7 Relationship & Lead Building Strategies for Coaches

7 Relationship & Lead Building Strategies for Coaches

To fill your masterminds & teleseminars, you’ll need a pre-qualified list of folks in your coaching market who want to buy what you offer. Use these 7 sure-fire strategies to build your list.

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10 Common Challenges Life Coaches Face and How to Solve Them

10 Common Challenges Life Coaches Face and How to Solve Them

Finding true success in coaching presents some significant challenges. All are solved with pinpointed focus on one target market, plus a handful of winning strategies and a bit of patience. No joke.

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What a Target Market Can Do for You That a Coaching Niche Can’t

What a Target Market Can Do for You That a Coaching Niche Can’t

Coaches who target a market do more of what they love, are paid better, and have no limits on their income. Coaching niches rarely match up.

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Overwhelm: A Bad Habit You Want to Break

I’m tired of overwhelm. Aren’t you? Nothing sucks the joy out of your coaching business like that over-burdened feeling – a burgeoning to do list, an overflowing inbox, too many learning curves to traverse.

If we are truly committed to our own success, then surely success includes keeping our sanity while we get there! After all, the freedom of working for ourselves is part of why we’re doing this, right? So when are we going to start acting like we’re free?

The truth is, overwhelm is most often just a bad habit wanting to be broken. Whatever the reasons, we choose to feel overwhelmed. Like the boy who cried “wolf”, we’ve trained our brains and bodies to perceive challenges as emergencies. We’re actually OK, but don’t know that we are.

So how about making a different choice? I agree with David Risley’s smack-you-upside-the-head post about overwhelm. It’s time the vogue went out of our crazy busy lifestyles.

Overwhelm is caused by:

  • Non-stop stimulation
  • Procrastination and chronic disorganization
  • Scarcity consciousness, and
  • Not knowing how to resource

This is Your Brain in Rehab

It’s no wonder we’re all over-stimulated. There’s so much coming into our psychic space all the time — we’re never without connection to global media and entertainment (much of it anxiety-ridden).

The New York Times reports there’s a neurological reason that all that digital input doesn’t seem to make us any smarter. It turns out, when people keep their brains constantly stimulated with input, they miss the mental downtime they need to effectively learn from all that incoming information.

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Sources of Inspiration for Your Coaching Business

Do you ever find your hand rising up to your forehead to try to coax your coaching business ideas out into reality? Whatever answers you’re trying to figure out rarely come from cognitive processing alone. True creativity is a much more open, organic process that starts with a spark of inspiration. But where to find that spark?

Inspiration Ideas

Here are three places to find reliable and quick inspiration that will catalyze ideas for your blog posts, coaching programs and products… maybe even your coaching business model.

Music & Art

To help my right brain engage when I’m generating anything – writing, planning or developing ideas into something usable – I stream Pandora online radio from my computer. With this online app, you can customize your musical taste. Consider buying it for $16/year – it’s well worth it to get rid of the ads.

Choose calming, wordless music – whatever works best to slow you down and keep your creativity flowing. (I like Karunesh, George Winston or David Darling.)

Anything you do to feed and exercise the artistic side of your brain will also help you bring more creative juice to your task list.

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The Essence of a Great Coaching Question

I’m just back from three extraordinary days at the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival in beautiful Lyons, Colorado. John Prine closed out the festival with a set worthy of the national treasure he is. A lot of great lines from the old poet, but here’s the one that’s still rolling around in my head:
gathering coaching questions wisdom at Folks Fest

It’s not really a question if you already know the answer.

That’s true about the most powerful coaching questions.

Learning to draw out your client’s wisdom rather than impose your own agenda is one of the foundations of coach training. Is it time to refresh that lesson? It’s so easy to get caught up in the task list and learning curves, and forget to lead with curiosity in a coaching session.

No matter how insightful you are (and you are insightful!) the most impactful moments in coaching are drawn out of your clients themselves. There’s no formula for those moments.

That’s why open-ended questions generally work better than yes-or-no questions in coaching. They leave the field open to the unexpected. The conversation can go in any direction from an open-ended question, and that leaves space for the magic to arrive.

Coaching magic can be courted, but it can’t be forced. No list of “canned” coaching questions holds the key to that transformational shift your client is on the threshold of.

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My Biggest Mistake as a Life Coach

Want to know? The single biggest mistake I made as a life coach was trying to sell coaching. I didn’t realize that few people seek out coaching as a solution. Add to that, I was trying to attract big groups of people that weren’t easy to reach — women in transition and later, midlife women.

Just thinking about it makes me tired.

I didn’t know any better. All my peers were picking a topic they felt passionate about as their coaching niche. I blindly followed them onto that rocky road and never stopped to question whether that was the way to make a good living as a coach. Turns out, it wasn’t.

missed target

After two years, very few clients and paltry income later, I did shift to targeting a niche market — women entrepreneurs — which was way too big of a market with massive competition. And still I was scraping by, feeling like a fraud, and running frighteningly low on resources.

Still, whenever I did get a client, they valued my coaching. And I loved it. But I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable. I was working too hard for poor results.

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Is Coaching Worth Paying For?

There are still people out there who don’t understand the value of coaching. Some define coaching the way Ambrose Bierce defined consulting: “To seek another’s approval of a course already decided on.” And some people think hiring a coach is like hiring a friend to listen to you.

But then there are people like Google CEO Eric Schmidt – the lead architect of the most successful business growth story in recent history. When asked to share the best business advice he ever received, he said “Everyone needs a coach.

So, is coaching worth paying for? The answer seems to be: It depends on WHO you ask.

I think I know where you come out on this question, or you wouldn’t be staking your career on the power of coaching. But here’s my point:  Draw your clients from groups of people that believe coaching is worth the investment.

So how do you find and connect with those people? The answer may not be obvious, but it is straightforward.

Choose a Niche Market Full of Seekers

Certain groups of people, because of who they are, will readily invest in their own personal and professional development. Here are three examples of niche markets that are full of seekers:

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Do Your Next Coaching Clients Want What You’re Offering Them?

I know you know what your current coaching clients want. But do you know what your prospects want? There’s a difference. Discovering exactly what prospects want from you is the key to enrolling lots of clients easily.

an offer with no takersSo many coaches miss this, because they already know what they’re selling – their coaching services. It’s a natural way to think, but it’s also a classic marketing mistake. They try to sell coaching as the solution before they’ve even asked what the prospect sees as the problem.

You have a profound appreciation of the power of coaching, and that’s essential. But if it leads you to try to sell coaching, you may be setting yourself up for poor results. The basic law of the marketplace is supply and demand. You can supply all you want of something you think has value, but if there is no demand for it, it won’t sell.

That’s why established businesses do research before they launch a new product. I realize “market research” sounds pretty off-putting – technical, boring, expensive. But at its core, it’s just listening to people to find out what they want. What could be more coach-like than that?

I call this “listening to your market” – and you have everything you need to start doing it. To prove it, try these steps:

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How to Be Influential in Your Coaching Niche

Influence is a new watchword in the world of client attraction. It turns out that being influential is not about knowing it all, having all the answers or being right. It starts with getting meaningful conversations going with the people you serve. Coaches are good at this, so I invite you to apply this with your niche market for 90 days and see what happens.

be influential with your coaching niche

Recently, a company called ThoughtLead offered “the shortest marketing conference ever”. The Influencer Project featured 60 thought leaders who offered sixty seconds worth of their best advice on how to increase your influence online. I’m impressed with the creative way that ThoughtLead offered value, started a meaningful conversation and built more influence with their market.

Six Tips to Build Influence With Your Coaching Niche

Here are six influence tips that you might not have thought of before. The first two are social media tips. The last four tips have a common theme weaving through them. Did you catch it?

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