Leading you through a comprehensive programme of Advanced Life Coaching Skill The Life Coaching Handbook is the essential guide for life coaches, and a key sourcebook for NLP practitioners, human resources managers, training professionals, counsellors and the curious.
Coaching for more than twenty years, her clients include celebrities, CEOs, directors and doctors. This book, however, recognizes that unless you address the deepest, most unconscious "shadow" layers of your operating system, you will self-sabotage your growth at every level.
Your shadow is composed of your fears, old trauma, and insecurities. It's the reason why most business owners struggle to stand out, attract ideal clients, and create consistent revenue. Here is the magic: your shadow actually contains the secrets to accessing your unique genius and gifts that can help you powerfully connect with your ideal clients and become an unstoppable leader in your industry. The powerful techniques in this book have been adapted from ancient wisdom, behavioral psychology, and the author's private coaching practice.
Anna shows you proven methods in an easy-to-practice format that will help you clear your biggest revenue blocks, identify your unique identity as a coach, and create a structure for your thriving business. This book is a must-have for coaches and entrepreneurs in all industries. For every book purchased, a tree will be planted. In this fun, easy-to-read book, join the bestselling author and renowned success coach as he guides you through ten sessions designed to change your life—and the lives of the people you care about most—for the better.
Whether you want to powerfully impact the lives of the people around you or simply wish to create a deeper, more meaningful experience of being alive, Supercoach is your essential guide to helping yourself and assisting others.
My attention is on building relationships and coaching people and making bold proposals. I enroll my clients by coaching them. As simple as that. In fact, my calendar now has only two colors: red and blue. Blue signifies any time I am coaching a client. Red signifies any time I am creating a client. I have made the two boxes overlap so much that if you were to observe me on a coaching day you would be hard pressed to know whether I was speaking to a client or creating one.
Lead powerfully. Challenge how your clients see the world. They do not need sympathy. They do not need you to be their friend. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster. I start that way, the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and go for it. A client of mine asked me to coach her as she transitioned from corporate work into consulting as a philanthropic advisor. In her previous job she had worked six to seven days a week and she was determined to never do that again.
She laughed out loud when a day later the company called her back to meet her terms. Me, I love to travel. As I designed my own lifestyle, I got clear that I would need to coach my clients by phone in order to have the freedom to travel as much as I wanted.
And I love to spend time in beautiful places, so when I do meet clients in person, we meet in beautiful hotels or in inspiring locations. The executive strolls down to the beach and notices a fisherman rowing in to shore. And then you could go fishing just because you love it. And then you could have a barbecue on the beach with your friends.
And you could play guitar and sing and hang out on the beach. Imagine your life five years from now. Ten years. Who are your dream clients? Where would you love to be coaching them?
What else would you love to be doing? People pay you not what they decide your coaching is worth, but what you decide your coaching is worth. I love to take clients to the hotel at the beginning of a coaching program. I take time to point out the remarkably thick roots that in many places protrude well above ground.
You cannot see the majority of the extensive and deep root system supporting the tree from beneath the ground. This is a wonderful metaphor for how a strong and deep foundation is needed for us to achieve great things in life. To become highly successful as a coach, you need to master three disciplines: at the front of 1. You need to master the business of Creating Clients in fact, to be highly successful, you need to love creating clients as much as you love coaching clients.
You need to become adept at Fearless Coaching a willingness to courageously lead your clients in the most powerful way possible. And beyond these, you need to be willing to work your own process—and do the Deep Inner Work necessary—so you can see your own blind spots.
Clients are created. And it has your clients on edge, waiting for that moment when you are about to manipulate them. Having a powerful vision for your business is a fantastic idea. But no successful business was ever developed from creating a vision board and then sitting down and waiting for dream clients to knock at the door.
A better way. And it occurs when you bring your creativity to the table. When you are willing to combine imagination with action. The kind of clients you would love to work with are only created in a conversation. And high-performing, high-paying clients are only created in impactful, life-changing coaching conversations. The majority is almost always wrong.
At the beginning they are a little shocked to learn the following: 1. And their business grows by invitation and referral only. Some of them may enjoy playing with internet marketing and social media.
Many do not. Because the formula that Steve and I teach—and use—does not involve marketing. Not even relationships, plural—just one relationship at a time. Honoring the individuality of the person in front of you. These days, I coach three days a week and I have a marketing budget of zero dollars. I take two months of vacation a year and I coach mainly by phone, which gives me the freedom to travel anywhere in the world.
For much of my working life I was a teacher. I was an employee working for others, working long, long hours for a paycheck that never changed—unless I sought promotion. Which I did regularly. Only to discover that often the more I earned, the less I was able to do what I really loved.
Fortunately, it turned out, one day a new boss arrived who wanted her own leadership team. And because I was one of the most recent hires, I was let go. But soon I was using some of the coaching skills I had learned as an educational leader. I became better and better at coaching. So I hired a marketing expert.
And a Search Engine Optimization expert. And I hated the boring marketing tasks that I was required to do. So I began to do things differently. And everything began to change. My great-grandparents were refugees from Eastern Europe. They built a clothing store in Waterloo Station in London, England, about eighty years ago.
If you came into their store they got to know you. They took down your details. And if some clothing item you might like came into the store, they contacted you.
Great businesses have always known that the magic is in building great relationships. Coaching is no different. And for you and your career, that is very good news. Get a coach. Remember that you have to practice them, not just understand them. Not just agree with them. Not just appreciate them. Practice them. They are not theories we always knew would work. They are retroactively collected practices harvested from what has worked for me and Rich and our clients over the years, and what still works today.
No cold calling. Use or create inner circle connections. Act quickly. Use conversations. Schedule conversations. Fill the day with conversations until your client list is full. Use certainty versus belief. Speak from what you are certain of.
Keep a success list. Share stories and case histories versus features and benefits. Needy is creepy. Stay with their wants versus your needs. Yes lives in the land of no. Leadership in the close. Direct all the action.
Slow down. All the wealth you want is right there in the next conversation. Get a coach who will build your practice and change your professional life. Leave the conversation in a context of possibility, not a context of affordability.
Limitation creates value. Make sure you are the one doing the auditioning of the client, and not the other way around. Be constantly aware of role reversal.
Do not surrender your power, leadership and role as the coach in the conversation. Be great at what you do Have routines, habits and practices that guarantee that you become better and better as a coach every day.
Read books, see movies, listen to audio and talk to people who make you better as a coach. Every day. No high-performing client was ever created outside of a conversation. And no high-paying client was ever created outside of a powerful conversation.
CHAPTER 14 Have the disciplines be fun by Steve T h e d e g r e e t o w h i c h w e p r a c t i c e these disciplines is the degree to which our coaching practices grow in both revenue and clients.
Those are our outcomes from practicing the disciplines. Disciplines are activities that are practiced. Disciplines are things that you put yourself through and work with and take out into the world and do. Soon they become activities you thrill to and breath in to. And when they are practiced out in the world with real people, they get amazing results.
After awhile they are just automatic. Whereas these disciplines might have once been awkward and clumsy, they will become, if they are continuously practiced, natural forms of self-expression. Slowly warm up to them and feel good about them. Soon you will get them at a DNA level.
Discipline 1: Sell the experience, not the concept. Make their decision easy. Discipline 2: No cold calling. Use your inner circle connections. Cold calling is not necessary, ever, in the world of coaching or in getting clients. We can look each other up. We all know people who know you.
We all have very few degrees of separation between us, and we can close these quickly. No cold calling, please. You already know enough people who know people who know people.
So if someone is excited about working with you, they have a certain measurable level of enthusiasm for your work and your coaching.
No way to stop that deterioration of enthusiasm. Yet most coaches are completely unaware of it! Even people who said they would! I want to take my action as soon after the event as I possibly can.
It has to. It does for anything in human life. However, if I can see that clearly, I can take advantage of that and make that play to my favor. I can always act now. Discipline 4: Do not use email. Now this is kind of an overstatement, because of course email has some effective uses. There are some things email can do for you, but most of the coaches I coach overuse it. They make the mistake of trying to use email for persuasion. They try to use email to convince people of something or to get them to see the value of something.
And it is ineffective that way. What do I have to respond to? What can I get rid of? It will not arrive in the same spirit in which it was sent. Please be awake to that. So many of my clients in coaching have sent an email to a prospect who was considering the coaching, and it transpires that if they had only had a conversation something great would have happened.
Instead they sent a long email, and now the recipient is considering the email. They read it, read half of it or… save it for deleting later. So always look for the possibility of a conversation. Use conversations, schedule conversations, have your day be about the next conversation you are going to have, because if you do that, you will get clients. All coaching agreements occur inside of a conversation. And no sale has ever occurred outside of a conversation. All those things that eat up our whole day when we could have been in a conversation.
Discipline 6: Certainty versus belief. Use certainty. It improves your voice tone. Do not have selling be an emotional crisis about whether you are worthy of your fee. That will send you south. That will send you down the ladder. That will have you not connect with people. The antidote to that is knowing what you are certain of. And then speaking with absolute certainty. Keep at your fingertips things that are factually true about your work and with a lot of beginning coaches I have them keep this list literally written out.
I want to really be connected with certainty. Discipline 7: Share stories and case histories versus features and benefits. Have case histories to tell.
She was struggling. She had various problems when she hired me. The hero of the book is named Jonathan. We made up this story based on various coaching case histories. Will you call me? I ended up coaching that person for a year.
You want to find the goal behind the goal. How would that be a benefit to you? How would life be better? Not only that, but sometimes we can create a shortcut.
What does that life look like? What is the downside of this default future of yours? What are the consequences? How painful is it? Discipline 9: Do not be needy. We want to have it be the opposite. Anything needy is creepy to the other person.
It causes people to not want to work with you. So it must be stopped. Because look what people do. We want to practice different ways to stay connected. We want to explore ways to deliver value in each communication.
Contribute and serve. Behave accordingly. Discipline The Lamp Post Metaphor. This is something Michael Neill taught me. Any time I catch myself wondering if my coaching is really good enough to be charging what I charge—any slippage in my confidence, or my realization of how good coaching really is for people—I think about a lamp post.
The point Michael makes is that even talking to a lamp post would be good for a person. Maybe he vents, maybe he talks about the problems of the day and about opportunities for tomorrow and areas where he can make improvements. But if he returned to that lamp post every evening and shared his successes and challenges of the day and his goals and dreams for the next day, even that would make his life better, would help create a better person.
Even talking to a lamp post every evening would be beneficial to a person. So your clients would get value if you just showed up.
But as a coach you bring an entire world beyond a simple lamp post. You can really listen, you can see things. And you as a coach can be better than a lamp post. You can talk back. Discipline Maintain innocence in getting your yes and no. Please know that yes lives in the land of no. Please see yourself in the same light as if you were a waiter in a restaurant.
See yourself serving someone by asking that question. Would you like dessert? They think a question is pushy and salesy and puts pressure on a person. So no is fine, yes is even better.
Discipline Show leadership in your enrollment conversation. They go soft and vague and the next thing you know the client has left the conversation and nothing is on the calendar and no money is in the mail. This happens because of lack of direction. A new granite countertop, for example, might be discussed over dinner. And so coaching with you just sort of fades into the ether. I want to direct the action so that once someone says they want to work with me it gets completed!
Open your calendar so we can put our first session on it. Now you can either pay at the website, mail your fee in or bring it to the first session, whichever way is most convenient for you.
Any questions about that? I look forward to this. When someone wants your work—wants your coaching—please direct them.
It is not pushy to direct. It does not put pressure on a person. It really helps. People are asking to be coached. They are asking to be led at this point. They are asking to be directed. Discipline This discipline is really important. Please look at who your next conversation is with. Who are you talking to? Slow everything down. Because everything you want is right here in front of you. You are not creating relationships. It occurs because of the focus you give to someone.
It occurs because they have a sense that you are there for them, that they are very important to you, that you have time for them.
I had a person in my Coaching Prosperity School and he was doing fairly well—I mean, compared to a lot of coaches. He was making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, but he was racing all over the place and he was always frantic to get into his own future every day. He needed to do more and more and more, and he thought that somehow more frantic activity and busyness would be the way to get his income up even higher.
Soon he found out that if he slowed down, life would get better. Especially in the income department. If he took more time off, and if he took long walks on the beach, his income would get bigger and his life would get simpler and better. All from slowing down.
Discipline Get a coach. I have a coach myself, and I believe in it because it works. I use natural healing. It makes them very nervous. It makes them want to go home and think about it. Most coaches allow a prospective client to hang up the phone in a context of affordability. In other words, the prospect leaves his talk with you wondering if he can afford you no matter what you charge.
That context of affordability is not a service to the prospect or to me; nor is it likely to bring me a client. Before our conversation ends I want to return the client and myself to the context of possibility. Why would it be worth it to you if we worked together? How would it be worth it to you? What in your world that you would like to be different might be different if we worked together?
What would you like to change? What do you want? Tell me what you want and then tell me why it is not in your life right now. What would that be worth to you? Would those results be worth that investment? You tell me. Now we are back in the context of possibility. Discipline Limitation creates value. When something is limited, its value goes up.
I read a story about a stamp collector. There were only two of a certain kind of stamp remaining in the whole world, so naturally they were very valuable. He owned one of them and when he finally got hold of the second one he burned it.
The price of the first one went way, way, way up when he burned that second one. Because now it was the only one in the whole world. The fact that you do have an opening and are willing to consider them for it raises the value of your offer—always. I want limitation to be very present in my communication about what I have to offer someone, even while I am offering it.
Discipline Be constantly aware of the danger of role reversal. Please keep in mind that you are the coach. You are the one considering adding someone to your list of clients. I have coaches come into my school who have it totally the other way around until they learn this powerful discipline. It does not get you clients. It has to be the other way around. Even if you only have one client and you have room for nine more on your calendar, you must hold your role.
You want to be the coach in the conversation. Now, finally, Discipline Be great at what you do—not just good. That kind of diminishes the term. Most coaches just try to do coaching as a novel way to make a living. Have coaching be something you consciously and deliberately get better at every single day so you know you are moving toward greatness. Become great through the books you read, the DVDs you watch, the people who coach you, the seminars you go to—this is to build greatness in you.
As you practice these disciplines, never forget that coaching really is good for people. Coaching is so good, so powerful.
Coaching has to be good. Because it does work. Therapy is about the past—healing wounds. Coaching is about the future. Stop making them. Stop wasting time on that website and that business card. Stop hiding behind lengthy emails to potential clients. Stop your need to create a huge email list. Stop going to networking events. This process is powerful. And it works. Only connect. And then call them. Bring your humor and curiosity.
Be genuinely interested in what they are up to. Long time no speak. What are you up to? There will be a book you can recommend. Or an article you can send her. Or a client you can refer to her. Maybe they just inspire you. If the answer is a clear yes, do not jump into coaching them in that very moment. Be like a doctor. So be a professional coach. Not a social one. In person is always best, but over the phone can work perfectly. Block out two hours for them.
Even a single session. Each woman is powerful, confident and successful. She has already achieved a great deal in life. Do you know a woman like that? Get curious What do you think may be holding her back the most in life, right now? Has she ever experienced coaching before? You see, I never cold call.
Even for a referral. Tell her that this is my gift to her from you. They are too busy thinking about their problems or their dreams. Indeed, they only ever care about the answer to one question: can you help me? If you can help them get what they really, really, really, really want, then they will find a way to become your client.
So the real magic is not in your diplomas or coaching certifications. And you definitely dont attract clients. Clients are created.
Getting clients is an oldfashioned, huntergatherer approach to growing a coaching practice. Its outdated because it puts all of your success in the hands of other people. It puts you in an aggressive mindset that isnt conducive to having people say yes. And it has your clients on edge, waiting for that moment when you are about to manipulate them. Attracting clients has become a trendy phrase. But its such a passive approach to growing a coaching practice.
Having a powerful vision for your business is a fantastic idea. But no successful business was ever developed from creating a vision board and then sitting down and waiting for dream clients to knock at the door. There is another way. A better way. And it occurs when you bring your creativity to the table. When you are willing to combine imagination with action. The kind of clients you would love to work with are only created in a conversation.
And high-performing, high-paying clients are only created in impactful, life-changing coaching conversations. Invitation and referral only by Rich. If you enter a market and dont know what to do, watch what everyone else is doing, and then do the opposite, if you want to be successful. The majority is almost always wrong.
Earl Nightingale. C o a c h e s a n d c o n s u l t a n t s come to me when they are ready to create a practice with just a few highperforming, highpaying clients a year. At the beginning they are a little shocked to learn the following: 1. They dont have to use any traditional marketing. And their business grows by invitation and referral only.
My clients create a lifestyle they love with the freedom to do what is most important to them. Some of them may enjoy playing with internet marketing and social media. Many do not. The point is they dont have to. Because the formula that Steve and I teachand usedoes not involve marketing.
Its a formula designed to build a relationship. Not even relationships, pluraljust one relationship at a time. Honoring the individuality of the person in front of you. These days, I coach three days a week and I have a marketing budget of zero dollars.
I have five oneonone clients. I take two months of vacation a year and I coach mainly by phone, which gives me the freedom to travel anywhere in the world. But life wasnt always like that. For much of my working life I was a teacher. I was an employee working for others, working long, long hours for a paycheck that never changedunless I sought promotion. Which I did regularly. Only to discover that often the more I earned, the less I was able to do what I really loved.
Fortunately, it turned out, one day a new boss arrived who wanted her own leadership team. And because I was one of the most recent hires, I was let go. But soon I was using some of the coaching skills I had learned as an educational leader. Later I became a fulltime coach and I trained with some of the worlds best coaches. I became better and better at coaching.
Something wasnt working. So I hired a marketing expert. And a Search Engine Optimization expert. And I hated the boring marketing tasks that I was required to do.
So I began to do things differently. I fired the marketing experts and I began to take an oldfashioned approach. And everything began to change. The popularity of social media had somehow made me forget that its all about relationships. My great-grandparents were refugees from Eastern Europe. They built a clothing store in Waterloo Station in London, England, about eighty years ago. They didnt have the internet or email or Google Adwords. If you came into their store they got to know you.
They asked interested questions and they learned what you liked and what you didnt like. They took down your details. And if some clothing item you might like came into the store, they contacted you. Great businesses have always known that the magic is in building great relationships. Coaching is no different. And for you and your career, that is very good news. Get a coach. Because you cant take a client any deeper than you have gone yourself.
We call these the Eighteen Fearless Disciplines, because they are activities that work but only when practiced. Remember that you have to practice them, not just understand them. Not just agree with them. Not just appreciate them. Practice them. They are not theories we always knew would work. They are retroactively collected practices harvested from what has worked for me and Rich and our clients over the years, and what still works today. Well describe them briefly first, then explain further in the next chapter.
Sell the experience, not the concept, so that the clients only decision is whether or not to continue coaching with you. Know the halflife of enthusiasm. Act quickly. Do not use email for persuasion or confrontation in the act of client acquisition when phone or inperson options are available.
Use conversations. Schedule conversations. Fill the day with conversations until your client list is full. Use certainty versus belief. Speak from what you are certain of.
Keep a success list. Yes lives in the land of no. If they have to go think about it the conversation was not complete. Slow down. All the wealth you want is right there in the next conversation. Dont have a huge todo list, just be with Whos Next. A coach without a coach is like a doctor who wont see a doctor.
Get a coach who will build your practice and change your professional life. Leave the conversation in a context of possibility, not a context of affordability. Limitation creates value. Make sure you are the one doing the auditioning of the client, and not the other way around.
Be constantly aware of role reversal. Do not surrender your power, leadership and role as the coach in the conversation. Be great at what you do Have routines, habits and practices that guarantee that you become better and better as a coach every day.
Read books, see movies, listen to audio and talk to people who make you better as a coach. Every day. No high-performing client was ever created outside of a conversation. And no high-paying client was ever created outside of a powerful conversation. Have the disciplines be fun by Steve. T h e d e g r e e t o w h i c h w e p r a c t i c e these disciplines is the degree to which our coaching practices grow in both revenue and clients.
Soon there is a movement toward really highpaying clients with good, strong fees for the coach. Those are our outcomes from practicing the disciplines.
Again, theres a reason we call them disciplines instead of other things like tips or strategies or secrets or things like that. Disciplines are activities that are practiced. Disciplines are things that you put yourself through and work with and take out into the world and do. Soon they become activities you thrill to and breath in to.
And when they are practiced out in the world with real people, they get amazing results. After awhile they are just automatic. They feel like natural acts of easy relationshipbuilding. Whereas these disciplines might have once been awkward and clumsy, they will become, if they are continuously practiced, natural forms of self-expression. Take your time to really understand these disciplines so you can own them thoroughly and understand their value deeply.
Slowly warm up to them and feel good about them. Soon you will get them at a DNA level. Discipline 1: Sell the experience, not the concept. The clients decision needs to be whether or not to continue with you.
Coach your potential clients with all the impact and attention and time and energy and focus youd give to your highestpaying client. Make their decision easy. Discipline 2: No cold calling. Use your inner circle connections. Cold calling is not necessary, ever, in the world of coaching or in getting clients. Calling people up cold when you dont know much about them and they dont know anything about you, and then trying to sell them something does not work with coaching.
Its really a waste of time, and its not necessary at all. Were all connected. We can look each other up. We all know people who know you. We all have very few degrees of separation between us, and we can close these quickly. Therefore, there are ways to prepare for my communication with a coaching prospecteven to overprepare.
I can rehearse really completely and make myself very knowledgeable about the person Im about to talk to, which gets me eager to talk to them. No cold calling, please. You already know enough people who know people who know people. You really do, and if you slow your life down youll see that. Discipline 3: Know the halflife of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm has a halflife. So if someone is excited about working with you, they have a certain measurable level of enthusiasm for your work and your coaching.
And so, a week from now, it wont be as great and as strong and as vibrant as it is right now. No way to stop that deterioration of enthusiasm. Yet most coaches are completely unaware of it! They worry and wonder why people arent getting back to them. Even people who said they would!
My coach, the fabulous Steve Hardison, has taught me over the years the last fifteen years a distinction that he uses called eventaction. I want to take my action as soon after the event as I possibly can. Lets say someone has heard me speak to a group and they email me the day after and say, Hey, I loved your talk, it was really great. Im really interested in asking you about possible coaching.
Now the enthusiasm is high! I dont want a lot of days to go by. I dont want a lot of time to pass because that enthusiasm will go down. It has to. It does for anything in human life.
Notice when you go to a concert and you love the concert and the next day you are telling everybody, Boy, we saw Springsteenit was amazing! And then a week later you might talk about it a little bit, and a year later youre thinking, Did I go to that concert?
So enthusiasm goes through a halflife of continuous diminishment. However, if I can see that clearly, I can take advantage of that and make that play to my favor. I can always act now. Discipline 4: Do not use email. Now this is kind of an overstatement, because of course email has some effective uses.
There are some things email can do for you, but most of the coaches I coach overuse it. They make the mistake of trying to use email for persuasion. They try to use email to convince people of something or to get them to see the value of something. And it is ineffective that way. Because when people receive an email, quite often these days its on their phone!
What do I have to respond to? What can I get rid of? Ive got so much clutter coming in. Your email enters that crowd of messages. You dont want that. Coaching isnt appropriate for that kind of cluttered, frenzied world. Coaching is a very intimate experience, so you dont want to send a long email explaining the value of your coaching. It will not arrive in the same spirit in which it was sent. Please be awake to that. So many of my clients in coaching have sent an email to a prospect who was considering the coaching, and it transpires that if they had only had a conversation something great would have happened.
Instead they sent a long email, and now the recipient is considering the email. They read it, read half of it or save it for deleting later. Its a good way to kill a relationship, especially in the world of coaching. So always look for the possibility of a conversation. So thats Discipline 5: Honor conversations. Use conversations, schedule conversations, have your day be about the next conversation you are going to have, because if you do that, you will get clients.
All coaching agreements occur inside of a conversation. And no sale has ever occurred outside of a conversation. If you can see this, you will have your primary purpose today to be inside of a conversation instead of pacing around, checking your email fifty times a day, handling family calls, writing a blog, wondering if you should write a book, going on social media, networking, trying some marketingall those things we do that dont get us clients.
All those things that eat up our whole day when we could have been in a conversation. Discipline 6: Certainty versus belief. Use certainty. Thats your discipline. It improves your voice tone. Do not try to believe in yourself. Do not have selling be an emotional crisis about whether you are worthy of your fee.
That will send you south. That will send you down the ladder. That will have you not connect with people.
The antidote to that is knowing what you are certain of. And then speaking with absolute certainty. I just got off the phone with a client in London is a statement of absolute fact. Keep at your fingertips things that are factually true about your work and with a lot of beginning coaches I have them keep this list literally written out. I dont need to have confidence or learn to believe in myself to say those facts to the person I am talking to.
When I fill my conversation with the things I am certain about clients I have, work I have done, accomplishments they have achieved, I wont get nervous and I wont get scared. I want to really be connected with certainty. Because if I go the other directionif I go in the direction of whether I am deeply, personally, really worthy, then fear enters in.
Discipline 7: Share stories and case histories versus features and benefits. Have case histories to tell. Have these things be stories youve told over and over and over. If somebody says, Tell me how your coaching works, I might say, Let me tell you about a woman named Mary Ann. She was struggling.
She had various problems when she hired me. When we first sat down Mary Ann and I looked at her calendar So Im telling this story and stories are beautiful because they connect with people and they end up saying, Well, I have a situation similar to Mary Anns, or, I want you to do with me what you did with Mary Ann. The hero of the book is named Jonathan. We made up this story based on various coaching case histories. One day I got an email from a person who had read the book: I want a Jonathan in my life.
Will you call me? So theres the power of stories right there. I ended up coaching that person for a year. Discipline 8: Find the goal behind the clients goal. As Im speaking to my prospect and my prospect says, I want to earn a million dollars this year, or, I want my business to show a monthly profit, I dont want to just say, Oh, okay, great. Ill help you do that!
Lets put a coaching contract together. Ive helped many people become profitable. You dont want to go there yet. You want to find the goal behind the goal. So tell me why you want your million. Lets say weve worked together for six months, and you are profitable now. How would that be a benefit to you? What options would you have that you dont have now? How would life be better? It doesnt have to be a business objective.
If someone says, I want to be able to communicate better with my exwife and my son, who lives with her, then you can look for the goal beneath that goal. How would that make your life better? Lets count the ways. The reason Im asking these questions is that if I can find the goal behind the goal, my prospect is more connected to me than ever. Not only that, but sometimes we can create a shortcut.
So, for example, my client might say, Well, that would give me the time to really enjoy my life and be with my family more. There are so many wonderful things that can come up in an enrollment conversation when you find the goal behind the goal. I dont want to be afraid to go negative either. Like Ron Wilder teaches in our live coaching school workshops, you want your client to describe the gap between the goal and todays reality. You want a long description of the clients default future: What if you dont do anything like this coaching and nothing changes?
What does that life look like? What is the downside of this default future of yours? What are the consequences? How painful is it? Discipline 9: Do not be needy. You will have a hard time really hearing your client if your own mind is occupied by your own needs, as in, I need this client, I need this money so badly, I really cant afford to lose this client, Ill discount, Ill do anything, Ill become desperateI really need it.
If youve got this sense of extreme need in your mind, your behavior and your communication is going to push the person away. Thats because neediness is creepy. We dont want to be needy.
We want to have it be the opposite. We want to talk and think deeply about the clients world, not ours. The sale always occurs inside the clients world. If my client says, Well, Im going to think about this, Ill get back to you, I dont want to keep calling and emailing this person like Im needing this work.
Anything needy is creepy to the other person. Human need in the world of business is really offputting. It causes people to not want to work with you. So it must be stopped. Many times I have my clients who are coaches put on their computer the phrase needy is creepy just to remind them. Because look what people do.
They check in, they touch base, they annoy people: Im just checking in. Im just touching base. Im just trying to find out if you are going to work with me. Im just trying to find out if you are going to be my client, and thats really uncomfortable to another person. We want to practice different ways to stay connected.
We want to explore ways to deliver value in each communication. We practice these different approaches when we communicate because well get clients so much faster that way. If you havent heard back, send a gift and a note. Dont even refer to working together. Contribute and serve. You dont need them; they need you. Behave accordingly. Discipline The Lamp Post Metaphor.
This is something Michael Neill taught me. Any time I catch myself wondering if my coaching is really good enough to be charging what I chargeany slippage in my confidence, or my realization of how good coaching really is for peopleI think about a lamp post. The point Michael makes is that even talking to a lamp post would be good for a person.
Maybe he vents, maybe he talks about the problems of the day and about opportunities for tomorrow and areas where he can make improvements. Its just a lamp post sitting there. But if he returned to that lamp post every evening and shared his successes and challenges of the day and his goals and dreams for the next day, even that would make his life better, would help create a better person.
Even talking to a lamp post every evening would be beneficial to a person. So your clients would get value if you just showed up. But as a coach you bring an entire world beyond a simple lamp post. You can really listen, you can see things.
And you as a coach can be better than a lamp post. You can talk back. Discipline Maintain innocence in getting your yes and no. Please know that yes lives in the land of no. Dont be afraid of no. So, for example, when you are talking to a prospect, when people are talking to you about coaching and you really feel theyve had a good experience of it and the conversation is about to come to an end, do not be afraid to live in the world of yes and no.
Do not be afraid to ask an innocent question like, Is this something you would like to do? Now notice how innocent that question is. Its not pushy, its not salesy. Please see yourself in the same light as if you were a waiter in a restaurant.
See yourself serving someone by asking that question. If you were a waiter in a restaurant you would come up to their table at the end of a meal and say, Would you like coffee? Would you like dessert? Thats service. And if theres a yes, then you bring coffee, and if theres a no then you dont, and you dont care which. Youre serving with your question.
A lot of times coaches dont see that. They think a question is pushy and salesy and puts pressure on a person. It doesntit serves. Is this something you would like to do? And if a person says no, that person usually explains whats behind the no. No, because Whatever is behind the no is showing me where a yes could come from if we keep talking. So no is fine, yes is even better. But the implied maybe someday does not serve either one of you. Discipline Show leadership in your enrollment conversation.
In sales training they call the agreement phase of the conversation the close. Most coaches refuse to direct the action during the close. They go soft and vague and the next thing you know the client has left the conversation and nothing is on the calendar and no money is in the mail.
This happens because of lack of direction. Lets say someone says, Yeah, I really want to do this coaching, and you say, Okay, hey great, so Ill be getting back to you with a proposal and availability, and after that youll get back to me, and after that well set it up Now it has disappeared! And the clients life is happening and there are all kinds of new opportunities to spend this coaching fee elsewhere.
A new granite countertop, for example, might be discussed over dinner. And so coaching with you just sort of fades into the ether. Because they have second thoughts, or someone else is asking for money in their world and they are thinking, Well, I could postpone the coaching. I dont want the conversation to disappear into the ether. Im the coach in this relationship so I want to show some leadership. I want to direct the action so that once someone says they want to work with me it gets completed!
Okay, great, so if you want to do this work, and youre ready to begin, heres what you need to do. Open your calendar so we can put our first session on it. Whats a good date and time for you? Now you can either pay at the website, mail your fee in or bring it to the first session, whichever way is most convenient for you. Any questions about that?
I look forward to this. Now Im directing the action as if youre coming to a great auditorium and Im standing outside and I ask, Do you have your tickets? Okay, then please go into that line. Now, when you get into that line, youll go here, then inside, and then talk to the usher; hell seat you. It is a great service to people to direct them. When someone wants your workwants your coachingplease direct them.
Dont get all shy and deferential because money is involved. It is not pushy to direct. It does not put pressure on a person. It really helps. People are asking to be coached. They are asking to be led at this point. They are asking to be directed.
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