access to life coaching. I will be turning that into a digital program so that people can sign-up and get it and they can do it at their own pace.

Blurb for KarFei’s book, MASTER YOUR MIND:

“After almost 10 years of coaching, mentoring, and training more than 20,000 diverse groups of people from around the world including corporations such as American Express, Citibank, KPMG, Accenture, IBM, and many more to transform the way workplaces are functioning and how employees’ happiness and productivity are correlated, KarFei has curated and tested 2 key elements which are missing in individuals who want to pursue success in their lives and live with passion, purpose, and abundance.”

Check out his upcoming book — on pre-order for a limited time only here.

Ways to Reach out to KarFei:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liferedesigned.co

Instagram: https://instagram.com/coachkarfei

Email: karfei@liferedesigned.co