We were lucky to catch up with Keegan LaMar recently and have shared our conversation below.

Keegan, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

As a collegiate athlete, you get pushed to your personal limits in everything you do. Sports, school, social life, personal life, and everything else demand so much from athletes competing at such a high level. Like most athletes, I had my ups and downs; and the downs make you feel like a crushing weight is on you. I held myself to a high standard and was my worst critic when it came to my performance on and off the field. When you aren’t optimally performing, things can go south very quickly because your coaches and fellow teammates expect you to be at your best all the time.

During one of my off weeks, I was told to go and see a sports psychologist because that was the only resource we had that could work on any mental part of an athlete’s development. Coming out of my meeting with the psychologist I was diagnosed with performance anxiety and depression which, I believe, was the beginning of the end to my sports career. What I didn’t ever realize as an athlete was that I was never actually broken like I was meant to believe, but I was just non-optimal in the way I approached the game mentally. I didn’t learn that there was another path I could have gone down as an athlete until after my playing days were behind me.

I was a highly functional person who did more in a week than most did in months (the same as my teammates and almost every athlete out there). I made it my goal to figure out what actually went wrong while I played and become the person I wish I had as an athlete. This lead me to becoming certified as a mental performance coach so that I can show athletes that in most cases they are not broken, just non-optimal which they can use daily disciplines to self-correct their habits into being high-performing individuals again.

Keegan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a former collegiate football player for the University of Colorado and a current business owner of multiple companies, including my performance mindset coaching practice. I help individuals who are called upon to execute at a high level understand how performance works for them and remove the distractions that keep them from tapping into their optimal selves through simple strategies and practices. I offer personal coaching, group coaching, and run workshops through the Positive Coaching Alliance for amateur athletes. I have worked with Olympians, professional athletes, amateur athletes, and business executives to help them all figure out what works for them and why it works for them. I believe performance=potential-distractions and most of us focus on increasing potential but the people who rise to the top focus on decreasing distractions while still increasing their potential to get the goals they want in life. Everyone could go online now and probably stumble upon some video or course about the “3 ways to get what you want” or something like that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, but I do know that what works for one person does not mean it will work for another person. However, when it comes to increasing potential, we go out of our way to take all the classes and workshops we can but don’t treat our mental performance the same way. I take great pride in working with people to help them think about their mental performance in a new way and have fun creating those moments where something exciting clicks within a client of mine that sticks with them forever while also celebrating their wins in life.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One thing that I have had to unlearn in my past was that the results of what you do don’t always matter, what matters is your ability to constantly push forward and give effort to everything that you do. As a college athlete, I was expected to perform at the highest level of my sport daily, which for most athletes is nearly impossible. Athletes at all levels have to perform at a high level but most of them aren’t capable of being at their peak state for very long. This is because there are always numerous factors that enter the game and there is no crystal ball that can tell you what’s coming, who is going to do what, and how things are going to play out. Our strategy for the game has to be fluid and therefore peak performance is never guaranteed. What is guaranteed though is our ability to put forth efforts and behaviors that lead to individual athletes to performing well. When I learned that it’s not peak performance that should be the goal, but effort and discipline that should be the goal then things really started to change for me and great performance became a byproduct of the effort that I focused on.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

One of the “side hustles” that a friend of mine and I started is a software development company. We came together and understood that we each had different skillsets with my partner’s being technology and mine being business development. We set out to close the gap between growing brands and their largest market competitors by making custom software development and strategies more available to smaller companies so they could let their ideas shine rather than be hidden behind piecemeal technology solutions that can provide harsh user experiences and cause bottlenecks to a company’s growth. When we first started, we had interest from a pretty big opportunity that was going to be roughly $250k which for us just starting out was massive for us at the time. We went through months of proposals and discussions and eventually won the proposal, just to have the company ultimately say they didn’t believe the money would be best spent on custom software at the time. It was a gut punch for sure, and the tough times were just starting for us. For the next seven to eight months we definitely struggled to get clients. However, nine months into us forming a business together, a client decided to give us a practical proposal which was for us to get their website up and running without issues from a design that was given to them. We had three weeks to complete the task and after some long weeks we pulled it off. That client then paid us for the work we had done and then signed us to be their core software development company for the next five years. Since then, the business has been continuously growing and we now have gone from two founders to six team members and growing! The key milestones for us were to find a company that we could fully understand on a personal level so we could think on their behalf and understand their vision for their company. We also had to have that first opportunity where someone would take a chance on us and give us the opportunity to walk the talk and deliver on our promise. From that point forward, the milestones have always come in the moments where we think we are stretching ourselves and/or challenging ourselves outside of our comfort zone and find a way to do great work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lamarcoaching.com
• Instagram: @lamarcoaching
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lamarcoaching
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keeganlamar/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@lamarcoaching1163
• Other: www.kadconsulting.it