Blog | Michael Knouse

There Is No Growth In Comfort

Happy New Year (about 3 weeks late!) Jill and I are about to leave for Africa for three weeks and my days have been filled with prep work for the big trip. Before I leave, I want to talk to you about the cost of comfort. I recognize there isn’t anything inherently bad about being comfortable or the desire to …

How Constraints Create More Freedom

This time of year is always sacred to me. It’s an invitation to slow down and spend a little more time with those I care deeply about. But this year, I’m navigating a bit of a balancing act. Besides my work serving coaching clients, I’m also in full production mode on a new creative project. After seven plus years, and […]

How I Started and Built a Rewarding and Profitable Coaching Business

The one question I regularly get asked from clients, colleagues, and friends is: “How did you build your coaching business to where it is today?” I’ve been a full time coach for almost 7 years now and here is my unfiltered story of how I did it and how I am still doing it. I know that some of you […]

What To Do When You Have Too Much To Do

Last week I wrote to you about doing less and doing it better. I talked about the liberation that comes from focusing on less and finding your flow. This week I want to dive a little deeper and get more specific. As a small business owner, I never expected it to be easy to manage a bunch of things at once, […]

Do Less, Better

Entrepreneurs and business builders face an enormous challenge. Aside from needing to learn new skills rapidly, we have more tasks to complete every day than we have time for. This ongoing challenge has driven me to experiment, practice and implement using proven methods for executing at a high level. Over the years I’ve adopted many principles that have worked well for […]

Accepting Life’s Challenges

Hey there! I’ve been pretty silent the past few months. The last time you heard from me was in early February when I reminisced about my days as a wildland firefighter. Since then, my beautiful and brave wife, Jill, was diagnosed with breast cancer, and there was a flurry of uncertainty, fear, resolve and then important decisions to be made. Just […]

The Biggest Secret I Learned As a Wildland Firefighter

A true story about me. During my summers in college I was a firefighter for the La Grande Hotshots. A Hotshot fire crew is an elite team of 20 wildland firefighters, the most highly trained in the country, which are prepared to battle the most serious fires nationwide. This was one of the most physically demanding things I’ve ever done. Imagine […]

Is Your Niche Too Big?

There’s a great quote from a mediocre movie (Man of Steel, 2013). In the movie, a young Clark Kent has a bit of a freakout about his power. His mom, Martha Kent, comes to help get him out of the janitor’s closet where he’s locked himself in. “The world’s too big, Mom.” “Then make it smaller.” For the last five […]